Just FIRED Ythisens And gave $15 MILLION to some SUIT

Community General Discussion
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#rehireYthisens

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Communication isn’t just talking. It’s also listening. Probably the most important thing the CM team does is filter ideas from the players to present to the developers as suggestions for implementation.

I know of at least three forum suggestions that were implemented and fixed what they were intended to fix. They were:

  1. A change to auction house fees to discourage the posting of individual items for commodities to fix what were at the time serious issues with auction house lag.

  2. Addition of minority faction war mode kill quests to help balance ganking across factions, and thus help balance war mode participation. This was implemented in the Against Overwhelming Odds quest and resulted in largely fixing the factional war mode participation imbalance to the point where the quest went away, as designed, in a few weeks.

  3. Changing the war mode bonus/compensation to be a variable percentage based on faction participation. This was needed to maintain faction balance after the imbalance was no longer bad enough to require Against Overwhelming Odds, and has thus far succeeded.

I happen to be familiar with these because I was one of the people making these particular suggestions. That probably means there were lots of other good forum ideas that they acted on that I’m not aware of because they were in areas of the game I don’t follow as closely. But there are even more forum suggestions that are not good ideas, just whining for stuff that will just help the poster’s own characters.

While Ythisens was there, the CM team did a good job of filtering out the chaff and sending on potential wheat to the devs for consideration. At some times in the past, they’ve done a far worse job. Will the current good job continue without him? I hope so, but I’m far from certain.

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He’s just trying to stay gold! :smiley:

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I like what you’ve said about communism but there is a clear issue with management here, something is amiss…

If you want to think about it in the classic “trickle down” sense, if there is rot and disease at the top it too will trickle down and affect the rest of the company severely

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And this makes it better how?

With stock, you are not taxed until you sell it, so instead of getting taxed off an extra 13 mil for the year, he is only getting taxed on anything he decided to sell that year + whatever dividends were received. Oh and dividends (if not reinvested) that would be more then I ever make in a year.

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At least pretending to listen would go a long way also. Threads such as The new Guild UI and Permissions...yikes - #446 by Dynara-zuljin have been waiting since July the 18th for even the slightest acknowledgement that Blizzard is listening. July the 18th was 209 days ago. Many people, myself included, feel this is a very important topic that has gone completely ignored. A simple post from a blue goes a long way.

We need a CM who at least pretends to care, it’s a shame we don’t have some of the older ones. I have said it a dozen times and I still stand by my statement; the last CM that was worth his weight was Bashiok.

I don’t feel bad.

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I and many others have tried to ram this through his thick skull many, many, many times already.

He doesn’t listen.

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People didn’t believe it before but as I mentioned last month, the $15 million to the ‘new’ CFO is to do the dirty work of first, reducing headcount, and second, (the more gritty part) imposing fiscal discipline on operating units going forward.

The two CFO’s (corporate and unit) who quit last year saw this coming and had no desire to play the hachetman/woman. Or didn’t get offered enough compensation to play the role of the corporate henchman/woman. Looks like $15 mill was the number for the current CFO.

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It isn’t a lie. $15M is $15M whether you are paid in cash or diamonds or stock.

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laid off, not fired. You may not want to believe it, but there is a difference. Getting fired usually is for job performance reasons,or disciplinary reasons, and can leave a permanent blemish on your work history record. Getting laid off doesn’t. If they were laid off there is a good possibility that if they ever do any rehiring than those folks who got laid off would probably be the first contacted to see, if they wanted to come back to work. If they were fired then chances are there would be no chance on being rehired. People need to quit making these stupid spam threads about it anyways, or at least get the facts right before spewing hearsay. Now were they fired, or laid off?

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Just like we all figured, J Allen Brack is running Blizzard into the ground.

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I’d rather have one that actually listens and helps make the game better than one who just pretends to listen and says nice things in a thread without Blizzard actually doing anything.

What they did to the guild interface was a travesty, but it would take a lot of work to fix without breaking communities, and not a lot of people seem to be carrying through on the threat to let their subscriptions expire, so they aren’t losing a lot of subs over it.

In contrast, the auction house fix was a quick fix, and the war mode problem was causing a lot of people to quit the game, so from a financial point of view, the cost benefit was a lot better. And Blizzard is all about cost benefit these days.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect Blizzard to say, truthfully, “we aren’t prioritizing the the guild interface fix because you guys aren’t really unsubscribing because of it.” Then people actually would unsubscribe, and it would still be difficult to fix.

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You, Samar, i like you. Well said.

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Oh wow… really? Facepalm

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lol they fired that guy? rip tseric

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Karma didn’t catch up with all those bankers who profited from the sub-prime mortgage scams in 2004-2008. Or from the dot com bubble in the late 1990s. They got their bonuses and many retired in their 40s and 50s.

The reason why they do what they do is because it works in the semi-capitalist economy we have. It’s a power thing and they have the power.

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I wonder how many people will get this reference

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Gimme Hotpockets/pizza/stuffed artichokes, red bulls on tap and i’d do it oh and ranch dressing and i’d do it and i’d give the majority of players what they want.

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stay gold ponyboy?

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I’ll only make one comment on this:

I feel for the person, but I also remember a forum complaint that he “only replies in fluff threads.”

So based on the forum user perspective, the consensus was that he was not having much of a “community impact.” I have no idea if this was something he did, or because Blizzard didn’t allow him/them to make replies on all of the “hard” questions/issues that players posted about.

Either way, it painted a target on him if you going to “cut costs.”

In fact, day after day I’ve seen threads saying that the CMS here are pointless. Many of them may have even been by the same people who complain now, after said persons were let go (which is again, unfortunate.)

So if you look at this honestly, if WE thought that how likely is it that THEY also thought that? It may have been their polices which censored what the CMS did, but either way it ends up being the same result.

Then you’ll also remember that they ADDED a WHOLE MESS of MVPs; The MVPS have had quite a presence on the forums, so it seemed to me that the writing was on the wall? Even I applied to be an MVP.

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