World Of Warcraft now blocks messages containing "reserved words."

For years, WoW has censored certain words through obfuscation as part of its mature language filter. Now, however, it appears to block messages from being sent altogether if they contain so-called "reserved words." For now, this covers one racial slur, but we expect this category to be expanded in the future.

According to Wowhead, for now, this filter only applies to messages sent within WoW; Battle.net currently allows you to chat with people playing WoW from third-party BNet messengers, and these messages will appear in their WoW chat boxes, but are not currently subject to the same filter.

Some Wowhead commenters have noted that this may be related to the text-to-speech support that will appear in the accessibility update currently available in the 9.1 test area. This feature will allow players to choose to speak a chat channel by voice. It is easy to see why Blizzard would want to take a stronger stance against hate speech if in-game chat becomes loudly spoken.

However, as anyone who has peeked into WoW's public channels knows, the community can be rather "creative" in coming up with hateful speech that bypasses existing filters. chat filters, which have not yet been officially announced, but it will be interesting to see if, in addition to the introduction of these, there will be an increased focus on moderation efforts.