World of Warcraft: Current Year

Elidroth said:

Only to people who victim blame..

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It's not victim blaming to have doubts about 'i was repeatedly sexually assaulted, once in front of witnesses, but kept my mouth shut for 9 years until there was a bandwagon I could jump on'

Elidroth said:

Because they (correctly) believe people won't believe them

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This excuse has been dead for years.

lol... oh Furor. Getting drunk and loudly announcing you're going to marry some random girl from the SC2 esports scene that you just met. Then follows her to her car and 'grabs em by the pussy'. What was he thinking? Sounds like cringe college dorm shit.

mkopec said:

I have also seen vindictive women too. Goes both ways bro. Again, im not in the gaming industry, never been to cali, but thiese are just my opinions. Maybe I have worked in too many professional places in my life to believe such culture existed in one of the biggest gaming companies in the world. But I could be wrong who the fuck knows what was going on there.

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100%. I've been victim to it. I've seen women play some truly psychotic games as a relationship fails.

My opinion on Blizzard is pretty simple. Management was willing to look the other way as long as the MASSIVE paychecks rolled in, and SOME probably thought any serious allegations of wrongdoing could simply be paid off with hush money, and made to go away. When you've got the kind of bank rolling in that Blizzard has, you'll do just about anything to protect the cash cow.. Now add in the fact that people in the company being harassed see management either looking the other way, or actively participating in the abuse, and do you REALLY think the people being abused are going to speak up?

IMO, Alex leaving Blizzard last year was probably a direct result of this investigation. I think he knew it was coming. Which means Blizzard knew it was coming and tried to cover it up and figure out their spin when it all came to light. Hell, Blizzard probably hoped Alex leaving the company would put it to bed and make it go away. Moving to Hawaii seems like running from California as well, but that could actually just be a coincidence. Again, my opinion only, but it sure seems pretty coincidental on the timing of it all.

Now, having said all of this, none of my opinions matter. Alex 100% deserves his due process and day in court. Just as anyone accused of anything should get.

Gavinmad said:

It's not victim blaming to have doubts about 'i was repeatedly sexually assaulted, once in front of witnesses, but kept my mouth shut for 9 years until there was a bandwagon I could jump on'


This excuse has been dead for years.

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This shit happened 9 years ago. 2012. LONG before the MeToo movement happened. The State of CA didn't come up with this investigation overnight. This shit has been happening for a long time.

wormie said:

Brett Kavanaugh had 4500 sexual harassment/abuse reports filed against him in a matter of weeks. Every report of sexual harassment or abuse without physical proof is a lie.

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I think that's a pretty big stretch. Also, you should look up what makes up sexual harassment. Often it isn't physical at all. I DO agree that allegations alone aren't enough.

Elidroth said:

100%. I've been victim to it. I've seen women play some truly psychotic games as a relationship fails.

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There's some genuinely scary stuff out there. Friend's wife was sure he was going to leave her, so she tried to off herself a few times, once on Christmas Eve. His next wife came home when I was there and she had a psychotic screaming red-faced and spittle breakdown because he kept her to the household budget that she previously agreed to. It is one thing to do that in private, but a whole different bag of worms to completely lose your shit in front of company.

I always end up with quiet bookish vanilla librarian types, which I find to be quite suitable.

Dude's got a serious Marriage fixation

Never stick your dick in crazy.

A rule to live life by if you like your penis attached to your body.

Hey Elidroth, while you're here I'd like ask that by the off chance you still have the Vanguard source code or tools maybe you could pass them on to the VG Emu devs?

How did so many priests get away with raping kids for so long? Few factors were present:

1. Hierarchy actively complicit in helping cover cases up.
2. Victims who were generally marginalized in society (the Priests were often targeting lower income kids from broken homes)
3. Government officials disinterested in investigating cases brought to their attention.
4. Social pressure to "not make trouble."

If you actually look at almost any situation of systemic abuse by people in power, you'll see a very similar set of conditions. I've been working in corporations since the mid-2000s, and never have I seen stuff like has been alleged at Blizzard, and frankly anywhere I've worked I have a high degree of belief if a woman told HR that a male manager tried to fondle her, made rape jokes, was taking part in "cube crawl" ceremonies etc, the manager would be fired. We fired a QA guy at my last job who sent a few emails to a woman in accounting that basically said "hey I heard you have tattoos, I have some too, do you want to exchange pics." This was on corporate email, he didn't actually send any pics, but his come on was just as lacking in artfulness as I wrote it. This was the same week he got married by the way. Most real corporations don't tolerate much nonsense around sexual harassment.

That being said, could I see this happening at Blizzard? Absolutely, the reason being I think the game industry has a lot of unique factors that make the studios function less like more serious corporations and more like relics of a bygone age. One of the big issues the game industry has is a huge % of the people in it are super like, obsessed with being in the industry. Most of them have dreamed of making video games their whole lives. There's a reason game industry devs work longer hours for usually shittier pay than many of their dev peers in other industries. Compared to all the nerds with CS and similar degrees who graduate each year, and how many want to get into the games industry but can't, there's a lot of people desperate to be in the industry no matter the cost.

That starts things off in an unhealthy nature. It's actually kinda similar to Hollywood right? No one is sucking dick at IBM to get to work on business reporting software, but for the chance to be a minor credited actor in a movie with Tom Cruise? Yeah maybe you do suck some dick if you're a desperate young actor. Now add on to that lots of game studios also have "startup culture" going on, and are frequently outgrowing the speed at which their business org gets built out, and it's easy to imagine things getting out of control.

The only really surprising thing about Blizzard is it's big enough and old enough that I'd have assumed it would just have accrued the business processes by now most stable companies have, but it looks like it may not have. And if you think about it, we've been told for years Blizzard was "different" than the other large studios and kept its small studio vibe (even though signs are Activision has been stamping that out vigorously the last 5 years or more), well maybe this is part of the dark side of that coin.

Now politicians I think there's a totally separate standard. Due to the ease with which you can manipulate the political system with spurious sexual harassment claims, claims against politicians that are lacking very hard, documented evidence, should generally be assumed to be false. I doubt Brett Kavanaugh has even had 1 on 1 interactions with 4500 people in his life, so harassing that many would be quite a feat, unless he had gone full Wilt Chamberlain.

No one should obviously be fired, legally punished etc without some level of evidence. But HR's job should be to pretty quickly figure out WTF is going on, stuff that happens at business functions with dozens of people present aren't going to be hard for an HR department to investigate. HR also can't leak claims made to it to third parties, and can't retaliate against employees for making claims, a lot of that is just very basic corporate legal 101 shit.

I’m just here for the popcorn.

maybe this is how morhaime gets all his IP back in a 38 studios-esque sell off as he looks down at Kotick’s whimpering husk. All he had to do was sacrifice the least talented of the EQ nerds. Tigole pats Brack on the back and says “Tell Furor it was me.”

mkopec said:

Thats the problem though. Hes already canceled. Im sure he does not give a fuck now, probably a millionaire for life, but still. The fucker will never work for ANY gaming company EVER. Regardless of guilt. Hes already been tried and sentenced.

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He left voluntarily. If being cancelled means living my life on the beaches of Kailua with a hot wife, then fucking cancel me..

Chris said:

Why are you defending a soulless multinational corporation?

Yes there's some bandwagoning by attention whores here and lurid language in the lawsuit, there always is. Filter that out.

Not a single employee has come out to say that this characterisation of Blizzard is false, other than the Bush admin lawyer who has been there 4 months and was hired specifically for this.

The state of the company and the game shows that there was something deeper going wrong, we thought it was Bobby Kotick but they have been fucking up since before Activision.

It all makes sense.

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Not a single employee has come out in support of Blizz? Well... yeah? Why the fuck would anyone step out in front of this? When you have every gaming news outlet on the planet blasting what a horrible tragic event this is, calling out the admins for being part of the problem (who are all apologizing if they ever had anything to do with anything, trying to not get caught up in the wildfire), calling out streamers who have nothing to do with Blizz but just haven't publicly come out to join the crucifixion... why would you say anythiiiiing?

If I worked at Blizz, and wanted to keep my job/way of life, the absolute last thing I would do would be to issue any kind of statement like "I've been here 8 years, love my job and coworkers, have never seen anything untoward happen, and think this is probably all just some big blown out of proportion thing". You would be MURDERED by the internet haha.

Like, look at this shit -


1,000 fucking employees signing a thing saying "Blizzard failed, we will be the change!". Do you think 90% of these people saw anything fucked up going on? Do you think 90% of them felt like they are working for frat douche party time rape company? Probably not. People want to be a part of a cause, they get to feel like they are making a difference, and are a better human being than the rest.

I'm not saying shady shit or harassment happened, people are terrible, it probably did. You know, like what happens all over, all the time..... that's humanity. I just don't get all the talk like this is some monstrous thing, and not a pretty fucking basic HR problem. By reading articles and peoples responses you would think that Blizzard execs had women chained up in the bathrooms to be used as toilets. I read the shit and I'm like "ok.. so this nerd hit on a girl a bunch? asked her to marry him?" cringy sure, not fun for her, yep, shouldn't happen at work, right. But then they go into "One supervisor had lube and a butt plug on a work trip" and I'm like.. so? Maybe the dude liked having a butt plug in his ass? What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Did he kill this girl with a butt plug? WHAT THE FUCK IS EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT?!? lol, I just don't get the outrage.

Lunis said:

Hey Elidroth, while you're here I'd like ask that by the off chance you still have the Vanguard source code or tools maybe you could pass them on to the VG Emu devs?

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Never had source or tools. I wasn't a programmer, and the tools required a connection to the database anyway.

Araxen said:

Never stick your dick in crazy.

A rule to live life by if you like your penis attached to your body.

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Except crazy is usually the most fun to stick.. um.. nevermind.