Mainstream Servers: Morals vs. Marketing

Thousands, if not millions, of comments flow through minecraft's servers each week. Of the numerous messages, hundreds of them contain forms of profanity, discrimination, or misinformation. Large servers claim to filter these messages, but how hard are they really trying?

I had been casually observing the in-game chat of a mini game when a specific user caught my eye. He had formed a conglomerate of profanities, mostly directed at another poor player. He seemed to be frustrated with his lack of ability to get a kill, and had taken it out on the unfortunate player. This interaction left me confused, wondering "How had Hypixel not blocked this obvious workaround of their chat filtering systems? Is this a mistake, ignorance, or just sheer apathy?" While shocked, I knew social expressions of anger such as this one are a common event among gamers, particularly through 'trolling', 'rage quitting', or many more.

Disgruntled, I promptly reported the player and logged off. Satisfaction turned to frustration as another thought occurred to me. We could attempt to report players all we wanted, but how effective was it really? There are thousands of these comments daily, and they are often rarely reported. Was Hypixel really trying as hard as it could? Were they merely standing by and occasionally banning one player of out lethargy and poor motivation? Was their goal to protect younger children from profane outbursts and cyber bullying, or just attempting to avoid gamers logging off as I did post-encounter?

I had always been aware of the risks of playing while enabling chat, but never really thought it would happen to me, as if it was in some distant problem only occurring to chat room frequenters or fools stating unnecessary comments or opinions around a gamer with anger issues. Me and my friends had always teased a friend of ours who had disabled chat, but this lead me to wonder 'Is he really wrong to do so?"

#minecraft #servers