Okay, so. Was gonna buy Dragonflight:

Community General Discussion
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This is just a tool that provides data. Data is inherently neutral. It’s what people decide to do with that data that will determine if they move forward with genuine representation or blatant tokenism.

To put it into perspective: if they used this tool on WoW to see how diverse their stories are based on fantasy representation in WoW they will most likely find out that there are too many human stories and that gnome representation is practically non-existent. This will push them to make more gnome stories. Same with Tauren, darkspear, etc.

Now is that bad or good? Depends on the story right?

Now used under a microscope on the Forsaken they’d find that within the Forsaken it’s actually female dominated (Sylvanas and Calia) so they may decide that they need to give more character development to a male forsaken (which would make all the incels happy) or flip a character to be more gender fluid (which if done wrong would be tokenism).

Crazy Rich Asians = Representation
Rose Tico = Tokenism

It all comes down to the execution.

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163

You don’t understand how the tech culture in Cali operates. They don’t use analytics to make money on these topics. They live in echo chambers and become MILITANT about their ideology. Many companies have gone woke and went broke. It doesn’t matter if they lose money. When they do they use that as an excuse to reinforce their bias that the world is racist/sexist then double down on their false beliefs.

It’s a mixture of extreme narcissism and echo chambers

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164

You’re oversimplifying the entire thing to utilize it for a conspiracy.

What they’re saying in that entire article is that they’re using a tool to help facilitate their thought process for things like unconscious bias (although I’d argue it’s more of selection bias because people tend to write what they know) and to see if there might be some gaps in certain characterization, or personality traits they may be over or under utilizing.

Here’s the full list of factors they mentioned: gender, body type, roles (“heroes” vs. “villains”) and even such granular factors such as pose, or body movement, can suggest powerful things about a character one way or another

If you’ve even written stories in any capacity, it’s basically just a way of trying to balance things out. Do you have a good balance of heroes vs villains in your story? Do you have a decent variation of people who are more extroverted vs introverted.

If what you’re worried about is that new characters will be terrible then what about characters like Talanji and the Primus? The world didn’t end.

Then if you push it into a more marketing and product design perspective, it’s basically so that you can capture market share from as many people as possible because you have a cast of characters that various people can relate to.

And also:

“In this effort, the Diversity Space Tool can clearly delineate between token characters and true representation,”

“It helps identify those stereotypes, while also helping creatives look closer at their designs, so they can dissect their own assumptions and presets. It also helps identify opportunities for more diverse character narratives, to ensure that we are not only creating diverse characters in appearance alone.”

Like I enjoy getting outraged as much as anyone else, but this is not it. This isn’t a tool to take over your homes or your families. And this isn’t meant to suddenly turn into “well every new set of characters cast must now be in green, blue, and red.” It’s meant to guide the decision-making process, and if it doesn’t make sense in that context, or theme, then it obviously won’t be used.

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165

Let me guess some future Rainbow Quartermaster:

This flying horse I am selling has every sexual organ you can think of and is currently a pregnant male.

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166

Why does that sound like some weird corner of deviant art?

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167

So, for future characters in WoW, Blizzard will just close their eyes, press a button on a computer, and the program magically creates random characters based off of diversity parameters?

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These sorts of words and phrases are really really terrible. When you look at the world through the idea that everything is “coded”, and every phrase you disagree with is a “dog-whistle”…you’re very firmly not living within reality and are attributing a level of importance to things that very clearly shouldn’t have that attention at all.

Life isn’t Cloak and Dagger, Spy vs. Spy, “you’re either with us or against us”. It’s literally become privileged people creating problems that don’t exist to make themselves feel important.

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169

How much money was wasted on this crap? Blizzard could literally have an intern walk around to every computer and put a posted note that says “don’t be racist today” and it’d have the same effect.

Serious question though, how terrible is the racism and sexism in California if they need to implement these sorts of things? Because, I’m actually starting to worry that Cali is some sort of dystopian hellscape where it just isn’t safe to be any kind of person ever.

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“Now”? Blizzard has been retconning stuff since, like Cata? Earlier than that? What’s this notion they only started retconning recently, and where did it come from? Was it the Dreadlords thing? Man, I hate that guy’s writing.

Blizzard rectons whenever they want to, it’s their own story. They have done so for years. Even in Wrath, when Naxx was ‘retconned’ back into existence so we could run it again.

Diversity and LGBT stuff has nothing to do with WoW’s quality of late. It’s bad because it simply is. Blizzard is mismanaged to hell and back internally.

It’s bad because all the lore department is legit gone, lol. Has been gone for sometime too.

It’s also bad because people keep buying the games. Blizzard has no reason to make the story good. It would be a total waste of money to hire decent writers. Why? Because you’ll buy it anyway, it’s a video game that many are too sunken into to quit. It’s literally their job to cut corners and save costs, and it’s why Drakthyr are using recycled rigging.

Idk people latch onto the notion that progressiveness is what ruined WoW, and that’s what ruining “eVeRyThInG”, just gotta roll my eyes.

What ruined WoW was old fashioned corporate greed, overinvestment into bad ideas that did not pan out. Every expansion we have a new system that’s thrown away (and these systems take time and manpower to create and test) only for it to all be wasted at the end. I’m sure Dragonflight will be no exception.

You don’t know if it’ll degrade into tokenism or not.

Everything so far is a knee-jerk overreaction, yeesh.

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171

Future Automated TOS bots will then fighting with automated character tool.

TOS BOTS: Sorry that character violates TOS.

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what exactly is the issue here though? specifically, how does this directly impact players? /confuzzled

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I live in California. It’s not good. Once I retire, I’ll be leaving quickly.

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174

Exactly. Tools themselves aren’t evil. It’s how the tools are used that matters.

If it’s done in a logical and holistic manner where biases are accounted for and called out fairly, then it’s perfectly fine. It won’t be perfect, but I often find what matters is having the ability to be rational about things that matters more than being perfect about it.

E.g. “let’s try Tool A, oh wait, it didn’t really produce the outcome we wanted, so let’s revise this, or look for other options.”

I can also imagine this is why we have multiple leads going into DF.

The GD tends to look at these things like as if it’s some agenda on their very existence, and it’s just odd. Either way, it’s none of my business how people want to think anyways.

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You are definitely missing something.

Uncovering unconscious bias and using data cross-checked with human expertise is an admission that we are all conditioned to thought processes and categorizations of things we may not even be aware of.

Whether anyone here would like to admit that or not, it’s a fact that is healthy and productive to acknowledge and work to mitigate.

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I think you’re right about the game, however, I don’t think the introduction of ideology in the game makes it any better. If anything It just further hasten the demise.

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What main character backstory has been retconned due to diversity?

This is a seriously poor excuse and you’ve still missed the point.

I never said it did. I don’t think you actually read what I said.

Again, nowhere near what I said.

We also don’t know that it won’t. Therein lies the concern. But the entire point seems to have gone over your head.

You went off on some “the game sucks, it’s always sucked, lore is dead, blah blah blah” rant and didn’t address anything I actually said.

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It Destroyed Star Trek. Real life stores have closed down permanently over progressive leanings. 20% reduction cost of coffee for women and 60% cost raise for men… Yeah that place closed down.
Roll eyes as if it did not matter but it does take a financial strain.

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179

No offense, but I think you might have answered your own argument here.

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I haven’t heard about this yet either. That’s actually racist of them and they’re treating race/gender issues as a checklist. Which, ironically, is extremely offensive.

I won’t be buying Dragonflight either, tired of supporting this kind of garbage. Didn’t like the Dracthyr model anyway.

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Incorrect. The question was posed for right now. This new tool is being used for Dragonflight. We have no idea what will happen with characters later. And that’s the concern people have. This tool has the ability to retcon character backstories and possiblymake what should be natural good diversity end up as bad tokenism with bad storylines, because the diversity was more important than that story.

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