The tide has turned. People are done with this Woke nonsense.
Blizzard better figure that out.
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While in theory, no. It really should be all moot. Given now that both sides have extremists looking for any tool on these key topics to arm themselves with can, and often lead down a very dank rabbit hole.
The aspects of it (from an artist’s standpoint) can be very useful in design and creativity to break away from cookiecutter styles and adapt to a growing media while out sourcing for more talent and get outsiders look from contracted writers and artists. As well, how they worded it and the responses (here, twitter and fb) are starting to lean towards, as I said before old school eugenics; which is bad. Though, hopefully they break down and build up more on it so that it isn’t really a marketing pride ploy and really is more of a creative / design development as they say.
I can get they want to present transparency to their customers, staff and the rest of the world - it seems like they ran with the second or third draft, not the final on all areas.
I’ll do that for now on if i see it in game…
Why hello there check box character!
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In other words: retconning character backstories is now more important than creating good storylines. Therein lies the issue.
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It’s because they went out of their way to give DH and worgens clear male/female features, but they won’t do it for dragon form evokers due to cutting cost and reusing incubus model. I’m not asking for the dragons to have big boobs, but just boobs while male dragons be more masculine. This is a fantasy world after all, not RL. Many fiction works have dragons with boobs and masculine dragons.
A lot of data from this tool is driven via an underlying mission to help players feel more connected to the worlds/characters being built. The data is being cross-checked with human DE&I experts and isn’t used as a sole decision point.
I think people have their minds made up about Blizzard (in some ways rightfully so) and are rushing with their bias toward a decision on intent. I am critical of Blizzard for a lot of the B.S. that has gone on, but that is unfortunate.
From my view point. All I can say is hopefully. The whole “for the greater good” vibes they presented and word rang all to familiar. It never really bodes well through out history. Just being cautious on I hope, that it is used for what it is intended and be more organic versus what was presented.
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Imagine now all movies must use this tool and must use that tool in a retroactive manor. What Dream May Come. Mr. Williams will be put in a dress. Any and all paint in the movie will be rainbow paint.
Not enough dead male people with a pregnant belly… All skinny angels will be removed and replaced with flying pigs with wings.
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So, basically, people like OP are upset because gaming is moving away from everything being marketed towards white dudes, since it isn’t just white guys that game.
That’s what the technology is for. It’s a comparison tool, for reference. That’s it. Other companies use it too, and it’s so we don’t get repeats of the same racial traits again and again to represent a culture, thus birthing tokenism.
You can guess the demographic of the people who are outraged by this the most, lol. It’s no surprise.
If everyone moves up, those at the top feel less special. 
That’s what true equality is about. No one is above another based on race, period.
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So again: retconning character backstories is now more important than writing good storylines.
That is the hope… but I have very little of that left.
It all started with a pencil and white paper. If you do not like something then build it yourself.
I am definitely in favour of more diversity representation in game.
I would like to see more variety in NPC’s.
My only concern would be that in a desire to expedite the results for the base content of these NPC’s the story around them becomes insufficient, and the NPC’s are simply reduced to their distinctions, rather then their quality as individual characters.
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So, I’m having a bit of a difficult time understanding what this “tool” is supposed to do. Is it supposed to nag developers and remind them that they’re racist whenever they create a new character? They live in California, they probably get that BS all the time.
I’ve got to be missing something. King’s entire model seems to be based on “unconscious bias” and we know that that’s pseudo psychology, so, again, why?
Hey, Blizzard devs, if you haven’t been through enough over the last few years, well, it turns out that y’all are racist on top of that. Devs, lets do better, ok?
Good god… remember when video games used to be about having fun?
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Yes modding the story line and not making a brand new version of the game.
I’d say leave the game alone. Go make the Diversity version of WOW.
If there truly was a need then we would have seen in the news how a illegal WOW server was full of diversity and people of all stripes are playing it!
But this has never happened and so we see the true need is not there and all this waving of hands for virtue signaling is all fake.
OW has an incredibly diverse roster.
To my knowledge, this is a new tool.
OW is proof that this tool is unrequired and all it will do is force arbitrary requirements to be checked.
For example OW added that Hamster characeter.
Is the game better off if it was an old female hamster instead? I don’t think so. But according to that tool, that would be best.
I for one wait for when some gesture comes off as a positive move but meets with massive community backlash and some suit at Blizz blames the equation.
No, you really can’t.
You seem to be missing the concern here. This is being portrayed as the most important thing now. The issue isn’t the representation itself. The issue is that characters can now be retconned and story can suffer, because representation is now the most important thing, based off of a bunch of checkboxes.
I don’t think most here have an issue with diversity. I think most here have an issue with the writing quality going down even more and concerned that good diversity will instead turn into bad tokenism.
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I dont think I’ll be playing Dragonflight. Seems like Blizzards dishonest attempt to redeem themselves. They’re too far gone.
I started SL about a year ago to give it a fair shake and I’m regretting it.
Blizzard Entertainment is not about making quality products anymore.
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I’m amazed that they had a team somewhere, at some place, who analyzed the data to present this graphical tool.
Once you have checklists on very specific people like this, it just gets weird.
Can’t we just play games and enjoy the characters for who they are without a graph? It feels like it takes away from the characters with a graph. They feel objectified, which isn’t good! =(
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