I have been keenly following the recent events surrounding Activision-Blizzard and read in the recent release from the World of Warcraft team:
“While we turn to our team for guidance in our internal work to protect marginalized groups and hold accountable those who threaten them, we also want to take immediate action in Azeroth to remove references that are not appropriate for our world. This work has been underway, and you will be seeing several such changes to both Shadowlands and WoW Classic in the coming days.”
One of the big issues I’ve had with content in World of Warcraft is the storyline in Battle for Azeroth in Drustvar, where villagers are accusing a woman of being a witch and are publicly executing her with a gathered mob. I have been a practicing witch for over 30 years. The blaming and violence towards women during the burning times by men in power to take their property and assets was a sexist atrocity towards women. It’s no laughing matter. Conservative estimates place over 500,000 women were tortured and murdered over fictitious accusations by the church and those in power.
This content is akin to having NPCs point at a black character suspiciously because they’re black, calling them the N word, and then publicly hanging them simply because they are black. It’s extremely inappropriate in-game content and should never have gone live.
If Activision-Blizzard is truly committed to cleaning up their culture of sexism and abusive perspectives towards women, this content needs to either be removed of changed.
I don’t have a direct email contact to your leadership team that is working on this. But I would appreciate a Blue response confirming you have received this feedback and will forward it to them.
um, the SFAs here on the CS forums are not liaison with the devs or higher ups so they really can’t forward your “concerns”. If you wish to be heard, post on General Discussion, they’ll see it, but you not likely get a “blue” response.
I have to concur with Swift, moderators here in cs will not be able to provide the feedback you seek. You do have the ability to edit your post to have it show in the general discussion forum though, in either case you are not guaranteed a blue post, sorry.
There’s no email address to share, you could try tweeting out to @wowdevs.
I’m sorry but I have to poke the bear. Take it opinion but that particular quest line is very similar to a piece of history. Referring to the Salem witch trials. I see absolutely nothing wrong with learning about history even if it is from a video game.
This is our history. I say this as a woman, and a very eclectically practicing one at that. Sometimes history is not savory, in fact, sometimes it is ugly. But you’re highlighting one small part and parcel of an overreaching storyline. That woman was accused, yes. The charges were proven false and we went through a whole schtick that led that woman to take charge of an ancient order to find and root out evil. An order that in actuality, is almost all NPC women save for Inquisitor Sterntide.
I don’t mean to disregard your personal feelings about this, we’re all entitled to our thoughts and feelings. But good grief, it’s a video game. It’s just like the one item that Ve’nari sells for 666 stygia, the Sigil of the Unseen that had some people up in arms.
That said, there are no GMs here, there are no Devs. Your appeal falls on deaf ears as this forum is one for players to assist other players. You are better off posting in the Quest forums or General Discussion. Or you’ve got the option of the in-game user interface. At least there you’ve got the chance of the proper staff seeing it.
At what point in that quest was it treated as a laughing matter?
No they shouldn’t. It was neither of those things. It was very heavily tied to context. If you want to equate atrocities being committed in the fictional world as equivalent to real ones, then you’re a murderer. All those people you’ve killed playing the game. That promotes murder as a solution to problems.
See how stupid that logic is?
Edit: Not to mention, I should note, that Lucille Waycrest not only takes command of the situation, including denying having men save her from it by slaughtering people, but also effectively proves her own innocence with the player as her helper. That is the exact opposite of sexism. That is a female character acting as a role model; kind, compassionate, but strong, intelligent and assertive. It’s a very positive presentation, just like many other female characters in the game.
This isn’t the right place for this nonsense anyways, but the company trying to reform their corporate culture is not a time for you to try and co-opt it for selfish gain (specifically what you want to change). This is not about players. At all. This is about employees. You have no hand in any of this, this is not your fight, and frankly this kind of opportunistic behaviour is just wrong.
As a practising witch I find no issue with it. But then I play games for their story and the enjoyment of it. Where should the pc culture end? Books, movies, videos games, all washed of any reference to anything that might offend someone. What about the violence towards men? Are you going to be asking them to remove the torture of Garrosh as well? Blank out the burning of the tree? Remove the fight between the Alliance and Horde?
I’m with you here. And too, really? I get what’s going on and I get that it may have people running a fine-tooth comb through everything, but I could sit here and come up with scenarios in this game that are so very much worse? We’ve got characters being tortured (multiple times, if you think of poor Koltira and his bad luck), all of the people and animals we’ve slaughtered for random bits and parts. Stuff like the experimentation of wildlife in Southshore and so many other ‘questionable’ things.
Are they steeped in real-life history? Not particularly. And this particular thing, it’s still not aimed to recreate anything down to a science. Should we then be thinking to go back and change out every ‘evil’ female NPC we’ve had to put down for whatever reason? This mentality is such a slippery slope - if you start going down this road, then where do we stop? hops down off soapbox
Oh here goes the clout chasers. They just like an over zealous politican going for a power grab tries to take advantage of a situation to push stupid agendas to fit their own personal fragile feeling and offense on nothing. Your a bad actor. Shoo!