/spit and world culture, wokeness may be part of it, but also red herring

There’s actually a giant culture clash bomb involved with /spit, China, and many surrounding countries. Spitting in China has deep historical and cultural associations. Apart from being common there’s deeper meanings, like spitting out evil or “bad”. Internally there’s conflict in China about it as well with periodic pushback against it to get with the times. In some countries surrounding China they take it a step further. Sure China may be trying to dominate everyone around them, especially the neighbors – but close neighbors like Singapore (for example) their laws draw a massive red line. Spitting is a $1,000 fine on the low end. They absolutely wanted to define themselves as a very different NOT-China and in their mind better. It’s a conflict issue.

For a world-spanning-game like Warcraft, taking sides in this is a no-win thing. You irritate people by having it just the same as irritating them by taking it out. So here’s this window that “wokeness” provides, we can blame it on toxic-culture-pushback and get rid of it! It’s a big perk to find some way to totally step around this giant turd of culture-clash. So, right right this is about improving us for our reasons. Right?

I’d sure hope spitting on people in real life was illegal, that’s disgusting to do.

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I don’t think Blizzard cares about this.

You can say racial slurs in the classic client right now that you would not be capable of in the retail client. Guild names and character names are littered with slurs. They removed spit to protect the people who bought the collectors edition for the mount/toy. They don’t care about harassment as harassment, they care about harassment towards people who gave them money. They aren’t gonna spend extra time examining Chinas cultural intricacies.

They aren’t out here to win, they out here to limp this sucker along across whatever finish line Activision drew up.

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Isn’t it only considered a proper greeting for the Welsh if there is spitting involved?

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yah, cynical, but fair

I mean, so is murder … which happens all the time in World of Warcraft

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Removing the /spit emote

GIGA WOKE

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There’s nothing woke about removing /spit, only money.

Store mount buyers were getting harassed by /spit so they are removing /spit.

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yeah, valid, I was conflating “woke” (racial) with modern sensitivity (snowflakeness), being too quick/glib. not a good look for me.