Last week’s Crossroads Innvitational announcement sparked a discussion in the Hearthstone community. As you probably know, we constantly see the same, usually male, popular streamers and community figures getting invited. Many people spoke up, saying that this should be changed, that we should be more inclusive and give more representation to both women and less popular community members. Being a part of such an event is a really big deal for players who don’t have a massive following. We also don’t have that many women in Hearthstone community, and one of the reasons for that might be the aforementioned lack of representation.
Today, we’ve learned that two of the participants – Kripparrian and RegisKillbin – stepped down voluntarily and offered their slots. They will be replaced by Lunaloveee (bloodyface) and Avelline.
Blizzard also promised that every invitational event moving forward will have a greater representation of women.
We have two new participants for the Crossroads Inn-vitational! Welcome @lunaloveee8 and @AvellineHS to the roster, and a huge thanks to Kripp and RegisKillbin for graciously offering their slots.
— Hearthstone (@PlayHearthstone) April 20, 2021
Official list of players for the tournament was also just updated:
Personally I’m onboard with Blizzard conducting their events however they desire; they’re a private company. If they want to run an all boys gig because they believe that they’ll attract the most interest in their event then go for it, similarly if they believe that they’re not reaching out sufficiently to potential female audiences and want to include more or exclusively females participants I’m also fine with that. I feel that they should operate at their own discretion as it’s their decision.
Having said that I do object to ‘equality’ for the sake of equality. It seems as if the definition of what constitutes equality is quite far reaching, my own interpretation of it leans more towards opportunity and not outcome. I have an example that a friend of mine encountered in his workplace about a year ago:
He was casually employed at the time and his employer notified him that they’d be putting on 4 full time employees, recruited from the current casual employee work pool of the time. At that point in time there was 8 male employees and 4 female employees. He discovered a few days later that of those 4 people 2 were to be women and 2 were to be men. Assuming all employees were equally competent the men applying for that full time position would have a 25% chance of gaining full time employment and the women a 50% chance, an outcome which I would consider manifestly unfair. Even when not operating under the assumption that the employees were equally skilled the system is still flawed as it leaves the potential for the 4 people employed to not be the 4 most suitable candidates for the position, be they men or women.
tl;dr: We should strive for equality of opportunity not outcome and let privately owned companies conduct their business and make their profits however they so desire, within the confines of the law.
I mostly agree with you, equality of outcome is not exactly what we should be striving for. It’s forced, unnecessary, and frankly hurtful for both sexes. But I do think that inviting more women to an event like that is exactly what you’re describing as “opportunity”, not “outcome”. Until now, we DID have many female streamers or pro players, but they usually weren’t given chance to participate in such an event. Inviting more of them is simply giving them opportunities to show themselves and build their audiences.
A “bad” sort of equality would be aritifially forcing 50% of the playerbase to be women, or having quotas (e.g. always qualifying at least X% women) in official competitive tournaments like Masters Tour or Grandmasters. If that would happen, I would be the first to oppose it.
And I said mostly agree, because I also disagree with your last point. We should NOT let private companies conduct their business as they want it. Why? Because we are their consumers, they make money thanks to us. We should all have a saying in how they conduct business. Just letting them do what they want because it’s not our concern leads to patologies. If people wouldn’t complain or strive for more, private companies would screw over consumers time after time. And I get it – that’s the reason they exist – to make money. They want to maximize profits. But we all should want them to be as consumer-friendly as possible, and speak up. I know that it’s cliche, but ultimately the power dynamic is on the side of consumers, as long as they work together towards one goal. A great example in Hearthstone would be the entire “Battle Pass” outrage – it was blown out of proportion, sure, but ultimately it made the game better for us. If we all just sat silently and accepted everything Blizzard does, the game would be in a much worse shape now for an average player.
You’re quite right, that would put more focus on opportunity and less upon outcome. I did preface my comment by saying that they as a private company should be free to exercise their own discretion however.
You don’t think that a private company is within their rights to make decisions about how they conduct their business? We as the consumer have the power that every consumer in a non-monopolised industry has: don’t buy the product. Historically this has been the mechanism that controls private enterprise and encourages good faith between producer and consumer. If you went to a takeaway shop and they tried to charge you $20 for a bag of chips you’d laugh at them and walk away, if the supplier continued to charge that rate they’d sell no product and they’d have to reform their pricing structure or cease to exist as a business. The reformation of the battle pass system was an example of this, the changes they made were widely unpopular, there was a ton of community outrage and they altered the system I presume under fear of losing out on overall sales. It’s worth mentioning that Blizzard have an advantage in this situation as money invested in the game has no value outside of the game, unlike other collectible card games. If they did decide to suddenly hike up their prices and you no longer wanted to spend the money required your collection is essentially redundant.
I should probably add at this point that I think the game is overpriced, I had several friends that used to play the game and no longer do specifically because of the pricing structure. I spend my $100 or so dollars 3 times a year and complain that that amount is not enough to play with every card in the game. Ultimately however I probably spend 10 or so hours playing the game a week and $100 dollars for upwards of 150 hours of game time is a transaction I’m willing to enter into, albeit begrudgingly.
So, it finally became a thing. Let me get the fact straight out.
Female gamers are always fewer than male gamers! It always has been.
So, why does it have to be like this? Can’t we just enjoy the game like it was, when the best compete with the best without caring if the players were males or females? if the players are good, then surely it will be enjoyed nonetheless.
It surely changes my mood for the game if the quality of plays dropped just because of this.
Don’t really understand why everyone’s getting so riled over this. Kripp and Regis willingly gave up their spots in the tournament. It’s not as if Blizzard blackmailed them into giving the invitations to female streamers. It’s unfortunate that Kripp and Regis won’t be playing, but it’s not like Blizzard can do anything about it.
Aw man I am a huge Regis fan and he was going to be the reason I watch. He’s a great person and very fun to watch. Nonetheless, props to him for stepping down. He did the right thing.
As usual, my opinion on this is that the hearth is on the right place, but the decisions are always wrong. You can’t ask for more representation when women are a minority. If you have, lets Say, 10 male players for every female, it is expected that in abu event you will have much more male representation… It’s maths. And if you go anyway and put more females no matter what, You are probably lowering the play level on the field, and I want to watch the Best players, no more females, males, trans or whatever you want. Luna (Bloodyface) is a fine example in why their decisions are always wrong, because she should have been invited from begginning because she is a top player with a Lot of followers, but they invited her because this issue arised and she is a trans and that fits their agenda…
Hearthstone has a much bigger male playerbase, I think that 1:10 would be a fair statement. And that’s what you see in actual competitive events – we don’t have nearly as many female players in Masters Tour or World Championships (in fact, VKLiooon was the first woman in HS championship ever). You’re right, it’s maths and forcing more diversity there would be stupid.
However, it’s a bit different when it comes to invitationals. Those are not meant to be “competitive” tournaments. Blizzard never invites “best” players. Let’s say Kripp, which is part of nearly every event like that. He’s a great player, don’t get me wrong, but he almost exclusively plays Battlegrounds, and yet he’s invited to Constructed tournaments all the time. Hearthstone invitationals are usually marketing events, not esports event, so lowering the playing field is not a big issue.
All of that is sort of an chicken/egg problem. The reasoning for not inviting more women to such events is that they make up for a small portion of the playerbase, which is obviously true. But one of the reasons why we don’t have more women playing HS is BECAUSE they don’t get invited to such events and don’t have extra opportunities to break through. Regis is a perfect example of those events really mattering – he was a really small streamer/YouTuber before getting invited, and he grew his sub count and Twitch viewership a few times ever since he started getting featured by Blizzard. Similarly, Slysssa’s popularity also jumped after getting invited to Battlegrounds Invitational. Giving more opportunities to women translates to more women becoming popular, which again translates to more women wanting to try out a game.
How things are seen is important. Just like men often don’t want to be doing things that aren’t seen as “manly” enough, the same goes for women. If a male player would see a game where 90% of the playerbase are women, there’s a solid chance he wouldn’t even try to get into it. And if a woman sees that the whole Hearthstone Twitch, including official tournaments, is a sausage fest, there’s a solid chance that she won’t even try to get into it. It doesn’t apply to everyone, but there’s a lot of people like that from both sexes. Gaming is still dominated by male players, being a female player is sort of a social stigma (not as bad as it was years ago, but it’s still there). Promoting women through such events (and thus boosting their popularity in general) is good for the game, because then more women will try the game in the first place.
Long story short, in my opinion, people saying that more women representation is unnecessary, because there aren’t many women in the game in the first place… sort of got it backwards. More women representation is necessary exactly BECAUSE not many women play the game, in order to encourage them.
Thank you! This is exactly the point.
Well said.
Bang on.
Props to Regis and Kripp, two of the best HS streamers out there. Not satisfied with Blizzard’s hipocrisy though: they tried to count this as a collective win, but nothing stopped them from inviting more women in the first place, it’s not like they couldn’t have switched some of the lesser known streamers in the list in favour of more female ones. It’s not their win at all, but it’s also not that big of a win in the first place: this kind of representation is something is you can feel good about only when it’s not done by the same company who tried to pander to the Chinese government over and over again. I don’t know about you, but I feel like the whole Honk Hong scandal speaks volumes on what Blizzard values more, and until it doesn’t come clean from that garbage, having two more female streamers in the Innvitational won’t make me revaluate the company as a whole, even more so because it wasn’t even their initiative in the first place.
I deleted that entire comment chain. You’re all entitled to your opinions, but if you want to be hurtful to others for no reason at all, please just keep your comments to yourself. It’s one thing to criticize Blizzard’s decisions and another to directly attack Hearthstone community members. You really gain nothing from saying that and can make someone’s day miserable, is that what you really want?
If I see more transphobic etc. comments, I’ll just start banning, so be warned.
I dont know what was said before, but we still have comments (DarkParsley) telling people in pretty plain terms to poison and hang themselves and that it would be better for the world.
Just an FYI that her comments don’t seem in line with the site’s community guidelines.
Sorry, I approved it by mistake. Deleted it again. Those comments are not appreciated no matter which “side” you’re on.
No problem, I appreciate you doing that. Again, I wasn’t here for whatever went down and didn’t want to get involved.
Not surprising seeing Regis ageee to step down but pleasantly surprised to see Kripp do it. A lot of respect for them for stepping down.
Big shout out to RegisKillBin and Kripparian for stepping down, huge respect to them for doing so. Love to see more diversity in these sort of events
Ok, but why?
Regis and Kripp are two of the biggest names in that list, this is going to hurt the tournament. Companies do not care about “inclusion” or “representation”. Blizzard thinks that virtue signaling like this will compensate the censorship of every female character they own, and the constant pandering to the chinese government.
Because Regis and Kirpp chose to. Which it says in the headline. And the article. Blizzard didn’t make this choice. They did.