Hmmm... yes this is annoying, but its kinda like how all internet browsers on Apple's app store are rated 17+. Apple, or in this case, Microsoft/4J cant control what the user might see, so this censorship is just so the game's E10+ rating is accurate in all circumstances. (Besides the chat function...)
you can play it online with this many signs ? you must have a super xbox or sommot, i struggle with about 40, can feel it lagging lol
It works fine. Very smooth at all times. The only Lag I ever received was when I surrounded the estate in tall grass. Used about 600 bonemeals putting grass nearby and it lagged terribly after that. Eventually I flushed it all away with buckets and it was good again.But yeah, this "sign" lag I keep hearing about, I've never experienced it.
It works fine. Very smooth at all times. The only Lag I ever received was when I surrounded the estate in tall grass. Used about 600 bonemeals putting grass nearby and it lagged terribly after that. Eventually I flushed it all away with buckets and it was good again.But yeah, this "sign" lag I keep hearing about, I've never experienced it.
I used to have tall grass covering my entire town, and it didn't lag.
I removed the grass, built a warehouse and put signs in it... and now the game lags, and whenever I break a sign, it crashes.
I would just complain to Microsoft. They probably wont care, but maybe if enough people do they will change something. I will say that part of the issue might be with the fact that this game is rated as a kids game and if you can write things like that it might not be anymore? Not sure of course though.
4J has about as much voice on the matter as we do. We may think it's stupid, but Microsoft doesn't... care what we think.
Microsoft forces the censorship of Minecraft because the game is rated E. Xbox, as a console, is unrated. Therefore, the console is not subject to the same restrictions.
This is still very much a defeatist attitude. I think a company who brought MS a percentage of over 4 million sales of a product that cost MS nothing to produce gives 4J a stronger voice than a single consumer such as you or I.
There are still options that can be put into place by 4J, such as parental controls for the signs that empower the parents without MS having to go the extra step and put in place an always active sign scanner. There are solutions for this, and if the community speaks up it may make a difference.
I checked the Xbox Live website to check out the ESRB rating and while you are correct that it is E10+ guess what it says about the online portion (see below). That means Xbox has no obligation to keep the online features at E10+ because the ESRB recognizes that "Online Experiences May Vary" which is another common term used in the rating industry.
ok censorship is fine, when it is functional. and sure i get that it would be a good thing if the servers were public, but they arent. if i swear on a sign, since it is only MY friends who can see it, i am positive nobody would be offended, unless i wrote something about somebodies mother of course. but a swear word isn't gonna corrupt the minds of my friends. they are waaaaaay too far gone for bad language to mess them up!
my game, my server, my rules, my effing signs so let me write whatever i like and if someone sees something they dont like, do what every other game does and have a report option. reading roughly zero emails a day about bad language on signs has gotta be better than having software that checks every single sign right?
Spot on my friend, a very strong argument. I completely agree.
The sign censorship is kind of lame, but it's nothing game breaking, just don't write anything deemed "offensive" by Microsoft.
It unfortunately is game breaking. The signs prevent pre 1.8.2 maps from loading, and crash current version servers if there are too many. Don't believe me, check the known bugs sticky post and you will see a temporary workaround for server crashes is removing signs.
MC XBL will never be like the PC version because of the Xbox's RAM, hence our vertical and horizontal world limitations. We need to squeeze every little bit of the system's resources out of our Xbox for Minecraft to run how it currently does. The sign censorship program uses resources beyond the limitations of the Xbox which leads to crashing. So we are left for with a choice: sacrifice performance and overall functionality of the game for sign censorship or encourage 4J to continue to pursue options with Microsoft to alleviate this issue. I'm voting for the latter.
Wow. I didn't know about this. I wondered where the lag came from and weird "censored" messages on my signs. That is really dumb. I only even play with friends anyway, and like fairliedaft said since the servers aren't public anyway, who really gives a toot? If it is absolutely necessary, can't they find a less performance affecting solution? Oh, wait. It's Microsoft.
That's the idea Squid! If the censorship program has to stay in some form, what options do we have to make it less resource intensive? Thanks to everyone that has posted so far.
It unfortunately is game breaking. The signs prevent pre 1.8.2 maps from loading, and crash current version servers if there are too many. Don't believe me, check the known bugs sticky post and you will see a temporary workaround for server crashes is removing signs.
MC XBL will never be like the PC version because of the Xbox's RAM, hence our vertical and horizontal world limitations. We need to squeeze every little bit of the system's resources out of our Xbox for Minecraft to run how it currently does. The sign censorship program uses resources beyond the limitations of the Xbox which leads to crashing. So we are left for with a choice: sacrifice performance and overall functionality of the game for sign censorship or encourage 4J to continue to pursue options with Microsoft to alleviate this issue. I'm voting for the latter.
Is there proof or confirmation that the censoring of the signs is what is causing the world crashing? Without confirmation, it's just random assumption by people, which is usually wrong. All the bug thread says is this....
Is there proof or confirmation that the censoring of the signs is what is causing the world crashing? Without confirmation, it's just random assumption by people, which is usually wrong. It says nothing about the sign censoring from Microsoft being the cause of the issue with the signs.
Under normal conditions a sign will process so quickly through the censorship program that you won't even notice it. The scanning process is built into that slight delay it takes to place a sign after you hit done. As you place each sign it will similarly go through this process, that's not where the issue starts though.
Here's an example of the problem: You just built yourself an adventure server and you have 50 signs all over. You close the server and load it back up. Now the censorship program queues up all 50 signs at once, while the game also attempts to load chunks and other items. When the games freezes, most the signs around you should say "Pending Approval" (which you normally would only see if you are lagging) when the game freezes. Great, so you hard reset your Xbox, load it all back up but this time you load your adventure server offline. All the signs load because there's no pesky censorship program checking your signs and the game runs flawlessly.
This indicates to me that the game is locking up because of the resources tied up with the censorship program. I can reproduce this over and over. Even better, if I remove the signs and that is the only change I make in the server, once I bring it online again the server is stable. I'm changing one variable, the signs, so we have an issue here. Address the resources required to scan the signs in online modes, tell me what the limit is on signs so I don't lock up my system or fix the censorship program.
I wouldn't think so. My Estate has roughly 400+ signs throughout various mob traps and water works and the world loads fine.
I've never had an issues with them either. I just made a Creative world and place around 50-ish signs then explored the entire map. Then I loaded it again in Online mode. It loaded quickly and didn't crash. It's been running for about 10 minutes now with no issues.
Maybe this only happens to people with slower internet or older Xbox 360s, because my game is fine.
Also, I saw two people earlier talking about how signs that said Bravo and Strip were censored. In my game, in an Online world, my signs were not censored when I put those words.
The only thing is that others are not having a problem with signs, like Sedistix.
I've never had an issues with them either. I just made a Creative world and place around 50-ish signs then explored the entire map. Then I loaded it again in Online mode. It loaded quickly and didn't crash. It's been running for about 10 minutes now with no issues.
Maybe this only happens to people with slower internet or older Xbox 360s, because my game is fine.
Also, I saw two people earlier talking about how signs that said Bravo and Strip were censored. In my game, in an Online world, my signs were not censored when I put those words.
Internet speed could definitely be a contributing factor. I think the key here also is significant builds in addition to signage. Such as building a medieval city or other large build with signs. The server in question that is currently being troubleshot has significant building projects all over the world in addition to the signs. For example, a 250x250 village with one building that peaks at the vertical build limit.
Thanks for taking the time to debunk the inaccurate claims of censoring words that are not considered vulgar etc. I have not experienced strange words being censored myself.
Sorry Kiddies, this is sooo not going to happen. The gaming industry have set the game rating as 7+ (10 for the dumbies in the USA). This game is now officially a family friendly game. This means you will have censorship for the rest of its life.
Also, I saw two people earlier talking about how signs that said Bravo and Strip were censored. In my game, in an Online world, my signs were not censored when I put those words.
I never claimed Bravo wouldn't work. I stated that I tried to make a sign that read: "Trap Bravo" on the second line and it censored it. If I put in just "Bravo" it works fine. I encourage you to try to see for yourself.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!" ~ George Bernard Shaw
If you REALLY wanted to put a swear word into a sign. . . personally not too sure why. . could you not split the word into two, and place on two signs? Kinda like mustache guys pics, but have the swear word split so that the first half is on the very right of the first sign, and the second half on the left of the second sign? Might work? Not tried it as I'm not on my xbox atm. Also, I wouldn't try it, cause I'm not sad. LOL
The one variable test Richcraft mentions is pretty convincing to me. Couple that with the fact that 4J has said they've been able to reproduce the bug related to signs and I think he's probably on to something.
Related to Sedistix's experience - how many of those signs actually have text on them versus being blank and used for their water or lava blocking abilities? The reason I ask is I can see two potential explanations for his lack of trouble (provided most of the signs are blank).
First, I wonder if the censorship program has a routine to bypass all blank signs? From a programming point of view, it would make sense to have such a routine in place because it would provide some degree of performance efficiency. (contrary to popular belief, M$ does have some vested interest in maintaining service efficiency). I doubt very seriously M$ is using true, smart-searching censorship routines; they're probably just brute-force searching against a list of prohibited text string combinations. If they are using a brute-force, sequential search method, then having a pre-test routine to ignore blank signs would significantly improve performance.
Second, if M$ is using true, smart-search text parsers for the censorship system, wholly blank signs would "process" faster because these ai-driven text parsers can tell when they are looking at a blank sign quicker than a sequential text-seek routine and can "intuitively" pass on such signs.
I think I'll do a little experiment later to see how easy it is to trick the censor filter. That'll tell us a lot about how the filter is actually working.
For those questioning why certain seemingly innocous words are filtered - remember some words in English are swear words in another language. For instance, you could not chat the would "after" on Puzzle Pirates - supposedly because it is German slang for something (I never found out what).
The vast majority of signs in my world are blank, and used simply to maintain water flows for transporting mobs. So in actuality of the 400+ signs I've placed, maybe 30-40 have actual text.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!" ~ George Bernard Shaw
I never claimed Bravo wouldn't work. I stated that I tried to make a sign that read: "Trap Bravo" on the second line and it censored it. If I put in just "Bravo" it works fine. I encourage you to try to see for yourself.
Interesting Expirement.
I took the phrase Trap Bravo and tried it many different ways on the signs.
The only time the words Trap Bravo were censored is when they were on the same line of the sign together. If they were on separate lines, it didn't censor anything at all. The two signs that were censored in the picture above said TRAP BRAVO on the second line of the sign and BRAVO TRAP on the first line of the sign.
So it has something to do with the worlds being together on the same line.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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i havent played minecraft in like 4 years lol
I used to have tall grass covering my entire town, and it didn't lag.
I removed the grass, built a warehouse and put signs in it... and now the game lags, and whenever I break a sign, it crashes.
This is still very much a defeatist attitude. I think a company who brought MS a percentage of over 4 million sales of a product that cost MS nothing to produce gives 4J a stronger voice than a single consumer such as you or I.
There are still options that can be put into place by 4J, such as parental controls for the signs that empower the parents without MS having to go the extra step and put in place an always active sign scanner. There are solutions for this, and if the community speaks up it may make a difference.
I checked the Xbox Live website to check out the ESRB rating and while you are correct that it is E10+ guess what it says about the online portion (see below). That means Xbox has no obligation to keep the online features at E10+ because the ESRB recognizes that "Online Experiences May Vary" which is another common term used in the rating industry.
"Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB"
Spot on my friend, a very strong argument. I completely agree.
It unfortunately is game breaking. The signs prevent pre 1.8.2 maps from loading, and crash current version servers if there are too many. Don't believe me, check the known bugs sticky post and you will see a temporary workaround for server crashes is removing signs.
MC XBL will never be like the PC version because of the Xbox's RAM, hence our vertical and horizontal world limitations. We need to squeeze every little bit of the system's resources out of our Xbox for Minecraft to run how it currently does. The sign censorship program uses resources beyond the limitations of the Xbox which leads to crashing. So we are left for with a choice: sacrifice performance and overall functionality of the game for sign censorship or encourage 4J to continue to pursue options with Microsoft to alleviate this issue. I'm voting for the latter.
That's the idea Squid! If the censorship program has to stay in some form, what options do we have to make it less resource intensive? Thanks to everyone that has posted so far.
It says nothing about the sign censoring from Microsoft being the cause of the issue with the signs.
Under normal conditions a sign will process so quickly through the censorship program that you won't even notice it. The scanning process is built into that slight delay it takes to place a sign after you hit done. As you place each sign it will similarly go through this process, that's not where the issue starts though.
Here's an example of the problem: You just built yourself an adventure server and you have 50 signs all over. You close the server and load it back up. Now the censorship program queues up all 50 signs at once, while the game also attempts to load chunks and other items. When the games freezes, most the signs around you should say "Pending Approval" (which you normally would only see if you are lagging) when the game freezes. Great, so you hard reset your Xbox, load it all back up but this time you load your adventure server offline. All the signs load because there's no pesky censorship program checking your signs and the game runs flawlessly.
This indicates to me that the game is locking up because of the resources tied up with the censorship program. I can reproduce this over and over. Even better, if I remove the signs and that is the only change I make in the server, once I bring it online again the server is stable. I'm changing one variable, the signs, so we have an issue here. Address the resources required to scan the signs in online modes, tell me what the limit is on signs so I don't lock up my system or fix the censorship program.
I've never had an issues with them either. I just made a Creative world and place around 50-ish signs then explored the entire map. Then I loaded it again in Online mode. It loaded quickly and didn't crash. It's been running for about 10 minutes now with no issues.
Maybe this only happens to people with slower internet or older Xbox 360s, because my game is fine.
Also, I saw two people earlier talking about how signs that said Bravo and Strip were censored. In my game, in an Online world, my signs were not censored when I put those words.
Internet speed could definitely be a contributing factor. I think the key here also is significant builds in addition to signage. Such as building a medieval city or other large build with signs. The server in question that is currently being troubleshot has significant building projects all over the world in addition to the signs. For example, a 250x250 village with one building that peaks at the vertical build limit.
Thanks for taking the time to debunk the inaccurate claims of censoring words that are not considered vulgar etc. I have not experienced strange words being censored myself.
I never claimed Bravo wouldn't work. I stated that I tried to make a sign that read: "Trap Bravo" on the second line and it censored it. If I put in just "Bravo" it works fine. I encourage you to try to see for yourself.
Related to Sedistix's experience - how many of those signs actually have text on them versus being blank and used for their water or lava blocking abilities? The reason I ask is I can see two potential explanations for his lack of trouble (provided most of the signs are blank).
First, I wonder if the censorship program has a routine to bypass all blank signs? From a programming point of view, it would make sense to have such a routine in place because it would provide some degree of performance efficiency. (contrary to popular belief, M$ does have some vested interest in maintaining service efficiency). I doubt very seriously M$ is using true, smart-searching censorship routines; they're probably just brute-force searching against a list of prohibited text string combinations. If they are using a brute-force, sequential search method, then having a pre-test routine to ignore blank signs would significantly improve performance.
Second, if M$ is using true, smart-search text parsers for the censorship system, wholly blank signs would "process" faster because these ai-driven text parsers can tell when they are looking at a blank sign quicker than a sequential text-seek routine and can "intuitively" pass on such signs.
I think I'll do a little experiment later to see how easy it is to trick the censor filter. That'll tell us a lot about how the filter is actually working.
For those questioning why certain seemingly innocous words are filtered - remember some words in English are swear words in another language. For instance, you could not chat the would "after" on Puzzle Pirates - supposedly because it is German slang for something (I never found out what).
I took the phrase Trap Bravo and tried it many different ways on the signs.
The only time the words Trap Bravo were censored is when they were on the same line of the sign together. If they were on separate lines, it didn't censor anything at all. The two signs that were censored in the picture above said TRAP BRAVO on the second line of the sign and BRAVO TRAP on the first line of the sign.
So it has something to do with the worlds being together on the same line.