Call of Duty: Mobile’s odd profanity filter causes confusion in the community

The mobile game considers “gun,” “boom,” and “assault” as profanity.
Image via Activision

The launch of Call of Duty: Mobile was a huge success, surpassing 35 millions of downloads in three days, but the game still has some bugs and incomplete features. One of them is the profanity filter—which, in its current version, makes no sense.

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Since its launch, the mobile game’s subreddit is full of threads complaining and joking about its profanity filter. This feature is common in online games; it prevents players from being offensive in chat and also filters the account and loadout names in Call of Duty Mobile. But it has a weird way of working in the franchise’s mobile title. 

Although Call of Duty is a realistic game, Reddit users have reported blockings of all words related to war. For example, “boom”, “sniper”, “Jesus,” and “kill” are considered profanity and are blocked from chat. Even “domination,” the name of one of the game modes, is censored.

Related: Is Hardpoint the next classic mode coming to Call of Duty: Mobile?

On the other hand, actual offensive words, even the most used ones, are not all censored. Without clarification from the publishers, the Reddit community has resulted to cracking jokes and creates memes about the profanity filter.

This issue is reminiscent of the struggle Tencent went through to export another of its games, PUBG Mobile, to China. It renamed the game “Game of Peace” and removed all representations of violence. It reached the point where when a player killed an opponent, he simply waved to say goodbye and left the game, so that nobody really dies.

Still, Call of Duty: Mobile didn’t have to wade through all the trouble to be played in China, but this contradictory censorship has stirred up confusion on what is considered censor-worthy. 

Silently, some words already have stopped being filtered, like “sniper” and “kill,” so this feature is clearly getting updated over time. Especially as an online game, this filter can have a significant impact on the player experience, so many fans are waiting for answers from the developer.


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Eva Martinello
Eva is a Staff Writer from Paris. Her part-time job is charging into walls with Reinhardt. She has been covering League of Legends esports and other titles for six years. She still believes in a Moscow Five comeback. She also fell into the MMO pit and covers FFXIV and Genshin.