The chat box of an MMO was never meant to be a safe haven for racists, but with the protests across the US calling for racial equality after the murder of George Floyd, reeling back racist behavior in-game is more important than ever. With that in mind, the developers of SMITE have put racists who play their game on notice, suspending 5,000 accounts for racism after a full chat log review.
In addition to the mass suspension, the tweet also announced that new tech has been implemented to help the team find and punish racist actions more easily. “We still have work to do and are committed to ensuring SMITE is a hate-free environment,” closes the tweet.Today we've completed a full chat log review, and have suspended over 5,000 accounts for racism.
We've also implemented new tech for our team to find and punish racist actions more easily. We still have work to do and are committed to ensuring SMITE is a hate-free environment.
— SMITE (@SMITEGame) June 5, 2020
source: Twitter, thanks to Hokanu for the tip!
Good. One thing I loved about playing TF2 on the server of a decent group of people that ran it is that when someone pulled this kind of racist crap it was easy to get them kicked off.
It’s sad we had to have so many deaths for this to finally be addressed so openly and it’s forcing companies to actually deal with it, but at least they’re actually dealing with this garbage behavior.
People of all stripes need to feel welcome in games, and getting rid of racists, misogynists, anti-Semites, and any other type of prejudice, is an important step.
Only 5000?
MMOs are full of discriminatory stuff. Player names, chat, item names where applicable, etc. etc. etc.
PvP environments, where the idea that trash talk and emotional disruption is an advantage is ubiquitous, are even worse.
You can’t talk to the other team in SMITE. The “emotional disruption” talk is non-existant here. The only people you can disrupt with words is your own team.
Which means they don’t have that excuse.
Cool, hope they keep up enforcing that and hope more games crack down on that as well if they haven’t already. Hopefully that’ll cull the tide of edgy teens (or adults who haven’t grown up) thinking that spouting off racial slurs is cool/edgy.
Re: George: Thank you. Thank you for calling it what it is. You fine people have never let me down on the topic of building a better world, whether it’s ingame or not.
Just a heads-up: This is all on the wake of Smite pros being caught on videos and photos saying the n-word. Some apologized, and tried to improve ( The case of SoloorTroll, who was doing charity giveaways BEFORE the picture even went public, and apologized right away after it became public ), while others tried to denounce a witch-hunt ( CaptainTwig who said something in the lines of: “Yeah that was a time when i was a idiot kid but why are you bringing me shit without context yo” ).
I’m interested in their punishment.
By the way, don’t forget. This is the same game that STILL allows dmbrandon to stream it: dmbrandon is a known toxic existence in the Smite community, and altho he is for the BLM, he is still a complete imbecile who shouldn’t be allowed 10-feet inside the game.
The “Too woke!” bro’s are finally being put in their place…
…hopefully this isn’t just a bottom line fad.
Sweet, now please keep this up and don’t let this be a one-off thing. If you want a monthly “F*ck Racism” newsletter for some nice feel good stories and social engagement go for it, at this point it’s pathetic enough that I don’t have problems with companies bragging about the fact that they actually took action against racists in their game (which you’d think would be a given, but here we are…)
Any step forward is a good one, even with qualifications.
No, it’s always been really, really important to curb racism and racists; it’s now just really bad PR for companies to ignore it.
Good! Can we please do this for the rest of the mmo industry.