I’m hearing troubling reports of Standing Stones Games community managers warning, censoring, and banning anyone who posts objections to the new African and Asian avatars and bearded human woman update in the upcoming patch of Lord of the Rings Online.
This is not isolated to Standing Stones Games, as the Reddit LOTRO forum is not allowing anyone to discuss this update:
MMORPG.com are not allowing any discussion whatsoever on this important topic either:
This seems to be a coordinated effort on the part of Daybreak Games and Standing Stones to bully their players and MMO news sites are censoring all negative opinions concerning this lore-breaking change that is coming to Lord of the Rings Online.
Editor and woke harridan Bree Royce over at Massively Overpowered is up to her old tricks and hectoring people who disagree with Standing Stone’s decision:
On a sad side note, her sidekick and long-time “Bio Break” blogger Justin Olivetti is pleased with the changes:
A user named Herr Dave on the official LOTRO YouTube channel claims he was banned for speaking out on this:
If you have been the victim of this censorship or bullying and would like to add your thoughts on this issue, please contact me directly or post your story here in the comments. Please include screenshots of your banned posts with names/handles of official representatives if possible.
We’re not going to let Embracer Group, Middle Earth Enterprises, Enad Global 7, Daybreak Games, and Standing Stone Games get away with this wanton act of cultural vandalism. Stay tuned!
–Wolfshead
Reddit, Reddit Mods, Cordovan and Massivelyop have something in common. Leftist hive mind bias, often not so great mods unable to deal with the sheer scope of their work on top of that. Though in the case of Cordovan, one might argue he isn’t a leftist but just a terrible CM, lots of threads criticizing his lack of knowledge about the game, LOTR lore and his attitude and practices. Since Massively became Massivelyop and they are on their own, they are now fully regurgitating game news from other sites and their other articles are so weird, yet they still seem to have a fanbase. I clicked through 5x load more articles and it made me wonder that they are still around.
The chance to speak up in such places, no matter how reasonable, behaved and sugarcoated one tries, are zero. Remember how Amazon censored, blocked, prevented, and manipulated the reviews of their Rings of Power series to get at least a 3,5 Star average. Where 3 stars on Amazon is already meaning “steaming pile of poo”, as every bull has at least 4-5 stars rating.
Some platforms are too far gone to be salvaged. While I like what Musk (I am not a fan of Musk per se) does with Twitter, the format of the short tweets itself is too limiting for a debate.
Blogs and forums still have their use. Here we are, on this very blog. Regarding LOTRO, it will break hearts, but people will have to vote with their wallets. There is no point in supporting the game anymore, no matter how much people still love it despite all this.
Wokeness destroys. The only way to get cleansed of it is apparently the end of the involved company, maybe then a new LOTR game will appear. The same can be said for Blizzard, which is also beyond salvation by now.
Somewhat unrelated, how times and culture change. I found a 2016 interview on Gameinformer with Jeff Kaplan/Tigole from Blizzard. He left Blizzard, in hindsight either luckily or smartly, before the woke storm hit his workmates and former guild mates like Afrasiabi etc. hard.
“My favorite gaming-related item that I have is – well, when we ship a game at Blizzard we have a lot of traditions: We do a champagne toast out in our courtyard, where the whole company comes and celebrates the launch of the game, and whenever we do that, whatever’s the newest game that we’ve launched, we hoist the flagpole out in front of the studio and it’s got the California flag, the U.S. flag, but also alongside those we hoist the flag for the franchise of whatever game that we’ve launched. The first one in our new campus where we started that tradition was Wrath of the Lich King. After Cataclysm had come out, they had hoisted the Cataclysm flag instead of the Wrath of the Lich King flag and J Allen Brack, who’s executive producer on World of Warcraft, had come up to me and handed me the flag for Wrath of the Lich King.”
You know what flag they are raising nowadays there… also interesting to see that Mr Brack was not always such a pink pony rider.
The way Kaplan/Tigole Bitties, Pardo, Furor and co talked on the forums does nowadays totally break the scale of what people call “toxic” nowadays. What they did, organizing in-game protest and all that. Regardless from which point in time one looks at it, they were quite awful to others and in their ways.
SOE didn’t listen. These guys made World of Warcraft, while they made EQ2.
The phases where devs listen to their fanbase and get inspired by them were always rare, with strong ideological blinders and censorship the leftist wokeship self-assures itself to run straight to the bottom of the ocean, absolutely sure that everything is fine-fine.
Dear LOTR(O) fans, remember what you had. I don’t think you can save LOTRO anymore, sorry. The story of the rise and fall of SOE/Daybreak/Blizzard and the ever owner changing LOTRO carries a lesson. You wrote about it in your gatekeeper article. For LOTRO it was when Turbine Inc. sold the rights and later became WB Games Boston. They sold it to SOE/Daybreak, who own Standing Stones Games. While they are themselves owned by Enad Global 7. Blizzard sold out to Activision. It worked for a long time, though quality declined, till woke sensibilities crept into the game and workforce.
Analyzing the rise and fall of MMOs and the studios behind them is very interesting and helpful. My personal lesson is that woke culture must be destroyed before it damages our society even more.
Another amazing post! I’ll try to reply as soon as I can.
One thing I can say is community managers are at the bottom of the barrel in the MMO industry. They are one rung up on the ladder from video game journalists who are the scum of the earth in my books.
Look at the MMO press right now… it’s an utter disgrace. All they do is copy and paste the press releases that the studios give them. They don’t have a shred of integrity. I’m going to post something about the woke clown that runs the Wowhead site soon.
Update: I replied to Herr Dave on an official LOTRO YouTube video and my comments were deleted. I went over to Herr Dave’s channel and replied to one of his videos and my comments were deleted.
I offered Herr Dave a chance to tell his side of the story on this website free from censorship but it seems he is not interested. Perhaps my site is too controversial for him. So be it.
Sorry to hear that. Censorship is working, people start “behaving” by self-censoring themselves.
No good deed goes unpunished. It’s all good. I don’t even play LOTRO. I have no skin in the game except that I care about Tolkien’s world and I’m tired of our culture getting destroyed left and right. Evil thrives because good men do nothing.
I give LOTRO another year and they’ll be having pride parades and LGBTQ characters. It’s just a matter of time.
They don’t care about the Lotro, they only want to downgrade it, make people hate and then time it to a shorting market bet. Would it be better, puppet in to push in the woke so much and in so many faces that it just destroys it much faster? The company already sold their soul to money, why not punish them faster?
I would say in the culture war we are winning, the companies that do this are out of touch, just a lot of asleep people still buy the trash. It is up the people who are awake to the facts, doing the due diligence every step of the way.