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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.'"
Individuals fight for Gay Rights. They fight for equal opportunities. They fight to be recognised as equals. Then they form a guild to spotlight the fact that they are different than the common society.
If you don't want to stand out in a crowd, don't call attention to yourself. There should never have been a guild in WoW that was allowed to recruit based on sexual preference. It is only a target for harassment.
Otoh, I can see how Blizzard has an express interest in keeping this sort of thing from happening. After all, the more accounts they have to ban for harassment, the less residual income they make. Although with their current numbers, tossing a few bad apples from the bunch wouldn't even make a dent.
Colonel Cranium this is Rectal Reconnaissance, we are on a collision course sir, Abort Abort!
Seriously, stop being so fucking sensitive then. Your feelings aren't anyone else's responsibility, and the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can get past your hangups about other people and just deal with things normally.
'Hostile environment' is the biggest load of crap in the English language. No one deserves an easy time of things.
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