So for those living under a rock, or more accurately outside, the last few months the previously "Premier" MMO World of Warcraft has been going through "changes" due to what is best described as a #MeToo moment.
Various staff have been fired, several Blizzard IPs have adjusted content as a result, [Any and all references to Jesse McCree are gone from WoW and Overwatch for example, this includes renaming an entire zone in the Legion Expansion that was called "Mac'Aree", a joke about a dance called the Mac'Areena, and who knows what about the OW character called McCree], and since then several literal rogue developers have been making objective changes to WoW that "they feel" are offensive.
Imagine what would happen if you let the woke Twittersphere make changes to a 17 year old game that's a global MMO, has various spinoffs, parodies, and other content and that's literally what has been happening.
Some examples which are in reverse chronological order so the most recent ones first,
George the Corpsegrinder Reference Removed & Quest Dialogue "Updates"
Blizz removed Most "Greenskin" references from the game...
Finkle Einhorn Renamed; More Transphobic, Sexual, and Racially Suggestive Dialogue Removed from WoW
All The Removed /silly Voice Lines in Patch 9.1.5
Suggestive Player Character Joke and Flirt Voice Lines Removed in Patch 9.1.5
Blizzard Has Removed Flirts and Jokes From The Game!
Negative Emotes Changed and Removed, Several Emotes Added in Patch 9.1.5
To give some context,
Greenskins
Orcs are literally green because of lore reasons. They used to be brown until the Fel corrupted them.
Finkle Einhorn
This is a Vanilla [base game, 17 ish years old] npc in reference to the Ace Ventura character.
So some of these features are literally as old as, if not older, than the game since green orcs and "greenskins" have been a thing since the 3 RTSs that preceed WoW. However now after the #MeToo moment the lunatics are most definitely running the asylum and changing what they personally feel should be. When called out on this they've reacted in true DARVO style of attacking the players and saying they deserve respect and such.
It was always said WoW was the only thing that could ever kill WoW and that certainly seems to be the case with this massive ongoing shitshow.
On the plus side of things, in addition to players unsubbing specifically because of this [which is on top of the already falling sub numbers since the game has had fuck all content for a while now], as many have pointed out on the WoW sub this has been great in working as a means to prevent resubbing to this game and falling back into WoW-addiction.
You missed the ones where they took down paintings of women in one of the dungeons and replaced them with paintings of fruit.
Just like how our society has taken down actual women and replaced them with fruits with nuts.
Fitting, really.
Reminds me of the Taliban destroying 1000 year old statues of budda.
At least in this case, since it's digital, there are (potentially kind of buggy) ways of preserving the old version. Of course, utilizing servers which are privately controlled instead of Blizzard controlled would be very naughty, so you wouldn't want to do that. Especially now that it would have forbidden emotes, NPCs named after problematic people and inappropriate paintings in dungeons.
Wow is fucked lol. With solid mmorpgs like ff14 and bdo.. and with new worlds, wow is just dead.
So it's true. Only WoW can kill WoW.
Let's not forget changing the gender of some random female mobs in Karazhan into males. Think it was the succubi too.
That happened in Black Temple as well. They changed the courtesan mobs as well as the Twin Consorts from MoP.
Honestly, this really is a problem.
FF14's servers are going to lag from the influx of new players, and that's just unfortunate.