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January 31, 2006

games

Blizzard Is Not GLBT-Friendly?

Posted Jan. 31, ’06, 12:00 PM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Games

resize.php.jpeg Apparently there’s something of a flap going on over at Blizzard with the creation of guilds and what affiliations they can have. They don’t seem to like GLBT guilds. More after the jump — In Newsweekly has the story. [Hat tip: Peter Cohen]

In Newsweekly obtained all of Andrews’ e-mails between herself and Blizzard. Numerous requests for comment from Blizzard were not returned. Here’s the sequence of events:

Andrews’ original posting read: “OZ [the name of her guild] is recruiting all levels ¦ We are not ‘GLBT only,’ but we are ‘GLBT friendly’! (guilduniverse.com/oz)”

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.”


1 Comments

Scott said:

First of all, I highly doubt that Blizzard actually thinks the creation of a GLBT friendly guild would create harassment because, well, that just seems a tad too stupid to me. I think Blizzard just wants to have an excuse for not allowing GLBT friendly guilds. If they really were't blaitantly anti GLBT they would let people create GLBT friendly guilds and then if any harassment did ensue they could ban the people who were stupid and mean enough to do the harassing and go about their merry way without making temselves seem like complete dumbass homophobic jerks.

January 31, 2006 2:29 PM

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