It’s been a dark day for Playstation Network’s premier edgelords.
Just imagine: you log into Call of Duty and abruptly find that your awesome snowflake-triggering gamer name has been changed to Temp787875. B-but what has happened? How will people know that you’re a totally badass bigot? Is it a conspiracy? Is this censorship? Is it political correctness GONE MAD???
And the answer is yes, pretty much.
“WHY AM I EVEN USING A WIRED CONTROLLER????”
Sony quietly rolled out a surprise change to their T&Cs around offensive usernames, meaning that if a name is flagged by another user as being offensive it will be looked at by moderators. If they agree, it’s immediately erased and replaced with a temporary name until the user can come up with something less stupid.
It’s a somewhat more elegant – and also playfully infuriating – option than banning the person outright or erasing someone’s game ID from the system. They get to keep their achievements and so on, they just get a nice public reminder to play nice.
The bonus with this is that Sony have now equipped offensive players with a nice obvious red flag for other players to see and go “whoa, a Temp? I’m not activating voice chat, no-o-o-o-o-o.”
Why can’t we all just get along, playerz? WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?