A) Do we have proof they were all removed? Or just their word. Because words are cheap. Like, say, the continued “Oh, we’re totally getting to giving night elves something to make up for the time we let one of those bad apples write a genocide story (because he hated them) that was never meant to be about them”?
B) Do you even know what the phrase “a few bad apples” means? It doesn’t mean “Just pick them out and everything will be good”, it means “The whole damn barrel’s potentially ruined”. Sure, some of the worst offenders were kicked out. That doesn’t mean that some of the lesser offenders didn’t get to stay, that the overall atmosphere improved completely, and that even some of the worst offenders might have been kept because they were “too important”
And yeah, there’s a reason they’re saying Blizzard can’t handle it like this: Because they read the quest text and went “That’s handled atrociously”! After a history of handling such issues atrociously! And yet that doesn’t even mean “Blizzard should never tackle issues like this”, it just means “What possessed you to write this with such little care, given how entirely unnecessary it was to do so”
There is no heinous act. World of Warcraft isn’t real. There’s some extremely vague hinting at the fictional representation of a heinous act described in a fantasy book from the last decade.
How this makes you whip out the bold upper case of furious outrage is beyond me.
I always say a sanitized story in order to not offend anyone is a bad idea. I want them to stand behind it and don’t change these dialogues.
Look most people didn’t care about story of dragonflight until now if you ask them what happened since 10.0 to 10.1 I wonder what you’ll get from them as a summary or something like “what were memorable quests for you?”.
All of a sudden many people have shown interest in this part, why? it is controversial or sensitive subject according to some but at least now we care.
If you want to clear the side quests, this is one of them, so you do have to do it, there isn’t even a token “choice” like there was in BfA on whether to support Sylvanas or to rebel with Saurfang.
It is indeed just the fictional representation of a heinous act, a representation inspired from reality. Such events happen in real life and this is essentially an excellent opportunity to show people who would have difficulty understanding what victims of human trafficking and rape went through, the traumas that has caused them. Instead it is being handled by a company with a terrible (recent) past when it comes to sexual abuse which then uses it in a quest that has text peppered with light-hearted humor and jokes. This is not the right way to go about it and it undermines the experiences of real life victims who went though similar things.
And to clarify, I am all for talking about these things in game and talking about Alexstrasza’s past and what she went through, the problem is it’s being handled horribly.
But if you don’t believe that fiction, let alone a game in which the player controls actions has an effect on the reader/player, then why do you care? If it doesn’t make the player feel things, then surely there’s no problem with removing the quest? It’s all meaningless!
Alternatively, you can accept that fiction makes people feel things, and that enabling a horrible fictional act can make the player feel awful (especially if they have experience of similar acts), and so care needs to be taken on such sensitive topics.
The outrage comes from seeing people deliberately choose to ignore this, blame it on political reasons, and then deliberately misrepresent the argument…
Like this. I never said I wanted the story sanitised. I never said I wanted the story of Alexstrasza’s abuse retconned. Why? Because I don’t. I just want it handled properly.
And I used to believe that idea, I was an edgy “free speech warrior” type as a teenager, but then I grew out of it. Why? Because having dark themes that offend or upset people does not inherently make a story or argument good. There is nothing wrong with going “I am not equipped to tackle this topic”, or “I handled this poorly, I should change it”. (If anything, it’s a sign of maturity to do so, instead of going "Well, my poorly thought out young dumb teenager level thoughts NEED to be heard!)
A lot of people think they believe in not changing something under criticism, but I’ve found that they either realise “hey, it actually isn’t a bad idea to accept “I am not equipped to handle this, I’m just upsetting people for no reason”” or they only believe it because actually, they just like offending people, and they never cared about good story writing or intellectual discussion in the first place.
After all, if it was about good story writing then shouldn’t they be fine with removing it in order for something much better to take its place? Like a lot of the people wanted? And what good does it do the story to have Chromie treat the repeated rape of an idolised colleague with the same nonchalance as just about anything else?
And yes, they’ve shown interest in it because It’s a part of Warcraft’s history that’s reasonably well known and pretty apalling, and so seeing it handled so cack handedly given Blizzard’s history is an extremely bad look. Raising emotions doesn’t mean you’ve done a good job, sometimes it means you’ve just been a rude jackass. A night out where you’re punched in the face and spend hours chained to the toilet may be memorable, but I’d be worried if you said it were good.
And yes, people do complain when other sensitive topics are handled poorly. It’s just that this topic has people pretending that it’s just “woke whiners” criticising it for… Reasons of having an grossly unpleasant personality.
How is you “wanting to clear the side quest” equal to being forced to clear them? Wth?
You are not forced to do them and this is an objective, irrefutable truth.
We know. Luckily fictional acts are quite different from real acts. The main difference, and a pretty big one, being that they’re fictional.
A lot of people have a lot of different traumatic real life experiences. Storytellers should still be able to tell the story they want, without having to carefully step around any possible trauma. That is a completely unreasonable request.
The problem isn’t that people have feelings. The problem is people demanding stories be changed or removed to appease those feelings, and not anybody else’s. Which is particularly detestable when the demanded action is unreasonable and the reasoning self-centered and hypocritical.
The player should take care to avoid topics that are sensitive for them, not dictate what can be written and how it should be written. The writer alone should have authority over their work. Victims or not, the world doesn’t revolve around them, and respect for the victims doesn’t pass through the educolration of any story they happen to rest their eyes upon.
There must be emotional ups and downs. These people always have reasons to get upset, if you want to lets keep track of some of those complainers and share what they complain about on twitter each day? Do you want it? Then you’ll understand that there is no point in trying to avoid / prevent them from being upset.
Some people are lost cause they are just lost cause, victimizing themselves or others and also virtue signaling is a lifestyle for them.
But outrage against such stuff results with sanitization of story. That is why we are trying to defend this. I mean if we use empathy what would you do if you were an employee amongst narrative team, would you take risks if you face great pushbacks for every morally gray thing you put into the game?
Let me read it again. So what is wrong here, Chromie says it has to be done again no matter how bad that past event is, then tells us to keep this part a secret in order to not make Alextrasza remember it. Then we complete the quest and she acts cheery, pretending like there is nothing to worry about to hide from Alextrasza. Then realizes that Alextrasza somehow knows about it. We look at Alextrasza and she is a bit cold but tells us it was necessary, can’t be helped.
It is completely reasonable to ask a storyteller to use a modicum of respect and common sense when handling a difficult subject, especially one that is so obviously prone to inflaming emotions, and especially one that is meant to simply entertain.
The storyteller is allowed to disagree, naturally, and keep the story as is. And likewise, people are allowed to criticise the storyteller for dealing with the topic with all the subtlety of a brick.
And if the storyteller decides “oh no, my story didn’t go over the way I wanted it to, I should change it”, that isn’t necessarily a great impediment on their vision, sometimes it just means “Thanks for pointing out that something unimportant and easily removed was upsetting people for no reason”.
Again, as a former “free speech warrior”, I very quickly learnt that the people who claim this are often demanding that it not be changed to suit their own feelings.
And that again, they usually tend to apply it when people, quite reasonably, feel uncomfortable doing/reading about an act that affects them (but has little narrative purpose), but not the person saying “Don’t change it for peoples’ feelings!”. Not when it’s things they have problems with, or is just boring.
It’s self-centred and hypocritical to say it’s wrong to ask for a change because of “feelings”, when you yourself are demanding it stay the same because of “feelings”. What if the author wants to change it? What if the author thinks they did a bad job? Now you’re demanding that they change it from what they want it to be!
So I should just throw in a potentially upsetting topic somewhere in a work of fiction that’s otherwise had little to do with it, and if someone’s unhappy it’s their fault for not checking to see that their story that never otherwise handled it suddenly threw it in? Or maybe it’s silly (if not callous) to blame the audience for suddenly being thrown a topic they had little reason to expect
Again, you’re acting as if the author is absolutely certain that what they’ve written is their perfect vision, and anything less than it is heresy.
It is not.
Criticism and editing exists for a reason. Authors sometimes float an idea out to be tested, and change it when they get a negative response. Sometimes it’s because what they wrote was boring, or didn’t make sense, sometimes its because it offended when they didn’t want to, but the former changes don’t see criticism about “ruining the artists’ vision” as much as the latter.
Once again, you make it clear that your problem is, like too many “free speech warriors” like I used to be, that you think “being allowed to offend” means “I should offend”, and that not wanting to offend is a universal sign of weakness as opposed to “How does offending people over this benefit anyone”.
There are times where it is important to offend people. To decide that a poorly written, poorly thought out quest that never needed to exist and does nothing to appreciably help the story (if anything it makes it worse) is a form of offense that absolutely needs to exist speaks far, far worse about you than it does to people who simply don’t want “Suddenly, time to enable a rape!” in their mostly fun past time.
With a quote like that, I’d say you’re a lost cause who gets upset over pointless things too, who always wants to be the victim because you’ve never had to worry about the wokies’ problems, so obviously they don’t exist!
If this is what you’re defending as necessary to avoid sanitisation of the story, then I question your motives. If this is your example of “moral greyness that must be kept”, I question your motives.
There are far better ways to tackle both the subject of greyness and Alexstrasza’s treatment than this dumb, barely checked over quest. To act like this is the way it has to be done betrays either a total lack of imagination, a desire to see “darkness” at all costs, or to simply “own the virtue signallers”.
And given how you constantly act as though the complaint is simply that it’s “morally grey” as opposed to the specifics of both the acts, its role in the game genre, and the history of the company (as stated repeatedly), and that you take the absolute most saccharinely charitable interpretation of the quest as though it were gospel (so why could people read it differently and be offended!), I rather doubt there’s any positive motive behind it.
Not least when you blame it all on virtue signallers who want to complain about everything.
My opinion won’t change on this, good luck with your crusade on these dialogues.
WoW must sometimes touch on sensitive topics if it wants to be relevant. Until now almost all topics were related to how bad / uninteresting / dull the narrative is, this controversy pulled attention back to it. There is nothing really offensive or anything like that in these dialogues, I summarized it above.
You for example blatantly lie about Chromie’s attitude towards this event in your ptr topic.
You say Chromie jokes about it, Chromie doesn’t joke about it, she just acts awkward, doesn’t know how to behave and perhaps even stressed out but you blatantly lie and say “Chromie jokes about keeping it quiet”
Now that’s an obvious lie, I don’t know what your purpose is, it seems it is so important to you, you even openly/explicitly lie about it to find more support from people.
My motivation is clear, I want the story to be attention worthy and you and likes of you try to make it as boring as possible.
I had no problem with Burning of Teldrassil too, it was an evil deed done by our enemies perhaps a warcrime. My problem was aftermath of Teldrassil, they turned our story to “no revenge, it was all Sylvanas lets not burn orcs in return, Sylvanas attacked Teldrassil by herself, solo, revenge only from her”. We know how it ends.
Do I like Burning of Teldrassil? As an Alliance zealot myself of course not actually hated it but it was a great memorable story arc.
Sometimes players should be exposed to things that they don’t like for success of narrative.
This i agree with. This is the one thing i don’t get how people get it to her joking about it. The only thing that can be taken as a joke is ”is tasty and full of holes” which she mean with time and not the actual issue your PC is tasked with.
Because the culling of Stratholme kicked off events that led to both Alliance and Horde departing for Kalimdor, where they eventually helped defeat the Legion.
Same goes for Black Morass (Bringing the Horde to Azeroth in the first place) and Durnholde (Ensuring Thrall escapes to do his part), in Durnholde the bronze dragons were very solemn about being unable to prevent Taretha Foxton’s fate, a far cry from “Best not tell her, huh?”
That’s my beef with this quest, it’s being treated too lightly by Chromie (Trying to play the “Cute gnome”-act a bit too hard?), and there’s no explanation as to why this particularly horrible thing must be done.
I don’t see the need for this quest either. But as far as I know, she was only held captive with the help of the Dragon Soul and had to lay eggs, which were then taken away from her by the orcs. There was no… act.
That is enslavement, yes. But rape? Can you call that rape? I just have to think of my neighbor who keeps chickens…
edit: Nevermind, missed a certain part of the lore
She was imprisoned with her consort Tyranastrasz, who died in captivity, his skull is on display in-game in the Ironforge Museum. She was magically kept in a constant state of weakness and pain and bound by mighty chains of adamantine steel, according to the Warcraft II manual and later Chronicle. She was forced to breed with him, and all the eggs she was forced to lay by Nekros were taken, some to become warmounts by the orcs and some to be magically brainwashed loyal whelps. There very much was an act.
It’s legitimate to ask, it’s legitimate to feel a certain way, and it’s perfectly legitimate to disagree with the storyteller. But it’s not reasonable to expect a storyteller to step around every single possible traumatic experience their audience may have had. I know this isn’t necessarily what you’re implying, but if we’re saying rape victims may feel distressed playing this quest, then a lot of other victims may feel distressed playing an awful lot of other quests. If you have to be careful not to upset anyone, it becomes quite literally impossible to tell a story, because strife and suffering are so fundamental to narrative art, and you’ll always find somebody upset by something else, especially in the age of internet, where most of the people feeding the outrage aren’t even personally involved, being more victims of polarisation than victims of rape.
Speaking of victims, do they ask TV news for a trigger warning when reporting about sexual crimes? Do they storm out of the classroom when the history teacher explains the founding myth of Rome?
If you know somebody who suffers from PTSD after being sexually assaulted, it is only humane to avoid the subject or to be exceptionally careful about it, and it would be horrible to suggest otherwise. But you can’t expect the entire media world to completely avoid the subject, because the mere mention of it can trigger a response in people still displaying avoidance. And most certainly you can’t fault a narrator for it: the fault lies with the abuser. At that point the focus should be recovery, and it’s a medical issue, not a narrative one. PTSD symptoms will go away over time (I believe we’re talking months for most people), and victims will be able to watch the news, read dramas, watch TV shows and play the Chromie quest without experiencing major distress.
But let’s not fool ourselves here. The criticism doesn’t come from people suffering from rape trauma syndrome. It’s mostly coming from perfectly fine people who thought “eww, how dark” and wanted to earn good boy points on the bird app.
I don’t know what bizarre internet faction wars you went through, and I offer you my deepest sympathies, but this reasoning doesn’t work. People aren’t speaking against the outrage because they enjoy rape, because they feel positive instead of negative when reading the quest text, but because they believe the arguments made against the quest to be faulty. Or at least, this is why I’m speaking. I couldn’t care less if the quest stays or goes, it’s not like you’re tearing pages off the Iliad. But I’m speaking out because, based on this kind of reasoning, you could.
What I meant by “self-centered and hypocritical” is this.
Actively torturing people to death: sleeps.
Butchering innocent civilians by the hundreds while they plead for mercy: fair, rational.
Union busting: coooool.
Implicitly referring to a sexual violence from a 10 years old book: WOAH WAIT WTF!
By the logic of “horrible crimes may be traumatic to some people”, you either start throwing a fuss over all the horrible and potentially triggering events happening in WoW, or you’re a self-centered hypocrite.
I’ve read people saying that war is less real and important than rape. In 2023.
I didn’t say it’s their fault. If a victim suffers distress after being exposed to a triggering topic, it’s an unhappy circumstance, but you can’t fault quest designers for it.
, sometimes it’s because they want to avoid backlash from an irrational, clout hungry mob of tweeters.
??? I what? I never said any of this.
I don’t think that “not wanting to offend is a universal sign of weakness”.
What are you even talking about?
Stop projecting please.
This is all happening in your head and has absolutely nothing to do with my arguments.
