The Choice to Censor - A Better Alternative
Note: TL;DR is the underlined below.
I understand that given the nature of FPS gaming, you're going to expect a lot of heated back and forth chat. Some of that chat may get toxic which ultimately detracts from actually playing the game itself. Players can choose to hide all chat, but that would effectively censor everything. As one means to deal with this toxicity, BFV now has a chat censor that proactively filters out derogatory terms, either directly or indirectly in reference to cussing, racism, hate speech, etc.
Of course, there has been plenty of push back from the gaming community given the current level of censoring sensitivity. Many gamers state that one should have the freedom of speech to say what they want and express themselves, especially for an M-rated game. Other gamers vent their stress in chat and don't even mean their repeated derogatory word choice, but need to actually see it said to express their frustration (and are strangely more relaxed as a result). Not to mention, any chat censorship won't carry over to verbal toxicity over the mic. Whatever the reasons, perhaps it's just a matter of actively tweaking the censorship logic, which may prove more effective over time.
However, there's a far simpler way to demote toxicity: muting. Players can actively choose to mute certain players from appearing in chat. Now, I get that some players may get hot-headed for a particularly heated game. The following match may have the same players but with cooler heads. Therefore, the player's choice to mute another player would be made temporary and only to the match in which the muting took place. The muting can be made by say, pulling up the scoreboard (TAB) and clicking to the left of the player's name where the mic icon typically is (in BF1). This selection would filter the specific player from both chat and mic.
The freedom of players to temporarily mute toxic players, IMHO, is the best of both worlds - it neither disrupts the gameplay for all nor stirs controversy. This player choice is the perfect, self-governing mechanism against toxicity. And, it's not only I who is putting forth this request. Many, many gamers in-game ask if there's a mute function. Anyone who has grinded out hours and hours of Battlefield have heard this request. It's therefore a community request, with an emphasis on choice, to censor. So, give players the choice to censor, and we can all have our cake, and eat it, too.
Just my 2 cents.
