What's Wrong With WoW - Total Fuckwads

Opinion from Matt - Wednesday, 06 October 2010 @ 1:38am

This might seem like a duplication of Elitist Assholes, but it's really not. Just to give you a bit of a background, my gameplay experience started as Alliance. And hey, I heard the usual nonsense and stupid jokes (Chuck Norris, amirite?) but nothing could prepare me for leveling a later character on Horde. Nothing could prepare me for The Barrens.

The Barrens are a low level (10 - 20) area for leveling Horde characters and most people go through it. And for some reason it's become a haven for trash talk, flame wars, racism, sexism, and homophobia.

It doesn't take long to see it either. The level of conversation on WoW is not dissimilar to to that on Xbox Live. The Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is alive and well.

There are no consequences, no need for consideration or restraint, and this has led to an almost memetic level of racism and homophobia, especially.

It's interesting that, especially in the case of homophobia, Blizzard are well aware of the problem. In order to stop gay players from copping abuse and flaming Blizzard did the right thing and banned players from being gay.

Well, more specifically they banned players and guilds from identifying themselves as gay. Don't ask don't tell. Way to go, Blizzard, you absolute cunts.

Fixing these issues would not be difficult if the company gave a shit about the flaming of the community. They've said in the past that they want to clean up the trolling and so on, and the first step they took towards that was the RealID system. I've written previously about that particular first trimester abortion, but as that's specific to the forums it isn't strictly relevant.

In game there are plenty of options. Terms like jew and faggot could pop up a warning to the speaker saying that such hate speech is in violation of the EULA. Another option is to go the "report for spamming" approach and be able to "dob" players in for "report for antisocial speech". Given that discussions are logged it would be easy to find and flag such behaviour.

If a few people got three week suspensions for yelling out this kind of bullshit in Dalaran's trade chat or across the Barrens, the game would clean up almost immediately.

Of course, the forum could be dealt with in much the same way. Blizzard just has to care, instead of pretending to care.

There's another part to this, of course, which is simply those of us who do find this behavior unacceptable need to rail against it, to criticize those who use it, and to be the ones pressing the button to end the abuse.

Maybe it's just me, I don't know. Other people seem to find it funny, and people I like and respect are happy to join in the fun and games. But I think "gamer culture" needs to move past a place where "jew" and "faggot" are funny things to call people, and grow the fuck up.