There’s been a lot of chat recently about user levels having been deleted or moderated from the LittleBigPlanet servers. Well, according to Sam over at the LittleBigPlanet Workshop, less than 200 levels have been moderated, making up less than 0.5% of all the levels published. He tells us that the majority of these were because they contained obscenities, fair enough, and the rest for copyright reasons. He says, by way of an example: “Oasis is the name both of a band and of a soft drink (at least in Europe), however any level using the title ‘Oasis’ would be absolutely fine right now unless it included music by Oasis the band, or the likeness of the drinks bottle.”
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the moderation, and Sam is confident that a lot of this is “exaggeration”. “No level is moderated unless it has been reported using the Good Grief tool,” he says, “at which point it will only be blocked from online play if it is in violation of the EULA. Secondly, even if a level is moderated you will still be able to access it offline on your moon, and make changes if you know where the problem was, before republishing.”
“Finally, if your level is moderated you will receive a message informing you that it has happened – if you don’t receive a message, it hasn’t been moderated. Try searching for your PSN ID to find all the levels you’ve published. There is work to be done on improving the communication of why levels have been moderated, and this is underway, however this is not as widespread as you may have been led to believe, and it does not affect levels you have locally.”
What are your thoughts on this? Have you had a level moderated or deleted without notice, and what was the content that you think caused this? We’d like to hear from you, either in the comments below or via [email protected].
