Anets naming policy

On 2 April anet released their naming policy on the website. They said they have been using this before aswell, but that it is now more clear to everyone. A dangerous part of this policy is this:

Because there is no way you can know offensive words in other languages.

My guild, Super Kaon Action Team [SuKa], got banned because the word 'suka' means bitch in polish. Noone in my guild is from eastern europe, so none of us had a clue it was bannable. When I used google translate to translate SuKa from polish to dutch, the meaning I got was "vrouwelijk" which means female.

We are upset that our guild got banned. Over the two weeks we had this guild we played about 300 gvgs (this is a lot) as our goal was to get into the top 20 of amount of victories. Because we got banned, all we can do is reform the guild and start over again, because anet will probably not unban us.

I think that Anet needs to change this policy. In this case it is obvious that SuKa was used as an abbreviation because SKAT (look it up if you dont know it) was not allowed. This rule is not one that only matters to us, lots of guild tags could be offensive to someone by this rule, and there is no way you can know before you actually get banned.

I understand that polish people feel offended by our name, yet there is nothing I can do to prevent this, because I did not know. In order to prevent these kind of situations where a guild gets banned without expecting it and having to start over again, Anet should allow us to either change our tag, or expand the word filter so we would not have made the name in the first place.

What is your opinion on this?

IMHO, expansion of the word filter is highly unlikey considering the amount of languages GW population speaks.

If it were up to me, I'd give you guys 24 hours to change the tag. Destroying such an effort by a group of people just because someone "feels" offended by your tag is, pardon my French, retarded. Besides, I really doubt the Polish spell "suka" as "SuKa". Therefore, the "offense" must have been taken by pronouncing "suka". Following that logic, Croatians could ask the NPC ancient hero Kitah to be banned because "kita" means "d i c k" in Croatian.

Obviously we Croatians have a sense of humor however immature it may be.

Seriously, sometimes I wonder whether it is truly intelligent people sitting on the other side of the customer service line.

What I personally think is that ANet should ban itself. There has been an NPC in Kaineng called Akane (http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Akane), which means the process of emitting excrements in bulgarian and other slavish languages.

On topic: Are you sure that you can't appeal in any way by proving that the name is not offensive or not intentionally offensive, they should be able to give you a chance of having another tag if you actually use that customer support button over there.

(in Czech, 'suka' is also verb in present tense, meaning 'is having intercourse'. Super Kaon Action Team [SuKa] is very ... hmm ... rude. Funny thou, because it almost looks like pun related to one czech internet mene)

I fully agree with you. Actually in your case it is even worse cause in Polish this word means several things: a female dog - most common use, police transport car (slang), bitch (slang) and probably more I do not know. The issue is that the latter two are probably not included in most dictionaries and they are for sure far from the common use of the word. I think ANET goes a bit too far since people even if they would be checking every name in the dictionaries will not find anything offensive for most of the words and later they can still get banned.
My message to the people reporting such cases: some words are bad only if they are used in a specific context and the example above is far from it.... (not mentioning the spelling)

Me with my friends were starting a guild to do some more serious ha/gvg. We wanted the name 'Beaver Formation [Bf]'. We weren't allowed to do that because it could mean vagina. Every person who mentally disturbed knows we don't mean a couple of vagina's in formation .

Ridiculous...

I fully agree with the OP, and have expressed that sentiment in the thread that was created earlier regarding naming policy. Anet should have just done nothing to regulate names if they wanted to go to one extreme, or just let the naming filter catch the names. It isn't fair to people like the OP.

Not to mention the favourite ss/lb farming boss caleld Dupek...

the DoDo ban was much worse imo... yeah this new filter thingy is bullshit, and the fact that they fully ban guilds is even dumber

They need to make it change names/tags within 72 hours. If their making that much of a fuss over some of the guild names, perhaps as other have mentioned, NPC's should get renamed aswell.

This just shows how complete joke Arena.Net as company is.

Requiring people to crosscheck every possible meaning and/or hidden intentions behind every part of the name/tag in every language, including slang for symbols, sayings, words, interpretations, religious references etc. is simply put, utterly ridiculous.

As already pointed out in this thread as well, Anet made the same mistake in naming a warrior boss Dupek.
Or what about Boulad The Perverse?

I agree that Anet can not have the knowledge if our guild tag is offensive at will or not. But in order to filter those mistakes out they shud give whatever guild that would be banned the oppertunity to switch name/tag so that all your spent time ingame isnt lost instantly. And i mean just like said before Suka means in our 1st language: Female , Female Dog which i cud only see offensive when your a male dog and playing GW :P .

So yeah, we got banned a second time. This time for an even smaller thing.

Main problem is:

You'll never get banned untill someone reports you as something "offensive".
Sadly enough, once someone does that, even the smallest of reasons is enough to get a guild banned. And usually, they just report because they dislike the guild, not because they feel so immensly insulted.

The problem isn't the policy, it's the way it is implented at this moment. If you ban guilds straight away after a report, and consider that a final action, you're just screwing over those guilds.

I'm sorry, but if "SuKa" is bannable, they should have banned guilds like "Seppo Hovi Action Team [pre][Shat][/pre]" aswell, and many many others.

Chances are the people at Anet had no clue that suka meant bitch in any language .... at least not before some team you beat at GvG knew what it meant and reported the name to get revenge ... just a thought

I think that at this point, any name is a bannable offense with the rate that ANet is going at. They need to stop pandering to little kids and people who get butthurt by one name out of thousands.

There's a point where a name goes from just a name to something that's meant to be offensive. When two people see it from different sides, it seems ANet can't think for themselves about it and go for the ban stick.

Arena.Net Fails once more.

So was it innocent? Furthermore the OP has this:

How did you learn that? Do you get that amount of details when you get banned? (I have no idea what happens when a whole guild gets banned)

Because the guy that reported us was so kind to post on QQ forums how awesome he was that he got us banned.

I quote:

Notice he even made a new account with matching name to post this.
Also note the primary meaning of Suka is "female", if we can believe google.

We knew it so fast because someone posted it on QQ forums (see above post).

Usually the only way to find out is sending a report ticket though.