World Of Warships developer Wargaming has apologised after issuing a promo code that hid an insult against a streamer who was formerly part of its Community Contributors program.
As reported in PC Gamer, the drama has been rooted in an ongoing tension between the developer and its community as several high-profile World Of Warship streamers have stopped playing the game in protest of its overly aggressive monetisation policies.
A Russian streamer called Turry was kicked out of the program by Wargaming for being overly critical of the development team. Following this, the developer issued a promo code to viewers of another Russian language stream last week, which provided bonus in-game content to players on Russian servers.
As observed by English-speaking players on the game’s forum, the code was ‘W0LAXU5FKUTURY5’, where the latter half’s letters “FK U TURY” appear to be a direct insult to Turry.
Since the hidden message was identified, Wargaming brought the incident up in a forum post on August 25, acknowledging the “offensive content” and that after conducting an internal audit, the employee responsible for generating the code has been suspended, while “most stringent measures were applied to him according to the results of the audit.”
“On behalf of the entire World of Warships team, we apologise to the players, the viewers of Friday’s stream, and, most importantly, we apologize to Turry,” read the post. “We made an unacceptable statement in your address and are fully aware of our responsibility.”
Wargaming has also released a new bonus code for players, TURRYWEARESORRY, which unlocks 1,500 community tokens that can be used on in-game loot, while Turry has also received an apology directly from the developer.
Elsewhere, in a large policy u-turn, Apple will let developers promote purchases outside of the App Store, thereby circumventing the commission the company takes on all purchases.
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