Slashdot Mirror
Male Blood Elves Get Pumped Up
Kotaku reports that the Male Blood Elves, from the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion Burning Crusade, have been made more masculine by their Blizzard overseers. Which totally makes sense, because when I think elves I think paragons of masculinity. From the article: "You changed it because your constituency is a bunch of capslock-riding asshats who are threatened by bishy player characters. The reason Blood Elves were Horde in the first place is because everyone was whining about all the Horde races being ugly juggernauts. The point of Blood Elves was to inject some swish into a very physically intimidating set of races. They're not exactly chunky now, and I do not begrudge a game company making prerelease aesthetic changes, but their reasons for doing so are pathetic. " Before and after photos are available in their post.
"Bishy"?
Are we reading the rantings of some crazed slash-fiction writer? This has to be the most mind-numbingly stupid objection to a change that I've ever heard.
Canthros
That's the sound of the WoW playerbase not giving a damn and picking whatever race gives them the best bonuses for their class. While I love Kotaku, this honestly strikes me as one of the whiniest posts I've ever read on there. Boo hoo, Blizzard "nerfed" the character model by making it buffer. While I think its high time Blizzard enable characters to alter more of their physical appearance similar to City of Heroes, I have to wonder...is this really worth posting on the front page of Slashdot?
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
That's an interesting euphemism for "customers".
I read Usenet for the articles.
Why is this news?
Because it is so much more "news for nerds" than the info Apple posted about adding application signing, mandatory access controls, resolution independence, OpenGL 2.1, and automatic threading to use multiple cores for single threaded OpenGL applications in Leopard, that I submitted and had rejected yesterday.
This is a non-story. And it's rather insulting that it made it ANYWHERE let alone a major news/blog/whatever site. Who is the source? Oh, that's right, some random "offended" person at http://gaygamer.net/index.php?id=1632 who is complaining that the team behind a currently-in-production game made an art decision.
Unfortunately many more people find this minor tidbit of information more interesting and relevant than a tedious discussion about program controls for a minor platform.
A less hostile way of stating it is: to appeal to the masses you need to aim for the median, to appeal to the specialists you need to be specific.
If you're uninterested in gaming content, you can unsubscribe from that channel in Slashdot.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Yes it did. It also lagged all to hell when you were in a slightly populated area. I wish WoW was more customizable too, but I think they did that on purpose to reduce the amount of character info that needed to be passed around to other players.
Look at the Dark Elves in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. My character is like a twig. He has less muscle mass then me in real life and that is saying something.
The real reason behind this probably has little to do with player demands. Wow has always been plagued with horrible clipping and armor fitting problems. Many of the issues are still around from release. Most likely Blizz realized geting the male armor models to fit the extremely skinny blood elves correctly was going to be difficult. Male BE are now almost identical to male Night elves. I actually support the change, however, because Warcraft elves (before and after their change to blood elves) were thinner then normal humans but never the impossibly thin elves of some fantasy worlds. The new elves look a lot more like the elves in warcraft 3 imo.