The Devilsaur Mafia

No sooner had WoW developed an economy than pernicious capitalists began to exploit it. Sites opened up, offering gold, rare items, and accounts with powerful characters in exchange for real money. Where these sites acquired it, no one knew for sure, though there were rumours. Most assumed they just bought it from players at a low price and then sold it at a mark-up, and that definitely happened. But the owners of these sites sought to maximise profits, and minimise costs. The solution was to set up sweat shops in China. Dozens, if not hundreds of them.

Multiple interviews have been done with Chinese gold farmers. They all described it as mentally exhausting, with working days of at least 12 hours, often spent killing a single enemy over and over. The value of farmed gold is different across the world. A day’s worth of gold could sell in China for $4 dollars, but could fetch triple that amount when sold to Americans.

It’s by exploiting the differences and selling to cash-rich, time-poor gamers that Chinese gold farms prosper. Former Wall Street banker Alan Chiu founded an online trading platform for virtual currency, a virtual stock exchange, if you will. And he sees videogame work as another opportunity for outsourcing.

“It’s a very labor-intensive job. I don’t see it any different from low-cost Chinese workers working in Guandong, producing Nike shoes, and for Nike to be sold eventually - sold at retail stores for maybe 600 percent margin.”

Yet it is different because gold farming is a gray area. Gaming companies like Blizzard, which owns World of Warcraft, see gold farming as cheating, and regularly ban the accounts of suspected gold farmers. Robin admits he’s been closed down four or five times, losing thousands of dollars each time. However, there’s always a market for gold farmers. Surveys show 20 percent of gamers admit to buying gold.

According to the New York Times, while some gold farmers enjoyed playing games all day, they nonetheless had strict quotas and were constantly supervised. They estimated that there were between 100,000 and 500,000 young people working in China as full-time gamers, earning less than a quarter an hour. It’s true that this practice did not originate with WoW. But WoW is perhaps the first time it became a major issue due to the sheer size of the playerbase, and the overwhelming demand for black market gold.

For its part, Blizzard has tried to crack down on black markets, but arguably their most successful attempt was by creating the WoW token, effectively creating a legal avenue to sell gold via Blizzard. That has its own controversy, which we’ll get to later.

Gold farming was known to evoke a strong reaction. It was seen as violating the spirit of the game, and players looked down on those who used these sites. There was a sense that if you had suffered to reach where you are, then everyone else should have to as well. Others defended it as yet another part of the free market, which catered to players who wanted to sacrifice money to ‘get ahead’.

In an interview with Jared Psigoda, a market leader in virtual trade, he states that originally, these black markets were regionally exclusive. Europeans worked in the European black market, Chinese players in the Chinese, and Americans in the American, which resulted in dramatically different prices. It was in the early 2000s that the use of Chinese labour was used across the board, undercutting western currency exchanges, in order to make further profit.

Perhaps the most infamous group of gold farmers were the Devilsaur Mafia. They realised killing devilsaurs in Un’Goro Crater had the potential to return the highest profits out of any creature in the game. While devilsaurs didn’t drop much, they could be skinned to get Devilsaur Leather, a material from which a number of powerful pieces of hunter armour could be made, such as the Devilsaur Leggings and Devilsaur Gauntlets. Outside of raiding content, this was the best gear you could get in Vanilla wow. All in all, a single devilsaur could net its killer 20 gold – a kingly sum at the time.

But where most enemies constantly reappeared, devilsaurs did not. They regenerated sparingly, and could appear anywhere in the zone. Players would spend their whole day in the zone, waiting for one to spawn. And so, a group of sellers decided to coordinate their efforts. They completely took over the crater (LINKS TO REDDIT), using their organisation to out-compete other farmers, and this indirectly gave them total control over the Devilsaur economy.

On PvP servers, these cartels had teams on both factions working as security – if a Horde player tried to step on the Mafia’s turf, the Alliance security team would be alerted and sent to hunt them down, kill them, and keep killing them every time they resurrected at a graveyard. Technically speaking, cross-faction communication was against the Terms of Service, but it was almost impossible for Blizzard to prove players were communicating using third party apps (LINKS TO REDDIT). The only way to get close to a devilsaur on any PvP server was to submit to the whims of the mafia, which meant selling at regulated prices and handing over a cut of the spoils. All-out turf wars were known to occur when multiple cartels came up against each other.

This was not remotely the only instance of farmers banding together to control resources and manipulate the economy – that happened every single day. But it may be the most well-known. And when Classic Wow came about, players eagerly worked to recreate the Devilsaur Mafia.

It’s an interesting case study, but the Mafia disappeared as WoW’s economy grew and changed. The gold farmers did not. For years, WoW’s economy would be driven by a black market that depended on sweat shop labour from China (and later other countries like Mexico, the Philippines and India). It never stopped, but the practice of online black markets for virtual currencies expanded far beyond WoW, to encompass many of the biggest games in the world. Blizzard still hasn’t been able to get rid of it. No company has.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

The Game-breakers

No one had ever made a world as big as Azeroth before. It had been a massive undertaking, a wonder of programming and code which cost $64 million ($94 million accounting for inflation) before it ever even began to see returns – making it comfortably the largest and most expensive game at the time. Thousands of hands left their mark on its world, and while Blizzard would spend years polishing them away, they would never succeed completely. Even now. But it was a lot more obvious in Vanilla and that was part of the charm. For many players, it wasn’t the erotica or the world events or the combat or the gold that drew them to WoW, it was the world itself. As you might expect from a world that big, it was full of oddities. Little holes in the world, carefully hidden in spots players weren’t meant to see, written messages under the borders of the world, slabs of random environment thrown together in private areas, unfinished or rejected zones, exclusive locations for the developers and game-masters. An entire community grew up around investigating these curiosities, unravelling their meanings, and showing other players how to reach them.

Looking at this map, you can see large empty patches between zones, or on the coast. Below Silithus lay the inaccessible land of Ahn’Qiraj (meant to contain the city of temples we covered earlier), north of the Eastern Plaguelands is the elf nation of Quel’Thalas, somewhere in the inaccessible west of Eastern Kingdoms lay the Twilight Highlands, and then there was the blocked off city of Stratholme, the focus of an iconic moment in Warcraft Lore. Players would agonise for years over the islands in the sea, and what they might be. The challenge became all the more tantalising when players discovered that many of these areas did exist in some form, sometimes mostly finished. Sometimes the reward was standing on a platform or tower in a major city, where no other player could get, and becoming a minor celebrity for the day.

But Blizzard had hidden their secrets well. It wasn’t possible to just ‘go to’ these areas. Explorers had to break the game to do it. A game of cat-and-mouse arose, with players discovering new ‘exploits’ and Blizzard racing to patch them out. There were techniques to fall through the world, climb vertical walls, teleport to a specific graveyard upon death, or overcome fatigue (a timed effect that begins when players move too far from the coast, which rapidly drains health).
To detail all of these hidden spots and how to reach them would take literally hours. To those who want to delve into this topic, I present a quick-fire montage. To the rest of you, let me elaborate on a few of the best ones.

[1] By far the most famous secret area in the game was GM Island, designed to serve as a ‘lobby’ for Game Masters. For years, the island was located north-west of Kalimdor, way off the map. To get there, players had to overcome vast distances of nothingness – a land without texture or direction, which made it totally impossible to reach the island without exploits. So many stories have been penned about GM Island that it has taken on an almost mythical status.

Members of the company were cagey about the island. An image of the island was visible on Blizzard Europe’s Career Opportunities page, but Blizzard rarely spoke publicly on it. Before patch 1.8, players could add GMs to their friends list, and their locations would be listed as ‘GM Island’. A forum moderator ‘Zarhym’ explained in 2010:

The game masters who respond to you in the game are doing so through a separate chat/support tool. They’re not actually using the game client to whisper you, however, logging into the chat client means the character they use to contact players with is logged into all of the realms they need to. While GM invisibility exists, it makes it safer and easier to have a simple storage/port point to keep all of these characters out of the normal game world.

The island itself was small and round and covered in dense vegetation, with a tall peak on one side. It included a mansion (taken from Stormwind City), a wall, and a graveyard. There were two NPCs, a Gnome named Ari and Tuskfyre the Troll. Embedded within the lower structure of the island (about 100 yards below the surface) was a hidden room known as ‘The Prison Chamber’. It’s textured with large blank white tiles and lit with a single light source. The only object in the room was a single chair, right in the middle. Players could enter, but can never leave without the help of a GM. Its walls couldn’t be climbed, teleport/hearthstone spells did not work, and it was the only place in the game where players could not be located using the /who command. While the room had no official purpose and seemed to have been added by a programmer purely for their own amusement, it is said that in the early days of the game, before an out-of-game chat interface was added, GMs would take offenders there to discuss their crimes.

GM Island was one of those things you spoke about in a hallowed whisper, hunched in front of a blurry youtube video in 3x4 ratio with an ‘Unregistered HyperCam 2’ watermarked across the top. Those who could reach the island were legends. Most fans would only ever be able to reach it on private servers, which allowed them to teleport straight there – and that is where we get most footage of it today.

The first adventurers to come across GM Island got there by swimming (there was water back then), constantly casting spells to heal themselves from the fatigue damage. It took an hour, and if the player’s direction was even slightly off, they would be forever lost in a seemingly endless ocean. Blizzard removed the water, so players tried manipulated the models in the game files to let them cross. This back and forth process went on for a while. Players found a new way, blizzard patched it out, players found a way around the patch, and so on. When all other attempts failed, the island was moved into an instance, effectively placing it in a separate world upon itself, and then eventually it was removed from the game completely. (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Other locations created for developers include Designer Island and Programmer Isle. Neither was ever accessible in live version of the game – only on private servers. Both are filled with stock assets, written messages, and a few test quests. The regions of Programmer Isle are named after some guys called Jeff and Patty Mack, and there are even a few test NPCs.

Despite, or perhaps because of the fact that so few players ever reached GM Island on a live server, and also due to its mysterious origins, it is still one of the most iconic places in the game. Even years after its removal.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

The Homophobia Problem

Gamers have long had a querulous history with homophobia. You couldn’t get through a single conversation in Vanilla without someone calling you a fag, and it still pops up a lot now. Blizzard themselves have denounced prejudice toward the LGBT community many times, but this may be a case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’. .

When a woman named Sara Andrews set up a guild marketed toward being LGBT inclusive, she was threatened with a ban from administrators, due to the language she was using. They claimed ‘advertising sexual orientation is not appropriate for the high fantasy setting of World of Warcraft’. That’s pretty rich considering the kind of things WoW players say every day – in a much worse tone. The controversy was so great that – once again – WoW ended up in the headlines.

To publicise her plight, Ms Andrews visited many discussion sites and forums where Warcraft players gather. The debate that followed largely criticised Blizzard for its heavy-handed treatment.

Many pointed out that Warcraft has a thriving community of gay players, or gaymers, and that it made no sense to censor talk about players’ sexuality outside Azeroth.

Gay pride marches are known to have taken place in Warcraft and there are many other guilds in the game that are known to be friendly toward the gay community.

Two such guilds, Stonewall Champions and The Spreading Taint wrote an open letter to Blizzard criticising its policy.

At first, Blizzard tried to defend their stance. “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”, they said. Quite simply, their police on sexuality was ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’, and that only amplified the rage aimed their way. Discussions began to stir of possible legal challenges. They eventually backtracked and publicly apologised to Andrews, promising that its GMs would be given more thorough training on how to handle LGBT issues, but this would be far from the last incident.

Blizzard landed in hot water again in 2011 as one lesbian gamer pointed out during a Q&A session at Blizzon there had not been a single LGBT character in any Blizzard game or property – ever. Creative Director Chris Metzen responded that LGBT characters were ‘certainly a possibility’. The woman who asked about diversity was then harassed on the WoW forums afterward.

Metzen’s open-ended statement would soon turn sour. Blizzard had collaborated for years with the band Cannibal Corpse, who was recorded during an interview at that same convention saying, “Go fucking cry in a river and tell me about how you’re going to slit your wrists you Night Elf f*****.”

Blizzard’s art director, Sam Didier, endorsed the video and invited the band to play on stage. It took a week of negative press for Blizzard president Mike Morkaime to apologise.

A year later, Blizzard turned the profanity filter on by default, and players suddenly noticed that the words ‘transsexual’ and ‘homosexual’ were filtered out, but not ‘fag’ or ‘faggot. Blizzard was quick to change the filter, but the damage was done. The community wanted to know why those words had been blocked in the first place – someone at Blizzard had to have made the decision. Unfortunately, that thread seems to be lost now, but I can tell you it was an absolute clusterfuck that spun rapidly out of control. Members of the Gaymer.com forums had tried on previous occasions to force Blizzard to address the use of homophobic slurs in the game, with no success.

I emailed Blizzard and asked them to do something, Blizzard’s response was “just ignore em, they’ll go away”, riiiiiiiiight, like that’s ever worked with a gay basher. So my retort was why would other slurs against minorities go punished, yet calling someone a faggot in open forum is to be “ignored”…

When asked again about diversity at a 2015 MIT Media Lab event, then-chief creative officer Rob Pardo dismissed the idea, stating:

I wouldn’t say that’s really a value for us. It’s not something that we’re against either, but it’s just not … something we’re trying to actively do.

For this gaff, they received an open letter which spoke on behalf of LGBT players, stating they no longer felt valued by the company.

The comments made by Mr. Pardo and Mr. Browder, speaking as employees of Blizzard Entertainment, seem to imply that representing people like me will never be a priority to the company. They seem to be suggesting I go elsewhere.

Morhaime once again apologised (be prepared for that to happen a lot going forward). “This will be an ongoing process for us—it’s likely that we will make mistakes again in the future, but we will continue to listen, learn, and grow.”

Sadly it would take a few more years for Blizzard to learn how to not hate the gays.

Just recently in 2019, there would be another controversy over LGBT guilds. A pro-homosexuality guild called ‘GAY BOYS’ was reported “an inappropriate number of times” by other players until Blizzard forcibly removed the name. The guild had been warned before by a forum moderator in 2016, who said, “Picking a name that you can identify with without also using words that would illicit [sic] a reaction from other players would be far more beneficial.” Indeed, members of GAY BOYS claimed they had received abusive messages for their guild name over the years, such as “Fuck the gays, reported.”

The Guild Master blamed rampant homophobia within the WoW community, and accused Blizzard of kowtowing to this subset of players. An in-game pride march was held in protest of the decision, and they were able to successfully appeal it.

“To say there is anything inappropriate about the words GAY or BOYS is, in and of itself, inappropriate, childish, and discriminatory,” Jilani said.

Blizzard had often taken the stance that ‘if you ignore it, it will go away’, but in 2020, they finally declared that homophobia had never existed in Azeroth, with the intention of undermining roleplayers who tried to RP as bigots. It wasn’t much, but it was something.

It’s hard to say whether Blizzard has improved over the years, but based on recent allegations (we’ll get there), I have my doubts.

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

The Barrens Chat

Every zone in WoW has its own regional chat. Opon crossing the border, you will enter that chat and be able to talk to other players in the area. In most cases, these chats are silent and ignored, with one glaring exception.

The Barrens was a large, relatively empty zone where most new Horde players were funnelled after level 10, and where they would remain until level 20. It was a really boring zone, so players chatted to make it go quicker. Barrens chat became infamous for its juvenile and incessant nature, its bizarre conversations and memes, but players would sometimes find themselves talking about philosophy, physics, theoretical science, ethics, law, or whatever subject happened to come up. After out-levelling the Barrens, a lot of players would go back to hang out and make jokes about Chuck Norris.

One of the most popular Barrens memes was Mankrik’s Wife. You see, one quest tasked players with helping an NPC named Mankrik find his lost wife. But since the game didn’t indicate where she was, and there is no NPC called Mankrik’s Wife – she has the unfortunate name ‘Beaten Corpse’ - they often never found her. This all happened in a time before every single answer to every question could be found online. So naturally, newbies would consult the local chat. (LINKS TO REDDIT)

Over time, the players loitering in the Barrens for the social scene began to find this question annoying. It got asked over and over and over again. And as you might expect, the answers gradually became less and less helpful. New players found themselves pointed toward bizarre, far off destinations like Blackrock Mountain or Stormwind City.

In 2010, the Cataclysm expansion released, and all of the Vanilla zones were revamped, Barrens included. Mankirk’s wife was laid to rest, but her name would live on forever.

Even today, Blizzard sells a shirt that says “I survived Barrens chat.”

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj

This was, and remains the most well-known event from Vanilla WoW, and for good reason. The date was 3 January 2006, and Blizzard were releasing the much-anticipated patch 1.9.0. Food buffs would no longer stack, shard bags were introduced, and the Ahn’Qiraj world event would begin. It would affect every one of WoW’s six million (at the time) players.

Ahn’Qiraj is a huge complex of insect-strewn architecture in the south-western corner of Kalimdor, crowned by impenetrable mountains and only possible to enter through a monumental, hexagon-shaped gate in Silithus, to the north. Ahn Qiraj contained two raids, the Ruins and the Temple. But rather than simply throw open the gates to all and sundry, Blizzard created an event designed to unite entire servers around the goal of getting in. What followed was a clusterfuck of such enormity that it made headlines even outside of the gaming sphere.

There were three phases to the event.

Firstly, players on both factions would work for weeks to collect resources – hundreds of millions of them. Food, bandages, metals, herbs. Everyone chipped in. The economies across every server collapsed as resources were siphoned away to open the gates. Prices shot through the ceiling.

This part of the process could last from several weeks to half a year. Since each faction had a separate shopping list, it was meant to become a race to see who could get there first. However most servers had/have a major faction population imbalance, and so one finished drastically quicker and ended up waiting in frustration.

Then came a set of extremely long and challenging quests, which only the best guilds could even think of tackling. The reward was a legendary item – the Scepter of the Shifting Sands. To be the holder of the Scepter was a magnificent honour, with much political backstabbing and conspiracy to ensure it fell into the right hands. Only that person with the Sceptre could ring the Scarab Gong and open the gates (and once they did, they would gain a legendary mount to ride around on).

(Gong Ringer’s Name), Champion of the Bronze Dragonflight, has rung the Scarab Gong. The ancient gates of Ahn’Qiraj open, revealing the horrors of a forgotten war…

With the gates open, the real battle would begin. Obelisks appeared throughout the world, floating ominously in the sky. For ten hours, ultra powerful enemies flowed out out, swarming players and killing them off in droves. But the enemies dropped valuable loot, so thousands of players flooded Silithus to get a piece of the action. Many thousands. Too many, in fact.

More than had ever assembled in one spot, and it was enough to break the game. Servers saw rolling crashes and such colossal lag that players began to flee the battle ground in the vain hope that it might make the game more stable. Boats glitched out and disappeared with the players still on them, reappearing in a ghostly nonexistent space beneath the world, dead players got transported to cemetaries on another continent - it was utter chaos.

The server to open the gates first was Medivh, on the 23rd January (still an effort lasting twenty days), but others took months. Aside from the greater drama of the event itself, there were many smaller stories taking place within the insanity. Major guilds coveted the wealth of Ahn’Qiraj for themselves, and went to great lengths to get it.

Rather than slowly contribute to the resource pool, they would privately hoard them until they had enough to open the gates on their own. In some guilds, spies would sell information on when the gates were going to be opened. Players would try to steal the sceptre from other guild-mates.

And it didn’t end here. It needed to be repeated every time Blizzard opened a new WoW server – which they were doing a lot, as the game was leaping from strength to strength. It was only in February 2009 that a patch was implemented so that all new servers would release with the gates already open. Ahn’Qiraj was finally over for good. The world event entered into history.

History became legend.

Legend became myth.

And over many years, the gates passed out of all memory. They were still there, quietly seething in a dark forgotten corner of the world. But to many new players, they were nothing more than window dressing in an old zone that no one wanted to level through anymore.

But they were all of them deceived, for another gate was made. But that story will have to wait until later down our timeline.

#The Funeral of Fayejin

This is one of the many strange and curious events that took place in WoW’s early days, back when guilds were more than a place to collect an XP boost. They were closely knit communities who stayed friends for years. These days, when a guild member logs off for the last time, it goes by without notice. But that was not always the case.

Fayejin was a well-loved player on the Illidan PvP server (we’ll get to that), where she played a horde mage. On 28 February 2006, she died of a heart attack. Her guildmates decided to honour her with a digital funeral. Fayejin loved fishing and snow, so they went with one of Vanilla Wow’s most atmospheric zones, Winterspring. It was one of her favourite places in the game.

The funeral was advertised online on all the popular forums of the time, with an open invitation to anyone who wanted to come along. There were dozens of respondents. When the time came, they were summoned to Winterspring. One of Fayejin’s friends was able to get onto her account, and logged on so that other players could say their final goodbyes. It was beautiful.

There were even characters from the Alliance present, in a cross-faction gesture of respect. Rather a lot of them, in fact. And they were all carrying weapons. If that struck anyone as odd, they never had time to contemplate it.

Within minutes, everyone was murdering each other and teabagging the corpses. As is tradition. Black tuxedos don’t do much against knives, and you can’t change your armour when you’re in combat, so the mourners were left defenceless. It was a slaughter.

The raid was the work of the ironically named Serenity Now, and would follow them for years. The organisers insisted that they were honouring Fayejin with one final battle – she was an avid PvP fan, after all. Perhaps the bloody violence that ensued was more fitting than a load of people standing around making sombre emotes at one another. But nonetheless, the forums reacted in anger, though many found it hilarious.

A video of the funeral survives to us from the time thanks to a youtuber named ‘Women Shouldn’t Vote Productions’. Here’s another video about it. And another. It made it to the gaming media, partly because of its climactic ending, partly because of the discourse over whether the raid was acceptable, and partly because nobody had ever held an event quite like it before. On the one hand, it was a funeral, and you can’t just attack a funeral. On the other hand, it was a PvP server and attacking was the whole point of the game. The ethical quandry still divides players today.

Fayejin’s Funeral is referenced in a 2009 academic paper by Stacey Goguen, titled Dual Wielding Morality: World of Warcraft and the Ethics of Ganking and submitted to the ‘Philosophy of Computer Games Conference’ in Oslo.

Regardless of ethics, the raid is what made the funeral famous, and gave Fayejin a place in WoW history. What more could you ask for?

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

The Racism Problem

From the very beginning, questions were asked about WoW’s relationship with race. Often, fans laughed them off, or responded with aggression, but these conversations continued well into the present.

Every race has a different backstory, a different home, and most importantly, a different set of abilities. Undead (who had once been humans) could originally speak to humans – the only race who could communicate across the faction boundary – but that was removed because it was being rapidly abused. Certain races could only be certain classes – the nature-oriented Tauren could be shamans and druids, but never warlocks or mages, whereas the more civilised humans could be hunters, but couldn’t be druids.

But what drew the most attention was the real-world people these races were based on. Cultural borrowing is nothing new to MMOs or the fantasy genre, with Tolkien directly comparing his Dwarves to Jews and his orcs to ‘Mongoloids’. Tauren, Humans, Dwarves, and Trolls were caricatures of real world cultures.

Dwarves, taking a leaf out of the Lord of the Rings movies, were Scottish Human architecture was generically European, though they spoke with American accents. Many players pointed out that there was a distinct lack of non-white humans in the story, and while it was possible to create a dark-skinned human, none of the face options had non-white features. So even the blackest human looked like a white person with a tan.

There are no non-white human heroes or NPCs as far as I am aware, I certainly cannot think of a single one off the top of my head.

A lot of players asked Blizzard to add more variety to the character designs, but it would take an astonishing 16 years for that to happen

The Tauren are clearly based on Native Americans – they’re giagantic, nomadic bull-people with braids and piercings, who boast a spiritual connection to the hand, live in teepees, and whose capital city is literally a colossal totem pole. For years, Native American people drew issue with this.

When you grow up as a Native American, you grow up seeing your culture used as a plaything by the mainstream. We are constantly reduced to a caricature and commodified. Blizzard has perpetuated this history in American media with their massively successful and long-running MMORPG.

Their developers gave the borrowed elements a fantasy paint job and stripped them of their real world cultural identifiers. In doing so they created a race that is instantly identifiable as Native American to its users, while retaining nothing directly belonging to an actual tribe. The Tauren are thus doubly offensive to me for being blatant cultural appropriation for the express purpose of commercial gain, while also continuing the erasure of actual real life natives in the popular consciousness. Hundreds of distinct cultures amalgamated into one group of bull people and their “braves”.

Trolls were… well, just read their description for yourself.

…Lean predators, they’re as tall as night elves when they stand fully erect, but normally bob along, hunched over, coiled and ready to spring. While Warcraft players know them by their Jamaican accents, voodoo-flavored culture and wild hairstyles, the trolls are also cruel, sadistic and evil…

This description neglects to mention they were also cannibals. They hobble around with scabbed knuckles, pock-marked skin, tusks, skull adornments, and wild shaggy hair. They were heavily inspired by Haiti/Jamaica, with Zulu influences thrown in for good measure. This portrayal in particular ruffled a few feathers, because it’s not a positive one. A significant subset of fans found the game’s trolls offensive, and demanded change.

But if Blizzard even noticed this outcry, they didn’t care. Later expansions would introduce more races based on stereotypes – far stronger ones, in fact. Worgen are a pastiche of Victorian cockneys, Goblins are Jewish-Italian New Yorker mob bosses with some unsettling antisemitic references (huge noses, disgusting skin, accents, obsession with wealth, absolute psychopathy, con aritsts and crooks). Draenei are vaguely Eastern European refugees from another world, and Pandaren are literally just Chinese pandas with fake accents – but we’ll get to them later.

In the essay “Multiculturalism in World of Warcraft”, Christopher Douglas examines the issue in enormous detail, and long story short, he agrees that the portrayals in the game are racist.

In Azeroth, of course, race is not understood as socially constructed, but rather to be a biological fact. Composed of inherited, immutable, essential differences, race in Azeroth is the old-fashioned (which is to say, nineteenth and early twentieth-century) notion that the outward packaging signifies an inner reality, where the differences are.

WoW has an incredibly complex backstory, with vast amounts of worldbuilding, so it would be wrong to say these races are just thrown lazily together. But the fact remained that there were overtones of racism in many of them. If anything, the story sometimes supports this, such as the time Humans locked up Orcs in internment camps and used them as slaves, which apparently had the positive effect of reducing their desire to kill. Those based on non-European ethnic groups went in the Horde (the faction associated with chaos, primitivism, bloodthirst, barbarism, and savagery), those based on Europeans went in the Alliance. And a large part of the game involved taking allegiance based on your race and killing members of the ‘enemy’ races.

If you are a member of one race, you hate and are hated by this “other” race. We’re literally fighting race wars here, and it’s more than a little unsettling how much it’s just accepted.

Blizzard has tried to undermine the idea that the Alliance is good and the Horde are evil many times, over multiple years. But they would fail again and again, and seem to be inexplicably drawn to portraying them as absolutely vile. Many players like to imagine WoW as a utopian society where – despite the clear connections between certain races and real-life cultures – all players can be whoever they want without prejudice. But it doesn’t take a very close look to see that isn’t true at all.

It doesn’t help that the WoW community long had its own issue with real racism toward players.

We are all Mexican and had really strong accents. One of my friends couldn’t quite speak much English at all. We got a lot of bad responses from guilds and got kicked out or resigned because of reactions to our accents and stuff like that. Eventually we found one that was really awesome about it and we would even feel comfortable talking to each other in Spanish during raids in order to not distract anyone else." Said Hernandez in an interview with NPR.

These problems seem to have improved over the years, as WoW’s userbase has grown older and become more open, but in many ways they have not. And this is just race. WoW has always had a similarly strange relationship with sexuality and gender. Speaking of which…

(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)

Thank you for posting these! Brings back such good memories.

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is the best expansion (and game) I have ever played in my life. I was so addicted that it affected my social life at the time, but it was a great time. I was a teenager at the time and remember playing for hours. I have no regrets and will never regret that I played too hard, although it would be better to keep it balanced. Bottom line is, I had a lot of fun, have great memories, and felt the love of the community. The fact that the nostalgia is still there all these years later is a testament to the hard work Blizzard put in during the golden era. A huge thank you to all the game directors, developers, and designers. We will never forget all the excitement and fun we had!