Blizzard finally steps up with zero tolerance on offensive names.
To ensure all participants in the Arena Tournament have the best experience possible, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for any inappropriate character or Arena team names created on the Arena Tournament realm.
Characters with inappropriate names will be deleted. This means that you will need to customize another template from scratch and re-earn all personal and hidden ratings. Keep in mind that in a later phase of the Arena Tournament team rosters will be locked down. If your character is deleted during this time, no exceptions will be made and your team will need to use whoever is left on that roster in order to continue competing.
Arena teams with names deemed inappropriate will be dissolved. This means that you will need to create another charter for your team and climb back up from a rating of zero.
Please think twice before naming your characters and Arena teams!
Thank you Blizzard. An awful lot of crap names slip through the net on normal realms. I’m glad to see a zero-tolerance policy on the Arena Tournament.
I am unbelievably lucky. I’m in a very gender-balanced guild. While jokes may be lewd, they’re not homophobic, racist or sexist. If a bloke does make a sexist joke, he generally knows better and is just trying to tweak the nose of one of our female guildies. I have never EVER seen anyone assume that a bad player was a girl, or assume that because someone was a woman, that they would be a bad player.
Maybe I’m just more cynical these days, or maybe I’m getting angry in my ‘old’ age. I find my tolerance for certain types of jokes growing gradually smaller, and I’m less likely to let them slide. Perhaps it is because I’m not as afraid of being seen as ‘overly PC’, or a ‘harpy’ or anyone of a number of insults used against people who object to -ist slurs and language. ‘PC gone nuts’ is a regular phrase, whipped out whenever someone gets called on their ableism or sexism (or any other -ism). Derailing for Dummies covers many of the not so great arguments used. Linguistic Reform seems like an impossible task. How do you stop every teenage boy in the world using ‘gay’ to mean something is bad? You can’t, but that doesn’t mean you can’t point out the problems inherent with using words like gypped, lame, or retarded.
Quoting the dictionary origins of words and citing their historical use doesn’t really change the fact that such words are problematic. Maybe your gay friend isn’t offended, but others certainly will be. Straight people who accept homosexuality as a normal part of humanity will find the use of ‘gay’ as a slur distasteful and offensive. As someone with mental health issues, a lot of everyday language that has it’s roots in mental disability or illness doesn’t ‘offend me’, but becoming more aware of how problematic some words are reminds me of the stigma that is still attached to mental illness, and disabilities in general. (Please note that I am not saying that someone using the word retarded is being malicious towards those with mental retardation, or that someone saying their hip is giving them gyp is intentionally being racist.)
Now this is not to say that you need to spend your life watching how you speak. A lot of people wouldn’t care even if you did. But a ‘sense of humour’ is not the same for everyone. We don’t all find the same things funny; or if we do it is because we recognise that the joke highlights something particularly dark and uncomfortable.
‘Sapped Girls Don’t Say No’ is not funny. Jokes that trivialise or glamorise rape are not funny. Jokes that target the raper, rather than the raped, and make them an object of derision? I can see the humour in that.
It is very easy to be defensive and dismissive about -ist use of language. Especially if you personally feel you are something of an enlightened, tolerant, intelligent individual who would never dream of discriminating against anyone, or putting those. Any insult is grounded in something ‘bad’ or ‘other’ – body shame, internalised sexism, fear of being not-normal, so asking someone to find a substitute for every ‘bad’ word is impossible. Even non-slur phrases have a certain amount of ableism in them (“I hear you” and “I see”, seemingly innocuous to those of us with our hearing and vision intact. No, again, not asking you to drop those phrases from your vocabulary.)
Something of a ramble again! Back to the topic – the arena zero tolerance policy. The response on the forums so far has been low key – predictably with some people going THANK GOD BLIZZARD and others going TAKE A CHILL PILL DON’T GET OFFENDED. Yay for dismissiveness.
