Gay Guild Recruitment Disallowed From WoW?

Fireball394 wrote with a link to an article on the site 'In Newsweekly'. The article, entitled "Blizzard of GLBT gaming policy questions", discusses the application of a harassment warning on a player who was recruiting for a GLBT guild. From the article: "In her follow-up letter to the company, Andrews explained that there was an obvious misunderstanding and that she was not insulting anyone, but merely recruiting for a 'GLBT friendly' guild. The response from Blizzard was, 'While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a GLBT friendly guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to be temporarily suspended from the game. However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning.' Blizzard's stance was clear that recruiting for a guild using 'GLBT' was inappropriate as, the company said, it may 'incite certain responses in other players that will allow for discussion that we feel has no place in our game.'"

Ratings

[manonthespoon]

The game is rated Teen and not Mature. I imagine that the Teen rating limits the sexual content of the game, and blizzard's Terms of Service reflect that rating by also restricting people's ability to discuss sex and sexuality in game.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if your character is Gay/Straight. World of Warcraft is not supposed to be a game in which sex and sexuality is a defining aspect of a character. I wonder how you are supposed to recruit for a Gay/Lesbian guild while not being allowed to discuss sex in game?

Anyway, the "why?" is the Teen rating. Blizzard may need to work on the "how?" especially since they seem to be just pissing more people off with their current policy of "Don't ask, don't tell."

Re:GLBT?

[gclef]

Gay
Lesbian
Bisexual
Transgender

Complaint based system

[Anonymous Coward]

Since I haven't seen this mentioned yet, Blizzard works off a complaint based system. That is, mods are not actively seeking out policy violations on the server. Players report players. Someone took exception to the recuitment message. You got griefed!

I read the second message as, "We messed up, but we are not totally backing down from our previous position." Company policy or uppity support tech? You decide.

Try Second Life instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like these players ought to give Second Life [secondlife.com] a go if they've never tried it and are looking for a massively multiplayer online world (and community) that accepts anyone [google.com], however they want to be.

Linden Lab deserve their money far more than Blizzard does - Linden have managed to cultivate fantastic diversity in their online population and to sucessfully police their community for harassment - of any sort - to other players. Their single most important community rule is to be polite to other players - and it works brilliantly.

If Linden can prevent players from abusing each other, Blizzard also ought to be able to do that. Instead Blizzard makes excuses because they can't be bothered. I'm guessing it's cheaper for them to make the GLBT guild go away than to police players to prevent abuse.

Of course Second Life isn't much of a Fantasy MMORPG (if that's what you were explicity trying to play), it's a virtual playground with diverse user-created content - although I hear there are a couple of pretty good games that players have created.

Extreme example but...

[bortykins]

Giving blacks equal rights could result in racial slurs. As such, we shall continue enslaving them to maintain the family values of the community.