Disable chat in options

Can a disable chat in options be provided? My boys are starting to play more and they’ve started interacting with people.

An in-game indicator (e.g. a specific colored hue around person or above their head or compass indicator) could let others know that a player has chat disabled, so they don’t think the person is rude who has chat disabled.

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Are you implying that you don’t want your children interacting with people?

My wife and I don’t want our 6 and 8 year old boys chatting with strangers The two older daughters, we will enable it, once the games goes 1.0 and I get the extra keys.

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Sounds like you need a parental control option of some sort. You should put together a list of features that would be ideal to you for parental controls.

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Disable chat is only option. Everything else is good. An in-game indicator would be nice to have since it would save other players time knowing another player’s chat is disabled.

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Disabling chat in the options is a simple thing for us to enable - and we’ve added it to the backlog todo.

In general I’m really keen to help families play online together and this includes allowing minors suitable online access. I’ve always assumed that we would need to do more than simply disabling chat.

  1. Pin protection: Do we offer a parental mode with a pin to protect the options being reset?

  2. Chat: Do we allow chat to be fully or partially (see next point) disabled.

  3. Friending: Do we allow friending to be limited by parental control. Should friends be able to chat, but non-friends be muted.

I’d assumed we’d go for (something like the following - but we’d love to get parent feedback):

  1. Parents can lock the game options with a PIN.
  2. Game exposes a “Protected” mode where:
  3. Protected accounts only see chat from friends.
  4. Protected accounts can’t make friends.

Anything else required or useful?

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I was thinking on this the other day and my thoughts were, if a child is smart enough to figure out this game, chances are they’d be smart enough to enable a disabled chat given the opportunity. James brings up some good points to consider.

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Each of those are neat features. We trust our children so a quick and easy fix of disabling chat in-game menu, sooner than later, would be welcome. Our boys have been playing World of Tanks with chat disabled in game menu since it was added a year or so ago.

Robust parental control features you listed would be nice to have. When setting up the kids accounts it would be nice to create a “child” account from a parent account, and permissions for real money payments, chat, password, or other controls you enable can be controlled via the parent account. Parent accounts should be able to make the child accounts “stand alone”, or no longer controlled by parent at some point.

Thanks for the reply.

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I have a five year old that would love to play this game. I still think he needs a few years before his first online experiance but that day is coming. He is already building amazing structures on mc.
While I dont want to restrict who he would chat with in game it might be nice to flag his charicter as a juvenile.
Just knowing who is a child and who is an adult greatly affects how I act around them.

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At first I thought this topic was a tad overkill, but the points/features you suggested sound like legitimate features that may help parents feel comfortable with their kids jumping on.

+1 James!

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