Personally, I feel strongly that this was a needed change, and one we should have made some time ago. I’m thankful to the team who devved this.
I’m by no means perfectly placed to comment on this, but I still hold a belief that we, and so many other games, can do a much better job of representing different cultures in our games. We want to be better and are making steps to be better. Too often, cultures are demonised, stereotyped or made faceless, and it’s the latter category which Pollnivneach skirts too close to. The Ali joke denies the town members the rights to individual character, effectively making them walking jokes. There is little inclusivity in a joke that lumps together a culture and slaps on a single label, particularly when there is weak representation outside of that label. To me, it feels like a joke that a team of people would make about others who aren’t them, and they have little information about, and that is what it was.
On a creative level, I also find it a pretty lazy joke. I know there are many people championing the Feud, but no one has ever said it’s their favourite quest, and the joke has never been celebrated like the troll names or the White Knight names. The world of RuneScape has so much fun and creativity without this in the game, and I don’t think the game is reduced. The change also didn’t take much time at all, and didn’t rob anyone of an update: to me, the issue isn’t that this was worked on, rather that you aren’t getting the value from updates that you feel you should, and I am wary of compounding those issues.
I’ve also seen a couple of people saying that by making changes for 1% of our player base, we have peeved 99%. To me, championing the 1% is the point: we need to better welcome and serve minority groups so that 1% can go up.
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