The head of World of Warcraft comments on the reaction of users to the fact that inappropriate references are cut out of the game Leave a comment

Inside Blizzard (Yes Activision) began to undergo significant changes after the scandal with the working culture. Part of the transformations concerns the company’s games: for example, in Overwatch renamed McCry, and from World of Warcraft all sorts of references are removed that have not passed the test of time and now seem inappropriate.

About the current situation around MMORPG, Venturebeat publication talked with John Hazzikostas (Ion Hazzikostas), leader World of Warcraft.

– How the community reacts to these changes?

– The reaction is https://fabulous-vegas.uk/ mixed. Some confused. The changes began to notice before we explained why we are doing what we are doing. People are different. Some believe that this is politics and unfriendlyness. “Just focus on making an interesting game. All this does not care about me ". Others express the concern that we are doing this, just to put dust in the eyes. Like, instead of fighting real problems, we just change some words in the game.

But this is not "or". This is "and". We understand that we do not eliminate systematic injustice by changing the emotion in World of Warcraft. But why not do this while we are also working on a larger cultural association, diversity, security issues, and so on? At the same time as we improve our processes for evaluating managers, according to reviews within the team.

While we improve our employees hiring processes so that the team becomes more diverse, we can pay attention to the game with the same goals. People see only one change in the short term. But in the long run, we realize that we will be judged as a team, as a company, as a game – and all these are much wider issues. Work on them is still being carried out.

Bye Blizzard understands internal problems, she also tries to improve feedback with users. For World of Warcraft announced the "Council of Communities" – a special forum that everyone can read, but leave messages there only selected players.

Among the elect, there will be at least a hundred people from different fan layers: those who love raids, PVP plays solo, storm epoch -making dungeons, collects clothes, chases at achievements, rophallis, sticks out in Wow Classic and so on. These people will be able to communicate more closely with the developers, and developers will be able to better capture moods in the community without raking tens of thousands of comments on the forums.

Application for participation in the Council allow everyone. To cover more users and hear different opinions, developers plan to change the composition of the Council once a year.

Judging by the ratio of likes and diesels under the announcement of YouTube, community World of Warcraft will be tossed to the idea with a skeptic. Users are worried that some streamers, YouTuber or popular hardcores will get into the Council, and ordinary players will remain away again.