Hey, does anybody have some advice to play with less racist people?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Hey, I’m really sorry to ask this and some of you will probably think it’s a joke, but I don’t mean it like that! Also, I don’t want to be unkind to anyone.

I’ve been playing WoW Classic for a while and enjoyed speaking to the community, but a lot of otherwise nice and polite people have posted racist comments without warning. This isn’t deniably racist stuff – my guild master asked everyone to post their race and asked a black player if he’d been abandoned by his father. I’ve rerolled several times but run into the same problem on multiple servers. Some people have written me with garbled fake Chinese or Korean but, when I replied, they responded with “ching chong bing bang,” and that sort of thing. When I told someone I wasn’t Korean in real life, they asked me to send them proof, which was really strange!

I’ve also seen many people post impolite things about gay and transgender people. Gay or not, transgender or not, I don’t understand what’s so funny about these people.

I assume many of the people who post this sort of thing are not really racist, homophobic, or transphobic, and just think it’s funny, but this sort of thing isn’t funny to me at all, so I’d prefer to encounter as little of it as possible. This happens almost every time I play Classic, and the rest of the playerbase seems to widely tolerate it, so it makes me really uncomfortable.

Do any of you know any actually guilds that have zero tolerance for this kind of thing? I would be willing to switch servers or play on either faction for an experience that will be actually accepting.

Sorry to those of you who do it – you’ve paid your $15 and you have your right to be how you want. I just don’t have fun when I’m around it, and I don’t think you’ll have much fun being around me! As long as you don’t do racist or hateful things in real life, I’m sure your racist jokes and stuff (made in close company) are no big problem.

Thanks, by the way, to the many players I’ve spoken to who are seriously past this kind of behavior!

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Best thing you can do is report and /ignore. I would hope you will find they are a minority. I’m on Remulos and have thankfully not seen anything like that, but then I have trade and general turned off.

My guild also has zero tolerance. I’m an officer and I would boot anyone making prejudiced jokes.

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Oh! By the way, the two servers I have played on are Grobbulus and Deviate Delight. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to visit your server! (I’m pretty normal, so don’t worry too much.)

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If you can, playing on RP or RPPVP servers does somewhat cut down on instances of that (ha… instances) because the more edgy players tend to be powergamey types and so will gravitate toward pure gamey servers (PvE or PvP). I find RPPVP servers are good in that people don’t get on your case for not roleplaying all the time–but you can still find some roleplaying fun here and there if you want it.

As for the usual advice of report and ignore? Well, that’s fine in theory, but it doesn’t do anything about the problem of needing to have your mood darkened by being exposed to it before you do that. So that advice only goes so far on its own.

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It’s strange, because both of the servers I saw this on were actually RP servers! Maybe I need to visit a third server, or just find better guilds.

I agree that while reporting and ignoring might be the only practical thing, it doesn’t solve the problem completely. It’s especially bad because I have preexisting positive relationships with these players, and then they call someone a slur or something and I now have to explain why I’m removing them and their friends.

Like, I don’t really want to leave guilds that contain otherwise good people after finding out that some of the officers have a problem with Jewish people, for instance! It’s nerdy, but one of the things that helped was me making a veiled political or race-related comment as soon as I joined a guild or met a person, so that if they had a problem with race they would post about it right away.

But that makes me look race-obsessed!

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I’ve heard Grob is the unoffical 4chan server, so makes sense it might be a little rough. I’ve been playing DD since launch though, and I haven’t seen too much toxicity. Barrens chat is a little rowdy, but I’ve also seen plenty of people calling out others acting like jerks. Personally I don’t put up with that kind of nonsense, because I’m not 14 anymore and don’t find it funny. I wouldn’t mind finding a decent guild likewise, because I just… prefer people who are pleasant to be around? Weird right?

Bloodsail is also pretty good, as far as community goes. I go there when I get salty about PvP and have run into a couple LGBT guilds, so that might suit you. RP realms in general are more chill while PVP are a little edgier. You get a mixed bag on RPPVP.

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Hey, I’m going to visit Bloodsail next! Thanks – while I really appreciate the PvP gameplay, I can understand that that sort of thing might appeal to people who are very dominance-oriented. I’ve heard a dominance-oriented world-view is related to having prejudiced beliefs!

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I totally agree. The real solution is for people to stop being jerks and ruining things for others. I just have no idea how to achieve that :frowning:

Forum Mod Edit: This post has been edited by a moderator due to masked language as it is in violation of the Code of Conduct.

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Well, there’s no catch-all solution. That was just a hedge-your-bets bit of advice.

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Hey, it’s not like I’m going to hold things against you about advice freely offered online! I’m probably perplexed the way you are.

It’s a sidenote, but one wonders how many Classic WoW players have come in thinking “yes, I’ve practiced on private servers for years, and now I can set all my plans in motion!” This seems like it would appeal to someone who doesn’t have much to live for, which is probably a descriptor that applies to a lot of these supposed dominance-oriented types and racists!!

(I’m very bad at video games; I just like the tension of being ganked every few minutes!)

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There might be the obvious, too, which is that the situation in WoW classic can be literally interpreted as a race war. You know, the same as the thing that might be taken to give Tolkien its appeal, and something I think retail WoW has softened on?

However, I don’t actually think WoW Classic’s politics are very clear, so it’s probably a case of reading what they want into the game.

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This sounds to me like you are a generally nice person, which of course is a good thing, but also has some disadvantages. In this case, it seems it is difficult for you to deal appropriately with people who are behaving in an abhorrent manner.

There are words that have become common parlance that fall into this category, and people use them without malice. So, it is possible that they aren’t particularly any of these things, and I’m not quite sure what the best way to deal with those things are, e.g. pass words off as what they mean, like “Hey that pink cloak is really happy.” or take it to be a slur, and try to correct it.

However, asking everyone their race, and then making racial jokes doesn’t seem to fall into that category to me.

I’ve noticed this a lot too. It’s actually quite unlike my old experiences with WoW. We used to have mostly university and grad school students in our guild, who were all quite intelligent, and now it seems like a lot of rather uneducated people are playing (I say uneducated, because I believe that racism is a symptom of a lack of education; in fact, that seems patently obvious).

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Try a PvE server. Might have a slightly older playerbase. No guarantees, but the stuff you are describing sounds like young people… Teenagers or early to mid 20’s kids who are going through their “rebel” phase and love to intentionally do or say the most impolite things they can come up with to feel like “adults”.

Almost everyone goes through that phase, but its hard to avoid it in online gaming. Like I said, check out some of the PvE servers, there’s lots of guilds filled with older gamers that no longer get off on trying to offend someone.

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WOW the irony in all these posts condemning racism and prejudice people… while making broad generalizations and stereotyping people in the same post.

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Hey, thank you a lot for your response!

Yeah, I need to clarify something. There’s a character that a lot of people play of “the reasonable racist” – that person happens to say lots of racist things, but he doesn’t really have any racist opinions or ever actually do any racist things, so he’s not really a problem.

I don’t really think this person exists, but usually people claiming to be this person will say that they’re just being edgy, or that they’re telling jokes and I need to chill out – and, well, my patience for this (and belief in it) is limited!

But the truth is – I’d be able to tolerate a world that only contained the reasonable racist I’ve just described! So my goal here is to defeat the frivolous “reasonable racist” plea in advance by saying that that person is not the one I’m complaining about.

Sorry – it’s a little strange, but I’m a moderator of a large internet forum so I’ve had this conversation a lot of times, and I’m trying to pose my question in a way that will be productive!

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Repeat after me:

Sticks and stones may break my bones but Words will Never Hurt Me.

I mean really just don’t worry about what people say, don’t be weak.

Though I think you may just be a low level troll.

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Just let them talk

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I really don’t have any weird political opinions. Basically none of the things I’m complaining about are things that would be tolerated in polite society. I think tolerating extreme racism, like the events I described in my original post, is actually the unusual thing.

You’re lucky these things don’t bother you. All I’m saying I’d like is the ability to play without people who act like that!

This is good and true advice, but this is a recreational activity for me. Because my other hobby is “forums moderator” I end up reading a lot of comments like this anyway during my spare time – I’d like a spare time hobby that doesn’t involve showing respect to people who are being unkind to me!

It’s not different to how, if you were a grocery store clerk, you’d want a hobby that didn’t involve putting objects in bags for people.

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Play single player games and cancel your ISP.

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None of this bothers me because I grew up watching madtv and southpark, and music still played on Mtv. Take that how you will I guess.

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