Old School RuneScape’s playerbase isn’t showing its best side this week.
Motherboard reports that following the announcement by a Jagex employee that a small gay pride quest will be implemented in the game, Old School RuneScape players have flocked to Twitter and Reddit to complain (the latter with over 6000 upvotes, though the original poster has since updated to note he no longer wants the event removed because of the inevitable “media backlash” that could tank the game’s rep). Objections range from reasonable (the event wasn’t put to a community poll in accordance with the server’s guidelines) to tedious (no politics in my games! think of the children!) to overt homophobic screeds that I won’t reproduce or dignify here. Just imagine really bad stuff, then crank it up to 11.
In fact, some players are plotting to riot (their word) in-game while the event is live, not against the LGBTQ community (they say) but “in support of keeping this game free of any agenda.”
Jagex’s Senior Product Manager, Matthew Kemp, told Motherboard that the event ties in with the company’s values and “is very simple and straightforward” in that “players have to collect pieces of a rainbow that’s scattered around the world, and they put them together and create a rainbow-colored scarf.”
“There is a lot of unfortunate noise right now, which I’d rather not have,” he said, dismissing Reddit because, you know, it’s Reddit, “but everyone at Jagex is behind it and the vast majority of players will be behind it. […] The backlash shows that there’s more than needs to be done for LGBT equality, and we’re kind of happy to play a tiny part in that.”
Jagex has said it won’t take any action against would-be rioters.
It's an honour to announce a small holiday event of mine will be coming to @OldSchoolRS this Thursday to celebrate #Pride2017 pic.twitter.com/7C9ECF42b3
— Jay Wilton (@Jay_Wilton) June 5, 2017
