The Elder Scrolls Online has long been a welcoming community for queer players, with yearly Pride Parades, LGBTQ+ streamers in the official ESO Stream Team, guilds proudly flying their rainbow colours, and its creative director telling bigots to get lost.
However, just a month after Pride, developer Zenimax Online Studios came under fire after a former employee alleged she was pushed out by transphobic policies, while ZOS was alleged to be doing “nothing” to combat bigotry. Several streamers said that its actions (or rather, inaction) had led to a spike in hatred throughout the community.
This finally came to a head when a Discord server for queer players organised by Twitch streamer Locke, who also helmed in-game Pride Parades, was targeted and shut down using a newly-discovered method. Until Locke’s Pride Discord, there were much fewer ways to interact with other LGBTQ+ ESO fans. You could either get in touch via the forums or Twitter, which are by nature public spaces that cannot be moderated by queer players; LGBTQ+ guilds; via LGBTQ+ streamers who have their own spaces alongside moderated chats, or in smaller servers. There wasn’t a collective spot for queer players to come together, it was more fragmented and spread apart, but Locke’s Discord aimed to bridge those gaps and let queer players find each other in a safe and protected space.
“While I don’t have the full scope of how it happened, here is my understanding,” Locke says. “Some people joined the server at some point and posted normal messages. They then later edited those messages to say hateful things and change the context. The server was then reported, as it appeared those messages were part of the server.”
This led to the server's irreversible deletion, which Locke revealed on Twitter at the end of July. “For those of you who may have noticed, the ESO Pride Discord server is no longer there,” Locke tweeted. “Sadly, according to Discord, there is no way to recover it.”
Locke is also a community member of the Discord admin team and claims that this tactic is used to destroy other servers, and it's not a new phenomenon. YouTuber No Text To Speech highlighted the method in their video, “Strange Discord Raid Method that Bans Servers”, which was posted 12 days ago. Despite this, Discord has not addressed the tactic or outlined any plans to combat it publicly.
We reached out to Discord to ask if it’s A) aware of the issue that has now been employed against queer spaces and B) how it plans to stop people from doing it. This was its response, “Discord has a zero-tolerance policy toward hate and violence. We are committed to ensuring that our platform is a positive and safe place for all our users and any behaviour that goes counter to that is against our mission.”
The shutdown of the LGBTQ+ Discord server is an attack on queer ESO players everywhere and makes it clear that even just coming together is something these bigots will not allow. But that hasn’t dissuaded Locke, as they already have plans to make a new server when things quieten down.
“I’ll work to get something back up,” Locke says. “While it’d gotten mostly quiet after Pride the intention was to have a place for people year-round to share, find inclusive guilds, people to play with, etc. I still want to provide that space, just sucks I have to start over.”