The developers at Triternion are being bombarded by propagandists from major gaming outlets and the Twitter hordes to compromise the freedom of community interaction in place of censoring their forums, the chat, and the in-game communications as a way to silence anyone who uses language that agitators deem “problematic” or “toxic”. The developers are obviously caught between doing the right thing and kowtowing to the demands of the no-fun-police, and seem to be contemplating a middle ground.

It all started with an article by PC Gamer on July 1st, 2019. The article from Samuel Horti attempts to bash Triternion over the head with the proverbial shame tactics, claiming that the developers aren’t doing enough to curb the “racism” and “homophobia” and therefore it’s driving players away, which is based on zero data.

If you look at the Steam Charts you’ll see that after the initial launch in May the game has settled into a 13,500 peak average of daily players, which is a heck of a lot more than Valve’s Artifact, which can barely accrue 500 players.

Nevertheless, Horti wants Triternion to kill off their community in the same way that Blizzard did with Overwatch, with overbearing censorship, instant-bans, and constant authoritarian rule to keep players from having fun, writing…

“This is not just about a lack of resources—the developers are currently unwilling to take a hard stance against any toxicity. In a recent update, they added the option to mute players by clicking on them in chat, but in an interview before that update, they told me they didn’t want to add any sort of word filter, partly because “people might claim we’re censoring. […]” “[…] Other developers of competitive multiplayer games are happy to take a more hardline approach. Rainbow Six Siege aggressively filters slurs and has a manual moderation team, while Rocket League has a similar system. Many multiplayer games don’t police their chat that tightly, but most have fleshed-out reporting systems, which Mordhau does not.”

Rainbow Six: Siege’s censorship skyrocketed to the point where you can be auto-banned for using profanity in the chat… in an ‘M’ rated game! The censorship is so ridiculous that many others have been trolling the community to get people banned for accidentally triggering the ban filter.

The developers at Triternion weren’t willing to go that far given that they’re indie devs, and would probably prefer actually making money selling a game instead of killing their community and their reputation. Mike Desrosiers, an artist at the studio, told PC Gamer…

“We want to put the power in the players’ hands. If we take an official stance and we put an official filter list on all the words in chat, people will, first, find a way around it, and it might catch innocent words, or people might claim we’re censoring. So we’d rather put the power in the player’s hands.”

That’s how normal people handle the situation. If you don’t like what someone is saying and you’re man enough or intelligent enough to speak up, then mute them and move on.

PC Gamer wasn’t satisfied with that, though, because their staff don’t fit the aforementioned category, and require authoritarians to censor content on their behalf. Triternion’s Andrew Geach was also pressured by PC Gamer to talk about the customization, specifically females and darker-skinned characters.

Geach told them…

“That goes back to a similar situation as the chat filters. Whatever stance we take officially, some group of people are going to be upset with us. And so, ideally we’d put the power in the players’ hands, and give them the option to enable and disable different things. “There has been endless debates about it, and it attracts a lot of toxicity, a lot of stuff we’re not interested in attracting to the game itself, any more on top of what’s already present. But we’re always looking to expand [our customisation].”

PC Gamer goes on to state that the developers were contemplating the addition of filters for non-whites and females, but the developers shot down the claim about filters for non-whites. In a tweet posted on July 1st, 2019, they clarified their stance (somewhat) with the following posts.

We do not, nor have we ever, had plans to add a toggle to hide other ethnicities or “disable characters that aren’t white” in Mordhau. Any claims to the contrary are false. Official statement coming soon. 2/2 — MORDHAU (@mordhaugame) July 2, 2019

It didn’t matter, though. PC Gamer’s claims had already taken off, and there’s a post over on Reddit’s largest gaming sub /r/Games/ where people are calling the Mordhau community a “racist”, “sexist”, “cesspit” and a “trash fire”.

If the developers were smart they would ignore all the noise and just focus on making sure the game works well; that players have to tools to mute and block players that are too manly or too childish for them; and that there’s a steady flow of new updates to fix any performance issues and content so that the game is fun and entertaining for as many people as possible.

Once you start crawling down the intersectional rabbit hole of degeneracy there is no coming out, and it’s setting your studio on a fast-track to killing your game. Just look at what happened when Nexon decided to listen to sex-negative prudes who didn’t even play Hyper Universe? They forfeited listening to their own community and chased after the phantom audience in stead. The game was one of the many prime examples of getting woke and going broke, which is why it’s on the Get Woke; Go Broke Master List.

If Mordhau is currently successful, there’s zero reason to break the formula now by listening to propagandists.

(Thanks for the news tip Quickshooter)