Tuesday, January 31, 2006

More on Blizzard

From Kotaku, a link to a post by a Blizzard rep in the WOW forums
(http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=wow-general&t=6847462&tmp=1#post6847462):
We encourage community building among our players with others of similar interests, and we understand that guilds are one of the primary ways to forge these communities. However, topics related to sensitive real-world subjects -- such as religious, sexual, or political preference, for example -- have had a tendency to result in communication between players that often breaks down into harassment.

To promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent such harassment from taking place as best we can, we prohibit mention of topics related to sensitive real-world subjects in open chat within the game, and we do our best to take action whenever we see such topics being broadcast. This includes openly advertising a guild friendly to players based on a particular political, sexual, or religious preference, to list a few examples. For guilds that wish to use such topics as part of their recruiting efforts, our Guild Recruitment forum, located at our community Web site, serves as one open avenue for doing so.

We will be clarifying some of the language in our game policies in order to help avoid such confusion in the future.

That seems fair--they're banning all guild recruitment in open chat based on affiliation of any kind, essentially. But they also create another avenue, the guild recruitment forum, where such recruiting can take place. And if they had phrased it with that level of precision originally, it would have never become an issue.

Thanks to all of you who sent in information about WOW and how recruitment is handled.

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