One of the original emotes from World of Warcraft was removed from Classic, and at first there were plenty of questions as to why. Especially when they apparently still haven’t filtered out certain slurs.
On July 30 WoW players on the game’s Public Test Realm (PTR) noticed that they were no longer able to use the /spit emote on other players.
Literally, all the chat prompt would say was “X character spits on Y character,” no animations, nothing like that. So it was a surprise to some people that you could no longer use it on other players.
As WoW Classic player Mindtrick points out above on the official Warcraft forums, /spit has been around since day one in Azeroth (the emote would be old enough to drive if it were a person). Now, it can’t be used on other human players at all anymore.
This seems like a minor gripe, as a member of popular MMO streamer Asmongold’s chat informed him, they may have made it so you can’t spit on another player in chat, but amazingly, you’re still able to call them a racial slur.
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“They removed /spit, but they didn’t remove the n-word,” Asmon said, while laughing at just how ridiculous Blizzard seemed to be handling things. “I mean like wow, what is this?”
One possible reason, if the removal of the emote wasn’t related to Blizzard’s ongoing lawsuit, is that /spit was removed because there was an addon players could download that would automatically target and use the emote on anyone within range that had the deluxe, cash-only mount.
One user on Reddit suggested, “I guess Blizz was worried people would be afraid to buy the mount LULW. While another added, “they found a spit emote too problematic and ‘toxic’ because people were using it against players who spent money on their cash shop.”
Whatever the reason, only removing /spit and not cleaning up the in-game chat at the same time has more than just Asmongold and his viewers shaking their heads.