There exists now in WoW a bug so insidious, so horrifying, that hundreds are threatening to quit, due largely to feelings of emasculation. Long threads debate whether the bug is a bug at all, and whether or not this is an insidious stealth nerf of the highest order, further cementing the notion that Blizzard hates the Horde.

I am, of course, referring to the great shoulderpocalypse.Yes, in a patch almost two months ago, Blizzard somehow shrunk the scaling on all shoulder pieces worn by orcs to a size which looks… well, almost reasonable. The reaction from the fans was quick, visceral, and seething with shock and hatred. Blizzard was quick to assure the fans – it was all a mistake, and a fix is, in theory, coming in the next major patch. The fans remain skeptical, seeing as how at least one minor patch has already come and gone without what seems to them a low-risk, high priority fix, and many cannot fathom how this purely cosmetic issue can go without an emergency hotfix.


You know what they say about the size of an orc’s shoulders, right?”
Explaining all of this to an artist who doesn’t play Massively Multiplayer games is somewhat difficult. Let’s face it, the shoulders in WoW are ludicrous, garish, and unrealistic. They often clip with other body parts when animating, and totally dominate the visual appearance of the avatar. But those same attributes is what makes them popular. Shoulders are highly visible. They frequently have animating portions or particle effects. They strikingly change the silhouette of the player. Players quest long and hard for their shoulderpads in WoW. Whoever thought that a fantasy roleplaying game would have shoulderpads be more vital than say, Madden?

The lesson from all this, of course, is as old as the hills: Fuck with a player’s visual appearance against his will at your own peril.

I still bear the scars of this lesson. As part of the original Meridian 59 team, we shipped a game with character art that was, not to put too fine a point on it, pretty much directly exported from Poser, a popular-but-not-very-good 3D modeling program of the era. Our model was basically a painted copy of their default model. The results were serviceable, not great. But hey, we were making an MMO based on the loose change found in the producer’s couch, so we dealt with it.


Original flavor Meridian. Yes, Virginia, this was once state of the art
Well, 3DO bought us, and half a year later, gave us a new art director. As we ramped up for our first expansion pack, our art director declared flatly – she was not going to let it with her name listed as Art Director and these default Poser models acting as characters. She wanted to redo them all. I pushed back – redoing the character animations were going to cost us a ton of cycles we could use for more monsters and items – but lost the battle when she promised she’d crunch her team so we’d get both.

Well, she did, but the extra work meant that the art came right under the wire, and we had no choice to ship with it. You could tell immediately there were problems. Most notably, some hair styles were removed – on the patch day, players with Mohawks logged in to find themselves with a completely reasonable conservative haircut. If you had an eyepatch in the old version, well, that was gone too. But these issues were fixable (if I recall correctly, fixing them involved throwing a hissyfit in front of the whole team so loudly that in retrospect it probably could have gotten me fired). Those issues were not the horrifying thing.

The horrifying thing is that every woman in the game logged in to find that, in their judgment, they had a fat ass.

The original poser models were basic, but they were also thin, lithe and well-defined. The art director felt that they weren’t heroic enough, and for the new direction, wanted to beef them up. For the men, this meant they suddenly had superhero proportions. For the women – well, they got more meat on their bones. And their asses. The new asses weren’t even unreasonable in a vacuum – but try telling any woman that going from ‘thin’ to ‘normal’ is acceptable.


Upgraded Meridian graphics. The flesh-colored shirt was always very popular.
This supposed slap in the face completely destroyed any awareness of the actual benefits of the change, such as we now could hue shirts for greater customization. All players could fixate on was that the self image they had lovingly constructed in character customization, and had bonded with over the period of months or years, was gone. There was this… this stranger in its place.

So to the orc warriors – chin up. Sure, you’re constantly hearing a river of emasculating jokes about shrinkage and what not (seriously, my main tank didn’t want to raid the day the bug went live – his ‘heart wasn’t in it’), but on the bright side, at least your shoulders will get fixed. Meridian’s heroic asses live on to this day