Pretty sure Avalon is not a fan of the competing game.
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I guess, Free what surprises me is my naive notion that treating others with some semblance of respect is common sense. Apparently not.
Alcohol at the workplace opens up a company to major liability - if someone where to drive home and get in a head on collision. Common sense missing again.
I’m not going to get into all of the sexual harassment items, as they are all egregiously contemptible and defy common sense again! That’s what I guess surprises me, is the level of which this stuff was going on.
An occasional person walked out the door is one thing, but this bespeaks of a culture run amok.
Anyway I’ve talked enough about it, dang man I’m just an old (white) man, I certainly don’t bring anything to the conversation. Though I do though believe in respect for all and therefore I do post support for those mistreated in this issue.
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How would you know what I know? I can’t see it’s different from when a female know-it-all elplains something obvious in a condescending way to another woman.
This sounds like it could be a bunch of creepy guys, but it’s no different to what some women do in the office - a touch on the arm or on the wrist whilst saying something work related or not. Some men actually don’t like that.
-It does not make anything better by calling either person some sexist word.
The guys in your example are creepy, but please don’t put that label on all men. -You do that by using that creepy word.
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I can agree on all these points except the one about seniority. Unless seniority means something different in the US
Seniority does not qualify anything. No one can be better just because they were hired first.
Seeing and hearing about other people who stand up for themselves can make a difference in what amount of abuse people will endure before they say no. But no one should endure years of abuse. Maybe it would be better if we could go back to when women slapped men who misbehave. -My grandmother always had a hat pin ready when she went out, and nobody bothered her.
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Yep. If one were to harass a mule and get a swift kick, I wouldn’t blame the mule.
If justice were only so simple with humans. The ability to lie changes everything.
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Yes and no. A lot of places have limited slots for training or advancement and will tell you to “wait your turn” - if all else is equal. So someone who has been there 3 years may get the first chance at a project lead training course when it comes open vs someone who has been there 6 months. This is, of course, if all else is equal. Seniority tends to mean experience and performance reviews to base selection on.
The lawsuit has a several examples of where well performing experienced people were passed over for newbies who were friends with management.
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Highly competitive? Long run? You wish they are mate.
- They are all just clueless chicken shooting in the dark, hoping to hit that sweet spot that will make them enough sales. Besides, the words “long term strategy” are practically derogatory among execs.
- Games are not a mutually exclusive product. It’s not a frying pan or a car, where if you get one, you won’t need any others for quite some time. New studios appear all the time, and new games appear all the time, and there is no one player that completely dominates the market, like Microsoft or Amazon.
In order to succeed in gamedev, or in any field really, a company needs to suck no more than their next rival. That’s enough. And it appears that’s what they are doing:
-- The famous Kotaku article about Riot Games
https://kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-games-1828165483
-- Riot CEO under investigation
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/9/22275059/riot-games-ceo-investigation-gender-discrimination-sexual-harassment-allegations
-- Some others
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/27/20835249/game-developers-sexual-assault-publicly-accused-allegations-metoo
-- Female streamers
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/23/style/women-gaming-streaming-harassment-sexism-twitch.html
-- Ubisoft resignations
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/gaming-ubisoft-metoo-harassment-1.5657963
They are competing against companies with exactly the same cultural issues. Is this a norm in the entire industry? You tell me.
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I won’t say I have never done that. I have. However doing it at work, even if you are 100% right, gets you fired. If reporting someone who grabs your parts gets you re-assigned because mgt protects them, do you think assault on your part is going to help? It just gives them a solid excuse to “fire a troublemaker”.
Trust me 
Been there. Done that. If I had not been so young and tiny I would have been likely up for charges as well - and no, the person who assaulted me did not even get a talking to. They laughed. It was “funny” that I tried to defend myself and make it very clear my backside was off limits.
At this point I just stick to hitting strangers who dare to touch me.
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I always thought Blizzard had a very progressive and decent working environment. I guess that was the illusion we were fed though. Google was portrayed that way as well and turned out to have a lot of issues.
Big yikes. I guess plenty of attorney’s are off in cray-cray land though.
PS: holding scumbags accountable shouldn’t be a political issue, though I realize that one team keeps voting for predators and those who enable and defend them for some reason
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Uh no. You can fund examples all across the spectrum. For an example just use the former and current Presidents. Power corrupts.
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The truth likely is that it can also be those things. Then you just have some ‘rotten apples’ and the people who protect them. Not sure which is worse.
The management who do not fire an abuser might very well be progressive, genuinely trying to ensure non-discrimination, anti-harassment etc. in the workplace. Until the person who is discriminating happens to be their long-term buddy. Then they find a way to look the other way.
Just like a lot of people do not even see that there are discriminatory wage gaps, unequal job opportunities etc. They are not necessarily trying to actively create this environment. They are just blind to it.
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Possibly, but in this case it sounds like there might be a significant number of people both participating in what was going on as well as people very high up looking the other way.
I’m also curious how long it went on for. Was it always that bad or did it get worse after certain key figures higher up left? Did it used to be better and then after X Y and Z left, the people who took over didn’t have the leadership ability to hold things together? Or were the original Blizzard big guys who left that a lot of people looked up to actually really terrible leaders as well?
Alex Afrasaibi who is named in the lawsuit as the predator with the “Cosby suite” has worked there on WoW since 2004. If that tells you anything. He very quietly left summer of 2020 and is not credited in most of the current expansion.
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Hell, I would be surprised if he was responsible for 800 claims. Dude always struck me as a predatory creep.
Like the union situations. Anti-union peeps love to point to the 1 bad thing that happened and act as if it’s how it’s always is. I’ve read first hand accounts that this isn’t wide spread throughout Blizzard.
Makes me think it’s might be mostly limited to the WoW teams where you had the more high profile “untouchable” senior players amongst the largest teams, on the game making all the bank. Easier to cover up or look the other way.(admittedly I haven’t read the case info yet, just going off what I’ve seen discussed so far so it could be happening throughout the company.
I don’t think I ever met him. I have met several people, and toured the WoW offices but he was not around I guess. The folks I mostly interacted with are Community Managers (not a shock) and some of the more tech related folks. I also toured the D3 offices.
Nobody I met is on the bad list, but that does not mean that stuff did not go on during normal work days when strangers were not in the offices.
The only person at Blizz I met that I did not like was Travis Day. Former member of the Diablo team. He was not a creep or anything. He just came off as really arrogant and dismissive to me the two times we met and talked. So I chalk that up to him being busy with Blizzcon or something? I don’t know.
I’ve never met him either, but all of his mannerisms, looks, and the way he carried himself just reminds me of people I know(knew) that here harassers/predators. I could be totally off base, but he was named and was the owner of the suite where bad stuff happened.
Yea, and he seems like he was pretty high up the food chain fairly early as well. I guess I’d still wonder if previous people had kept him more in line until they left, but even if that was the case that would mean they knew he was someone who needed to be kept in line and chose to keep him around all that time anyway.
I also have to wonder if Jeff Kaplan’s friendship with him somehow protected him and kept him around longer and if that’s in anyway related to Jeff recently leaving as well.
Even if they aren’t specifically named or directly part of it, a lot of the old “good guys” at Blizzard have a lot of question marks now.
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I liked Jeff when he was on the OW team, but he was just as arrogant and a real a-hole and bombastic online when he was a EQ raider. They were all a big part of the boys club that ran WoW. I’m sure he knew he may have been that participated. But there us no way people like Metzen, Morhaime, Kaplan, JAB, and the other top guys didn’t know what was going on and I’m sure they were complicit in helping to look the other way and cover it up.
I know this is Blizzard forum, but this has gone on and still goes on currently in many studios. Almost monthly a new story comes out about why someone left Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Ubisoft, and so on because of sexual harassment/abuse.
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