Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.

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This is the second part of my World of Warcraft Hobbydrama series. I recommend reading the first part, which covers Beta and Vanilla, before moving onto this post. But if you don’t want to do that, you should have no trouble understanding anything.

• Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla

• Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King

• Part 4 - Cataclysm

• Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria

• Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor

• Part 7 - Classic and Legion

• Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth

• Part 9 - Ruined Franchises

• Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard

• Part 11 - Shadowlands

Part 2 - Burning Crusade

World of Warcraft’s first expansion ‘The Burning Crusade’ released on the 16th January 2007, to enormous hype and acclaim. Other MMOs had released expansions before – most notably EverQuest had already released twelve by that time – but nothing to this detail, and scope. Players journeyed to the broken planet of Outland, the original homeland of the Orcs.

The continent had scorched red deserts, storm-beaten cosmic hellscapes, spiked mountains straight out of a medieval torture fantasy, and even a drained sea full of giant mushroom cities. But by far the most popular new area was Nagrand, a relative paradise with floating islands and calm music. BC truly offered every kind of experience, and it was clear that a lot of thought had been put into making it as alien as possible.

WoW had a huge catalogue of lore to fall back on, so it would be almost a decade before Blizzard had to start coming up with new concepts from scratch. Players had heard of Outland before, and many of its leading characters were old faces. That only added to the excitement.

BC cemented the idea of what a WoW expansion should contain: a continent to play around in, many new raids and dungeons, ten new levels, and a new class or race.

Even though many people look back on BC with a critical eye, WoW continued gaining new players throughout the expansion, and it revitalised the existing audience, so it’s hard to say it wasn’t a success. Everything from the level design to the writing to the end game was a step up from Vanilla. Its most iconic dungeons are fondly remembered today – such as Karazhan and Black Temple.

But don’t worry; there was plenty of drama too.

The Space Goats and Gay Elves

Burning Crusade gave us not one, but two races, and both of them managed to piss off some section of WoW’s playerbase.

The Horde were going to get Blood Elves – a race of civilised, fancy, sexy snobs. This made no sense to a lot of players. They were a Horde after all. They were meant to be savage and bestial and gruesome and primitive. The delicate Blood Elves had no place among their ranks, and would be better suited to the Alliance, they thought. Sure, the Blood Elves were sort of ‘evil’, but they weren’t the right kind. They were the ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ kind of evil, not the noble, misunderstood kind of evil from the Evanescence songs.

I’ll try to give a VERY brief explanation of the lore so that we can pin down exactly why they’re evil.

It started with the Trolls. A small group of trolls settled near the ancient Well of Eternity (a fount of infinite power at the centre of the world), and used it to fuel their rise, gradually turning into Night Elves in the process. Stuff happened, the Well of Eternity went boom, and the continents of WoW were made. A small group of Night Elves took a vial of water preserved from the Well of Eternity and used it to create the Sunwell, which gradually turned them into High Elves. Stuff happened (it does that a lot), the Sunwell went boom, and the remaining High Elves found themselves desperately addicted to its power, but with no substitute. They found an alternative in Outland, using demonic energy which turned their eyes green and gave them a somewhat evil disposition. They renamed themselves Blood Elves in honour of the people who died when the Sunwell went boom, which was most of them.

So long story short, they’re evil because they used evil energy – which should have satisfied the crowd who wanted the Horde to be the bad guys (since using that same evil energy is how the Orcs turned green). But on the other hand, the Blood Elf men were wonderfully, stupendously camp. And that really was a deal breaker.

Here we can see a prototypical conversation on the topic. In a 2014 poll, 36% of MMO-Champion users considered Blood Elf men to look/act ‘gay’.

I love Belf Males casting animations and thinking of using my free 90 boost for a belf priest. However, they do seem a bit gay e.i. there emotes/stance

Don't get me wrong, I'm not the slightest bit homophobic. Just curious of your opinions.

There were users who pointed out the deception here.

You might not be afraid of homosexuals, but you have a strong enough stigma against them to both stereotype them as well as avoid being associated with them... Which means you're pretty much afraid of homosexuality.

So it is, indeed, homophobic. :P

Here’s another

For christs sake how homophobic and sterotypical are you.

Does it look like a bear? an otter? a twink? a jock? a cub? metro? chubby? or you know the infinite spectrum of body types that gay people can be, just like straight people.

What the hell is wrong with you? The fact that this is even a "dilema" for you pretty much tells me all I need to know about you.

And another.

Gay? No, but, I've known a lot of homosexual people that are of many different body types, attitudes, etc, so I tend not to really pay any attention to the stereotypes.

Feminine/"Metro"sexual? Yes. They're characterized as prissy and vain, which is an attribute most commonly seen as gay, however, I've known more straight men that act like that than gay.

And also… whatever this is.

Well, if my Blood Elf Rogue looks gay, then it's because he is gay. Well, more omnisexual. He still remembers that one night where he got drunk and tried to mount one of those statues in Dalaran in the horde area. You can still see the dent.

This is just one conversation on one forum. During the period of Burning Crusade’s release, the topic was everywhere, and held a lot of controversy.

After all, they had perfectly sharp eyebrows, almost impossibly beautiful hair, fine chiselled jaws that looked a bit like Brad Pitt if you squinted and turned your head a little, with the most elegant cheekbones, a gorgeous slender frame with just a hint of pec poking out from their v-neck robes, an absolutely flaming swagger, cat-like delicate eyes, and such kissable lips, God…

“Wait,” several million young men cried out in unison, just quiet enough to avoid waking their mothers upstairs. “Do I want to fuck a blood elf? No. No, it’s not me! I’m not gay! I’m manly as fuck! It’s Blizzard’s fault! How could they do this to the Horde!?!”

Hmm.

Anyway, they were not the only ones unhappy at the evil actions of Blood Elves. There were others who insisted they were too evil to be allowed to join the Horde (who were, lest we forget, honourable in their savagery). This debate tended to spiral into long, drawn out arguments about collective responsibility and the subjectivity of demon magic. The Blood Elves we played never used upper-level demon blood, they said, only demonic pests and mana beasts – the equivalent of rats and lesser rodents. They were practically vegan.

Then there was an angry contingent of Alliance who proposed that they should have Blood Elves, rather than the Horde. The High Elves had long been their allies, with continuous calls for them to be added as a playable race, and the whole idea of Blood Elves had clearly been contrived to create an excuse to alienate them from the Alliance. It had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Blood Elf women were a lot better looking than human women, and would no-doubt look even better gracing a table at the Goldshire Inn.

The had some fair arguments. For example, Blood Elves traditionally spoke the same language as humans, known as Common, and frequently talked to them in non-game material like the books, but due to WoW’s rules on cross-faction communication, they would never be able to communicate with humans. The response to this was that there is no evidence all Blood Elves spoke Common – maybe it was just officers, delegates and diplomats – and players happened to control Blood Elves who didn’t. But also, Blood Elves could be Paladins. Up until their introduction, only Alliance races had been Paladins, never Horde races.

In retrospect, perhaps they were simply afraid of monster Blizzard had unleashed.

Indeed, before long Blood Elves became the most popular race in the game, with Blood Elf women in number 1 and Blood Elf men in number 2. It was a golden era for ERPers. The Horde finally had a race they could wank off to, and they took to it with gusto. On RP servers, Silvermoon City became the Horde hub for any and all roleplay. While the Wayfarer’s Rest Inn was its heart, almost every single building became the home of this guild or that guild. Silvermoon was so out of the way that non-Roleplayers never bothered going there, so it was the only city in the world wholly dedicated to Roleplay.

But that would not be the last we heard of our metrosexual blood boys. In 2015, Blizzard decided to update the models for them, and players quickly noticed that the new models were a lot more masculine. They had thicker frames, bigger muscles, and better posture.

A Community Manager by the name of Nethaera confirmed that the change was done to make Blood Elf men look more intimidating and manly, which drew heavy criticism. To those who played Male Blood Elves, their waifish figures were part of the charm. Hell, they had actually become very popular among feminine gay men. They were furious that Blizzard was forcibly bulking up their characters, citing a culture of machismo and stereotyping. Defenders of the change pointed out that by making Blood Elf frames more similar to humans, less work was needed to make sure that outfits didn’t break or tear. Also a lot of WoW’s promotional art has historically been done by Sam Didier, who always portrayed Blood elves as quite muscly, so there was a precedent for it.

Regardless of their controversy, Blood Elves were here to stay. The true irony is that by the standards of Final Fantasy 14, the new MMO on the block, Blood Elf men are positively masc for masc. The gays would win in the end.

So we’ve gone over what the Horde got, but what about the Alliance?

The new race given to the Alliance was the Draenei, a motley crew of tall goat-people with blue skin and tentacles. They arrived in Azeroth on a crashed space-ship made of giant crystals, led by a 25,000 year old prophet who could see the future, and guided by giant floating light gods. The community found them a jarring addition, more sci-fi than fantasy, and there were complaints they didn’t really fit with the aesthetics or themes of WoW. No matter how you look at it, Burning Crusade was audacious.

Of course, Blizzard never skimps on the lore, and they had plenty of backstory in Burning Crusade. The cliff notes are these: The Draenei had originally been Eredar, a race of powerful aliens who lived on the planet Argus and mostly stood around smelling flowers and praying, until they were corrupted by an even more powerful alien Sargeras, who himself had been corrupted by some particularly capricious Old Gods, who were, at the time, trapped under the surface of Azeroth. A small group were able to escape the corruption of the Eredar and named themselves Draenei. They fled to a planet full of Orcs and Ogres, which they called Draenor, where they set up shop for a while alongside the Orcs. But the Eredar found them and weaponised the Orcs against the Draenei. Stuff happened. The planet exploded, becoming Outland, and the surviving Draenei then fled to Azeroth in their space-ship, while the Orcs built a giant inter-dimensional gateway called the Dark Portal, through which they would go on to invade Azeroth, which made a lot of people angry and has widely been regarded to be a bad move.

Got all that? Good.

Chris Metzen apologised for the difficulties in the new lore, which contradicted the old law in more than a few ways. He dismissed the idea that the space ship was sci-fi, because space-ships fly through space, and the Exodar didn’t fly, it teleported, which was totally different and not at all sci-fi. After all, mages teleported all the time, and no one went around calling them sci-fi.

For some reason, this perfectly flawless logic didn’t convince players.

It didn’t help that no one quite knew how to pronounce this race’s name. In Warcraft III (the game which preceded WoW), it was pronounced ‘dra-neye’ with an accent on the first syllable. But in an official forum post in October 2006, it was ‘dran-eye’. Lead designer Scott Mercer used the pronunciation ‘dr&’ni’, and community manager Tseric (remember that name) claimed it was ‘dray-neye’, and another lead designer pronounced it as rhyming with ‘man eye’, and all this didn’t exactly fill the community with confidence.

In the end, the Draenei would never capture the attention of players the way the Blood Elves had, despite the fact that – as many noted – the female Draenei more closely resembled female Blood Elves than male Draenei. A spectacular example of the sexist dimorphism of WoW’s character design.

Unlike Silvermoon, Roleplay never really took off in their zones, and their little corner of the world remains largely empty. They would see a brief resurgence in the Warlords of Draenor expansion, as well as in the final patch of Legion, but that’s all.

The Issue of Flight

During Vanilla, the world was strategically dotted with flight masters. Every time a player interacted with a new flight master, they unlocked the ability to fly from that point to any other flight master on the map, for a small fee. And in a world where the alternatives were walking or a very slow ground mount, flight paths were considered cool.

One of the most consequential changes to come with the Burning Crusade was the introduction of flight.

It was a huge promise, but no simple task to deliver. Blizzard couldn’t just give players the ability to move vertically. Vanilla’s zones were not designed with flight in mind, and that allowed Blizzard to cut corners. When designing a building, tree, or mountain, they never bothered creating the whole model as a single object, they would only create the parts the player could see, and leave the rest behind. From the ground, everything would look complete, but when viewed from above, the illusion would become clear. The flight paths had been carefully planned to avoid revealing anything.

Outland was the first part of the game designed to maintain its structural integrity when players flew above it. And at first, it was incredible. The ability to fly cost 900 gold, and a flying mount cost another 100, which made it incredibly costly at the time. On top of that, players could only fly once they reached max level. But it was a worthy sacrifice. The moment players first took off from the ground and flew around Outland, it was like a whole new game had opened up to them. Players could let the world fall away, sweeping over monsters or natural obstacles without a care. The floating islands of Outland which sat tantalisingly out of reach were now easy to visit, and a lot of max-level content in Outland was only doable with flight.

But after a while, the cracks started to show. Players began to voice their concerns on the forums, and in the game, that the community aspect was disappearing. The chance encounters and group activities that had kept WoW’s world so exciting became a rarity, because everyone was in the sky. The change was even more pronounced on PvP servers. Players would idle in the safety of the stratosphere, where nobody could find or touch them. And the long, perilous journeys from one end of the continent to the other suddenly became a breeze that took no more than a few minutes to complete. This had a massive impact on the social fabric of the game.

“The world feels a bit more populated when everything is at a slower, smaller scale,” says Hazzikostas. “You can see someone next to you. They’re not 50 yards above you. So there’s no question that adding that extra dimension has the effect of making some of our cities feel a bit emptier.”

Wow’s Developers often compared flight to Pandora’s Box. No one predicted the consequences of adding it, and once it was there, it became such a pivotal tool that it was extremely difficult to remove in future expansions. Once players had flown, they would need to fly everywhere. They couldn’t go back to flight paths. They were now a crutch. And often they were badly planned so that they took inefficient, slow routes. But as long as players could fly, the game would suffer. Ever since this reality became clear, WoW’s playerbase has been fiercely divided on the issue. It’s a dilemma which would infect every MMORPG in the industry going forward.

Blizzard continued integrating flying into new expansions. Wrath of the Lich King prevented players from flying until they had out-levelled all but the final two zones – both of which were built with flying in mind. The next expansion, Cataclysm, had flying baked in from the start. The plus side was that this gave Blizzard a free reign to design the most extreme geography and architecture they could imagine, because none of it had to be traversable by foot. Flight was so necessary to those zones that when players died, their ghosts would appear on flying mounts, presumably because otherwise it might be impossible to reach their corpses to revive.

After that, there was a gradual attempt to phase flying out, with controversial results. We’ll get to them in a later post.

The Bot Lawsuit

Like every MMO that came before it, WoW relied on grinding. That’s the term we use to describe repetitive, low-skilled work in order to gain resources, experience, or gold. One form of grinding might be running between five pre-determined points in an area and clicking a piece of ore every time it appears, or killing the same animal over and over for its skin. Grinding is generally awful and easy to automate, which led to the rise of ‘botting’. Players would use programmes to do the work for them.

The bots were sold to normal players, but most of their customers were sweat shop workers – a topic we’ve already covered. One such bot creator was a certain Michael Donnelly, whose programming skills birthed the WoW Glider. It sold for $25 online, with the option of a 5$ subscription that provided additional functionality. The Glider website included this:

"Getting a bunch of characters to 70 is a pain. Getting money to equip them is a pain. Doing big instances, Battlegrounds, raids, and generally socializing in the game is fun. We use the Glider to skip the painful parts and have more fun. Someone suggested we sell it, so.."

Blizzard reached out to Donnelly’s company (MDY Industries) to ask them to stop. MDY Industries responded by pre-emptively suing Blizzard, to which Blizzard responded with a counter-suit in Feb 2007. They claimed he had infringed upon their copyright, broken World of Warcraft’s End User License Agreement, and made more than $2.8 million in the process. By knocking the game’s economy and gameplay out of whack, he was costing them money.

"Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time,"

For the most part, the lawsuit is a long, tangled jumble of legalese. If you want to read about it in detail, you can do so here.

There are two parts to Blizzard’s case. The End User License Agreement (EULA) part and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) part. The EULA is the agreement players make upon buying the game, and the DMCA is a US law which ensures that owners retain control of their works.

Blizzard argued that the EULA prohibits bot use and therefore if a player used Glider, they were breaking the EULA, which constituted copyright infringement. They held MDY responsible for distributing the Glider in the first place. The court agreed that the bot broke the EULA, but did not agree that it was breaching copyright.

This was a major win for DMY, because it hugely reduced the potential penalties Blizzard could seek against them. However, Blizzard won the DMCA argument. The court found that since Glider was specifically designed to evade Blizzard’s control over their client, it broke the anti-circumvention laws in the DMCA.

Much smarter people than me have gone into great detail on the precedents set by this decision, and how they would affect games going forward. But if all you want to know is the outcome, Blizzard demanded $6 million in damages. Donnelly couldn’t pay that, so the judge granted Blizzard all the profits made from the WoW Glider. Blizzard didn’t think that was enough, so it asked for Donnelly’s entire life savings and even the title of his car. The judge declined. For a company with a value in the hundreds of millions, this came off as a bit malicious.

As usual, the forums had a lot to say. There were the hard working ‘sweat of the earth’ resource farmers who had felt the bots cutting into their profits, and they supported Blizzard wholeheartedly. But at the same time, some players pointed out that bots made the experience better, and may have kept customers from ending their subscription with Blizzard out of sheer boredom. By using a bot, they were able to play the parts of the game that appealed to them, and skip the annoying bits. Blizzard argued that the bots caused them to lose subscribers, when the actual result may have been the opposite.

Blizzard would go on to sue many creators and distributers of bots, and would use patches to try and undermine them. But whenever they destroyed one, two more took its place. Botting is still a common thing in WoW to this day – and it’s present in every other MMORPG. It’s a simple fact of life.

The Broken Mod

This particular fiasco takes place on World of Warcraft’s forums. Players have dozens of different places to talk about the game nowadays, but in the early years, the official forums were the place to be. The moderators were known as ‘Community Managers’, and tended to be a lot more up front and personable than the ‘unseen hands’ who patrol most modern social media. Even so, they were vastly outnumbered by the overwhelming userbase. Keeping it in order was an impossible task.

There was one CM who stood out from the others. He was known as Tseric. At first, Tseric would rebuke players who had broken the rules, or respond with frank honesty about their suggestions. He was friendly, hilarious, and respected, though he didn’t put up with bullshit.

After two years on the job, however, it was starting to get to him. In May 2007, tweaks to the Enhancement Shaman class left them severely underpowered, and players took to the forums to make their anger known. Tseric was there to read their posts, console the weary and confront the abusive. It was too much for any man. When one user created a thread called “Tseric = Dou chebag”, Tseric responded.

At least I don’t circumvent the profanity filter to try and call someone out.

I guess you can’t help it. You’re an e-thug.

This sparked a controversy that soon spiralled out of control. You can read the whole thing yourself, but to summarise, users started asking about where they could report Tseric for inappropriate behaviour. Tseric replied ‘Good luck with trying to get me fired, or whatever…’ It reached the point (LINKS TO REDDIT) where Tseric was complaining about his job in the form of poetry.

Can't help it.

Posting impassionately, they say you don't care.

Posting nothing, they say you ignore.

Posting with passion, you incite trolls.

Posting fluff, you say nonsense.

Post with what facts you have, they whittle down with rationale.

There is no win.

There is only slow degredation.

Take note. It is the first and only time you'll see someone in my position make that position.

You can be me when I'm gone.

It was remarkably candid for a Blizzard employee. This only riled up the playerbase more, and strengthened the calls for Tseric to be removed. He lashed out, describing how ‘a group of beligerent and angry posters can drive people away from this game with an uncrafted and improvisational campaign of miery and spin-doctoring.’ Some players began to support him at this point, and it was certainly clear he was suffering. The sense of banter was gone, and Tseric had fallen into despair. A lot of users took Tseric’s side – they were sick of the behaviour on the forums, and were thrilled that someone at Blizzard had finally acknowledged it.

Understand that this moment will be fleeting, and that there is a hard crash of self-esteem to follow. You'll try to feed it again, and fill the void, but it will never be enough.

You've backpeddled into the troll excuse. You have no point. You have no meaning. You have no significance.

You will be forgotten.

Godspeed.

The thread was deleted after that. But the abuse continued. Trolls are like sharks – even a drop of blood is enough to draw them from miles around, and Tseric was a wounded animal thrashing in the water. His rant went viral, drawing attention to Blizzard’s moderation, to the toxic environment on the forums, and to Tseric. After one final post, he was never heard from again. Blizzard quietly announced that he had left the company, though they declined to state whether he quit or had been dismissed.

And so ends the ballad of a broken CM.

The Pedophile Guild

Let’s move on to something a bit more juicy. In September 2007, one of World of Warcraft’s most famous guilds hit the spotlight – Abhorrent Taboo. They were an ERP guild on the server Ravenholdt, who marketed themselves on scandal. You could entertain any and all proclivities among their ranks, but the biggest draw was politely described as ‘extreme ageplay’.

And yes, that probably is exactly what you think it is. We’re talking about pedos again today, folks.

While ageplay is legal, it’s not the best sign if someone is into it. Very quickly, Abhorrent Taboo found themselves in forums, and plastered over Digg. This all suited Abhorrent Taboo just fine. They were actually branching out to other servers. And when they did, their Guild Master introduced themselves on the server’s local forum with this charming statement.

"Role-playing is legal. Even if you are role-playing something that would be considered deplorable and highly illegal IRL, it's still just role-playing and isn't subject to any form of disciplinary action. Negative publicity is still publicity. Make a Digg or website about how sick we are. Report us to PervertedJustice. All it does is bring in more members. In fact, the Digg the guy on Ravenholdt made about us was so effective, several people signed up for WoW just to be in our guild. The bottom line is: We're allowed to do what we do on any server we please and no one can do anything about it."

The guild also posted their recruitment policy, which explained exactly what these ‘highly illegal’ activities were. "NOTE: Be advised that we frequently ERP in guild chat and often engage in even potentially offensive kinks such as (Extreme) Ageplay, Bestiality, Child Birth, [something that is censored by the WoW forums so I can't tell what it is], Watersports, or any other kink those playing may wish to explore. If you are easily offended or upset by others using kinks you may not personally enjoy, this is not the guild for you. Furthermore, we are a guild based on freedom of love and sex. Monogamy of any kind runs counter to this, and so, all sexually exclusive relationships are prohibited." The guild denied insinuations from a whistle-blower that they purposely avoided checking the ages of applicants.

The behaviour of the guild was so extreme that other erotic roleplayers started investigating, and they quickly came across real under-18 players roleplaying sex with adults, the youngest of which was a 12 year old girl. As soon as this got out, the WoW forums exploded in talk. Everyone kind of knew there was something like this going on in the game, but most hadn’t seen such a blatant display of it before.

[Guild] [Lilith]: See, what pisses me off is… I can’t decide who to defend when people call us pedophiles

[Guild] [Celenia]: Do elaborate.

[Guild] [Genidaron]: Just say, we are not, then leave the forums

[Guild] [Lilith]: I want to defend us. But I also want to defend the pedosexual community.

[Guild] [Genidaron]: I put on my robe and wizard hat, and cast level 3 eroticism

Lilith would later clarify that she meant to defend pedophiles who are only attracted to children, but who do not molest them, and that she herself hated kids. This was, as we say in the entertainment industry, ‘a bad look’. The whole fiasco quickly drew attention from Blizzard, who forced the guild to disband. Their statement on the forums boiled down to ‘it’s gone, now please never speak of this again’.

This topic is no longer suitable for conversational purposes. We understand there is immense interest in this subject due to the changes that it may cause on your server. However, this matter is not one Blizzard takes lightly in any way, shape or form, and we do not wish to have this topic continue circulation.

Those who were part of the offending guild should not post information sent to you on this forum or any other, as it is prohibited by our forum rules to discuss such matters.

Let it finally be said that we appreciate those of you who brought this particular issue to our attention and that we will continue to follow up with this matter in the future to ensure the safety of all parties concerned.

Of course, getting out of a bind was something the members of Abhorrent Taboo enjoyed greatly, so they were up and running again almost immediately under the name ‘Vile Anathema’. The Guild Master, Lilith, suggested that they were given a free reign to reform because one of their members was a Blizzard employee, which caused another huge stir. After all, reforming so publicly under a name which was almost identical to Abhorrent Taboo was almost like a challenge to Blizzard.

I promised I wouldn’t give out their name, since they could lose their job. But let’s just say that not everyone at Blizzard is as uptight about what we do as the people who banned us.”

Whether Lilith was being truthful or stirring shit (probably one of her many fetishes), we may never know. But this incident once again raised a conversation in the wider WoW community about extreme ERP, and whether it was ever acceptible in the game, even when contained to private channels. A lot of players wanted it gone completely – they considered any pornographic chat to be too much. But other players were more even handed. Some ERP was innocent. And who decided what counted as ERP, anyway. A lot of players chose to blame the parents.

You know who's to blame? The parents of this 12-year-old for letting their kid play an online game which clearly states in its ESRB that content may change online. Parents -- please be parents, and don't leave the job up to video games.

Was a simple romance erotic? What about a kiss?

There were also legal quandries. Is it the player’s responsibility to verify the age of another player before performing erotic roleplay? What if the other player lies? Does the responsibility lie with the user of the platform, or the platform itself? Should video game age verification be more complex than simply ‘clicking’ if you’re above a certain age?

For once, World of Warcraft was not leading the conversation. The epicentre of all this nonsery was Second Life. And that’s how we got ‘Aschroft v Free Speech Coalition’, which confirmed that criminalising virtual child pornography was unconstitutional in the USA. However ageplay was explicitly banned in other countries, specifically Germany and Israel. Since these game worlds were accessible world-wide, the result was that every player had to adhere to the laws of the strictest nation.

If one country banned something, it was banned throughout the digital world. This whole thing prompted further discussions about where virtual worlds stood in relation to real-world countries. A number of American political minds were concerned that this could be used to ban otherwise legal speech, during a period where the online world was becoming ever more dominant. And that risked causing the opposite problem – a tort.

The proposed solution was to split players up by country, or even by province/state, and enforce separate rules for each, so that every player could be guaranteed the maximum possible freedoms under their local laws. Obviously, this never happened. But it could have, and perhaps the precedent would have changed online gaming forever. Blizzard elected to avoid splitting up their playerbase, and chose instead to tread the fine line of legality, dealing with issues as they arose.

That turned out to be a bad decision, because as we have seen (and will continue to see), Blizzard is terrible at dealing with sensitive issues.