Microsoft Lays Off 1900

Same here! :slight_smile:

There are two titles I lose here and there but always over and over again. One of them is the renown explorer and i can’t remember the second one.

Bug seems similar to the old store bought transmogs randomly going away.

I just logged in and first thing in my chat!

:ocean: :dragon: :ocean: :dragon:

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No doubt

Yep. I bought it on preorder. I believed. I…played it past any legal ability to get my money back.

I still play arpg. Grim dawn itch flared up. I scratch that recently lol.

Why I love it broke records! arguments. So did fallout 76. That game was a dumpster fire for a good year and a half. Fun times , bag gate and such. Screwed over clients on bag AND would not give refunds.

That is one of the frustrating things about the current support system. It sends you a template with other resources if it thinks you are asking for a game hint, quest help, bug reports, etc.

It does not really make it clear though what services Blizzard does NOT offer. So people keep trying to ask for things that GMs are not allowed to do. I get why in high volume ticket times even an auto responder is helpful, but it frustrates players when that response does not actually clarify anything.

The number of times I have been able to explain to someone and walk them through the proper channels instead is very high. Reduces frustration to get a clear “Blizz GMs can’t do that - go here and check the comments on this” instead.

The only good place to get that info was the CS forum where Vrak has a Spotlight on GMs article he sometimes pins.

Right, but GMs don’t fix bugs 99% of the time. They are not the means to report it either. But you know that. The in-game bug report tool or Bug Report forum is. Devs fix the bugs. It is very very very rare they give GMs a tool to change something. Mostly people have to wait on a more global bug fix.

Some but so far I have not seen any at Blizzard. I did see some for COD, 76.

They are not part of the Community Management team. They are Support Forum Agents. Very different roles.

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It depends. I think Phil Spencer (the head of Xbox) is a good guy, but he isn’t in charge of Microsoft as a whole. I had hoped that he had great plans for Blizzard, but it seems like the guys in the board room have decided otherwise.

Well, I hope that this is a good thing, although I do feel bad for the people that got laid off. Hopefully they’ll find a job that suits them best.

:cat: :cat2: :cat: :cat2: :cat:

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You know who isn’t leaving? Ion.

He’s gonna stay and turn this game into a dumpster fire.

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The most disgusting part is Look at good Ole Bobby Kotick.
After the sale, he got out with his golden parachute. He got a package worth 100’s of millions of dollars. He also got to keep a good amount of stock options which are now Microsoft. Which just recently surpassed Apple as one of the highest value stocks.

So Bobby Kotick, got to get a utterly eye watering severance package as he walked out the door. And now comes the termination of all those employees.

If you thought Microsoft was going to be better. You were wrong. It is just as soulless, heartless a company as Activision/Blizz/King with Bobby K at the helm. They are just as focused on short term quarterly gains as any other company.

Look at the gaming industry right now. Most gaming companies are terminating 10% of their employees. After almost 3 years of record profits off the covid gaming boom. The shareholders, board members, and executives got their money. Rambled on about 5 year plans and hiring so many people to develop great games.

Now the market started to stabilize a bit. The covid boom plateaued. Those short term quarterly profits started to drop. Now the axe comes in and they lay off 10% of the workforce, and cancel a lot of games and projects. Get ready for lots more items on cash shops everywhere.

Corporate business is sickening at times. All for short term quarterly gains and record profits for those at the top. Then just hire people to get you there, then fire them.

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Well said Bigspanky.

Ideally the layoffs hit the management section. As its that layer who to some has taken the company down some questionable roads.

At some point devs and such I grant have no say in what they do. The suits say do it. You do it. I get that. IRL I do some stupid crap too. It keeps paychecks getting cut.

I saw that with BGS games when they started creation club. Some big name once indy mod makers whose work I loved…had work go to crap for their contracted creation club content.

The mod makers didn’t suddenly get bad. Most of what made their indy mods fun was ripped out by BGS games managers most likely.

Wowhead posts an article (maybe, I haven’t checked), some Blizzard staff posts a Twitter post, people don’t read any news articles and instantly it’s “Oh no, Microsoft fired 1,900 Blizzard workers, WoW is dead”.

People gotta learn to read, it was not just Blizzard that was affected and there were 22,000 staff total in the Microsft gaming division, only 1,900 across the entire division were fired.

With the reports also stating Microsoft are paying them out and will support them where they can, I am 99% sure those staff didn’t just show up one day and were told to go back home.

This could be due to Blizzard going to Microsoft and Mike not wanting to go back there, we won’t know unless he tells us.

Plus this, it’s not just Microsoft. And with the recent changes in China where they are banning loot boxes, online bonus purchases for games and bonus logins, there was bound to be a shakeup in the games industry.

And this is important, you cannot merge companies of this size and not have some sort of overlap.

Plus you need to think, new management, new direction, staff being complacent and not meeting the requirements of Microsoft. You cannot slack off and get away with it forever. We will not know for some time if this was a good thing or not, maybe it will be, maybe it will entice staff to work harder and better and give us a better product.

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I love everything you said.

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Ehhh. Yeah they did. People did not even get to say goodbye to their teams. They got locked out of their work stations and apps. Sent home. The news media knew about the layoffs before the staff even knew who was impacted. They were sitting there reading the news, waiting for their “turn” with meetings and results.

They will be getting severance packages though and depending on their state, layoffs can be eligible for unemployment insurance.

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Bye :v:

So TWW might be good but the other expansions will have their content cut. Got it. Then maintenance mode after the new titan or w/e. Probably announced all 3 xpacs to make it harder for microsoft to kill WoW soon.

As for the OP. NGL I should firing that many people should be illegal. But I also think big companies merging like this should be illegal (it technically is but hasn’t been enforced since the 70s)

Huge load on the taxpayer because of selfish companies.

Should increase the tax rate on them to pay for all those employees on unemployment now. 2k people needing unemployement. How much is that gonna cost?

get rid of ion too pls thanks

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Not necessarily. Some of those may not be eligible, others may get jobs faster than they’d be on unemployment, others may have enough saved up plus severance to not touch it.

I don’t know if it’s been stated anywhere to who in regards is being laid off, but if it hasn’t, then people should keep in mind, as others in the thread have said, the ones being laid off are people in admin, management, HR, marketing, etc.

The actual workers and devs should largely be unaffected I imagine. But other than theorizing, we possibly don’t know who’s leaving.

Doesn’t justify it. Not when they’re still making profits. You have no excuse to do mass lay-offs every while you’re in the green. If you have PROFIT then you firing masses amount of people has no purpose. Firing because someone did something inapprioate, broke work rules, or because you are losing more money then making is acceptable.

These companies have too much power over people’s lives.

Fire CEOS and don’t give them million dollar severances and you can afford to pay those 2k employees easier too.

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