Posts with tag offensive

Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.

The other night, one member of a random PUG The Spousal Unit was in announced exactly which bosses would be downed. He stated that any disagreement would cause something on his body to be put into something on your body -- only he used slightly more graphic words. The run was fine, because, though his method of communication was crude, it did convey a strategy that worked.

There are some, however, who are being crude and offensive in the same way that creeps in college libraries reveal themselves to solitary students. These poster children for GIFT (Note: The link for GIFT is not safe for work. But if you are not familiar with Penny Arcade's theory about the internet, you really need to go there.) aren't criminals in the legal sense of the word, but they do have victims and therefore I will call them perps. Who knows what motivates them. Maybe they are troubled teens who have terrible home lives and should be pitied. I don't know and honestly I don't care. I'm too busy spending my sympathy on Haiti to include these jerks in my monkeysphere. And besides, at some point you have to take responsibility for your actions, regardless of how horrible your environment is. This week, we talk about these GIFTed perps.

Vinna asked in the comments to yesterday's Breakfast Topic, "How do you feel when a guildmate makes a character with a questionable name, i.e. offensive/borderline offensive?" After all, your name appears above your guild name, so should guilds be policing their members' alt names?

We already know that unless someone reports a name, it doesn't get changed. We also know that there are some extremely offensive names out there. So, if you are in a guild you want to stay in and someone makes an alt with a name that offends you what should you do, if anything?

The conservative Christian investment firm, the Timothy Plan, has released a list of the 30 most offensive games on the market (Warning: link is to a PDF file). This list details the areas of sex, nudity, gay / lesbian, violence, cartoon violence, language, comic mischief, drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, demonic, and game addiction as things that are against any "morally responsible" mutual fund to invest in.

In other words they don't want you to invest, like they don't, in companies that make games which deal with any of the above areas.

World of Warcraft is on the list. It has an overall score of a 9, which means it is half as offensive as Grand Theft Auto IV. According to the Timothy Plan, WoW is morally deficient in sex, violence, language, alcohol, and game addiction.

Some investors will take this advice, and that's their right to do so.

After the break we'll examine areas in which WoW is morally deficient, according to the Timothy Plan.

Do you ever stop to think about the other players in WoW? The game attracts a wide range of folks, but odds are good many of them are remarkably similar to you in many ways. Sometimes it's hard to remember that there is a living being behind those pixels. Someone who is excited by triumphs and aggravated by mistakes. Oddly enough, we don't always treat them as real people.

Take for instance one of the PUGs I did this evening. Within 10 minutes of joining the group, the Hunter typed a vulgar joke in party chat. At this point I saw four options four options for dealing with it:

As if there was any doubt, Nethaera has posted that Blizzard considers the sharing of any Wrath of the Lich King alpha information "extremely offensive and inappropriate," though it's a good question as to whom that is, other than Blizzard themselves. Here at WoW Insider, our policy is not to rehost or quote any leaked alpha information, though as a service to our readers, we've been linking to other sites where it may be found. But is it within Blizzard's rights to lash out at anyone who does host or discuss leaked alpha information?

As copyright holders, they certainly have ownership of any notes, updates, or models released, so it could be considered a violation of copyright law to rehost the information. But to really get to the center of the problems behind this leak, you have to realize where it likely came from: the Friends and Family Alpha release. A little while ago, Blizzard distributed the client for Wrath to a number of their "friends and family" -- probably a group that consisted of employees and their WoW-playing relatives, as well as likely some folks at Vivendi and Activision, other Blizzard partners like Upper Deck and Figureprints, and probably a number of high-end raiding guilds who've done a lot of pre-beta testing for Blizzard before. Somewhere in there was someone not quite as trustworthy as Blizzard thought (odds are that Blizzard at the very least collected a signed non-disclosure agreement from everyone that they sent the client to), and that person uploaded or otherwise shared the client, against the agreement.

Cut to a few days later, after that person shares it with another person, who shares it with one more person, who then uploads it to a popular bittorrent filesharing site, and suddenly everyone's got access to everything in the Wrath client, and even if they can't play it, they can still datamine and grab information.

We've definitely had this conversation before, but Bhou on the EU forums brings it up yet again: why don't we treat the various races like they, y'know, are those various races? He asks why we can't skin Taurens for leather, but that brings up all the other race issues in Azeroth. Why aren't Undead immune to fear? Why aren't Gnomes tameable? Oh wait, that last one might not be right (though it would be funny).

But besides the game balance problems, the fact is that the racial abilities are about as well-represented as they're going to get (and in fact, if there are any changes in the future, they'll probably be towards conformity rather than radically away from it). You can't skin Tauren because, guess what, they're humanoids. Undead can't be immune because guess what, they're humanoids, too, and while a weakness to holy spells might make the game interesting, it won't help towards balance.

The Warcraft world is a mean one, but would the Alliance really go so far as to skin fallen Taurens on the battlefield anyway? For game balance or for lore reasons, it just doesn't make sense.