What’s gross is Blizzard keeping someone like Alex in charge of Creative Development as long as he was allowed to stay there.
Any lore or story that originated from Alex’s tenure in charge is fair game to be criticized and rejected.
That’s it. That’s as complicated as it gets. Blizzard should just retcon the last 10 years of lore as Old God delusions and just be rid of Alex’s corruption.
Everything must be reconsidered. He was at the top for a long, long time. His degenerate attitude towards women likely infected a great many things. Blizzard corporate culture is also under scrutiny and its influence on this IP must be considered. A racist, sexist and drunken work environment is not conducive to quality work.
Not only is this not realistic but it’s also unfair to all the non-Afrasiabi people who worked on the lore, including his victims. This is their work too, not just his.
I’m sorry, but they are tainted as well because of his tenure. No fault of there’s. Nothing anyone on the creative development team currently needs to be taken seriously from this point forward. I wish them well in future non-Blizzard related projects. But these are people who worked closely with Alex day in and day out. Close intimate members of the Dojo. Anything they wrote is worth less than nothing.
Maybe not everything is about Afrasiabi. Maybe we should consider his victims before we consider him.
Saying “tear it all down, it’s all irrevocably tainted” strikes me as not only lazy and giving Afrasiabi more power than he deserves, but it also strikes me as narcissistic preening. It doesn’t cost US anything to declare that multiple generations of writers have a decade of their work invalidated, after all.
Please refrain from off-topic discussions and quarrels in this thread.
Confine that to the existing dumpster:
In any case, the role that Sylvanas plays going forward and Shadowlands finale seems more important now.
Her soul being made whole again can be viewed as regaining her agency. But it makes her portrayal in the 9.1 cinematic somewhat odd. She seemed frightened which is uncharacteristic.
Is she going to have a confrontation with the Jailer or simply be instrumental in deposing him?
No thanks. I’ll post what I want to post where I want to post it. I appreciate your suggestion though.
Let’s be real here the other thread is a dead man walking.
A lot of that lore and story was likely written by the victims of this toxic culture. I don’t think that’s the way to go with this at all.
Certainly look at things twice, but a blanket wipe does nothing helpful.
So since Alex Afrasiabi was behind Teldrassil and the Night Elves’ extinction and all of this happening to the female dominated race of the game… can we retcon it all now? Now that we know the true nature of these events?
What influence will this have? Probably none at all. While I do wish the worst upon Blizzard for what they’ve been doing with their game, story and most importantly, real people and employees, they’ll most likely just ignore the problem until it goes away.
And I really don’t want to distract from the real victims of this, it disgusts me, but since the thread is kind of designed to talk about the story…
All the more reason to wipe it, the slate, clean. Victims wrote stories under duress and stressful conditions to please the in-power vicitmiser?
That’s no defense.
I don’t know how much clearer I can be here. Every bit of lore that Alex touched must be retconned and wiped clean.
As long as his taint is present it will ruin everything Warcraft’s lore is supposed to be about.
Given that people were already demanding that the last ten years of lore be retconned even before these revelations, I find it hard to believe that them continuing to do so afterwards but with a brand new justification is entirely a good faith reaction to today’s news.
There is no good faith reaction to today’s news. That option was off the table in June 2020 when they let Alex quietly resign.
Presuming to speak on their behalf is gross. I think that you need to take a step back and ask yourself if what you are proposing is actually beneficial to any of his victims or if it’s mostly performative.
This has BEEN influencing everything in the game, from story to systems to the massive amount of bugs and the late patch release dates. If you create a toxic work environment, your product WILL suffer, in all areas. Everyone’s been wondering what was up, right? Apparently booze fueled harassment parties in the office are what’s up.
And since the pandemic hit? Since employees have been able to work from home? Golly, where are all the harassed women to do all the work while the boys drink and harass the day away??? Shadowlands had probably been delayed because they aren’t terrifying women into doing everything for them. YEP, that’s one of the charges in the legal documents, I cannot make this crap up.
Oh that’s rich coming from you.
Realistically much of the smaller scale stuff was done without Alex’s input at all, and was not done to “please” him whatsoever.
Which would be kind of telling because the smaller scale stories aren’t even close to be as awful as the main narrative
The questing in zones seems fine for the most part, it only gets really really awful once you look at the big picture.
You do not get it. Everyone at Blizzard knew Alex. Everyone in power at Blizzard were close personal friends with him.
There is no seperating Alex Afrasiabi from Blizzard.
I mean you guys do realize this could ruin Chris Metzen’s reputation right? And everyone else who has ever worked in C-Dev?
This is a weird assertion and is probably not true, Blizzard had like 5000 people at one point.
You’re getting waaaaay ahead of yourself.