Madden 22 has had its fair share of issues since launching back in August, and some of those got fixed with the first major Title Update, but profanity didn't make the cut.
Over a month after the game became available, players are still reporting issues with their names being deemed profanity in Madden 22 Face of the Franchise, and EA has finally responded.
Madden 22: Face of the Franchise seeing names as profanity
It's not exactly new to see a game the size of Madden 22, especially one that operates permanently online, have an included profanity filter.
Unfortunately the nature of games is that whatever you can imagine as terrible is something that another player will be amused by and want to use as a name.
However, it looks like whoever built the profanity filter in Madden 22 got a little overzealous, and once again multiple players are seeing their names flagged as containing "a profane word."
This is actually something we identified several weeks ago, around the same time Face of the Franchise was also getting bugs that froze the game during halftime or forced your player to run in slow motion.
While names were causing issues at the time, the outcome seemed to be different, so the potential fix by EA Sports may have only exacerbated the issue.
John Madden or Generic Player are out, "profane word" warning is in
When the issue first started to pop up in early August, gamers were actually reporting that their Face of the Franchise player was having their name force-changed to either "John Madden" (the default in-game name) or an even more bland "Generic Player."
There was a potential fix, as some stated they could play through the earliest parts of Face of the Franchise and that their manually selected name would appear after the NFL Draft, leading some to speculate that the glitch was affected by team names on your college squad.
Others managed to identify something that now seems fairly confirmed: the real issue was Madden 22 recognizing an absurd amount of names as containing "a profane word."
While the game offering a prompt that prevents input of a particular name does technically prevent the name changing glitch from occurring, it's instead making obvious how many plain names are being flagged as profanity.
Between the ones back when the issue first arose and ones now, players have reported the following names as profane by Madden 22: Simpson, Burnzee Boyee, Deshawn Morris, McCune, Tangard, Nofsinger, TacocaT, Shibusawa, Dixon, Kelly, Kuhn, Clanton, Brodie, Martinez, Ringer, Keel, King, Sena Kobayakawa, Michael Johnson, Hart, Gay, Kobylski, Nagordki, Nathan Taylor, Cameron Cunningham, Dez Smith, Wilcox, Carson Kelley, and Eric Dickerson.
When the initial issue popped up, there were replies in the EA Answers HQ thread insisting they were looking into the problem, but now we have a more direct response.
EA responds to criticism of the Madden 22 profanity filter
After continued issues popping up, the original EA Answers HQ post reporting the profanity issue now has a top reply explaining their stance on the situation.
While the reply was initially posted over a month ago, it was updated on September 15, 2021 and has been pinned as the "accepted solution" to this issue by EA.
EA revealed that they have "agreements with various schools and our commitment to preventing the use of current college player’s name/image/likeness," which is likely connected to the long-term progress on EA Sports College Football 24.
The following filter rules and guidelines were outlined by EA:
- the types of content players report to us most
- historically hateful concepts
- trending offensive terms
- game rating
- and names that may not be eligible due to agreements.
The weirdest one here might be game rating, as they're seemingly trying to prevent people from criticizing the game with their chosen player names.
However, the most likely culprit seems to be these agreements, as they appear to be proactively blocking the names of any players connected to the colleges that are already in the game.
EA gave the following final remarks regarding the situation:
Unfortunately, because of the disruptive behavior of a few members in our gaming community who use certain words or names to harass other players or to glorify offensive conduct, our filter prevents anyone from using those words or names.
We think it's best to proactively eliminate any potential harm or disruption these terms can cause for players of all backgrounds.
And sometimes our filter makes mistakes when a word or name is similar to an offensive term. If that is the case, we’ll fix it as soon as we can. With monitoring and reports from players, we aim to balance things so that players can speak freely in chat, be creative in their names, and still remove the most disruptive content.
There hasn't been any further follow-up since that September 15 response, and it looks like Madden 22 is going to continue to flag normal everyday names as profanity for the foreseeable future.