World of Warcraft Chat Filter in Testing

Casting Silence

A new World of Warcraft chat filter is apparently in testing on live servers. This feature changes up the way chat messages work, preventing you from sending messages that contain a “reserved word.”

World of Warcraft is an MMORPG and that means that players are going to be communicating with one another through in-game text chat at some point. Unfortunately, some people have a potty mouth and Blizzard doesn’t seem too keen on letting bad language slide. Most Blizzard games have some kind of option to filter out mature language, but a new feature is in testing that would prevent certain chat messages from being sent at all.

How Does the New World of Warcraft Chat Filter Work?

According to Wowhead, this new World of Warcraft chat filter operates on a pretty simple premise: attempting to send a message with a “reserved word” — that is, a particular word that Blizzard entertainment has blocked — will not go through. Instead, the player sending the message will instead receive the following notification in the chat window:

Unable to send chat to [Player] because your message contained reserved words.

Wowhead’s testing indicates that this list of “reserved words” currently only has a single reserved word on the list. This particular world is considered an egregious racial insult in the United States, so you can probably guess what it is.

Mind, this chat filter does not apply across all of Blizzard’s games — it looks like this new World of Warcraft chat filter only works within the WoW game client itself. A gamer could send a message to a player from another game or through the Battle.net client that contains a banned word and it would still go through, though it might still be blocked by the built-in mature language filter.

It’s unclear if Blizzard will give players the option to turn off this new chat filter. Games that already have some kind of filtering (such as Overwatch) and even the Battle.net client typically give you an option to turn it off entirely. We’ll probably find out more if this feature finishes testing and Blizzard decides to implement it. For now, you can enjoy all of the challenges of the latest Shadowlands expansion by playing World of Warcraft on PC right now.