The Gamers Arms

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019 ... ng-support

It hasn't been a good year for Blizzard's publicity department, has it. Diablo Immortal, tax dodging and now they've banned a Hearthstone esports player because they voiced support for Hong Kong's pro human rights protests during a livestream. This has, understandably, not gone down well with Western players who see it as not wanting to offend the Chinese government.

In a post on the Hearthstone website, Blizzard claimed Blitzchung violated section 6.1 of its competition rules, which state that players cannot engage in any act that "brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image". The punishment for this is removal from Grandmasters and the total loss of the player's prize money, which is exactly what Blizzard has imposed on Blitzchung.

"Effective immediately, Blitzchung is removed from Grandmasters and will receive no prizing for Grandmasters Season 2", the statement reads. "Additionally, Blitzchung is ineligible to participate in Hearthstone esports for 12 months beginning from Oct. 5th, 2019 and extending to Oct. 5th, 2020."

Despite the two presenters covering their faces and quickly cutting to a commercial, Blizzard says it will "immediately cease working with both casters".

Yes, they even banned the two esports hosts who had nothing to do with it.

It's brought to light other offensive decisions, such as Tracer (the Overwatch character) being gay only in the West, but straight in Russia and China so as not to cause issues for those governments. Blizzard openly supports Pride in the US.

https://imgur.com/a/bvXCKYU

Brian Kibler, one of the big streamers and commentators, has stepped down because of this.

https://www.pcgamer.com/brian-kibler-sa ... s-streams/

The backlash against Blizzard for this is starting to get pretty widespread on all their community sites. Rightly so. Pandering to an autocratic country just for a few more dollars sends out all the wrong messages. China has a terrible track record for committing atrocities on all levels, kowtowing to them just empowers them further.

There was stuff on Twitter yesterday about how their account cancelling system was stopping people from deleting their accounts. The suspicion was that it was just failing under the load.

Activision do not give a flying fuck if the uptick in Chinese consumers more than offset the cancellation of accounts in the West. Money talks. They don't care.

One of the more entertaining aspects of this story is that the Internet has decided that Overwatch character Mei, who is Chinese, is being used as a symbol of the HK protesters.

https://kotaku.com/overwatchs-mei-is-be ... 1838899963

Where I work, we have:

1) A decision last year to amend content going to China, only to backtrack after massive backlash (both in public and internally) and then agree to publish without censorship...only said publications will only go into the country through approved distributors, passing the censorship off to someone else.

2) Chinese members of academic societies whose materials we distribute are being taken out of mailing lists without either the member or the society being made aware of it - all because the "company line" has been kicked into the long grass so we aren't actually able to tell anyone involved because no one's agreed of what we're going to tell them.

3) Some fucking idiot running out website once set Taiwan's country code to include (Province of PR China) all of a sudden for no fucking reason and we're still trying to get them to change it.

tl;dr - fuck this noise and fuck everyone trying to play both sides and failing all involved.

This story's getting bigger:
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2019 ... cs-private

Funnily enough, Epic Games are the ones coming out in favour of people expressing their opinions, despite being partially owned by Chinese sugardaddies Tencent.

Oh boy does this story keep going. Now US politicians, including ones major enough for me to have heard of them before (namely Marco Rubio of Florida as well as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a representative from New York who Trump recently told to go back to where she came from) are calling on Blizzard to reverse their decision, citing the usual issues with Chinese control.

https://kotaku.com/u-s-congress-members ... 1839172415

Blizzcon is in two weeks. This is not going to get swept under the rug in two weeks. I expect they're going to come out of the gates swinging, probably with a Diablo IV reveal, in order to try to win back some positive headlines. I don't think they can afford to have two Blizzcons in a row with overwhelmingly negative reactions. They're obviously going to vet peoples' questions in the Q&A sessions, if they have them at all, but from what I understand they vetted questions last year too, before that chap in a red shirt decided to ask them instead whether Diablo Immortal was a late april fools' joke.