NHL 20 Racist Team Names Will Be Punished Harshly, Devs Vow

Update: June 5, 2020, 7:15PM PST -- With increased rise of online racism in NHL 20, the EA Sports NHL Team issued a statement on Twitter vowing to take immediate steps to crack down on the toxicity of the online community. The online statement states, "Chel shouldn't be a place for any form of hatred, bigotry or racism. We have manually actioned on thousands of accounts to date, but it hasn't been enough, and that's on us."

The statement also laid out steps that the developers would take to put a stop to the growing online racism following the team's plans to curb toxicity and all forms of discrimination online. In addition to having harsher penalties for offensive content, NHL 20 will strengthen profanity filters, strengthening online moderation. Furthermore, the developers also stated that new measures would be put in place for players to report offensive content from other players.

In addition to the message from the EA Sports NHL Team, the NHL 20 community manager had an additional statement online as well.

"What has been happening in our game is unacceptable and we’re dedicating the proper amount of resources to fix it. We should be a leader in bringing people together, not a platform for racism. Thanks for raising your voice and keeping us accountable. I’m sorry it took this long."

Original post: NHL 20 players have been concerned about an influx of racist names in the in-game community, with complaints over the past month regarding EA's lack of reporting measures leaving plenty stumped.

Hockey has historically had a diversity problem, and this appears to be reflected in NHL 20. The month of May saw a number of posts on the official NHL 20 subreddit outlining concerns from the community around what has been dubbed as "rampant racism in online NHL". One Reddit post called NHL 20's community "one of the most racist" that a player had been a part of, citing examples of team names with overt racist references and racial slurs, especially against black people.

Additionally, a statement given by EA in April this year to the Vancouver Province contained a promise by the company to improve its filters used to detect discrimination within NHL 20. The Province also reported that the Vancouver Canucks hockey team had weighed in on the issue of racist language in the game, noting that it would "strongly condemn racist behavior in all forms, whether online in sport or society."

However, it looks like those changes have yet to be implemented. Two days ago, another thread was made on the community subreddit, once again entreating EA to take steps to prevent this racism in online NHL. The EASHL mode, which allows NHL 20 players to team up with friends against other players, was identified as the main mode in which racist abuse is a particular problem. This abuse can range from racist team names to the names of individual players and even players dressed up as racist caricatures.

Prior to that, EA had put out a tweet mentioning a "long term commitment" to fighting racial injustice. Despite that, there remains no effective way for players to report offensive team names within NHL 20: players have to report any discriminatory or racist content that they encounter from another player to an EA Sports "Gamechanger," who is a community volunteer and not staff at EA. While Gamechangers can make recommendations to the team who work on the EA Sports titles, there is no mandated throughline to ensure change once something has been reported by a Gamechanger.

The current content filter blocks slurs and swearing, but only in their most direct, unedited forms—players can be creative when it comes to team names with symbols and the like if they truly wish to express racist sentiments. Currently, the community's frustrations appear to center around a lack of punishment for those who are populating NHL 20's online play with racism.

EA CEO Andrew Wilson mentioned in his statement that the company is looking to drive "meaningful change through actions," and has committed to pledging over $1 million to organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and others. EA will also double match any funds donated to similar organizations through their YourCause program during June. On the matter of online racism in titles like NHL 20, however, it remains to be seen what changes will be implemented going forward.

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