Back in January, Blizzard got a bit of unwelcome publicity after one of its customer service representatives warned a GBLT-friendly guild for advertising itself as such. Of course, inevitably, Blizzard finally got around to apologizing for this boneheaded action.
According to InWeekly, which initially reported Blizzard’s warning against the GLBT guild,
Paul Sams, Blizzard Entertainment’s chief operating officer, contacted In Newsweekly and said, “What we’ve done is decided to add a guild recruitment channel to the game… providing players with a designated area where they can advertise their guilds in an appropriate fashion.”
This would mean that players who wish to find others to associate with will have a channel designated to finding those individuals and will not interfere with the general chat channel.
Blizzard has stated that the original incident with Andrews never should have happened and that they will be reviewing policies and procedures and having “sensitivity training” with their 1,000 GMs on staff in North America, Europe, and Korea in the hopes that something like this doesn’t happen again.
Sensitivity training? Ugh. Just train them to support their players rights to say whatever they want. After all, it is trivially easy to /ignore anyone you disagree with in WoW (I really need that command in real life).
One has to wonder, though, how far this openness in the guild recruiting channel will go. GBLT friendly will presumably be okay, what about a hetero-friendly guild? A Fred Phelps-friendly guild? An Asian-friendly guild? A whites-friendly guild?
Sources:
Blizzard apologizes for ‘GLBT’ policy problem. Alexander Sliwinski, In Newsweekly, February 8, 2006.