I remember some drama wiht OS runescape regarding pride month, and how they bypassed the community vote to put it, and other stuff, but I recall reading that they removed it after community backslash.
How has the situation regarding that (and other shenanigans like that) evolved?
Some years ago some of the developers made a pride event on their own prerogative. There were protests in-game, but these were ignored and the game continued to have a few more pride events over the years.
Then, a new CEO took over and decided to not have a pride event last year.
In-game, there were a few protests but not as substantial as the protests when pride events were added. All of the prior pride month rewards are still in the game (although there was another cosmetic that had its functionality changed in the past because it was used to troll pride events, but it hasn't been reverted).
Out of game, there were a bunch of people crying about the removal, but either these people don't actually play the game or they are only a vocal minority, because since then we have seen the game have its most successful months ever (correlation is not causation, I don't think the removal of pride month led to the success but it appears to not be a big issue to the community that actually plays the game).
That's good then, have there been any other woke shenanigans since then?
There were a whole host of DEI changes. The OSRS Wiki has a good overview of all of them.
It includes the usual suspects like character creator using body type and changing an NPC to no longer have "gypsy" in their name. My personal least favorite changes were: a change to a quest that previously required the player to switch to female in order to complete a puzzle but this is now unnecessary, and a change to a random event where the player would previously have to kiss a frog to turn them human.
The event used to have the player kiss a frog prince/princess dependent on the player's sex, now the player can get either prince or princess (it's random) but no longer has to kiss them and now has the option to "touch" them, which just sounds creepy.
There haven't been any changes like this since 2024, so hopefully we are past that era in RS.
I know in rs3 they changed the names of npcs in a town from Ali to generic Arab names, the problem is that the npcs were all named Ali for a lore reason involving the mayor's will containing a guy called Ali, so the town all named themselves Ali to get a share.
I'm sorry, I am an Arabic speaker and what's offensive about this? It's not like every desert npc is called Ali it's just one town!
Also, there was a valentine's day quest involving two lesbian thieve couple, but I didn't care a bit for them as they weren't established characters, and ozan is the only thief character I like.
They did a similar thing with the Ali town in OSRS, but they did it correctly this time: the NPCs are all named Ali until you finish the relevant quest, at which point they get renamed since they no longer need to try for the mayor's will.
Christmas event was a bit naff.
What happened?
Their focus was elsewhere, so it was just 'go to this pub, get ingredients for 4 people's Christmas dinner' fetchquest
total shitshow, just play a mod of it like 2004scape or something.