Players testing the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 beta discovered they couldn’t send messages containing the phrase “Arc Raiders” in the game’s text chat. The block was oddly specific—typing “Arc” or “Raiders” separately worked fine, but combining them triggered the filter.
The discovery kicked off immediate testing. Players confirmed that other game titles like “Battlefield” or even “Battlefield 6” sailed through without issue. Only “Arc Raiders” got caught.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Multiple players reported the exact same block existed in EA’s Battlefield chat system. The same two-word phrase, blocked in two completely different games from rival publishers.
The cross-game censorship points to a shared moderation system rather than deliberate competitor blocking. Most major publishers outsource chat moderation to third-party vendors like WebPurify, CleanSpeak, or Community Sift. These services maintain databases of flagged phrases that get applied across multiple clients.
Arc Raiders is an upcoming extraction shooter from Embark Studios, the team founded by former DICE developers who also created The Finals. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and features parkour-heavy gameplay in a sci-fi setting. It launched in early access recently after pivoting from its original co-op PvE design.
Automated moderation systems regularly produce bizarre false positives. The infamous “Scunthorpe problem” describes how innocent words get blocked because they contain letter sequences that match banned terms. New World once accidentally banned any message containing the letter “V” after a moderation update went wrong.
Why both games probably share the same filter
The Arc Raiders block likely stems from an overzealous phrase list or spam detection rule that both Activision and EA inherited from their moderation vendor. No evidence suggests either company deliberately targeted a competitor’s game title.
Neither Activision, EA, nor Embark Studios has commented on the filter. The block will likely disappear once the moderation provider identifies and removes the false positive from their systems.
