Sega MMO Phantasy Star Online 2: The non-player characters in New Genesis were renamed during this week’s regular maintenance. The PSO2 NGS Meseta black and brown members of the CAST race of robots previously called "Diggah" will be called "Excator" in the future.

Originally brought to our attention by Joe "Kongablooey" Negron on Twitter, Diggah was originally the name of the non-player character in the recently released "Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis" who is responsible for distributing mining tasks to players. He introduced the player to Dualomite, a rare purple mineral used to upgrade equipment in massively multiplayer online games.

The name Diggah itself is not offensive, but it does differ from a very bad word by one letter. Whether this name is intended to be offensive is questionable, because it is basically the English version of the character's original Japanese name Dighoru (basically Digger). However, combined with the relatively unique color of CAST and the fact that he asked players to find Dualomite, this sounds very similar to the blaxloitation comedy Dolemite of the 70s, and it is easy to see how this name is considered very offensive.

The name change in this week’s patch happened quietly and was listed in the update description as "The name of an NPC determined to be unsuitable as a character name has been corrected." So far, it seems that Diggah is the only name changed. We have contacted Sega to comment on the name exchange, but have yet to receive a response.