The act of filtering profane expletives is a good step towards the healthy and holistic development of a child, who is playing Wizard101 often. They will also have to spell words correctly in order to articulate their thoughts – that means that they cannot type offhand remarks and this reduces the possibility of they misspelling words. The censoring of expletives is understandable, because hardly any parent wants to see their children cursing at such a young age. Teachers and the public will definitely question their parents of their upbringing and doubt their inculcation of moral values.

However, abbreviations like ‘lol’, ‘brb’ and ‘lolz’ are still within the bounds of Wizardry speaking, so I don’t see the reason why you are thinking that the filter is making a mockery of the whole game-play experience. And yes, there are the numbers we cannot spell in game, so I still have to agree that the filter is absurd in the sense that it is even censoring ‘innocuous’ words.

But the paradoxical thing is: Players who have membership have a much more open text chat. So does that mean that we have to compensate to talk freely? Isn’t this similar to paying a bail to release yourself from the shackles of who-knows-what?

However, if you really want to communicate completely uncensored then buy yourself a mic and use ventrilo. It’s free for a 5 person server (and as Wizards101 only allows you to have 4 people in a group, that’s all you need). Besides chatting while playing an MMO takes too much time and is completely ineffectual (especially as there are other options that allow you to actually speak instead of typing when you should be targeting monsters, running to a new location, etc). Or if you still find this filter offending then stop playing the game and find a new one.

Oh and to Waresmith…the blame on that rests solely with you (as I highly doubt that you did anything other than ban the game in your home). 1) The kid should have been instructed as to what the punishment for theft was as soon as they had the cognizance to realize that money bought things (and reminded of it often), 2) if after around 9 years of life (and with proper parenting) they still pulled that, then you make the punishment worse (like grounding them till college), and finally 3) KingIsle is correct when they say that there is no way to prove that a child stole their parent’s credit card…for all they know you actually did purchase things from the online store and were trying to get out of payment. You should have gone straight to the credit card company instead.

Really, I can understand & handle a black list, but Wizard101′s system makes any kind of intellectual conversation almost impossible. They block everything but the most basic words… it’s truly frustrating.

In fact you cannot even type numbers. I was playing it earlier when someone asked me my level, I tried to type it in numbers… blocked. So i tried to type it in letters and the word was blocked as well! Absurdity.

Censorship promotes ignorance and ignorance promotes stupidity. If I was a parent, I would want my children exposed to reality. They are going to be eventually, all the better if it happens in the safe environment of a game.

OK, you don’t need to type in numbers if you go to the friendly chat icon in menu chat you can say you level in the stats part. The filter is fine.

In the end, it dosent matter that the game’s censored. There’s always a way around. At least the Commons cant turn into something similar to WoW’s infamous Goldshire…(Shudders)

Really? Really?

What’s really depressing, though, is all of the stories about “10-year-old steals parent’s credit card, spends ridiculous amount of money on game.” Bad parenting skills aside, when I was 10 (pretend I is in italics), I was smart enough to know that purchases would show up on my parents’ credit card bill. Sheesh! The blind stupidity of today’s pre-teens!