If you made it out to Blizzcon and were lucky enough to catch the closing concert, you may remember a brief video clip played during the performance of Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftan. The video featured Corpsegrinder, the lead singer of Cannibal Corpse, and generally revolved around his passion for World of Warcraft and insane hatred of the Alliance faction.

You can check the video out here, but be warned that it contains graphic language:

The video, which is packed to the gills with curse words and homophobic slurs like “faggot” and “queer,” was somehow vetted by Blizzard officials and shown to the Blizzcon audience. Naturally, the gay gamer community is fairly upset over the remarks, but more so over Blizzard’s insensitivity to the subject matter. It’s worth noting that the content was censored in the video that played for the audience, meaning most of the words had to be inferred.

All gamers deal with profanity now and again, and homophobic remarks often seem to come with the territory, but there’s a big difference between someone calling you a “fag” in general chat and the game company broadcasting those terms out to the world. Knowing Blizzard's in-game chat policy for WoW, it’s surprising they would make public any video that violates their own rules, but perhaps it was just an error in judgment.

The WoW forums are blowing up regarding the video, with numerous threads of complaints and a few weak “it was a joke” apologies from Blizzard staff. The most recent update involved locking all previous posts and providing this snippet to forum members:

“Thank you everyone for your feedback regarding the closing night performance at BlizzCon. While we had some other messaging worked up we were going to post, the members of band wanted to instead address it themselves:

Hey guys, we read and heard all the feedback from BlizzCon this year. The Corpsegrinder bit was never intended to be taken seriously. We are sorry that we offended anyone; everything at our shows is just meant in fun. Thank you all for speaking up. We’ll definitely keep this in mind for future shows.

Our humblest apologies,
Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain”

The drama is still ongoing, so we’ll see what ends up happening. There’s not much Blizz can do besides apologize, but some players are definitely upset.

What do you think is the appropriate response?

Via Gay Gamer

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