Take a step back, take a breath, and think for a moment

Look, a lot of things are going on right now, and Blizzard feels they need to act fast, but you are not acting in the correct direction. You are literally reacting like Don Quixote at a windmill.

The issue you have was “in house” not Paintings in the Game, nor the name of a mount, or the title of an NPC. If anything your knee jerk reactions you have done in the past 2-3 weeks are in fact doing more harm then good. A painting has Cleavage, or a woman was painted in her small clothes, changing these does nothing more than enforce the concept that women should be ashamed of their Bodies, and hiding the fact that people like skimpy, and people you hire, could be closet pervs. So what, this is life.

We get it, you want to make changes that let the player base understand that you know there is an issue, and you want to fix it. Unfortunately you are just blindly stabbing in the dark and hoping that something works. Changing the “The Big Love Rocket” to “X-45 Heartbreaker” does literally nothing to those people who felt they were abused by some “cubical creepers”. All this is, is a complete 180 degree change in direction, when only 30 degrees is needed.

The change in the paintings only furthers the notion that women should be ashamed of their bodies. If this is the case, Why do Male characters get to walk around topless. This isn’t a case of “what’s good for the goose is good for the gander”, you are seriously making the wrong changes to make yourself look better in the public eye. As an example, you are changing the name of “Twin Consorts” to “Twin Empyreans”. This fact alone shows that you don’t even know what a “consort” is, and assume it is a Concubine or Prostitute. Consort merely mean “Husband or Wife of a Ruler”. I think Devs need to keep a basic Paper Merriam Webster dictionary on their desks.

Look I’ve been playing World of Warcraft non-stop since TBC, no breaks, no hiatus, and this is the first time I felt that you need to be told, “You are doing this wrong.”

Do I expect special treatment because I’ve been a loyal customer… no, not in the slightest.

Do I expect I get banned from the forums, could be, but hope not.

Those of us who vocally, and public, complain do it because we love this game, not because we hope to see it fail. We complain, because we care about this thing we’ve invested Years into, and we don’t want some random person hired 3 weeks ago, who thinks they know what we want, to force things that serve no purpose other than to wipe the history clean, upon us.

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I kind of went back and forth on whether or not to reply to this. It feels awkward disagreeing so openly with a friend but ultimately I owe you both honesty, and my thoughts rather than just privately disagreeing.

I don’t really want to quote every single sentence you posted, moreso the spirit of it. If I’m wrong on what it is, fair enough, but my reading of it, and what I’ll essentially be responding to is:

“Problems inside Blizzard with sexual harassment are causing a bunch of negative changes to be implemented into the game which are unnecessary and do nothing to help the abused.”

And the tl;dr of my response is

“Removing completely → unnecessary ← sexualisation from a videogame is at it’s absolute worst a neutral change, and at best a positive one, and isn’t actually intended to help the abused so much as just help the game have less random out of place innuendo.”

H’okay, let’s get into it.

You raise the example of the picture change. You claim that changing those paintings “enforces the concept that women should be ashamed of their bodies”.

…How? These are some obscure as all heck images that 99% of the wow population literally never knew existed before the wowhead article. No one in life is walking through stormwind, into the houses, seeing a picture of what was previously a posing woman and is now a fruit bowl and thinking “Darn. I’m so ashamed of myself now.” This change is completely and utterly neutral/positive. It’s purely removing context-less sexualisation from the game.

And, frankly, saying “People you hire could be closet pervs, so what, this is life.” Is unacceptable. We don’t need to accept that people are crummy, we can all endeavour to both not be crummy and influence those around us to not be crummy.

Next up, Love Rocket. Like… I dunno man this one seems pretty cut and dry. The icon was basically a [Male reproductive organ]. The name was basically “[Male reproductive organ] mount”, and it has nothing to do with people who were sexually assaulted, it’s just again completely unnecessary sexualisation. It’s some premium frat-boy garbage. “Hey guys what if we made a mount and we made it like a [Male reproductive organ] mount haha wouldn’t that be funny?” Like… Get out of here with that. Now the icon actually matches the mount instead of being a random [Male reproductive organ]. Now the name fits in the WoW world. This isn’t even neutral this is strictly positive as far as I can see.

Next paragraph… This is some moon logic my dude. Male chests and female chests are perceived differently, in general. Context is of course important but I just… I don’t even get what you’re getting at here. It’s blatantly obvious that it’s not remotely the same thing.

Again with the Twin Consorts like… You’re just looking at a change, thinking to yourself “This is stupid I hate it” and whipping out a dictionary to try and prove yourself right. You know what makes Twin Consorts not great? It’s not the fact that they’re consorts (note that there are tonnes of consorts in the game that remain), it’s the fact that in lore they’re trophies of the thunder king. They’re objects to him. And what use does he get out of these objects that makes him treasure them so?

Changing them to have a more combat-y name also changes the lore and context of the boss. Just by changing the name the inference is that they’re treasured for something more using for sex. That dictionary take is so… I dunno, offensive.

None of these changes have any impact on the game you experience. You weren’t logging in every day looking forward to seeing that picture in the SI:7 headquarters. The game you play now will be identical to the game you’ll play in 9.1.5. You are not the target audience for these changes, neither are the victims of the sexual abuse. This is just about making the game friendlier and more welcome to everyone.

And that’s a change that’s worth changing some names and icons around for.

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Well said. It really seems neutral at worst.

You were very polite, well spoken, and articulate. I hate to diminish your statement by agreeing with it lol.

But that aside, I keep wondering what the harm is? What are the damages? Alot of people throw in hyperbole or “slippery slope” arguments, but I don’t see alot of actual harm or damage by changing a few things.

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have you ever watched a rocket launch? lets say its going to the moon. its a giant cylinder, reminiscent of other cylinder shaped things such as the famous deliverer of new seeds in mammals. its gonna enter the gravity well of the sphere known as the moon, reminiscent of other spherical shaped things such as the famous receptacle of delivered seeds in mammals. then its payload is injected onto the surface of the moon. geometry repeats these shapes in this universe because thats what nature has to work with. how is it offensive?

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They will use anything to justify the scrubbing sessions.

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does nothing of the sort.

If they go the you can’t wear ‘x’ transmog anymore, then I might agree with you but not this.

This originally was a decision made by men on how women should look. I am very tempted to believe that it was in fact AA that made some of these decisions and I am perfectly happy to see his influence removed from this game.

So what if woman want to look sexy and feel good about themselves and like it when men think they are sexy and acknowledge them, are they wrong ?

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I don’t know are they? Or have they been trained that is all the value they have to men.

LOL. Or are they trying to been changed by woman that are insecure and need to bully people into doing what they want.

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I don’t know, do you think blizzard hired a woman to do this? If so, then the power was given to her and she didn’t need to bully anyone.

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but fam (sorry had to use that word in its abbreviated form at least once!), they arent doing the same thing to scantily clad males. this means only males will have eye candy representation.

Take a step back, take a breath, and think for a moment

Sorry, thinking is no longer stylish in today’s culture. We are about 75% of the way to Idiocracy at this point.

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do you think men think they only have a ‘sexual’ value for women?

I think the company will do anything to cover their butts and pander to anyone who will accept their BS, the rest of the scrubbing is just people taking advantage of the situation trying/ thinking they are making a difference when in reality all they are doing is killing the game and chasing people way to other games that could care less about a made up crisis.

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Thats a nice sentiment, but sexuality is part of the core of human existence.
Sexualization and innuendo are part of our world at every level, to deny that is ludicrous and pointless.
And has been a part of human history since the beginning, some of the earliest carvings made by humans were of sexualized women.

It really isn’t random, or out of place. It’s par for the course.

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do women think they only have sexual value for men?

I see so renaming a few things and changing a few paintings is ‘chasing’ people away. If so, I am actually glad to see those people go.

you tell me - are you going to speak on behalf of all women though

A woman is a partner to man, just a man is partner to a woman, one have distinct advantages over the other, but when combined both make a good team, and there is nothing wrong with a man telling a woman he thinks she is attractive and to let her know. Also there is nothing wrong with a woman letting men know she is pretty and sexy!

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absolutely not. you?