World of Warships: Pan-Asia flag controversy
After a massive review bombing from Chinese players on the Steam version of World of Warships, Wargaming decided to replaces the flag of every ship in the Pan-Asian tree into a dragon flag, which caused controversy from non-Chinese players.
Background
At the 2017 Tokyo Game Show, Wargaming announced the new nation tech tree into their online ship battle game World of Warships: Pan-Asia, a combination of five Asia-Pacific nations (People's Republic of China, Republic of China (Taiwan), Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand). The flag representing this line is a red dragon flag, however, the ship from various nations in this line is hanging their naval jack representing the navy forces they came from.
When World of Warships was ported into Steam on November 2017. it sparked controversy for the Mainland Chinese players for including the Kuomintang flag (ROC flag) and mentioning the Republic of China. resulting in the Steam version of World of Warships being flooded with negative reviews from Angry Mainland Chinese people saying "Taiwan is a part of China".
Reaction
After the massive negative feedback from Mainland Chinese players, Wargaming decided to replace all Naval Jacks of Pan-Asian ships into a single red dragon flag. But, instead of applying these changes to the Steam server (one of the only two servers accessible by Mainland Chinese players other than the Chinese server operated by KhongZong Inc.) Wargaming applied these changes on every server around the world. They also deleted the history section of the nations included in the Pan-Asian line in the Wargaming Wiki and replaced with short description said "The Pan-Asia is the special nation in World of Warships that does not cover any specific nations" , and started another controversy from all around the world.
Many World of Warships players pointed out that this was Wargaming's attempt to not upset Mainland Chinese players, but this was also disrespectful to other non-Chinese nations that got their flag replaced, as the red dragon flag strongly resembles to the Chinese.
Later, Wargaming announced that they will restore the original flags into the game in 0.7.4 update, with an option to switch between the original flag and the Pan-Asian flag.