Originally written by qDot for mmorgy.com

Hoo boy.

For those of you too lazy to click out of your newsreaders, here's the situation:

Someone decided to put "GLBT Friendly" (Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Transgendered) as part of their guild name in World of Warcraft. One day, they sign on to find themselves flagged with a policy violation. After firing off an email to Blizzard, they find out that having terms indicating the sexual orientation of the guild is against policy. Quoting from the article:

The response from Blizzard was, "While we appreciate and understand your point of view, we do feel that the advertisement of a 'GLBT friendly' guild is very likely to result in harassment for players that may not have existed otherwise. If you will look at our policy, you will notice the suggested penalty for violating the Sexual Orientation Harassment Policy is to 'be temporarily suspended from the game.' However, as there was clearly no malicious intent on your part, this penalty was reduced to a warning."

So, long story short: If you have a guild called "God hates fags", then you're violating this policy. If you have a guild named "GLBT friendly", you're violating the same policy.

If you have a guild named "My name is Gay. No, really, like Gay, as in the First Name, is Gay"... Hey, someone with a WoW account wanna try this? Hell, they let The Spreading Taint through.

Since I'm the only one around (updating a sex blog on a Friday night... But my mom thinks I'm cool!), I guess I'll throw in the first MMOrgy opinion:

Man, Blizzard.

WTF, dude. Seriously.

Shit like this is what turns virtual worlds into day care centers, and you're seeing why. Yes, gamers, for the most part, are an insensitive bunch of asses. I know, I'm one of them. But you try to clamp down on everyone, and ain't no one gonna be havin' a good time.

'course, you've got 5.5 million players now, you can probably pull crap like this and laugh at the 1% drop in your servers as people continue to level grind mindlessly so they can ebay their lvl 60 character. But watch as the interesting people leave due to crazy ass rules, the fun people leave due to creative stiffling, even in guild names, and see how nifty your world is then.

You'll still have players, hell, you'll always have players, but how fucking fulfilling is a world without interesting, diverse players who let others KNOW they are, and are willing to stick up for it, eh?

Other people's opinions (I'm gonna keep updating this as these come in):

Fellow Sexy Geek Jason Schultz Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing Terra Nova Thread