Racists on the Server
We've always been vigilant about combatting racist names and chat on our server, but this week brought us something new. I was looking at Guildox Tuesday morning, during maintenance, and I saw when I brought up our server raid rankings that there was a guild name I had not seen before at the top - I don't even want to type it here, but the name started with "nappy" and you can use your imagination for the rest. I was appalled and dumbfounded, and immediately went to check this "new" guild out on the Blizzard armory, but it apparently no longer existed. After going back to Guildox and looking at membership moves, it was clear this racist guild was an offshoot or something of the top raiding guild on our server, Rebellion, as members of Rebellion had "moved" to the racist guild, and then, a day or t wo later, moved back to Rebellion. I popped into Mumble that evening and told Tay about it, who, as he does, decided to pursue the matter in research and in chat. He has a great thread up about it at our web site, which I won't repeat in total here, but his research indicated that Rebellion changed its guild name to the racist one and then after a day or two changed it back to Rebellion, for reasons unknown, although perhaps they did it to get the top 10 man spot as well as the 25 man spot. And to be dicks. And perhaps people complained and Blizz forced them to change it back - I personally never saw the guild name in game, so it wasn't me. Tay raised it with Rebellion members in trade chat that night, and got a torrent of racist abuse back for his trouble. He also complained to WOWprogress and Guildox, the two ranking sites, about this guild being listed, and WOWprogress at least listened and removed them - I don't think Guildox has yet.
In a final little incident, I went to the official Blizzard forum for Garrosh, thinking I might put something there about this, and I saw a very recently updated (within the previous 24 hours) post from Rebellion's guild master advertising their paid carry services (in which you give them gold and they carry your toon through challenge mode dungeons or heroic raids). I posted a response on that one , urging people not to support racists on our server and outlining what we believe Rebellion had done with this guild name. I expected to get abused for this, just as Tay was in chat the previous evening, but when I checked back in a couple of hours, the thread was gone, and Blizz has a 'this topic is not available" message when I clicked on my avatar's posts to get to it. So, either the Rebellion GM took the thread down when he saw my post, or Blizzard closed it, I don't know which.
All of this has made me furious and worried about not just WOW, but the internet in general as an outlet for abusive racist, misogynist, and homophobic attacks (news flash, I know, but it needs to be talked about, I think.) I know the unfiltered nature of the internet, which allows anyone to say any damned thing they want without consequences, probably inevitably leads to hateful and vicious talk and bullying. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't fight back whenever we find it, whether on a web site or in a video game. I'm very proud of Tay for taking the fight to the racists on our server, and I'm proud of our guild's record in always standing up to racists and homophobes in game.
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