https://www.wired.com/story/hong-kong-tripwire-tech-firms-china/ > On Wednesday morning, Mark Kern sat down with his 12-year-old son to tell him the guild was breaking up. Kern had been involved with World of Warcraft from the very beginning—a game developer himself, he was the original team leader for the title when Blizzard Entertainment launched it in 2004—and was a steadfast player of WoW Classic, a throwback version of the game that launched in August. Yet, things had changed. Over the weekend, an esports player for another Blizzard title, Hearthstone, had shouted a Hong Kong protest slogan on the game's official Taiwanese livestream; in response, Activision Blizzard suspended the player from high-level competitive play for a year and said it would not pay out his past winnings, claiming that he had violated rules barring acts that "offend a portion or group of the public." > For Kern, who was born in Taiwan and spent time in Hong Kong, the studio he'd called home for nearly eight years had changed. He told his son that he had decided to cancel his WoW subscription, putting an end to their family tradition. "I explained how … people [in Hong Kong] were very concerned about their freedom and China's history of human rights abuses," Kern tells WIRED on Discord. "I told him that Blizzard had punished a Hearthstone player for supporting Hong Kong and what that punishment entailed." His son decided to do the same.