Punching Down?

Community General Discussion
324

Uhh, yeah, there is. Here’s a bit of a story for you.

When I was in High School, there was a bloke in my year, a good friend of mine, who was gay. He was one of the first people I knew to come out as gay, but he did so at a really bad time when hardly anyone respected people who were gay and people who did come out (or were caught) were often the subjects of ridicule.

My town has a local dairy, he was working there from the age of 16 and he came out at 17. His job was simple, remove the full milk bottles from the conveyor after the machines filled and capped them and take the full crates of milk to the walk-in fridge. He enjoyed his work, he was good at it and it paid well.

You want to know what happened when the people who ridiculed him for being gay found out that he was working at a dairy? Yeah, he got a lot of ‘homogenized’ jokes thrown his way, and some people would even shorten the word, removing the ‘genized’ part and just call the milk company he worked for ‘homomilk’.

They insinuated horrible things about the milk that he was responsible for, including that he jacked off into the milk (which he obviously didn’t do, because that was a major health code violation) and they bombarded his workplace with hateful calls about him being gay and how being gay was unnatural. Ultimately he got fired from his job, because even though his boss accepted that he was gay, the woman he hired to work as a receptionist for his company was coping too much abuse because of him, and it was ultimately better to let him go rather than endure the abuse further.

Now you might say: “Oh, but that’s only one unique case! Who cares!” well he does. When World of Warcraft came out a year after he got fired, he was actually really interested in playing the Tauren race, because he loves Native American culture, which the Tauren are heavily themed on. Then he heard that joke line, and it caused him to mentally break down and he had to go to a shrink for a while because it brought back a ton of memories that he had thought he had supressed.

He refuses to touch the Tauren race to this day, and when I told him the news that the joke in question was being removed, he was really, really happy about it. Will he play his first Tauren character in 9.1.5? I don’t know. Maybe. But he’s just one of the many people affected by these types of ‘jokes’.

The more you know.

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325

Stating your sexual preference isn’t homophobic. Sorry, but try again.

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326

yeah, i noticed early on. like with the color of the dress quest. one of the npcs telling me that Any color dress is good as long as it’s easy to take off. followed by the next one’s answer of “well, you know what they say: once you go black, you never go back.”
imagine that, a T-rated game that doesnt pretend to be E or lower :open_mouth:
dont know that i can say ive played enough on the trial yet, but so far it’s feeling like a step up from wow in multiple ways

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327

There’s absolutely no way you read the full post in the time it took you to reply. So, bye troll.

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328

I read it after because your post was predictable after the first line. Your one anecdote doesn’t change the meaning of a word.

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329

sounds like he was already fragile for non-wow reasons to begin with…an mmorpg was likely not a safe bet no matter which it was if he lost his mind because of one joke…
that isnt wow, blizz, or anyone elses problem but his own for being so obviously close to the edge in the first place and not seeking some kind of therapy in any way

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330

Neat story. I mean, granted it’s completely made up but still neat.

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331

there are a lot worse ones in the game but i can’t say what it’s about because of ToS. there is one in the very first dungeon if you read what the npc’s say and actually explore the whole dungeon but most times i did the dungeon nobody explores it they just want to speed through it despite it’s not even that long.

i came across from it by watching one of zepla’s vids about it. i just assumed that it was pirates in there all of them.

332

Well yeah, of course he was fragile. He copped abuse for over a year at school and lost his job, a job he loved, because the abuse followed him there, and all because he was gay and was brave enough to come out at a time when no one respected gay people.

He was also a nerd, and one that loved Warcraft III when it released back in the day, so he was 100% going to jump into WoW, because it was a universe he wanted to create a character in. He still plays, to this day, he’s played through all the bad times and all the good times. He’s mentally stable now, but in the year after he was abused and fired, he was very, very fragile.

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333

still not wow or blizzard’s problem or anyone elses but their own no matter how tragic
not his fault for receiving the abuse, but for not dseeking treatment if it truly was that damaging to him as what you say…
coddling someone isnt going to help them overcome and thrive, it’s just going to keep them mired in the damage others caused. others shouldnt be expected to cater to it either

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334

You’re an open, predictable, boring book. It takes about as much time to read and understand your post as it does to wipe my a$$

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335

i was already figuring on there being more stuff like that since that example was so early on :slight_smile:

336

Great video clip, and almost ten years before the release of World of Warcraft…But hey, Seinfeld wasn’t a progenitor of pop culture.

People who genuinely like to be offended will make up any justification they can…Stressing that shrunken heads are only part of VooDoo and that it’s only part of Jamaican culture…
Then, when that wasn’t enough…Oh and btw, it’s also sexist…

God, I wish I drinking again right now…

337

If you punch down all you hit is air unless you are 7 foot tall. Thats what blizzard did, a swing and a miss.

338

People like you are the reason racism still exists.

Semper Fi! :us:

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339

LOL People with any brain know that you’re a Blizzard shill and just ignore you.

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340

Okay?

No skin off my back.

What was your point again?

341

and you and your friends are? tic-tac-toe.

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342

Do players actually want these changes. It seems like everywhere I go that is WoW related everyone is talking bad about it, mocking it, making jokes about it. I don’t really see anyone defend it cept a handful of forum people and maybe 5 twitter people. Most of the people “defending it” just don’t think it’s that big of a deal because it doesn’t effect gameplay vs actually thinking the content is offensive and needs to go.

I think its really, really weird how many people nowadays are willing to defend things being REMOVED instead of added…

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343

I find it hard to believe anyone won’t play a tauren over that joke. I’ve played WoW with people from so many walks of life including many gay people who played taurens and none of them ever complained about it. Regardless, the jokes intent is not to offend anyone. The problem with the world today is so many people are taking things that are not intrinsically offensive, like many of these WoW jokes/flirts, and trying to find something offensive about them. These changes do not reflect the values or opinions of most people who play WoW in my experience which is why we’re seeing so much backlash over it. Your friend’s bad experience with the taurens isn’t the experience of most people who play them. Maybe if there was some big outcry from fans in the past to change it for whatever reason, but there wasn’t and there isn’t now. In fact were seeing quite the opposite from the WoW community about these changes. No one ever complained about these things. Things shouldn’t change because they offend 1 or even a small amount of people. All of these changes should’ve been proposed to the player base and should’ve been considered based on our feedback.

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