The Evolution of Creative Content in World of Warcraft

[Drusin]

I’m not sure who or what a taliesin is, but what proof is there of this?

Taliesin is some youtuber

[Harthmut]

It's a compromise. They need to grow to appease shareholders, which is a legal obligation. They either do that or do EVEN MORE scummy business practices to bleed people of their money. Think actual play-to-win items. But really, they (people who do work at the company) can believe in these morals and have pride in them but then need to censor or compromise where necessary to prevent getting kicked out of other markets (and hinder their growth). Blizzard doesnt have the ability to willfully sabotage themselves and so without the viable option of a international message, they can at least do this.

For the pride example, everyone should be happy companies investing millions to promote good causes (to raise awareness and normalize) but never mistake a company for being moral. Don't become their white knight or try to marry them because they said "gay people are valid" or "<company> said trans rights". The relationship is buy and sell, nothing more. Encourage the message, don't befriend the messenger.

I shouldn't even have to say that, and I hope you didn't get me wrong in the first place; I'm all about LGBTQ+ rights and against racism. Everyone should live in peace and the way they want. And I believe most people think that way. But companies know that.

They know that the vast majority will agree when they say "gay people are valid" but it always comes off as pandering. It's like when mid-40s "priests" who never listened to that kind of music rap about the christian youth on television. Or when some sites advertise with lolz tehrandomz internet humor that was funny 20 years ago to lure in the nerd community.
You can feel the dishonesty and i'm having my intelligence insulted by this kind of marketing scheme and I'd rather companies let actual politicians do the politics.
Many politicians also don't always have the best interests in mind, but at least they got elected.

And you know what, if it was only the pandering, i wouldn't even be as mad as I am today. The pandering is just the icing on the cake.

[Soeroah]

If it is coming from the developers, I support whatever they want to do 100%.

If it's coming from management, it's cheap and it's pandering emptiness.

[Waterlily Invasion]

Male developer hits on female developer, she turns him down.
He puts a sexy nude lady artwork in game and says "I made this in your image, and now I will always be able to look at you as i imagine"
Male developer has now made "nude" artwork of a co-worker who did not consent at all to it, and its now ingame... for everyone.. for years to remind her of him, even after hes long been fired. And now with the current stuff going on she finally reports it, and so it gets removed.

First of all, none of the two pictures were nude. One had her cleavage showing, the other was posing and had her belly exposed. I assume since the cleavage girl only had her cleavage covered and the other one got exchanged for fruits, that the person you're talking about was memorialized in the picture, that got exchanged for fruits.

Second of all, what does that mean in her image? It's a cartoon painting of a girl in a video game. She even has her face covered. How can you look at that picture and find it resembles any living person? You can barely make any facial features out.

And third of all, nobody even had these pictures on their minds, until Blizzard removed and changed them. Nobody was thinking about them, and barely anyone will probably even remember ever having seen them. If some woman was memorialized in them, nobody knew, noticed or cared.

Until now. Talk about the Streisand effect. Everybody is now aware of them more than they ever would have been.

I personally find it highly doubtful, that some guy hit on a girl, got rejected, and then created one of these pictures to objectify her eternally in a video game. If that was his intention, he probably did a poor job, because I can hardly make anything out in these pictures.

But most importantly, removing them from the game doesn't do anything. Because they're still out there on the internet, and always will be. And now more attention has been drawn to them, than ever before.

Well done. You did nothing and made everything worse.

[hydrium]

The more bland and generic you make a game the less a customer can relate to it and for a game that lives and dies off of customer engagement, not relating to your product is a massive fucking issue.

[Yarathir]

I will, I haven't bought D2 Remake, i refunded WC3 Reforged and I have deinstalled all of their games.
It's not even the hipocrisy they show these days, it's the fact that all they care for is my wallet. They don't respect me as a customer and supporter of their products, they don't know what I and all the other players want anymore. They have alienated themselves from their playerbase. All of their games have turned into milking machines they want to hang on your wallet.

If they made products that are worth my time and money, that'd be a whole other thing but the quality is ever declining. I want to play a game, not drown in chores.

I'm happy to hear it- genuinely.

For all the bellyaching about the evil entitled gamers, a good portion of them give gaming companies far too many chances. Customer is certainly not always King, but the fact of the matter is that you develop a game for its playerbase, not for your development team. If you want to do the latter, be prepared to be left with only the latter playing said game.

Not just here, but just in general the past few years, multiple gaming studios including Blizzard have shown their open disdain for the people paying their bills so it's time for those people to vote with their wallets. Customers may not be entitled to anything, but neither are the developers or the studio.

Hopefully these situations alongside the many at other (primarily western) gaming companies will teach gamers to be less brand loyal, to stop pre-ordering stuff and to respect their own time, as well as to stop asking, begging or desperately yelling for improvements from people that don't respect them, will block them, will mock them and then assert their own desires without a moment of consideration.

[Acidbaron]

And who decides when something is offensive or not, outdated or not?
As right now it seems to be decided by something that resembles the cancel culture twitter mob, which is neither sensible or intelligent.

Rather than using a broad brush and going over everything and removing everything that may be seen as offensive or used offensively is a poor way of handling this, and it also won't work.

Just seems more pandering really, glad i am no longer supporting this game. The intentions are probably well meant but these are not well thought out actions.

[Yarathir]

And who decides when something is offensive or not, outdated or not?
As right now it seems to be decided by something that resembles the cancel culture twitter mob, which is neither sensible or intelligent.

Rather than using a broad brush and going over everything and removing everything that may be seen as offensive or used offensively is a poor way of handling this, and it also won't work.

Just seems more pandering really, glad i am no longer supporting this game. The intentions are probably well meant but these are not well thought out actions.

Simple: they do. With their contemporary social values that surely won't age poorly, they will purify the game and remove all trace of icky sticky stuff and you will thank them and pay them for it.

[Powerogue]

Finally, sexy male demons.

I think this means the Ellisande concubine room is safe thanks to the "exotic dancer" gnome! Huzzah!

[Acidbaron]

Simple: they do. With their contemporary social values that surely won't age poorly, they will purify the game and remove all trace of icky sticky stuff and you will thank them and pay them for it.

Mhm, hypocrisy is going to be well represented in there, so is ignorance and a few other modern day values often displayed on todays -new media- platforms.

They will continue to have a base that is very forgiving, however it seems to have been shrinking each content cycle.

Only game i might return to is HoTS, who do quite a lot of work the community wants despite being a small team AB abandoned pretty much. But WoW, far better bang for your buck online games out there that respect your time, if i wanted to buy my end game rewards there are also better P2W games.

[Vomax]

"with our goal of building an inclusive and welcoming game world."

In a game called Warcraft.... How does changing outdated paintings that literally no one looked at achieving this?
How is changing armor, and removing emotes changing this?

This is a game of War. Where kingdoms falls and horrible atrocities occur.

Its sucks. I understand the current state of blizzard and the pain and uncertainty going on. Removing your history, and neutering every reference that made the game fun is not going to fix it.

Yes. I said it. The references were fun. They were then. They are now. You cant change that.

Remove the REAL LIFE problems from the company. Dont screw the game over as a result.

[Souflikar]

"with our goal of building an inclusive and welcoming game world."

In a game called Warcraft.... How does changing outdated paintings that literally no one looked at achieving this?
How is changing armor, and removing emotes changing this?

This is a game of War. Where kingdoms falls and horrible atrocities occur.

Its sucks. I understand the current state of blizzard and the pain and uncertainty going on. Removing your history, and neutering every reference that made the game fun is not going to fix it.

Yes. I said it. The references were fun. They were then. They are now. You cant change that.

Remove the REAL LIFE problems from the company. Dont screw the game over as a result.

Couldn't agree more!!!!

[Varitok]

Anduin x Wrathion marriage when?

Not soon enough.

[Zeek Daniels]

suck a dick blizz

[FelPlague]

First of all, none of the two pictures were nude. One had her cleavage showing, the other was posing and had her belly exposed. I assume since the cleavage girl only had her cleavage covered and the other one got exchanged for fruits, that the person you're talking about was memorialized in the picture, that got exchanged for fruits.

Second of all, what does that mean in her image? It's a cartoon painting of a girl in a video game. She even has her face covered. How can you look at that picture and find it resembles any living person? You can barely make any facial features out.

And third of all, nobody even had these pictures on their minds, until Blizzard removed and changed them. Nobody was thinking about them, and barely anyone will probably even remember ever having seen them. If some woman was memorialized in them, nobody knew, noticed or cared.

Until now. Talk about the Streisand effect. Everybody is now aware of them more than they ever would have been.

I personally find it highly doubtful, that some guy hit on a girl, got rejected, and then created one of these pictures to objectify her eternally in a video game. If that was his intention, he probably did a poor job, because I can hardly make anything out in these pictures.

But most importantly, removing them from the game doesn't do anything. Because they're still out there on the internet, and always will be. And now more attention has been drawn to them, than ever before.

Well done. You did nothing and made everything worse.

Oh hey, your opinion is so shitty, wrong and pathetic you had to make a burner account to do so!

1. yes, but its as good as.
2. ... Seriously "its a video game charecter, how can it resemble a real person!"
3. The person who was target of the abuse sure as fuck had it on their mind.
4. cool, who the fuck cares?
5. you really find it doubtful? Man do you find it doubtful that the cosby suite existed too?
6. "Doesent do anything" except it literally does, because it makes them no longer part of the world that the victims work on.

[Zoibert the Bear]

No other competitor game needed to be a WoW killer. Blizzard killed WoW all by themselves. All of this is ridiculous and no changes need to be made to WoW or WoW classic. People need to learn to develop a thicker skin.

lmao couldn't be further from the truth. They want to seem woke, that is for sure though.

This is like punishing the players because the Blizzard devs couldn't keep their hands off of female employees.

Fucking KEK, this is a fucking disgrace.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Next steps:

No more damage meters because it exposes the weakest players and creates a unsafe environment.

FFXIV bans damage meters. It changes nothing. All the raid groups do is force everyone to join their discord and they post the logs in there, chew people out for not doing enough DPS in there, and then kick people from the raid group, but since the log conversation didn't happen ingame the FFXIV GMs have no proof that logs were the reason someone got kicked so nobody gets banned. A perfect example of why banning something doesn't make it go away.

[Yarathir]

Oh hey, your opinion is so shitty, wrong and pathetic you had to make a burner account to do so!

1. yes, but its as good as.
2. ... Seriously "its a video game charecter, how can it resemble a real person!"
3. The person who was target of the abuse sure as fuck had it on their mind.
4. cool, who the fuck cares?
5. you really find it doubtful? Man do you find it doubtful that the cosby suite existed too?
6. "Doesent do anything" except it literally does, because it makes them no longer part of the world that the victims work on.

My guy, can you stop being abusive and exclusionary with your aggressive language? That kind of conduct doesn't belong in 2021.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The only groupfinders left are LFR and LFD, as pugs create unsafe enviroments. In LFR and LFD local chat and /whispers to group members are disabled to create a safe enviroment.

Serious raid groups would just move to discord to form PUGs rather than using ingame tools.

- - - Updated - - -

so the hollywood politicaly correct mindset hit the gaming industry (california....what the heck happen over there, drink to much clorium water?)

The crazies understand that politics is downstream of culture, so they tried to disseminating their ideas at the source: by infiltrating and taking over our corporate monoculture. Now they've converged all major institutions in America.

- - - Updated - - -

For everyone complaining, it's about evolving with the times. 20 years is a looooong time, culture-wise. Imagine if we had video games in the 1950's. How different would they be in the 1970's? Look at movie themes and dialogue from 1970 to 1990. Gaming is influenced by cultural norms, y'all need to relax and stop being stuck in the early 2000's.

The narrative that "things get better as times goes on" needs to die. The old sometimes really was better than the now.

- - - Updated - - -

FF14 still has the lower subs. Try not to kid yourself.

No subscription MMO will ever attain 12 million subs again. The conditions that made WoW the cultural titan it was in the late 2000s and early 2010s no longer exist and will never happen again.

- - - Updated - - -

The more bland and generic you make a game the less a customer can relate to it and for a game that lives and dies off of customer engagement, not relating to your product is a massive fucking issue.

This.

Warcraft was great when it catered towards a specific demographic and nailed what it wanted to be. Then the devs and their target audience was diluted and now they're making weaksauce that nobody likes.

- - - Updated - - -

For all the bellyaching about the evil entitled gamers, a good portion of them give gaming companies far too many chances.

Yup. The West doesn't have a boycott culture like Japan where you can get near unanimous boycotting of a company. The boycotters in the West are in the minority. Most people have been conditioned to worship franchises and to religiously continue buying products even when they are bad.

Mass Effect 3
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Aliens Colonial Marines
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Bioshock Infinite
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

No Man's Sky
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Halo Master Chief Collection
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

The Division
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Fallout 4
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

FFXV
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

MGSV
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Nu Star Wars Battlefront
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Fallout 76
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Mass Effect Andromeda
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Anthem
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Pokemon Sword & Shield
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

Cyperbunk 2077
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

[FelPlague]

My guy, can you stop being abusive and exclusionary with your aggressive language? That kind of conduct doesn't belong in 2021.

Nah, get over it, people obviously gunna make burner accounts just to be dumb, im gunna call em out on it.

- - - Updated - - -

Pokemon Sword & Shield
"HYPE! Pre-ordered!"
It comes out
wth it was a scam. I've learned my lesson. Never preorder!

man no one saw it as a scam that pre-ordered, literally all the complaints that were made were made and well known before its launch, those who didnt want it didnt get it, those that did, did, there was no "scam" They never mislead players with graphics or promises like those other games did.