'No homosexual, no pay': The RuneScape group is totally mauling Jagex's new CEO over his resolution to cancel new Satisfaction Month occasions
RuneScape gamers have not relented since information broke a couple of days in the past that new Jagex CEO Jon Bellamy—additionally identified in-community as Mod North—was successfully killing off Satisfaction Month celebrations in RuneScape and Outdated College RuneScape (OSRS) with the intention to “make sure the enterprise is protected in opposition to people who would need us hurt.”
Chatting with workers, Bellamy stated that Satisfaction content material was “controversial in a method it didn’t was and that controversy now brings extra danger than it did beforehand, danger that I’m personally accountable to guard in opposition to.”
That did not mollify workers—who penned an open letter to Jagex execs asking to be allowed to run Satisfaction content material—and it actually hasn’t mollified the group. Throughout social media, RuneScape gamers are in a steady uproar in regards to the rollback.
“I labored on RuneScape 2005-2014,” wrote John Ayliff—former Jagex Mod John A—on Bluesky, “this makes me actually indignant. Cowardly and disgusting.”
“You absolute cowards,” wrote one other participant on X. “You dial again Satisfaction content material since you’re afraid of imply tweets from alt-right losers on-line? All whereas pretending to nonetheless be an ‘ally’. Nobody’s falling for this.”
This being the RuneScape group, although, a lot of the protest has come within the type of absurdly particular shitposting and memes. Gamers have been circulating faux patch notes about “De-Gaying” RuneScape and OSRS by, for example, eradicating the multi-hued Fancy Boots from the sport and banning anybody carrying the much more ostentatious Fancier Boots.
Elsewhere, some gamers are merely internet hosting their very own, community-run Satisfaction occasions, with some proving in style sufficient that the sport struggled to render all of the attendees.
On Reddit, poster FemaleAssEnjoyer (there are complicated semiotics at work right here) shared a in style mock-up of “Summer season Sweep-Up Pt 2″—a parody of Jagex’s (actual) Summer season Sweep-Up replace from final Could. To be able to stay “an escape from the extra ‘undesirable’ elements of actuality,” the Pt 2 replace declares that OSRS will likely be promptly eradicating “All indigenous or in any other case ethnically problematic NPCs, any NPCs with out confirmed, documented Gielinorian citizenship,” and, in fact, “Girls.”
Elsewhere on Reddit, some customers have emblazoned themselves with a “No homosexual, no pay” badge to protest the adjustments to Satisfaction—itself a cheeky inversion of a homophobic slogan, “We pay, no homosexual,” deployed by some customers when Jagex introduced Satisfaction content material in 2017.
STONKS 📉 from r/2007scape
The memes are absurd and plentiful, and present no signal of letting up. Underlying them, in fact, is a real sense of damage and betrayal on the a part of RuneScape’s LGBT+ group, which had grown used to the annual Satisfaction content material solely to have it yanked out from underneath them at a time when the queer group is underneath assault.
“The fact is that any ‘impartial’ place solely emboldens bigots,” writes a participant on the OSRS subreddit. “Twitter is totally stuffed with posts praising Jagex for lastly ‘eliminating the woke mob’. I am positive Jagex would say ‘that wasn’t our intention, we simply do not wish to endorse both aspect!’, however in so doing, they’ve platformed the worst of their participant base.”