I cancelled my World of Warcraft account today. Truth is, I haven’t played the account since June. Mind, I got my account in May, so I logged maybe one month of play time. This is in comparison to FFXI, which chained me to my computer 12 hours a day for three months, and Puzzle Pirates, which lasted even into school time for a whopping 8 month addiction.
Was WoW just that bad of a game? Is Blizzard capable of screwing up that badly? Well, yes and no. In the “Why are you leaving?” comment (Blizzard asks, but does it read?), I explained some of my feelings:
There’s just too much unaddressed harassment in-game & on the forums. As much as I enjoy playing, it got too uncomfortable to continue. As a woman and an avid gamer, I feel that Blizzard doesn’t fulfill its own harrassment policy. Also, the hyper-sexualized female characters are a problem. Even my guy pals think it’s over the top. Blizzard already has a strong male following; it has nothing to lose and everything to gain by making the game more attractive to women and minorities.
Being that concise pained me, I assure you, but the character limit was unforgiving. I also apologize for the “guy pals” line, but it’s less characters than “guy friends”.
Now, anyone who knows computer games knows that Blizzard makes a damn good game. I’ve been a fan of theirs since Warcraft II. I own both Diablos and Warcraft III (but not the expansion). I used to play Tower Defense maps all the time before WC3 lost my interest. In terms of gameplay, WoW is one of Blizzard’s best games and it far outstripped FFXI in almost every way. So what went wrong?
Well, after listening to yet another moron bitch and moan about “teh eval femenests” (this after him cracking jokes about abusing women, mind), I realized, “This just isn’t fun anymore.” I couldn’t log on and play for more than an hour without something happening. The comments were like Barrens chat, except that I couldn’t switch zones to avoid them: they’re in general chat, in tells, in the emotes, in chat bubbles, and even in my beloved guild (though we had a policy against that). I couldn’t escape the drama or the harassment.
I mean, being on Laughing Skull is pretty much agreeing to put up with idiocy; it’s a popular PvP server. But it was also there on Shadowcouncil, an RP server with a stricter policy. And yet, it was on that very server that I would get tells like “hey sexy” or people trying to give me free stuff because my female dwarf was “hot”.
After I had seriously considered leaving, I logged on and joined my guildmates in the Scarlet Monastery. I was having a blast going through it, and I started feeling like, “I was going to leave behind all this? What was I thinking?” And then some sexist idiot started harassing a female guild member. He was silenced, but the woman had already left the guild. It wasn’t the first time it had hapened to her and she was sick of it. I could relate. I convinced her to come back to the guild, but that was the last time I played. I was sick of it, too.
Has Blizzard changed, or have I?
Well, I can remember being disappointed in WC2 for not having any female units. I can remember being excited when WC3 came out because of the Night Elves, but I was soon disappointed again because of their representation and the fact that the heroes were still overwhelmingly male (even in the Night Elf race). I remember being angry at the gender ratio, or perhaps the class type, of the original Diablo characters. And don’t get me started on the concept art; the busty Night Elf mascot for WoW says it all. Or perhaps her pole dancing does. No, it doesn’t seem that Blizzard has changed its tune. But, perhaps, that is exactly the problem. In all these years it hasn’t changed, at least not in its attitude towards its female players.
And perhaps part of it is that I’ve changed. Games like Beyond Good and Evil and Eternal Darkness have shown me that there are companies that get it. Why waste my money with the same sexist bullshit repackaged over and over again when there’s something better out there? Even FFXI did a better job of keeping the gender representation fair and balanced.
Still, when all is said and done all I’m left with is a bad taste in my mouth. Like I said, I’ve been a Blizzard fan for a long time. “This time,” I thought, “this time will be different. It’s an MMO. Blizzard has to be more fair; I mean, if FF can pull it off, Blizzard should too.” More the fool I. Oh well. As the saying goes: Live, learn, and then go get Guild Wars.
August 17th, 2005 at 5:27 pm
i’m a guy gamer and i agree with your comments. i know a few girls in WoW and they take some serious shit from immature 12 year olds. All the assholes are either geeks or kids who havent even grown hair. WoW was sort of a dissapointment, not with gameplay but also because of cheaters and deuche bags who find random reasons to make things hard on people. blizzard charges 15 fucking dollars a month so they should at least make the experience fun for everybody and boot out cheaters, sexists, hackers, and people who ruin the fun for everybody.
August 18th, 2005 at 9:54 am
Glad to see that I’m not the only one out there who was turned off by WoW’s lack of interest in obtaining and maintaining a friendly community. Now that you mention the price, it seems that WoW is one of the more expensive MMOs I can think of (I’m pretty sure FFXI was 10 bucks, and I think Puzzle Pirates was in that range too), which I think puts even more onus on them to at least make a token effort to uphold their own “code of conduct”.
Also, your comment about “geeks” is interesting; being a part of both the gaming and the geek culture (they overlap, not surprisingly) I’ve found that the “boy’s club” mentality is pretty similar. Many of the male hardcore geeks I’ve known had a hard time looking at women as people, although I’m not sure how much of that was the culture perpetuating itself rather than a severe lack of social skills. Saying this, I’d like to point out that most of my friends (male and female) are geeks like me so obviously we aren’t a one trick breed. But, then, most of my friends are gamers, too, so the same holds true there. ^^;
March 25th, 2008 at 3:52 am
Did you try using the “report harassment” function? It’s there. The moderators can’t watch everyone all the time; but I know from experience that if you *report* the harassment, they take it very seriously.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:42 am
[...] my post, Goodbye WoW, hello disappointment, I described how after a while putting up with the sexist comments ruined the game for me. It [...]
April 8th, 2008 at 12:55 am
Qit el-Remel said:
And what would they have done if I had? For the invasive tells, they would have said to use the /ignore function (which I already did; it doesn’t really do much when the /tells come from different people every time). For the crap over the general chat channel, assuming I wasn’t told that it was none of my business they would be more likely to tell me to turn off my chat channels (which is what I eventually had to do). And for the in-guild stuff, I felt that it was a guild matter that should be handled internally.
Was I wrong? Maybe. But the lack of proper moderation on the forums informed my decision in part. If Blizzard doesn’t bother to uphold its clearly stated guidelines on its own forums, why would I expect in-game GM’s to do so?
My mom did report harassment once. The GM said that he would deal with it, but refused to tell her what kind of action was/would be taken. On a whim, my mother put the harasser on her friends list for the week to see if his account got suspended or something. Since he didn’t log off after she informed the GM and he logged on the next day, it doesn’t look as if the harassing player was dealt with very seriously.