4Game

One of the things I would do ever so often the last couple of wipes, is check EFT for racist, homophobic, and other types of nicknames that have no place in a healthy gaming community. The way I would do this, is simply search in the friends list for player names: "Nig" (autocomplete populates a list, I report the blatantly racist ones).

This would usually give too many results (yup), so I would type out more specific, longer terms, and include some of the usual variations (i/1, g/9, er/a, er4, etc). I would then repeat this for a bunch of homophobic slur variants, and so on. All in all this was maybe 5 minutes of work every week or so, and I thought of it as taking out the trash in my favorite game.

I noticed since this wipe, however, that it's become impossible to have the game autocomplete a bunch of these terms, making it impossible to see how many of these names are out there, and making it impossible to report them unless you personally come across them in a lobby or a fight.

You can try this for yourself: "nic" populates a whole list of names (Nic-308, Nic-Fiend, Nic-Nac). "nig", however, results in an infinitely spinning search circle. The same thing happens with n1g (but not with n1c), n19 (but not with n18), and so on. It seems to me pretty clear that this is intentional. This also works with f a g, fa9, f49, and so on.

I'd love to know if this is only on the friendlist SEARCH level, or if it's now also actually impossible to CREATE accounts using these letter/number combinations in the first place.

Does anyone know?