Do you see hate speech in your MMO?

The other day one of our readers, Joe F., pointed us at a conversation between Trion Worlds CEO Scott Hartsman and an ArcheAge customer who was banned. In the exchange, Hartsman said he reviewed the chat log that led to the ban, concluding, “In 2015, those two words aren’t ‘cussing.’ One is hate speech, the other racism. We wish you the best.”

Obviously, there are lots of kind players who exist together in peace in MMOs, but there are also bad eggs who do like to sling slurs against others out of anger or as part of their “gaming vocabulary.” In your MMOs, do you see much hate speech in chat and tells, or are most folks pretty much behaving themselves?

TH

Sure but I would rather no one steps in on the gaming team to ban/suspend people unless it goes to the extreme, such as creating characters non-stop to harrass people.

In most cases I feel that if people can't work out /ignore, and this goes for social media too, then they don't deserve assistance.

TH

I tend to have my chats ignore all but friends/guilds so I don't have to see junk filling up my chat log. But even if I did, I wouldn't be bothered by it. I agree that if people can't figure out how to ignore someone verbally "harassing" them, then they don't need assistance. On the other hand, it makes me really angry to think that some company would ban you for what you say in a game, however inflammatory or hate-speechy they think it is. When it gets to that point, unless it's explicitly written somewhere in the terms of service, then punishing people for what they say in chat is just a cover for pushing someone elses' social justice agenda.

Like the CEO's response. Who's to determine what exactly is hate speech in a medium where one can simply log off or ignore someone they don't want to talk to? I see it as something that sounds good for press and player coddling, but is actually pretty freedom-less fundamentally.