One Apex Legends player has been handed an automatic one-week ban for typing the word “sex” in the game’s text chat. This goes against the rules of EA’s Positive Play Charter because it’s apparently considered a form of harassment.
If a user breaks the guidelines in the Positive Play Charter or EA’s user agreement, the company may temporarily or permanently prevent that user from playing EA’s games. The player who got banned for a week typed “I get scared b4 [before] sex” during an Apex match. The player will be able to play Apex after one week, but EA may ban them permanently if it happens again.
On the Reddit thread, several Apex players simply advised each other to avoid using text chat at all costs if they don’t want to be banned out of the blue, and one Redditor complained that while EA is doing this, it could shift its attention to how people use their nicknames to offend others.
“It’s crazy the things that get auto-banned from chat logs meanwhile people have literal slurs in their names and are just fine,” the Redditor said.
The A.I. EA programmed to hand out these types of bans seemingly doesn’t take context into consideration. It’s debatable if the player in question was harassing someone by just typing that sentence. At the end of 2022, another Apex player complained he got banned for typing “Andrew Tate cringe” in text chat and was banned for one week too, which is an indicator that EA simply blacklists some words. There was even one player who got banned last year for typing “F GG” because EA considered it hateful conduct.
EA states in its Positive Play Charter that players must not harass, threaten, bully, spam, or do anything else to another player that is “unwanted”.
