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Social Justice in BF


Fimion

Sexism in Battleforge  

9 members have voted

  1. 1. Does Battleforge has a Sexism problem? Should changes be made?


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Hi

So the Skylords Reborn team believes that Battleforge is sexist towards women(Twilight Hag, Girl Power) and has decided to make some changes to Battleforge for the sake of Social Justice and id like to know what you people think of this. Lets discuss this in a civilised manner please.

https://forum.skylords.eu/index.php?/topic/8638-patch-400031-18-december-2021/

Majora wrote:

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Hey guys,

We hoped the reason for the change would be obvious and not require an explanation.

Short explanation: There is no reason for a stripper pole to be included in a game like this.

Longer explanation: BattleForge already isn't very female friendly. The RTS genre is less popular among females in general but this game also uses the ''females armor has to be hot, not practical'' trope heavily. Quotes like ''my face is up here'' and ''I can feel you looking'' from Amazon also shows the old devs were aware and lean into this ''boys-club-vibe''. Cards like Twilight Hag and Girl Power are not helping in the image that the game is inclusive for all genders. Why is Twilight Hag on a stripper pole?.. She is a witch, she could easily have had a general description that she bewitches her enemies.

The cards in question feel like mockery towards females, which is a clunky joke at best, and just rude at worst. BattleForge is an old game, and these cards would definitely not see the light of day in 2022, but even in its time frame it was already questionable. Over time, we have also received multiple comments about Twilight Hag and Girl Power, through for example our survey last summer. We feel those comments and complaints are legit, and want to take them seriously.

So does this mean we are suddenly going to remove all references and things that might be considered offending? Of course not. But we do feel removing the worst offenders is worth it. Changing Girl Power is a lot trickier, but we plan to tackle it at some time in the future, for the reasons mentioned above.

We figured changing the icon from Twilight Hag was an easy change that should not ran into any issues or discussions. 

I wrote:

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Sorry but what kind of woke and radical feminist bullshit is this ???

I would even consider Battleforge to be a pretty progressive game considering it has many strong female characters.

Battleforge is also full of half naked men like Dreadnought, Giant Slayer, Shaman, Executor and MANY others.

Sure a stripper pole is not the best icon for her abillity but its definitly more appropriate than just a disco ball considering she creates the illusion that she is the most beautiful creature in the world and makes all male units stare at her.

Today the whole entertainment industry is completely obsessed with virtue signaling and promoting cultural wokeness and identity politics. Everything is offensive and people getting cancelled for the most stupid reasons. This is the reason many people dont play modern games and watch modern movies anymore.

Personally i have always been a pretty progressive person but cultural wokeness doesnt make anything better it just makes people completely oversensitive and hate eachother it is the absolutely opposite of progression.

I am absolutely sure that the vast majority of Battleforge players just want to have a good time and do not want you to virtue signal and fight for feminism and social justice.

I have been a huge fan of you people since almost day 1 but if you keep this up you will lose me as a fan and probably even as a player and im sure many others too.

 

Edited by Fimion
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Stop making it such a black-and-white issue.

First off, the current icon is only tentative as far as I have read. For me the issue with it is simply that it's immersion breaking. It does not belong in the fictional universe. It's a throw away joke that doesn't add anything.

The entire "male/female" class mechanic is in a shit state as well. In some instances there is no way of knowing if a unit is either and you have to try if the spell works. It's a throw away joke made into an attempted mechanic. Which is even sillier. It's not even worth salvaging.

Pretty much the only reason to even be outraged by this is on principle because of being sick and tired of the entire topic. And I sympathize. But I bet most people wouldn't even have noticed the change because both Twilight Hag and Girl Power are abandoned concepts. Bet if you were to count the amount of times those cards have been played since release, you would barely even hit triple digits.

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I am also not a friend of the male/female machanic and Girl Power and Twilight Hag are both almost useless cards that should be changed but not for the sake of social justice and wokeness. I am concerned about the direction this project is heading in. Wokeness can be very destructive. Battleforge is not sexist and it has never been. 

Majora claimed that 

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BattleForge already isn't very female friendly. The RTS genre is less popular among females in general but this game also uses the ''females armor has to be hot, not practical'' trope heavily.

and that

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Cards like Twilight Hag and Girl Power are not helping in the image that the game is inclusive for all genders.

even tho Battleforge is full of half naked men that is just part of the style of Battleforge.

Comments like this make me very concerned. Just focus on making this game better and more fun but stay out of (identity)politics. In real life i have to deal with stuff like this all the time and i play games to get away from real life.

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2 minutes ago, Fimion said:

Wokeness can be very destructive.

Relaxing can help 🙂

 

I personally didn't care for it so far (but what can I as a guy say on this), but if people feel offended - why not change

Edited by Volin
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15 minutes ago, Volin said:

Relaxing can help 🙂

 

I personally didn't care for it so far (but what can I as a guy say on this), but if people feel offended - why not change

But why can the people who feel offended not relax?

Edited by Fimion
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1 minute ago, Fimion said:

But why can the people who feel offended not relax?

If women find this inappropriate, they are affected in a different way than we are.

Relax and sit back if you are not affected (as it seems). I really don't get your heavy shitstorm. Why does it hurt you so much to be considerate of others feelings?

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23 minutes ago, Volin said:

If women find this inappropriate, they are affected in a different way than we are.

How are they affected in a different way than we are?

If i would say that i find all of the half naked male units in Battleforge offensive do you think they should be changed?

Why is there a half naked male T4 unit in this game but no female one? Seems like men in Battleforge are more objectified than women! I am offended!

 

Edited by Fimion
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2 hours ago, Fimion said:

So does this mean we are suddenly going to remove all references and things that might be considered offending? Of course not. But we do feel removing the worst offenders is worth it. Changing Girl Power is a lot trickier, but we plan to tackle it at some time in the future, for the reasons mentioned above.

Shouldn't this put the entire thing to rest anyway?

Like I said, it's just the male/female mechanic that's getting scrapped/overhauled. A mechanic nobody cares about. That includes Twilight Hag and consequently its ability icon. It wasn't even the ugly, disgusting Hag itself dancing on the pole, which would've been funny. It was straight up just a stripper and a disco ball.

It seems you are concerned about this being the harbinger of a great purge of scrubbing the game squeaky clean. But the very statement you quoted specifies that it's not. It is about reworking the male/female mechanic. Which affects two cards that nobody uses.

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25 minutes ago, Cocofang said:

Shouldn't this put the entire thing to rest anyway?

Like I said, it's just the male/female mechanic that's getting scrapped/overhauled. A mechanic nobody cares about. That includes Twilight Hag and consequently its ability icon. It wasn't even the ugly, disgusting Hag itself dancing on the pole, which would've been funny. It was straight up just a stripper and a disco ball.

It seems you are concerned about this being the harbinger of a great purge of scrubbing the game squeaky clean. But the very statement you quoted specifies that it's not. It is about reworking the male/female mechanic. Which affects two cards that nobody uses.

Majora also said 

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this game also uses the ''females armor has to be hot, not practical'' trope heavily

which is absolutely not true since there are way more men showing a lot of skin than women.

And why is Girl Power offensive towards women? I think it could be considered offensive towards anti feminists(which i am not).

 

Edited by Fimion
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It doesn't matter. You are focusing way too much on the things in the statement that you dislike than what should put you at ease.

Nothing is changing in that respect except for the male/female mechanic, which includes only Twilight Hag and Girl Power.

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1 hour ago, Cocofang said:

It doesn't matter. You are focusing way too much on the things in the statement that you dislike than what should put you at ease.

Nothing is changing in that respect except for the male/female mechanic, which includes only Twilight Hag and Girl Power.

I really hope you are right but the events of the past 10 years have shown how quicky the fight for social justice can turn into the absolute opposite.

Also i find it absolutely outrageous that Majora accused the old devs of sexism nothing about this game is sexist in any way. Sexist people would never create a game with many strong female characters and a card named Girl Power.

 

 

Edited by Fimion
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To be fair, I think that this isnt any great issue (yet). In the end, it's up to the devs, whether they want to pursue such areas and spend time on them, if they so wish.

Personally, I would rather spend that energy elsewhere, but well, I am not working on the game. It just seems to be kinda waste of time, that's all. But then again, so is probably this forums post, in the end. 

Edit: Fixed wording, because I am falling asleep.

Edited by Nemoo SK
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4 hours ago, Fimion said:

cards that should be changed but not for the sake of social justice and wokeness. I am concerned about the direction this project is heading in.

Don't think you need to be concerned about this.

The team is not trying to make a big deal about this one way or the other, but you are the one bringing politics to the table. 

2 hours ago, Fimion said:

nothing about this game is sexist in any way.

The world has changed a lot since 2009. There are some things (such as the stripper pole artwork) that were acceptable by most people then, but seems in bad taste now. Doubtless, these things will be perceived even less favorably in the future.

The best thing to shut down SJWs is to quietly remove their ammunition, as is happening here. We're not making some fanfare to appeal to political demagogues, we're just quietly changing a rarely-used cosmetic that many people thought was bad taste.

So instead of 1% of people noticing the icon and being offended, now we have 0.1% of people noticing the icon was changed and being offended that we cared about the previous 1%.

Regarding the choice to disco ball: that's just a re-crop of the original artwork. The disco ball was always present.

Edited by Eirias
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As one of the most active females in the game, I find ingame chat is much more offensive than the actual cards and mechanics themselves. I have more than on one occasion seen players call winter witch the winter bi$ch, one guy justified his profanity by saying all women call each other bi%ches. Never once in my life have I ever found it appropriate to call another female a bit$h. On more than one occasion there has been reference to women as objects that are meant to be "used" and discarded, that's putting it mildly. Comments such as these are offensive, degrading and show complete and utter disrepect for women. It is absolutely unacceptable in the real world and ingame, people need to learn to put a filter on themselves and remember that are actually females in this game. I carry soulshatter and rifle cultists in my decks and would not hesitate to use it 😁
 

Edited by IceMaiden
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 I think the topic is being overblown to a large degree. Nocap, did anyone ACTUALLY use either card at all? Is anyone actually nostalgic for them to any degree? If I had to choose with whether I agree or disagree with the change, I'd go with agree, because I'd rather not worry about the image bothering anybody at all.

@Fimion If you feel like "wokeness" is going to ruin Battleforge, what do you actually mean? I quite dislike the term, because it tends to be used in a way that undermines the important aspects to the movement that haven't been commercialized for profit. What about the image do you think makes it justified that it shouldn't be changed? What does it do for you? Is it because it was from the original authors; therefore we shouldn't change it? Isn't that the entire point of Skylords Reborn?

My mind is just being blown that someone is having a semi-conniption over the change.

 

 

Edit: Can anyone change my vote? I actually voted no without reading the post because how could I have predicted what it was actually about lol

Edited by WatcherOfSky
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Whoa, what the hell is happening here 😕 Some time ago there was quite the chill discussion about this on discord, without all that politics dragged into this.

The icon in discussion is especially weird, since it has nothing to do with the World of Nyn. Some Hag poledancing disco-style so all males around her into doing nothing? Maybe some kids in mid-puberty are happy with that, but for us grown-ups, this is just lackluster and stupid.

I'm by no means a woke social justice warrior, but at some point you just have to notice that there is not one single dancer-type unit that doesn't have their arse on full display. I think you don't have to be a genius to figure out that we see some tropes in play in the artistic design of that game. By the way, that doesn't mean we have to change everything, because nobody proposed this yet, and as far as I know nobody sees this as a priority issue. They are working on new game modes, new maps, new voicelines, etc.

So let's not blow this out of proportion like anyone suggested radical changes.
 

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As Majora pointed out, we do not plan to make the game squeaky clean. Instead, the idea is to remove or rework the gender based mechanics, which includes only Twilight Hag and Girl Power. Considering the direction this discussion is heading in, we decided to lock this post. There is no point in making a poll about this, since the group affected is quite underpresented in the project. For future polls, I suggest using a less misleading wording than "Does Battleforge has a Sexism problem? Should changes be made?". Please discuss any further concerns in private messages with those who are interested in the topic. For reference, here are the old and the new ability icons:

Old

old.png

New


new.png

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