The crew over at www.worldofwar.net posted the following information today regarding some strange activity that happened over the last little while.

Dubious Activities Resolved

A few days ago a guild list was posted causing speculation regarding who in the guild was a Blizzard employee based on information on the guild's site. It seems that a member of the community managed to hit the nail on the head and tie the character name in the guild with the Blizzard employee. This person was subsequently banned from the official forums, even though the guild listing was public information Thread after thread regarding the issue was being locked and this resulted in much protesting from other members of the community. It was then bought to Blizzard's attention that the guild was in fact in violation of the guild naming policy anyway and should not have been allowed. This brought into question whether Blizzard employees' guilds were being afforded some leeway on the naming policy and forum rules that all players must adhere to.

Finally, after what has probably been long debates at Blizzard, they made an official statement regarding the above issues.

Over the weekend, a thread was posted on the Tichondrius realm forum warning Horde players of certain guilds and characters they should look out for while adventuring. This thread contained information on a Blizzard employee’s guild, and conjecture was made on which character that employee played. This thread was deleted, and all subsequent threads created on this topic were closed. Several other threads containing references to this guild were also deleted, and a few players were wrongly suspended or banned from the forums for participating in these threads. We would like to correct this mistake. If you feel you were wrongly banned or suspended from the forums, please email your character name and the name of the realm you play on to [email protected]. Furthermore, please note that we are taking measures to ensure this does not happen again.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this caused and thank you for your understanding and patience.

In addition, as part of our normal name-review process, the aforementioned guild’s name was reviewed last week and was found to be in violation of World of Warcraft’s naming policy. The name violates the rule dealing with real-world references, and is subject to the same procedure as other guilds. Therefore, the guild will be disbanded and reimbursed for their tabard, and will have to re-form using a different name. Please note that these are two separate issues that have the unfortunate coincidence of requiring attention at the same time.

Thanks to Xinhuan for keeping his nose to the ground on this issue over the past couple of days.


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Byron has been playing and writing about World of Warcraft for the past ten years. He also plays pretty much ever other Blizzard game, currently focusing on Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, while still finding time to jump into Diablo III with his son.

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