World of Warcraft: Current Year

Sieger · Jul 27, 2021

Fucker said:
I've done it, so it's not like I'm getting my ideas from reruns of Night Court. Granted, Mist might not have a case because she was probably playing Warcraft the whole time and trying to claim it as work. In my case it was dead easy to fix because all the hours worked were logged. Simple mistake that slipped through the cracks. They weren't a bunch of dirtbags, but I could see how a dirtbag company would do it just to screw with someone.

I don't doubt that an otherwise reasonable employer who just fucked up would make things right. In my experience most employers that really fuck people on back wages are smaller, and often in various states of financial distress. One of the shadiest fucks I ever worked for owned a few restaurants (I did short stints at a lot of restaurants/bars as part time gigs in college) in my college town and was always in financial trouble. He actually was in the news some years later for owing a guy thousands in back wages, the guy actually successfully got a judgement against him in court, and years later was still trying to collect.

Runnen said:
While I agree some youtubers/streamers/influencers think way too highly of themselves and how much anyone gives a shit about what they think, it's undeniable that some of them leaving WoW / going into another game IS having a major impact. Especially since Blizzard basically cut all communications towards the player community a couple years ago, so the players get their news from youtubers.

Only a couple weeks ago, Asmongold alone with his own stream was having almost 3 times the viewers compared to ALL the WoW content streams on Twitch. (200K for him, 73K total WoW)

He's definitely the largest influencer in this game, but every time another one joins the exodus, it's going to tip some people in the direction to cancel or move on because they were already on the verge for a while.

Blizzard's been too lazy for this expansion, they thought they're too big to fail, that players will keep playing no matter what because there's no other avenues to pursue, and it's been sometimes true in the past, but the context has changed, there's a serious rival now, and it's an aging game. Laziness and delays just won't cut it anymore.

I still play WoW, mostly because I'm an old MMO gamer that doesn't want to move onto another one because I really want this one to be my last one, MMOs take way too much time and I stopped raiding or caring about anything competitive like 13 years ago. I play it because I'm a OCD collector of various useless shit and sunk-time fallacy.

Quite a few people in my dwindling friends list in WoW do stuff for the same reason : I do it so once it's done I don't have to do it anymore.

MMOs as a whole have always been joked about as being a second job you pay for, but it's never been more true than now for WoW.

And how many players are just logging in to go through the motions, and then they see on MMO-Champion or Wowhead or whatever other snowflake website of WoW news that soandso stops streaming it, or leaves out of protest, or whatnot.. it's going to make them realize even more that they should just cancel their sub.

I always give the new WoW expansions a try and yeah, BfA and Shadowlands have both been short stints for me. I got into FFXIV for like 3 months around a year or so ago, and it's a well made game. It was/is a little hard for me to look past the mega weeb culture and all the weirdos playing it, but I really do appreciate that Square seems to take an almost opposite stance from Blizzard on most core game mechanics. Square deliberately doesn't structure things such that you feel compelled to log in every single day and do shitty grinds that aren't fun. I also think that group/raid content unless you get to the very extreme high levels, is a lot more open and easy to get into in XIV than in WoW. WoW has so many gate keepers, there's shitty guilds that don't even do anything beyond Heroic raiding that hyper analyze your parses and things like that. My uncle who is in his 60s, and was the one who got me into EQ back in the day, has played WoW casually for years. He's oddly still fairly decent for someone his age, he's always done PvP a lot and usually gets fairly high ranked in the rBG scene each patch, but he also will occasionally do Heroic or low end Mythic raids. He was in a guild that advertised itself as casual back in BfA, specifically only did Heroics and PVP. He was a Warlock at the time, and was usually one of their top 3 DPS on every raids. But he still had an officer in that guild basically giving him "counseling" sessions about how he was only using a certain ability 40% of the time when a top parser on WarcraftLogs was using it 45% of the time, and other nitpicky shit like that. He just peaced out of that guild, because he's like if we're going to be doing casual content and I'm basically one of the top DPS in the guild, I don't really care to get hassled over min max bullshit.

I have 0 issue with hardcore min maxers if you're like, US Top 100 Mythic guild or higher. I.e. you're in a guild that's seriously pushing to be competitive. But for most of the rest of WoW I think it's just a bunch of little soy boy posers who want to seem hardcore but really aren't. The sort of metagaming these clowns do extended into WoWC / TBC as well which completely turned me off doing those nostalgia servers.

Ehrgeix · Jul 27, 2021

Yeah, I was looking forwards to classic but the actual rerun was garbage - it just seems like such a crazy game to tryhard that much in.

kinadin · Jul 27, 2021

Sieger said:
All the incel mouthbreathing in this thread aside, any plaintiffs attorney worth their salt starts salivating at words like "not kept confidential" and "retaliation." Those are the bedrock of high dollar (successful) harassment suits and will usually result in big money settlements.

This is the same takeaway I had. My assumption was at least one person in this complaint had to have reported the behaviors to at least HR, and any modern company is going to have HR under the legal departments umbrella. If they followed the proper channels and their reports weren't kept confidential and/or weren't protected from retaliation then Blizzard has already lost the lawsuit. The entire time I read the suit I kept expecting to see some involvement from their general counsel and I don't believe I saw anything along those lines. Definitely not a good sign at all.

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

Hierarchy actively complicit in helping cover cases up.

Victims who were generally marginalized in society (the Priests were often targeting lower income kids from broken homes)

Government officials disinterested in investigating cases brought to their attention.

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.

In all honesty, we (as a society) need to start teaching people that predators manipulate in-group preferences to hide in plain sight. This is why they often are in trusted community positions, such as religious authority, public education professionals, community organizers, etc. You can see how easily a predator can defend themselves against accusations by manipulating these in-group preferences when you examine someone like Andrew Cuomo or Larry Nassar. A large group of people will reflexively say, "No, not this person! That can't be true!" when a credible accusation is levied.

At Blizzard, these people were "looked up" for some reason, so others likely made themselves believe it wasn't as bad as the victims said because maybe they only witnessed portions of the abuse that they viewed as harmless (e.g. arm around the shoulder, back rubs, etc.). Same concept, just different environment.

Fucker · Jul 27, 2021

Mist said:
You are almost as big of a know-nothing asshole as Foler, yet Foler is clearly trying to post as a humorous, one might even say Trump-ean persona, while you are just a stupid asshole.

BWAHAHA. it's easy to trigger LARPing morons like you by calling out your blatant, childish lies. You live in a shit shack, the very same shit shack you grew up in, and you - by your very admission - live in the same bedroom you grew up in. You try to make us believe that you are some highly paid, ultra tech savvy wizard, but you can't figure out how a thermostat or a window works. You've been sweating your fat ass off in that tiny room for decades, but have so much money laying around, you can waste $20k, but not spend $5k to have a working HVAC unit installed.

You are truly numb from the nuts up.

:honkler:

CaughtCross · Jul 27, 2021

Anecdotal, but I have seen a few of the smaller WoW streamers I follow start FF14 in the past week. And the entitled employees of Blizzard think customers wanting to play new content is part of the problem.

swayze22 · Jul 27, 2021

CaughtCross said:
Anecdotal, but I have seen a few of the smaller WoW streamers I follow start FF14 in the past week. And the entitled employees of Blizzard think customers wanting to play new content is part of the problem.

It's like sports. We don't care about you, we just want the product. Especially when everything is misrepresented BS these days.

When I buy dinner at a restaurant i'm not buying an emotional commitment to the well being of the server & chef's lives.

These self righteous virtue signalers are so tired.

Sieger · Jul 27, 2021

Frankly I don't even think most WoW fans want new content, we want content that actually makes the game fun again. I don't think the core structure of the team has changed so much since Legion that they physically can't produce good content anymore, I think it's more that bad decisions are being made and perpetuated. I'd happily see WoW release content less frequently if it was higher quality.

kinadin said:
This is the same takeaway I had. My assumption was at least one person in this complaint had to have reported the behaviors to at least HR, and any modern company is going to have HR under the legal departments umbrella. If they followed the proper channels and their reports weren't kept confidential and/or weren't protected from retaliation then Blizzard has already lost the lawsuit. The entire time I read the suit I kept expecting to see some involvement from their general counsel and I don't believe I saw anything along those lines. Definitely not a good sign at all.

Right, and the big thing is, just as an example, if someone reported Alex/Furor was doing stuff he shouldn't have done it doesn't matter if it was true or not. If HR took that complaint, leaked it outside the HR org, and then facilitated retaliation against the employee, the company is in fuck city at that point legally speaking. Now Alex/Furor on a personal level may not be because maybe the allegation wasn't accurate, or maybe doesn't actually rise to the level of being harassment, but the HR process breaking down is basically a black letter violation by the corp.

Warrik · Jul 27, 2021

My problem with the “Believe Victims” mantra is this:

it takes the stance of guilty first, prove your innocent which is not how our legal system works. It opens the door for anyone to accuse, exaggerate, or lie about a person and destroy lives.

In this case it seems there is some significant evidence and proof that bad shit went down, but some of these stories are shady/suspect.

Dirtbags will do dirtbags things, but over sensitive women or women who turn regret into victimization also exists. I think both are at play here

Sieger · Jul 27, 2021

Warrik said:
My problem with the “Believe Victims” mantra is this:

it takes the stance of guilty first, prove your innocent which is not how our legal system works. It opens the door for anyone to accuse, exaggerate, or lie about a person and destroy lives.

In this case it seems there is some significant evidence and proof that bad shit went down, but some of these stories are shady/suspect.

Dirtbags will do dirtbags things, but over sensitive women or women who turn regret into victimization also exists. I think both are at play here

I think the original genesis of "Believe Victims" was specifically as a pushback against the organizational stance that the default behavior should be "ignore victims and sweep complaints under the rug." I put it akin to what if someone shows up at a police station saying they've been defrauded of $25,000. The default stance by an investigator of crimes (in a police context) or of "institutional wrong doing" (in cases of a corporate or organization investigating internal allegations) should be to take the claim seriously and investigate it. That should not then extend to, once a suspect is identified and evidence compiled, pre-supposing the suspect of guilt--there still has to be an adjudication.

Like many things in our culture things like the #MeToo movement which started from a good place got weaponized as part of crazy/stupid culture wars, and morphed into a guilty until proven innocent mentality that causes more harm than good, and I've seen it cause a lot of men to just assume any claims are fake, which actually isn't healthy. It's a jury's job to start with the legal position of innocent until proven guilty, that mantra isn't always appropriate in interpersonal relationships. I.e. if your daughter comes to you and says she was raped, you probably shouldn't respond with "okay can you show me the DNA test and cell phone vide, if not please shut up."

That being said the court system has never abandoned the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Where we've seen this occur is more in the world of celebrities and such, who suffer reputational harm even if things haven't been proven against them. How much sympathy I feel about that varies based on the situation, but as a default multimillionaire celebs aren't people I spend a lot of time worrying about.

Big_w_powah · Jul 27, 2021

I mean, Alex is Furor right?

Mist · Jul 27, 2021

Warrik said:
My problem with the “Believe Victims” mantra is this:

it takes the stance of guilty first, prove your innocent which is not how our legal system works. It opens the door for anyone to accuse, exaggerate, or lie about a person and destroy lives.

In this case it seems there is some significant evidence and proof that bad shit went down, but some of these stories are shady/suspect.

Dirtbags will do dirtbags things, but over sensitive women or women who turn regret into victimization also exists. I think both are at play here

That's why the lawsuit isn't against individuals, it's against the company for allowing shit like this to happen constantly, for over a decade.

While individual stories against individual people might be exaggerated, basically everyone involved, including the officers of the company when you read between the lines of their own admissions, agrees that the company culture was a total dumpster fire and tons of bad shit happened and was rarely if ever punished.

Sieger · Jul 27, 2021

As much as HR is oft-reviled at like every company I've worked at, I do think the most egregious shit like this is no longer very common at "normal" large businesses. HR just has so much power for structuring legal liability mitigation that they tend to have the organizational heft to kind of clean shit up. Remembering that their job is to protect the company from liability, there's likely lots of managers at regular companies who are forced out of their positions long before their behavior even crosses the threshold into clear harassment. There is behavior that doesn't meet the legal standard of sexual harassment that absolutely does meet sort of the corporate governance standard of "I don't trust this person's judgement to be a higher ranking manager in this company."

It seems like a lot of these cases in the 21st century involving powerful entities tend to have things in place that "short circuit" this normal corporate HR process. Startup cultures with weak organizations, religious institutions, Hollywood outlets etc. Athletics also frequently seems to have it much worse than the rest of society, like the shit around Les Miles at LSU, or the various cases of college coaches all but helping squash rape allegations against players (see: Baylor Football), if those guys were just executives at Boeing they likely would have had their asses bounced out ages before, but you wield a lot of unaccountable power in a position like big time college football coach.

TJT · Jul 27, 2021

CaughtCross said:
Anecdotal, but I have seen a few of the smaller WoW streamers I follow start FF14 in the past week. And the entitled employees of Blizzard think customers wanting to play new content is part of the problem.

God damn right I want the next patch bitch. I don't care about your office problems in any other way than that they make your products shit and I want them to be good like they used to be.

Clean house and get to work or we'll take our money elsewhere.

Warrik · Jul 27, 2021

Sieger said:
I think the original genesis of "Believe Victims" was specifically as a pushback against the organizational stance that the default behavior should be "ignore victims and sweep complaints under the rug." I put it akin to what if someone shows up at a police station saying they've been defrauded of $25,000. The default stance by an investigator of crimes (in a police context) or of "institutional wrong doing" (in cases of a corporate or organization investigating internal allegations) should be to take the claim seriously and investigate it. That should not then extend to, once a suspect is identified and evidence compiled, pre-supposing the suspect of guilt--there still has to be an adjudication.

Like many things in our culture things like the #MeToo movement which started from a good place got weaponized as part of crazy/stupid culture wars, and morphed into a guilty until proven innocent mentality that causes more harm than good, and I've seen it cause a lot of men to just assume any claims are fake, which actually isn't healthy. It's a jury's job to start with the legal position of innocent until proven guilty, that mantra isn't always appropriate in interpersonal relationships. I.e. if your daughter comes to you and says she was raped, you probably shouldn't respond with "okay can you show me the DNA test and cell phone vide, if not please shut up."

That being said the court system has never abandoned the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Where we've seen this occur is more in the world of celebrities and such, who suffer reputational harm even if things haven't been proven against them. How much sympathy I feel about that varies based on the situation, but as a default multimillionaire celebs aren't people I spend a lot of time worrying about.

Well said. To be clear, I believe these should all be taken seriously and handled appropriately and in cases where bona fide shit went down, there has to be consequences.

xmod2 · Jul 27, 2021

Bubbles said:
Preach just said on stream that he's gonna stop covering wow (outside of friday's drama time)

He's got his hair plugs out of the deal. He's outta there.

swayze22 said:
When I buy dinner at a restaurant i'm not buying an emotional commitment to the well being of the server & chef's lives.

The restaurant industry is a good example of terrible working hours, excessive drug use and grab ass between all of the employees. But at least my god damned burger comes out on time.

sukik · Jul 27, 2021

How does this not end with surviving Blizzard being so woke and incompetent, that they make nothing but ideological drivel until they sputter out entirely?

Malkav · Jul 27, 2021

At this point the possible move for shareholders would be to just dissolve the studio and assimilate it into Activision proper.

Clean house, and let go of the bagage that is now associated with the name.

sukik · Jul 27, 2021

Malkav said:
At this point the possible move for shareholders would be to just dissolve the studio and assimilate it into Activision proper.

Clean house, and let go of the bagage that is now associated with the name.

It's pretty bad when Activision could turn out to be the good guy in any situation.

Warrik · Jul 27, 2021

sukik said:
How does this not end with surviving Blizzard being so woke and incompetent, that they make nothing but ideological drivel until they sputter out entirely?

Pretty much this. I wouldn't work for Blizzard after this under any circumstances. Not only becuase what the suit alleges, but the woke, inclusive, and toxic minefield the place is about to become. Its literally doomed.

Whats amazing is that the legacy of Blizzard, which was one of the greatest studios in history is now completely destroyed. Having Blizzard on your resume meant one thing before this, and now afterwards, its forever tarnished.

Utnayan · Jul 27, 2021

TJT said:
God damn right I want the next patch bitch. I don't care about your office problems in any other way than that they make your products shit and I want them to be good like they used to be.

Clean house and get to work or we'll take our money elsewhere.

It's amazing how fucking left this has gone not only in this industry but in hospitality.

We don't owe these fuckwads jack shit.

They make a product/service we pay for it. If it sucks, we stop paying for it. If we are not getting what we pay for, we stop paying for it. They make continual cash on the subscription to fund, develop, and deploy these content patches in between expansions and we do not give two flying fucks about your inter office garbage.

And it's in times like these everyone needs to stop buying this shit, cancel their subs, and then they can either bitch about that and go find jobs, or make course corrections so they provide quality content.

Whoever this Alex idiot is can fuck right off.

(I haven't bought this expac, I won't, and I'll be damned if this sorry sack of an organization sees any more money from me)

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World of Warcraft: Current Year

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