What you call a “great sense of humor” others call “disgusting”. Ever thought of that?
I had someone who I talked to only once in my life, send me pictures of mushrooms and that person thought “he had a great sense of humor” when all he did was just annoying people like me with his spam of pictures.
Maybe reflect on your “great sense of humor” and you may come to the conclusion that your humor isn’t the only one out there.
Tik Tok is a propaganda tool and good for you if you manage to avoid anything political but many people there just eat everything it spews at them. It’s probably true for a lot of social sites though.
I don’t generally find Vine like sites to be entertaining outside of stuff that is popular enough to be shared outside of that platform. On twitter I just avoid the stuff that the site tries to recommend me from accounts I don’t follow like the plague, same with reddit.
I don’t get anything political on any social media because it’s not something I’m interested in. It works like any platform, twitter, YouTube, facebook etc etc, it builds an algorithm of what kinds of things you like to look at and shows you stuff based on that.
The bulk of my feed on both twitter and tiktok is gaming related, funnily enough because that’s what I look at most.
Tiktok is not a propaganda tool. It’s the same as every other form of social media. It’s not something I’d ever trust as a news source (although most official things have channels on there too including news sites). I don’t go there for news. I go there for the memes.
Example:-
My most deepest secret is that I love 4chan.
Its so entertaining. An unmoderated forum is pure randomness and chaos. Love it.
Its the personified entropy of the universe packed up in neat 1-liners written by trolls cubed (trolls that troll the troll).
Can always rely on them for some ‘wow’ leak too regardless of whether there is any truth to it 
You don’t want to know what my classmates did to me.
Let’s just say it’s approximately 30 miracles that I am alive. There were MANY attempts on my life. And I don’t mean that in a small way like “Oh he got pushed” - I mean the real deal; actual murder attempts.
But I can still play WoW regardless. In fact, I would argue that WoW saved me in many ways. It let me discover that there was a world out there where this sort of behaviour wasn’t normal. It made me feel much better emotionally and mentally to meet people who were kind and decent; just knowing they existed and that I could make more than 1 friend was huge to me.
It kept me sane.
Of course when I left that school I realised most of the world is like that in general, but when I was 14 it was actually surprising. 
That’s why I’m so emotionally attached to this game, in case you were wondering.
Much like spam in the e-mail, or pop ups on the internet… one has to learn to simply ignore them and move on with your life.
Annoying people will quickly get karma and realize that crappy and annoying attitudes alienate you from everyone else. And those people end up alone. With no friends.
Fortunately WoW has a button just for that. I wish I had it IRL though…
In conclusion : I very strongly believe that “Daddy Blizz” and his censorship cant replace actual therapy to get through tough moments in ones life. Its not a games job to fix those issues. Its a therapists job.
Therefore, I dont beleive that reducing WoW to its lowest common denominator is a good thing for all of us.
Well, I’m sorry you had it rough, but I wasn’t wondering, and don’t see what it has to do with /spit or /fart emotes in a video game full of violence and killing. I understand that some people have been through bad stuff, I’ve been through years of realtively mild but consistent bullying myself, but it takes some exceptionally thin skin to be offended by these emotes.
If what happened to me didn’t make me allergic to WoW’s violence, why should being disrespected in another way make one allergic to WoW’s disrespectful emotes, especially those clearly used in jest?
And if the occasional negative social interaction is unacceptable to you, then you probably need to find a smaller space. It can never be eliminated in a game on this scale, but of course systems can be put in place that try to reduce friction that will make people genuinely angry at one another.
World of Warcraft is in the middle of extraordinary times. The MMO will be turning 17 years old this month, and while Blizzard prepares for the launch of a new patch, it is also looking within to fix its own culture under the backdrop of a state investigation into sexual harassments issues.
Last week, I had a chance to talk with World of Warcraft director Ion Hazzikostas. I asked him about what’s happening inside Blizzard and the World of Warcraft team since the investigation became public. We also talked about the changes that World of Warcraft is seeing in the upcoming 9.1.5 patch and beyond.
It’s a long and frank discussion, and you can read the edited transcript of the exchange below.
Changing the game
GamesBeat: The World of Warcraft team has been changing or removing some of the game’s emotes and art. What’s the thought process behind those changes?
Ion Hazzikostas: As we said in, I think, a brief blog, a forum post, this has been a process that has been ongoing as a result of an internal period of self-reflection over the last few months. These are changes that are coming from the team as a whole. In the discussions we began internally in the aftermath of the lawsuit and everything surrounding that, on many levels, trying to understand how we as the current leadership of the team could do better — better for our team, better for our community. One thing that came up is that there are pieces of our game that, over the course of 17-plus years now, that were not necessarily the products of a diverse or inclusive range of voices, that did not necessarily reflect the perspective of the current team and of many of our players. There are things that people on our team were not proud to have in our game. These are many things that people, over the years, have pointed out in the community, but we didn’t necessarily listen in the way we should have at the time.
What we did was we just set up a process internally for folks across the team, as well as sourcing some feedback from the community as a whole, to flag pieces of the game for review, whether it’s old quests or specific lines. As a random example, there were a number of jokes and references made a dozen years ago about how feminine male blood elves were, mistaking male blood elves for women, just poking fun at that in a not necessarily good-spirited way. That doesn’t sit right in 2021. That’s the sort of thing that was reviewed by a broad group that reflects the diversity of our team today. We made decisions on whether to leave some things standing, because they’re borderline, but we’re not looking to reinvent everything, turn over every single stone and rewrite 17 years of WoW. It might be a little bit juvenile. It might be off-color. But this isn’t something that is really making our game feel less welcoming for people, which is what we’re aiming to change. Those things we left. Others were removed, others were rewritten or changed accordingly.
Because of the nature of the feedback loop in the community and the way we publish new builds during the public test realm cycle and fan sites data mining them, every one of these changes ends up getting a huge spotlight shone on it alongside class balance changes or new systems we’re adding. This is a massive patch, but this is not something that took the entire team offline. In the grand scheme of things these are small changes. Many of them would probably go unnoticed if not for that spotlight being shone on them. But they’re things that were important to the team, and we’ve heard from many in our community that they’re important to them. This isn’t necessarily something that we expect to do in every patch going forward, to have a bunch of changes along these lines in it, but we want to be more sensitive to how the content we make is received by our team, and by the global player base that calls Azeroth, World of Warcraft home.
GamesBeat: What’s the community reaction to these changes been like?
Hazzikostas: Mixed, right? Some of it is confusion. Changes started to be seen before we explained why we were doing what we were doing. There’s a range of folks. You have folks who see this as political or unwelcome. “Just focus on making a fun game. I don’t care about this stuff.” On the other end there are those who have expressed concern that we’re almost doing this as a smokescreen. Rather than actually tackling the hard issues, we’re just changing some words in a game. This isn’t an “or.” It’s an “and.” We understand that we’re not fixing systemic injustice by changing an emote in World of Warcraft. But why not do that while we’re also working on larger cultural unity and diversity and safety issues and more? As we’re improving our processes for evaluating managers, for sharing feedback with the team; as we’re improving our recruiting and hiring to build a more diverse team, let’s also turn that same eye on our game. That’s one thing that may be more visible in the short term. But in the long term we understand that what we’re going to be judged for as a team, as a company, and as a game is far beyond that. That work is still underway.
Above: Shadowlands is WoW’s current expansion.
Image Credit: Blizzard
Alright, I see what you were getting at now.
And then there’s the Jailor, who is wholly evil but his evil cannot be shown because it makes the team uncomfortable, so he does nothing.
When you cannot permit evil people to do evil things in your stories because you are uncomfortable with their evil, then you cannot create a villain.
I firmly believe that these two situations stem from the same mindset. I don’t know that many of the people who got upset over these removals saw a connection between removing negative emotes, Garrosh Hellscream, and The Jailor’s botched story arc, but I do.
Is that your interpretation of issues with the Jailer. For me it a case of bad story writing. It wasn’t believable that Sylvanas would be duped by him. None of it made sense. And he wasn’t really much of a villain. Not like others before and after him.
Yes, or at least part of it. I honestly don’t know if he was supposed to be a villain. It’s hard to tell when they’re that poorly written. I think he was.
“Bad story writing” is of course true, but maybe we wanna look behind the curtain on that one and ask “Why is there bad story writing”? I think they just didn’t like showing what he truly wanted to do, so they got cold feet and backed off, breaking their story in the process. We saw that more publicacly, but with much less of a negative impact, with the whole Alexstrasza incident.
Of course it wasn’t believable that Sylvanas would be duped by him. Again, he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t really say anything of substance. His final breath is him saying we don’t get it; well of course not, he never does anything.
What is it that he told Sylvanas that made her believe that the world would be better off if the forces of death ruled the world, even in her more evil state?
And why should I despise him anyway? Again, he doesn’t do anything. His jailing of us lasts 20 minutes and he’s really not that dangerous. We cannot defeat Sylvanas, but we can defeat him? (in the final raid)
The whole Maw and especially Torghast is full of examples of telling but not showing, especially in the audio department.
BFA didn’t make sense either. There are rumors and theories as to why BFA’s story went the way it did but I have no way of knowing if they’re true. Anyway it feels like in SL the writers just got the story at an all time low and had to pick up the pieces so I don’t blame them if the writing is subpar.
I don’t disagree, I’ve been fairly vocal saying BfA and the reason for war made no sense.
It’s like they needed to get somewhere (with the story) and had no idea how to do it.
Imo by far the biggest issue with BfA’s story is that 80% of it takes place on two islands, but the whole world is at war. Telling a story like BfA requires a Cataclysm-like overhaul. Everything was just in books or other 2nd hand material. If you just played WoW and followed its story it was very hard to work out what was going on.
I really did love Zandalar though. It is really beautiful.
As a Horde main I thoroughly enjoyed levelling my Ally through Drustvar.
Yea… and that atmosphere in Waycrest Manor. The camera is annoying but the atmosphere… goosebumps.
I think BfA may well have some of WoW’s best zones aesthetically. But I’m not sure they were the right vehicle to tell the fourth war.
BFA had good stories locally but terrible stories overall in the campaign.
BFA had better zones and music than many wow expansions but also had Nazjatar…
