15 June 2012 | |
Heartbourne
Proudmoore Pride is an annual LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) pride celebration in World of Warcraft. It takes place on the Proudmoore server and is run by two main organizations: The Spreading Taint on the Horde side and the Stonewall Family on the Alliance side. The event primarily consists of a “march” through the Barrens, where players self-organize into themed floats or just walk along. Then, the party continues through Ratchet and into Booty Bay, where there are contests and general festivities. Check out the press release below and click-through for videos and more.
Proudmoore Pride 2012 Press Release
Greetings from The Stonewall Family (Alliance) and The Spreading Taint (Horde)!
I’m happy to announce that this year will be the 8th Annual Proudmoore Pride Parade and after-party Celebration — produced and hosted by our two meta-guilds. Both Taint and The Stonewall Family take great pleasure in putting together what is considered to be one of the biggest in-game parties anywhere! Previous years’ events have attracted a couple thousand toons from all over the realms and from around the world – we’d love to see even more this year!
This year’s Pride event will be held on Saturday, June 16th 2012. Alliance will begin marching at 1145a server time to join their Horde brothers and sisters who will be marching at Noon server.
If you’ve never been to Pride, and are curious what it’s like — do a google search for Proudmoore Pride — we have quite a few videos of years past up on YouTube.
The parade route this year will see the horde staging at Mor’shan Rampart — the Alliance will be staging at Honor’s Stand and meeting up with their Horde family as they begin to proceed south of Crossroads toward Ratchet, and then on the boat together for the ride to Booty Bay!
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27 October 2010 | |
Heartbourne
Many large guilds have been abuzz with the guild changes in Cataclysm for over a year. With features like guild experience, leveling, reputation, currency, and more, many plus-sized guilds had a lot to look forward to.
However, Blizzard announced that a cap of 300 members would be placed on all guilds. This would preclude guilds like Alea Iacta Est (AIE), <Taint>, and Goon Squad which each have upwards of 5,000 characters, from adding new members. There was lots of discussion on the official WoW forums and the officers of these guilds met to discuss possible solutions. Blizzard announced that the cap is largely for technical reasons, but that the developers were able to raise it to 1,000. Existing guilds would keep all current characters, but be unable to add more until they fell below the cap. All characters would be eligible for guild benefits.
The Goon Squad urged members of <Taint> to send letters directly to Mike Morhaime, CEO of Blizzard, to ask him to take action in assisting the large player base that their decision affected. Many players pointed to the good press that <Taint> generates as a safe haven for LGBT players.
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15 July 2010 | |
Heartbourne
Massively multiplayer games have a lot of opportunity for self-expression. You can customize your character’s race, their role in group play, and what you do with them day-to-day. There is massive potential for sociology and social psychology if you can somehow aggregate this kind of data. Second Life has been the poster-child for academic studies, but it really just doesn’t have the user base of World of Warcraft. Blizzard doesn’t release any of these type of statistics, but there are some services and people who are attempting to gather and analyze this type of data.
Warcraft Realms is one of the premier sites for contributing and retrieving population data and statistics. Players install an addon, then upload their data to the site to be integrated into the database. It’s unclear how accurate the data is, but it seems to be in-line with my experiences, such as the Alliance-Horde ratio on my server, class ratios, etc.
Gay-nerds.com recently posted a quick analysis of global statistics versus the statistics of Taint, the largest guild of The Spreading Taint family of guilds. Taint is a social LGBT-friendly (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) guild with open invitations; all LGBT-friendly people are welcome to join. Taint alone has 5,000 characters, and 2,493 were recorded on Warcraft Realms at the time of their study. This is a very large data set, making it excellent for analysis; Taint is largely accepted as the second largest World of Warcraft guild. Additionally, most of the members of Taint are LGBT, a significant difference from the overall player population. What differences did they find? Click-through for more.
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5 June 2010 | |
Heartbourne
June is LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) month in the US and elsewhere, and Blizzard recognized it with the gayest wallpaper that they have ever released. More importantly, it means that there are going to be lots of gay pride events around the world, including in the World of Warcraft!
Proudmoore Pride has been held every year since WoW’s launch and has been primarily run by The Spreading Taint family of guilds. This year, it will be on June 19th at noon PST. Many, many LGBT-friendly guilds and players take part in Proudmoore Pride from both factions. While I don’t know an exact number, it was easily over 500 last year, perhaps upwards of a thousand, and it has grown extremely quickly year to year, likely faster than the growth of the WoW player base. The Spreading Taint family of guilds alone reports 4,658 unique members have at some point been recorded in one of the guilds over some 12,000 characters. Even if you are not interested in the parade itself, it’s still quite an event to witness this many players in one place.
Players not currently in a guild on the US Proudmoore realm, or who would like to network with the The Spreading Taint on Horde or Stonewall Family on Alliance, can join a temporary guild connected to the other guilds’ chat. Both The Spreading Taint and Stonewall Family are already comprised of several guilds, so visitors fit right it. There are lots of guilds that participate, both Proudmoore and guest guilds from other servers, so if you are looking for an LGBT friendly guild, the parade is a great place to get to know people. The Alliance players start in Theramore and march toward Camp Taurajo, where they meet up with Horde players to march toward Ratchet to take the boat to Booty Bay for a party. If you’ve ever wanted to see a time when Dalaran is empty and you may disconnect from lag in Booty Bay, this may be your only opportunity.
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Proudmoore Pride is an annual LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) pride celebration in World of Warcraft. It takes place on the Proudmoore server and is run by two main organizations: The Spreading Taint on the Horde side and the Stonewall Family on the Alliance side. The event primarily consists of a “march” through the Barrens, where players self-organize into themed floats or just walk along. Then, the party continues through Ratchet and into Booty Bay, where there are contests and general festivities. Check out the press release below and click-through for videos and more.
