We’re all mad at Blizzard, and rightly so, after the horrors that came to the surface lately.
Thankfully the community overall is showing sympathy for the victims and outrage against the past and current company management. I did not expect such a widespread consensus against Blizzard and the toxic culture it enabled for so many years. That is great.
I think we can also seize the opportunity to take a look in the mirror, because misogyny and other forms of discrimination are not just a Blizzard problem, they’re a universal problem. The very same “bro culture” that plagued the company can also be found in our communities of players and fans.
Don’t get me wrong, I think most of us are probably fine, I’ve had great experiences playing WoW, built relationships with innumerable admirable people over the years. Sure, we may have our petty arguments and disagreements about the game, but those are not important.
I think ours is overall a great community, and I’ve seen proof of this time and time again.
But I also personally encountered, as many other players have, discrimination and harassment. I know people who felt the need to transfer to get away from a transphobic culture, because no matter how much they tried, they couldn’t find a guild capable of accepting them. I know people who hide their gender and don’t use voice chat, because too many times not doing so led to a sudden change in attitude by their guildmates, if not open mockery and exclusion. I know people who had to form guilds specifically for LGTBQ+ people, because of how hard it is sometimes to find a place in other ones, and struggle to shield them from trolls whose only purpose is to get in and harass the members. I’ve seen racial slurs and sexist jokes being thrown around as if it was normal, I’ve been the “boring” one for calling them out, for asking not to belittle other players, not to shame into silence for who they are.
I’ve seen a lot of comments about people who decided to stop giving Blizzard money in light of the recent events, and I respect that choice. But for those of us who decided, for whatever reason, to stay, there is something we can do: actively try to make the World of Warcraft around us a better and more inclusive space to play in.
I don’t mean for this to sound like a lecture, as I said before I know for a fact most of us are decent folks. But it only takes a couple of players to ruin a guild of hundreds, if the hundreds don’t speak up and don’t take a stance. And a lot of good people don’t immediately realise what’s going on, because harassment and discrimination often get passed off as a joke or as a meme.
It’s more of an exhortation really: Blizzard has a lot to answer for, and a lot to change. Hopefully they will and be able to prove it. Probably they won’t, and sadly we have very little power over that, if any. But we do have power over our own spaces: our guilds, our discord servers, our forums, our social groups within the game. Let’s do our part in our space, let’s make sure we don’t foster that same bro culture in the virtual fantasy world we elected to share.
I looked, I’m still hot even at my age.
Judging by the uproar, I’d say quite a few people care about this kind of stuff.
You cared enough to reply, even if not in a positive way.
Awww man, It have to be me who tell you the truth?
Okay…
Trust me brother, as a Venthyr we know, mirrors… are liars
I think the situation is completely unsustainable. Blizzard is showing that it cares little to none not only to its players (which results in an impressive slow but inexorable exodus of players) but also to its employees, wich is even worst.
Complex decisions always start from the headquarter and I don’t see how they can have a future if they don’t focus on people and the product rather than on the profit of the moment.
I don’t belive the management knows nothing about what is going on. I mean it’s not a sigle event: it’s a behavior perpetrated over time.
Bad apples are everywhere, and that’s not something that’s going to go away as long as humans still have free will.
Chances are good people are still good people, and bad people will just keep doing what they do also.
All this barking up the wrong tree every time some #metoo crap happens has gotten so tiresome.
Please teach us what tree we should bark up when a guild kicks us for being gay, or when you’re scared to take the bus alone because you’re a woman.
I agree with your general message (though the layout could use some work 
) and yeah at the end of the day it’s on all of us to come out of this as a better community despite what Blizzard does or doesn’t do. But let’s hope they will do something.
It’s just really unfortunante people once again abuse something as horrible as this to further their pathetic agenda and blast Blizzard as a whole without any concern about who gets caught in the crossfire innocent or otherwise.
Pot meet kettle.
People who are capable of self reflecting properly generally come out better.
It’s a good sentiment, but what exactly is the message to take away here?
Don’t criticize others until you’re perfect yourself?
There is a huge difference between a stranger online making a crude comment, and a person in a position of trust, power, and responsibility taking advantage of one of their employees.
Make Warcraft more ‘inclusive’? I’ve seen what these ‘inclusive’ actions generally do in media, companies and T.V. shows. They remove all men or replace everyone with people of dark colored skin - which includes getting rid of Chinese/Japanese/etc people. That is both racist and sexist, the very thing this ‘inclusivity’ is supposed to combat.
Ya, that’s real exclusivity lol.
Sigh, these movements are nothing but power grabs to paint things another way. They are the polar opposite of inclusion and equality.
Heck voice actors can’t even voice act now because its supposedly racist for a white person to VA a black character - but not vice versa.
then you find another guild near instantly
And there is now busses in wow, wtf are you even trying to make a point with there Cx
feelings =/= facts lmao
forced inclusion or diversity ruins everything, just let things be natural
Of course not. It wasn’t meant as a defense of Blizzard at all.
The message was: criticise Blizzard all you want, but when you’re done, let’s look at what we can do to make our own spaces better, since toxicity and discrimination are present in the community, and Blizzard execs have nothing to do with that. That is on us.
You make it sound like I’m proposing discrimination against white cishet males.
I’m saying maybe don’t start cracking cook book jokes as soon as a girl joins a voice channel. Maybe don’t kick trans people from your guild when their voice outs them. Maybe don’t join LGBT guilds just to tell the members to kill themselves.
Are you afraid this will lead to some kind of communist dictatorship enforced by the lobby of women?
If that’s what being a decent human being means, sign me up.
Sure, why abolish slavery, since naturally humans enslave other humans, just let it flow dewd.
is there a TL;DR for this thread?
No we’re not. Couldn’t care less.
Damn… what a wall of text.
Or is it bugged on mobile?
I do think we should treat people decently. Personally i don’t care what people are or do. It’s really not my business.
I also do agree that sexism definitely exists among the common people, knowingly or not. Seen and heard it on guild chats in different games. And women definitely suffers from it, i guess the it’s the responsibility of the guild leadership to deal with the problem in their guilds.
I don’t even know how people get into the discussion of being homosexual or trans though.
Are the first thing they say in guild chat “Hi, im gay/trans and new to the guild”
I usually get my first impressions from the voice of people, if you sound like a dude, i’m calling you dude.
Never known the sexual preference of most of members in the guilds i’ve been in. And neither would i care.
It’s like 30-ish lines, pretty big wall
To the op, the difference between Blizzard and the players is that the players are not the ones who are being sued by the State of California. I agree that people can be too sensitive at times in game, but people sometimes take the jokes way too far.
Blizzard was obviously a pretty bad place to work if you were a woman or a minority. I can only imagine what those employees had to deal with on an hourly or daily basis at the company. I imagine some of them were quite sick having to go into work and know that they would be treated like garbage day in and day out and no one cared. I would not want my wife or daughter to be treated like this or anyone for that matter.
As for in game behaviors, they can be pretty bad in any game, the same goes for WOW or even in social media, where trolling is the norm. But at least in a game or on social media you can hit the big fat X in the corner of the screen and it can end, the people mistreated at Blizzard could not.
I’m sorry but I have morales and I’ve never acted like that. I don’t need someone who doesn’t know me to assume because of my sex that I have done. It comes naturally to me not to act like that.
There is to much of this type of thing these days where someone sits on a throne lecturing random people about subjects that people didn’t have anything to do with. I’m sure most people wouldn’t act like what happend. It’s a small minority and I think if you need to be told how to treat people with respect and not do messed up things then something is wrong with you fundamentally.
Trying to stop issues for certain groups of people while trying to push another down and sterotype that group of people all being the same way doesn’t work.
I don’t understand the new phenomenon of people thinking using sterotype behaviours towards groups of people in a positive spin makes it any different in a negative way. If you judge “gamers” or “men” to automaticly act like these issues then you aren’t doing anything different than a racist who thinks that way about another race because of a minority.