Cameo of Lilith’s Staff and the Avaril in Board Game Online
└ posted on Sunday, 28 October 2018, by Novil
Board Game Online features a good number of magical artifacts, and they have just added two items from Gaia, Lilith’s staff and the Avaril!
They are already listed on the items page (Click on the thumbnail to see the screenshot in full resolution):
As you can see, they gave the items the correct, high-level, magical powers:
- Lilith’s staff grants focused spellcasting, making all spells of the player immune to defenses against spells.
- The Avaril grants floating, allowing the player to fly 6 to 10 steps forward or backward.
I think the artwork of this online board game looks quite endearing and professional. So you may want to check it out if online board games are something that interests you.
After reading the game’s FAQ, I can’t help but feel like BGO is something that one should stay far away from. Specifically, their defense of allowing players to use offensive words. “Most of these terms have become very common….” Uh, yeah, among hateful bigots.
They defend racial and sexual slurs right alongside sensitive, but reasonable to defend, topics like AIDS. I’m not about to use a service from people that think it’s perfectly ok to call people “n-ers” and “f-ots” (terms that are near-exclusively used insultingly, and near-exclusively by people that would like to wipe the relevant people off the face of the earth) and use an outright lie to defend their point of view.
I get that, being non-Americans, you may not have the perspective necessary to understand just how bad the n-word is, but it’s still disappointing to see you support such a company as Frostbolt that sees no problem with words that have connotations that entire groups of people are inferior to others and are best eliminated (f-word) or enslaved (n-word).
@ Formedras:
Hey Formedras!
We’re sorry that our reply comes so late, but better late than never. BGO is a game full of love and humor, so we’re sad that our FAQ gave you another impression.
First and foremost, BGO and its developers (just me and Silicon) are absolutely against homophobia, racism and any other form of mindless hatred. We supported non-binary genders and sexualities well before those topics got broad attention and we always aim to be as inclusive as possible. We want to spread love, never hate.
The thing you refer to is our stance on the use of words specifically. It’s something you are free to disagree on, but it’s important to know what our stance is and why. We strongly believe that banning words directly, empowers those words and the hatred they represent. This is not my own comment section, so I’ll respectfully refer to the n-word in a censored manner. It is our belief that by enforcing rules targeted at words directly, we’d fail to address the actual problem.
We vastly disagree with the bolded statement. The n-word is predominantly used by people who troll the internet. Trolls love to use terms that are as offensive as possible. The fact that the line “Hitler did nothing wrong” is used throughout the internet doesn’t mean that those people are actual nazis. They’re almost exclusively people who want to get a rise out of others.
We don’t allow the use of all words on our website because we support hatred, but because we want to combat hatred. By taking away the power of the n-word (and all those other offensive words), we take a step towards a future where racism has died and we merely joke about the idiocy of our ancestors. A time that, in our opinion, cannot come soon enough.
Please note that we distinguish between words and actual hatred. While a player won’t be banned for the use of the n-word, they will be banned for harassing players in a racist / homophobic manner.
I hope this helps you understand our stance. BGO has a lot of edge content, but hardly any of it jokes about racism or homophobia, so your comment gives a very bad and unrealistic view of the actual game. We hope our transparency here helps. 🙂
Love,
Dys & Sil