fury-brand:

kargathbladefist:

imo people saying they (blizzard) “used to be a Good Company” is either willfully ignorant or just ridiculously unaware, any long time player should be able to tell that this kind of culture has been extremely prevalent for years from innocent marketing stuff to how they write women to how rampant they let unacceptable behavior run in the community with little moderation or attempts at lowering toxicity at least until overwatch dropped. the atmosphere of gaming TM in the west in the 2000s and early 2010s was almost comically hostile towards women and people of color and lgbt folks

Pre-2010 during Wrath era I dropped WoW after their official policy was to tell lgbtq players not to tell anyone to avoid harassment (and some people got banned for saying they were gay), and knew people who dropped a couple years later during Cata when a prominent blizzard team member responded to sexual harassment allegations by saying “boys will be boys”. For the better part of Blizzard’s lifespan Jeff Kaplan was known as Tigole Bitties. They’ve always been like this.