We used to live in a world where someone with an offensive username was just outright banned from an online service. With the coming of PlayStation’s ability to edit names, though, things have now changed, and those offensive names are changing along with them.
Gamasutra spotted a note in the move’s FAQ that reveals what happens when someone makes a comedic overstep (or is an arsehole). When detected, the name is changed to Tempxxxxxx (so Temp345678, Temp902716, etc).
If it’s implemented on an old name, users can revert to that, and if it’s detected on a fresh name, they’re asked to change it to something that doesn’t suck.
This is interesting because 1) it’s a much cleaner solution than just banning accounts and have people make new ones, and 2) you now know that if you’re ever in a game with Temp274503, think twice about voice chat.
There’s a lil’ FAQ here if you still need some finer details.
[referenced url=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/2019/04/playstation-is-really-bad-at-suggesting-new-psn-names/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/bftp4baga8jpm0zenob9.png” title=”PlayStation Is Really Bad At Suggesting New PSN Names” excerpt=”Sony announced PlayStation Network name changes were officially ready for primetime. While a lot of people might have crappy user names they want to get rid of, they might not be sure what to replace them with. Fortunately, PlayStation provides suggestions. Most are terrible. Some are secretly amazing.”]
Comments
10 responses to “Sony Is Automatically Changing Offensive PlayStation Usernames”
He just as long as we don’t return to the weird censorship from the early days of PS3 I’m cool.
There was a time where I couldn’t even write “engineering” in chat because for some reason it was considered a naughty word.
“Puff puff” I kinda got but not basic English words.
Being a flight sim fan, we had a similar problem with Ubisoft when they used to manage the Il-2 franchise. Nobody could mention America’s WW2 ace of aces, who had the rather unfortunate name of Dick Bong.
Dick Bong is a fighter pilot? That’s a handy counter example next time someone brings up some bullshit about nominative determinism.
I just looked up ‘Dick Bong’ and the first thing I saw was a picture of him looking disapprovingly at me.
I laughed way too hard.
And yet I once played a game of COD4 on PS3 against a guy who was allowed to call himself “mancustard”.
A long time ago, I wanted to set my XBL motto to ‘Be attitude for gains’, and it straight refused to let me. After a little scientific investigation, I discovered that it was taking issue with the ‘tit’ in the word ‘attitude’.
To be fair we were all pretty clever when it came to screwing with those early auto-censors, my guess is they just gave up in the end.
Back when I was working as a games tester, there was a “random team name generator” that had a whole bunch of alternative words to go with the various team logos. So for the Canberra Raiders it could come out with something like “Vikings”, or “Norsemen”. The latter was fine on PS3, but got picked up by Xbox’s system filter for containing the word “semen”.
This is a much better option than outright banning accounts for name violations. Especially when those accounts could have hundreds of dollars of purchased games associated with them…
Was kinda hoping they would do the Overwatch GG EZ thing and substitute the offending words with something overly nice to troll people.