What's in an obscene name?
After a snow day and a night of staying up way, way too late getting to level 68, I felt in the mood for something light-hearted today. And thus I stumbled upon this thread in the Guild Relations forum, where the guildmaster of "Two Dollar Horde" complains that Blizzard made her change her guild's name.
What follows is a rollicking discussion of sexual innuendo in WoW. Many people come to the guildmaster's defense, arguing that Blizzard itself has more innuendo in the game (i.e. the /flirt emotes) than what was in the guild's name. Rising and Tori of the guild "One" on Blackrock take the opposite position -- according to them, prostitution is a much worse evil than the mild stuff Blizz puts in the flirt emotes. And it just kind of ... goes from there, in many weird and wonderful directions, about defiling sacred unions, frost mages named "Hoar", and the existence of certain establishments in Nevada.
At the end, Rising and Tori are revealed to simply be cleverly trolling. I kind of suspected this, since both of them are usually informed and intelligent contributors to the Guild Relations forum, which in itself is like the big soft teddy bear of the WoW forums. However, one of the last posts -- by the guildmaster of the former "The Spreading Taint" on Proudmoore -- made me start laughing all over again.
I know a couple of people and guilds on my server who have been forced to change names. A guild called "Domestic Violence" was reported, and Blizzard sent them a tell saying that their guild name had been deemed inappropriate. For the next few months, "Deemed Inappropriate" was one of the top guilds on Magtheridon. A druid formerly named Fukanocturna was complaining in Nagrand general chat that Blizz made him change his supposedly computer-generated name. In protest, he changed his name to something involving the phrase "your mom."
Have you known of any forced name changes on your server? Do you think this is a good policy of Blizzard's, or should people be able to make all the juvenile guild name jokes they want?
