Content warning: This article contains descriptions and discussion of racist and hateful comments.
World of Warcraft is undoubtedly one of the biggest games in the world, catering to players of all descriptions across the globe. Unfortunately, that also seems to include an assortment of fans, even at the top levels of the game's global raiding scene, with some extremely troubling views and a history of racist and hateful behavior, according to a recent dump of leaked chat logs from World of Warcraft's in-game chat and private Discord servers.
The two guilds at the heart of the controversy are Clout Gang and Instant Dollars, a couple of top-tier North American raiding guilds. While not necessarily as recognizable in the circuit as bigger names like World First winners Complexity Limit, they're ranked at 38th and 16th in the North American scene and enjoy a reasonable following. Those fans may soon be jumping ship in the wake of the revelation that several members of both guilds, as well as others, have been engaging in racist, toxic behavior and comments.
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The allegations first came to light after an image gallery containing screenshots of leaked chat logs began doing the rounds in various WoW communities and forums, including the subreddit r/wow. Posts sharing the images were initially deleted by the subreddit's moderators due to community policy against calling out individuals, but once the scale and impact of the behavior became undeniable they rounded up all the evidence, including chats and accounts of recorded and on-stream behavior, into a single thread for ease of reference and discussion.
Clout Gang seems to be the main focus of the leak, though a handful of members and ex-members of Instant Dollars are included too, and the chat logs themselves make for singularly unpleasant reading. In one message, Guild Master Apfelsaft posts lyrics to Strange Fruit, a poem about the lynching of Black people immortalized by jazz singer Billie Holiday's soulful and heartbreaking recording in 1939, while elsewhere he repeatedly and unabashedly hurls around the n-word and advocated violence against Black people. Other guild members branch out with their hateful slurs to put LGBT+ and disabled people in their crosshairs, and make comments like "time for a lynch" and "twist n***** heads off."
Redditors soon chimed in with their own experiences and evidence of bigotry in the community, and at the time of writing the thread has over 1,000 comments. The main point that seems to be coming through in the replies is that this kind of behavior is, sadly, not just limited to a couple of guilds but is in fact ubiquitous in the scene at large. Some of those implicated in the scandal have expressed remorse, including members of Instant Dollars, but there's an air of depressed resignation in many of the comments, with racist and sexist behavior seeming to permeate the WoW community at all levels.
The evidence all paints a pretty grim picture of the state of the community, but there are those who hope that people coming forward to condemn this sort of conduct will help to reshape it into a more positive place. As r/wow moderator Ex_iledd puts it, ignoring these issues is no way of dealing with them: "Only shining a light can help with that."
World of Warcraft is available now on PC.
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Source: Ex_iledd/Reddit