Huh...

[neintales]

Oh Blizzard, how you make my head hurt...That it's considered sexual harrassment to advertise your guild as being friendly to GLBT folk... wtf? Maybe I was psychic in my misgivings about going back to WoW right off, because this shit gets on my nerves to the boycott point, frankly

Comments

[parrhesia]

For what it's worth, here's Caydiem's explanation:

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Apologies for the length of time it took to get this information out to you.

We encourage community building among our players with others of similar interests, and we understand that guilds are one of the primary ways to forge these communities. However, 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.

To promote a positive game environment for everyone and help prevent such harassment from taking place as best we can, we prohibit mention of topics related to sensitive real-world subjects in open chat within the game, and we do our best to take action whenever we see such topics being broadcast. This includes openly advertising a guild friendly to players based on a particular political, sexual, or religious preference, to list a few examples. For guilds that wish to use such topics as part of their recruiting efforts, our Guild Recruitment forum, located at our community Web site, serves as one open avenue for doing so.

We will be clarifying some of the language in our game policies in order to help avoid such confusion in the future.
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I fail to see how talking about issues of religion, sexuality and politics is okay in the forums but not in general chat of the game... I can't count the amount of times I've seen the word 'gay' used in a contemptious way, and let's not even get into 'fag'. I haven't bothered to report these people in the past, maybe I should start doing so to see if they do anything about it.

I can very slightly see where they're coming from - true, sexual orientation is /not/ all about lledness, there's romance and love and dating and dancing and all that, but on the flip side, if they exclude all refrences to 'sexual' subjects, that's easier than having to decide where to draw the line - can they talk about straight/gay? How about bondage or bestiality? etc. But if they have a policy, it better be enforced evenly, and that means that 30% of the server population is going to be cooling their heels for 3 hour's worth of suspension because they think that 'gay' is an acceptable synonym for 'annoying'.

Well that was rambling...hope it made sense.