In Pokémon GO the nickname feature is currently causing confusion. Apparently, a normal Pokémon name has been censored – or has it?
Nickname filter out of control? On Reddit, players are once again trying to solve a mystery in Pokémon GO. But neither Team GO Rocket nor any crazy field research is turning trainers into researchers right now. No, it’s the nickname feature that is raising questions.
The crux of the matter: The legendary Pokémon Ho-Oh. It apparently has an inappropriate name, as Reddit user sliceanddic3 pointed out. Because when he wanted to give the bird its actual official name using the nickname feature, the game informed him of the complete inappropriateness of this name suggestion. It looked like this:
Ho-Oh banned – Censorship or bug?
What’s so inappropriate? On Reddit, the incident is causing amusement – after all, Ho-Oh is the official name of the fire bird. The theory: it’s the building block “Ho” that is preventing the renaming – as it can be used as a shorthand for the word “Hooker”.
The user glumada then found out that the variant “Hoe-Oh” would work, which led users like Asriel52 to wonder: “What exactly does this filter do?”
As some users report, there were similar problems with the names of the monsters “Shroomish” and also “Lickitung”. MojaveBreeze answered the question about the function of the filter with: “It shows us the madness of censorship.” But is this really censorship – or rather a strange bug?
Name only sometimes inappropriate
Can it be reproduced? In testing, we found that the name “Ho-Oh” can indeed be entered as a nickname. Both for Ho-Oh and other monsters. For example, Nidorino:
The name is therefore not fundamentally blocked. However, the problem could also be reproduced in the test – but it requires an intermediate step. This can look something like this:
Give your Ho-Oh an innocuous name. If you now try to rename it back to Ho-Oh, the following error is likely to appear for you:
Now you are no longer allowed to name your Ho-Oh Ho-Oh. Whether this is a bug or censorship – or a mix of both – is somewhat open. What is certain, however, is: this Ho-Oh is now forever called Alf.
If you are looking for a Pokémon that you can easily name with its own name, you will find it at the next community day:
