That's why. I wouldn't say it "offends" me, but it sure as hell irritates me, in part for the reasons the dev described.
I'm still not really seeing the reasons though.
Like, most of your complaints seem to be pointing out that the metrics being used are non-comprehensive and arbitrary and.. yeah. I don't think that's a problem. All metrics are arbitrary.
The second complaint seems to be that people can do this anyway and.. can they?
At the end of the day, if I was looking at this charitably, it just seems like a tool for getting people to think about the assumptions they make when designing characters. It's such a complete non-issue that I struggle to see why anyone would care one way or another, if not for the one thing that actually matters.
This is the company where a woman killed herself after naked photos of her were shared by male colleagues, which consistently pays women less than men for the same work, where a large proportion of staff have come out to report being harassed, groped and propositioned, often by men in positions of seniority, where one senior developer routinely had to physically pulled off women by his own supervisors (who nonetheless did not follow this up) at company events, and which handled these allegations so atrociously it lead to an organized walkout.
Beyond being a shallow and deeply cynical attempt by Blizzard to cover up the fact that they have been exposed as a company full of barely-socialized man-children, the problem with this tool is that ultimately its pretty meaningless. You can put characters in your media who are female, or gay, or neurodivergent, but you cannot create media which
includes people who fall into those groups unless you actually understand them. To actually create diverse media, you need diverse creators who can draw on their own experiences or that of people they know and are close to, and Blizzard can't do that because they don't hire diverse people and they've driven any they did hire out by being a company full of abusive shitheads.
Blizzard aren't creating diverse characters. They make the characters they would make anyway and then make social media marketing tweets about how that character is actually pansexual or epileptic or from Burundi. Wow! Breaking new ground here! The sad fact is that Blizzard doesn't make games with sophisticated enough writing that any of this is ever going to matter, it's just a sad dance to whip up online hype from fanboys looking for an excuse to like the thing they already like without needing to think too hard about the conditions under which it was produced.
There is no tool or technique or system which is going to let a bunch of homogenous guys (who didn't have the self awareness to realise what a stable of horseshit they were working at) create characters who are actually going to matter or mean anything to a diverse audience. The audience isn't that dumb.
