Probably because Overwatch is using real world country to represent their characters, if there’s any Overwatch hero that can’t be gay, it’s Zarya, Mei, and Ana.
It’s basically telling them “Haha the hero representing your country is gay”.
It is indeed would be a brave move.
Well, see, they totally can be. Just because it’s illegal or frowned upon in those countries doesn’t mean they can’t be.
But, well, they aren’t because Blizzard only feels safe pushing these kinds of things where it’s accepted and where it won’t get their game banned.
Corporate pandering at its finest.
Ask Blizzard to make Mei gay in China. See what happens. 
I’ll make Blizzard a deal. I’ll buy Dragonflight if Ana and Mei come out as gay in Chinese and Middle-Eastern countries in a public news announcement.
Yeah I’m def done with this company. The levels of degeneracy are too hard to ignore at this point.
rolling eyes
If you really accept people as equal then seeing these qualities broken out into weighted scores is particularly repugnant. It’s one of the most racist, sexist, bigoted things I’ve ever seen.
lmfao the crying over this trash never fails to amuse me… leave your petty little wah wah diversity crap in the real world where people still don’t care… it’s just a game that you are free to opt out of carebear :’)
What they’re doing is the same thing the communists did with erasing history, just extrapolate that to games, movies, etc… . Just like they adapted communism into feminism; replace workers party with gender.
Edit: BTW all the isms are linked & they all intend to disrupt the natural order.
Well. Golden rule of business. You try to please everybody, you will end up pleasing nobody.
I think some people feel they need metrics to tell them if people are doing things right or not, and don’t understand that certain things cannot be properly judged that way or that in some cases putting a metric on something can actually encourage bad behavior (in this case, tokenism).
In the immortal words of a sketch: “Well, the chart says.”
As much concern that there is about this in here, you guys are still going to buy the expansion and continue paying them.
They KNOW this and thats all they care about.
I am more upset that I read your title and thought they actually released a pre-order thing.
You snagged me OP, good on you!
Though I will give a small opinion of this post.
At this point, I’m so nonplussed about companies doing this I’m just kind of numb to it, which is a bad thing because I’m okay with everyone as long as they’re cool.
Just a company trying to over-compensate.
Obviously people can’t be relied on. That is what started this whole thing. That and a lot of groping.
If they need an algorithm to help them along, fine.
As for being “broken down into attributes”, what do you think every company online has done to you already? Every social media platform? Every government/education agency?
Just what do you think they are collecting and selling?
Oh boy, wait until you find out what Discord’s got.
People who want cartoons to be equal. LOL
I’d rather now go play the MMO of WorldStar. Complaints would be made about that if it got famous.
Agreed that people are deluding themselves if they think we can’t all be quantified as data points. That’s 90% of the tech economy. Using Google Chrome for 5 minutes probably provides more psychological and socioeconomic data about a person than taking part in a census does. Like I don’t think people get that we’re basically already living in a cyberpunk dystopia.
But I also think most people (who are actually coming at this in good faith) are knee-jerking on the numerical attributes thing, because they aren’t looking at the context or methodology. They assume it’s a literal ranking of how good a trait is, like some sort of digital phrenology. A value to rate how good or bad a feature or attribtue is.
It’s actually just a visualized metric of how differentiated someone is from the “default” media depiction, which in most western countries trends towards “straight, white, early-30s, cis, American male”. That’s the point 0 “default” not because it’s “normal” or better or worse, but because it’s what has very obviously dominated the media landscape until very very recently. There’s nothing wrong with that demographic, it’s simply been allowed to eclipse all others and propagandized to the point that people think that’s normal. Like just look at the lead for virtually 95% of movies before 2010, that’s the default, that’s point 0 on their chart. So looking at the chart and having Ana be rated higher in Culture than Brigitte, it wouldn’t be because her culture is better or Brigitte’s is worse, but because Egyptian culture is more differentiated from that “default” than Swedish culture would be. It’s just a visual tool to help them think outside of that point 0 default viewpoint and see where there’s glaring gaps or unrealistic concentrations.
I can, however, definitely see where people’s skepticism is coming from, especially from a company with a track-record like Acti-Blizz. The tool itself seems well intentioned, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it ends up being used as a way to present diversity in a product while ignoring it in the actual makeup of the creative team. Why hire someone with a different viewpoint when an algorithm can manufacture that viewpoint for you (again hello cyberpunk dystopia)? And making a big blog post about it just screams surface level PR move.
But I guess a team lacking in diversity using an algorithm to help cover their blindspots and make a somewhat respectful product that better reflects reality is still better than a team lacking in diversity (and filled with sexual predators) creating a product where all of the human good guys are white Europeans and every other race/culture is represented as a subhuman racist caricature monster person.
So… yay progress?
There’s really no progress to be had.
Fun Fact: Malcom X was an avid Communist until he realized this is exactly what they do, and from that point until his assassination he denounced the movement vehemently.
/Agree
Progress lies in the fact that we on the whole are acknowledging the intrinsic flaws in our social behavior. However, if we in the “real” world have not come close to solving these problems, why would we expect or support a video game producer in doing so for us? More pointedly, according to whose version of “right” are we being directed? ( I believe this is what you were presenting in the last couple of paragraphs?). This is where the real problems are, that we first need to agree about what is “right” before we start practicing it. So far everyone has an opinion, and everyone else is wrong…
This is an issue with a company trying to overcompensate, and going a few extra miles in wrong direction.
You start measuring characters by skin color and sexuality, I lose interest in your game set in a fantasy world that’s meant to focus on good story and the unknown, instead of trying to mirror real life issues.