Official explanation of the changes to jokes, emotes, etc

[Rhielle-sentinels (Rhielle)]

GamesBeat: The World of Warcraft team has been changing or removing some of the games 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 not a massive patch. 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.

I bolded the part that I found interesting in his response. I feel like I’ll have to think on that for a while, but there it is.

Thoughts after reading this? Or do you feel the same?

[Pyri-shadowsong]

in before somebody calls him a lawyer

[Thèón-emerald-dream (Thèón)]

Lllllllaaaaaaawwwwwwwyer.

[Sasarai-blades-edge]

I feel like there’s a lot of issues in the game that make it unwelcoming for new players and none of these are it.

This means nothing to me other than more nonsense talk to try and explain the unexplainable

[Columbo-thrall]

None of the stuff being removed is anything worth fighting for tbh.

Its really not a big deal if they want to clean the game up a bit

[Rhielle-sentinels (Rhielle)]

I’ll miss my painting that my guild had a storyline around. The noblewoman with the lowcut dress. And part of me is still trying to come to terms with feeling as if it’s not okay to be a scantily clad woman. But other than that… nothing in the changes affects me.

My hope going forward is that we’ll still see skimpy mogs, though. Or at least midriff chestpieces. I’ll be sad if that goes away completely now. Half the fun of me playing a tall elf chick is showing off that figure. I can’t do that in life, so I like doing that in game.

[Paycheck-malganis]

@Pyri-shadowsong

in before somebody calls him a lawyer

@Thèón-emerald-dream

Lllllllaaaaaaawwwwwwwyer.

Man you repeated one too many letters to beat her. So close!

[Paycheck-malganis]

@Rhielle-sentinels

showing off that figure. I can’t do that in life, so I like doing that in game.

Just be fat like me and you have no choice but to show off your figure.

[Liadariel-runetotem]

@Rhielle-sentinels

I’ll miss my painting that my guild had a storyline around. The noblewoman with the lowcut dress. And part of me is still trying to come to terms with feeling as if it’s not okay to be a scantily clad woman. But other than that… nothing in the changes affects me

Pretty much same here. That really felt like body shaming. The other stuff: meh.

It also just seemed a long winded speech that’s already been said. I do wonder who this ‘community’ of giving feed back actually are. It’s just a blanket term that seems to imply: see, we are listening to all of you. And we, the players, inherently trust this

Idk. Just maybe I’m the only one uncomfortable with that.

[Sleezy-firetree]

@Sasarai-blades-edge

I feel like there’s a lot of issues in the game that make it unwelcoming for new players and none of these are it.

Right?
I can’t even imagine picking this game up for the first time these days and trying to figure out WTF is going with the Pre-SL story. They jacked up the early levels so bad.

[Sabetha-turalyon (Sabetha)]

@Rhielle-sentinels

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.

On this note while somebody would always complain, I also feel like a lot of the flak they’re catching right now is because we’re just starved for content right now.

It’s understandable that the pandemic sort of disrupted everything, but at the same time normally we’d be gearing up and hearing about the X.3 patch by now and at the moment we’re still on X.1 hearing about the X.1.5 patch.

The spotlight was brighter on this patch because there is nothing else in Shadowlands right now to really get excited about. To top it off, the biggest thing content wise to talk about right how is how we get to run Legion content again but only once in a while.

We aren’t even getting any new heritage armour, something we were told was coming and something that would have been good to fill in the .5 patches with.

I assume the team probably is working on 9.2 right now, but the optics of this is that people see that we’ve barely gotten any content, this minor patch isn’t really bringing much new, and now they’re removing a bunch of things they’ve deemed inappropriate.

It’s just not a good look, regardless of the circumstances around it.

[Ingvaeonic-dalaran]

He is nothing more than a clown catering to the woke crowd.