Hot off the press. Johanna Faries the former Call of Duty General Manager is the new President of Blizzard Entertainment.
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A few personal facts about me: my #1 job in life is raising two amazing boys. In addition to parenthood, a typical week for me includes finding time for daily yoga and prayer, and of course, playing video games (big Diablo IV fan over here!)
uh… yeahhhhh sounds great. They have a modern casual gamer in charge of the company. What in the holy hell is going on around here.
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I’ve always been an advocate for video game company employees that have the time to actually play video games. How else can they know what gamers want if they aren’t gamers themselves? If they’re so overworked and stressed from their job of making video games, why on earth would they want to play them?
Old Interplay slogan: “By gamers, for gamers.”
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Thanks Charles for the information. I wish you good luck Johanna Faries, what is your favourite D2R runeword?
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“Big Diablo 4 fan.” We are screwed.
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Well they are already making changes, seems like they have deleted a good chunk of sekscalibure/omnipwns recent posts and hopefully threw in a temp ban 
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Praying Diablo gamer and big IV fan, this can only get wrong if you ask me…
Let’s hope there will be more. He reported me, edited his own posts where he got personal on me and others so he can’t get a temp ban for that. Like, MANY posts been edited by him. Hes so condescending and honorless…
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Mods can see the edit history.
Not gonna lie I can’t find any sort of real history on her, and nothing that would indicate she actually plays games. So you can hold out hope, she probably has never even seen the D4 loading screen.
Edit: It looks like during everyone’s mainstream video game marketing tour she was part of the talks trying to get video games televised or organized to some degree. She might be good for esports, but I don’t see any correlation between her and video game creation and I’m assuming it is simply a generic PR prepped lie.
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According to ACG, here is some info on Johanna Faries. She graduated from Harvard, held a leadership role for NFL along w/ CoD. I will hold judgement for now and see what she does for Blizzard. Atleast she plays the games she is over, so time will tell.
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Her academic and work history was out there it was more like I wanted to look at her tweet history or perhaps a insta/facebook post where perhaps during a time before joining Acti-Blizz where she was a gamer of any sort. Or even further like pre working for NFL if she gave a crap about NFL. But all of that is either private or doesn’t exist.
Personally PR teams and all sorts are so easily willing to lie about anything especially the stuff you cannot verify I just don’t actually believe 100% that she games or gives a crap about gaming. But that doesn’t mean she won’t be good or can’t be good. And I’m not so sure I would rush to fully believing that she plays anything other than angry birds on her phone while shes in the bathroom. Countless PR teams lie, but I’m not saying I know for a certain it is a lie either.
In charge of big company, husband and two kids. I doubt she actualy plays games lol on level to understand them well.
Lets hope she also like D2R :
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And here i was thinking Blizzard was already beyond repair, only god can help us now.
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this doesn’t really seem like good news on the surface… can only hope it’s a good thing. i’m doubtful.
Her taste in games is none of my concern. I’ll wait to see what her actual leadership is like before drawing any conclusions.
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Doesn’t really matter, the old Blizzard died long ago. It’s just more gacha and micro games from here on out and her bio was written by someone else, prolly doesn’t like gaming (and gamers) at all.
Just look at their lineup, RTS genre is already dead, MMOs will be the next genre to die in the near future because people are tired of pretending to be friends with a bunch of toxic spergs to get their pixel items. Diablo (2) is too simple/boring clicky clicky typical 2000s boomer game.
They don’t have any good single player game or franchise because all they did all those years was leaning back and milking their subscription/micro/pseudo esports games that are now dead or dying.
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She’s a business person, not a game dev background. This means they’re going to massively shake up Blizzard. Good. It needs to turn from being a corporate cult of self congratulators into a company of gamers making games for gamers.
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Nothing wrong with prayer being important to someone.
Hey, maybe we’ll get a Paladin in D4 now!
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What I find really discouraging is the comment about being a big fan of D4.
First it just reflects the same old party line.
Secondly, if she really feels that way, it reflects her gaming skills, choices and philosophy.
If she was made to say it as a condition of her promotion, nothing has changed. Same old same old give them a terrible game and continue to throw good money after bad.
I wouldn’t begrudge them the $100 i spent on D4 if only they had learned something.
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Stop paying them until they bring the basic functionality like chat in d2r back to the baseline it was decades ago in D2/LOD.
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