My observations of this event suggest this is primarily because the response from the community to these changes was rather vicious, especially to the public-facing members of the dev team. That response had a severe chilling effect that stopped most of the wow devs I know on twitter from talking about it publicly. Here is [Valentine Powell’s initial tweet]:
If you look at the responses to this tweet, many of them are accusatory and vicious. Many of the non-dev responses to several of the following tweets were also fairly spicy. Powell later had this to say about the responses:
It was also mentioned here by a senior systems designer:
And another from another WoW game designer:
There was also some further discussion later on this as well:
And a senior encounter designer on wow had this conversation:
Basically, some of the devs tried to say that these changes came from them, got dogpiled and yelled at by angry gamers, and they all backed off because nobody likes getting attacked when they don’t have to be.
ok. so: the first pic was supposed to be part of a visual biography introducing my scrawny, nerdy healer-main WoL as A Himbo Beefcake, Actually, but the idea of a messy comic continuation possessed me until 2am… ….. and now here we are.
This is a behind the scenes from a TV show. He’s the guy who plays the character whose gravestone it is. He’s mad that people are memeing a behind the scenes photo of a fictional character’s death because he happens to play that character.
I’m not sure if I should laugh or hit my head on the desk over this one.
The face I just made 🙄
My favourite part that this is leaving out is that by the end he and the rest of the cast weren’t getting along and they did a full on photoshoot in front of his grave.
if he doesn’t want us to use THAT photo, it seems like we’ve got three malicious-compliance-ready replacements right here
