sigh
Activision- Blizzard (ATVI) is the stock holding company over Activision Publishing, Blizzard Entertainment, and King games (Candy Crush).
So no, Blizzard Entertainment did not make the tool. King did.
It is ok not to know the difference between the stock holding company and the companies under it.
I think Taurens should go to the Alliance
Yes and give horde either the dark iron or lightforged
People are just calling it what it is, a virtue signal. Them not firing their entire CS department to cut costs would’ve done way more to cut down the toxicity in the game than an overhyped SJW PR stunt.
It’s annoying getting preached to by a corporation that makes bloody violent action games. Nobody asked for this, nobody wants this, it doesn’t make the games better, it’s Orwellian, please stop.
Nobody cares about the technical inner workings of who did what and how in a bureaucratic corporation, it’s useless semantics and I’m not sure how that changes anything. If it’s applied to Blizzard’s products it’s representative of Blizzard in the eyes of the customers.
It is a distinction without a difference. The same as saying Blizzard didn’t make Diablo. Regardless of who coded it, if you want to argue Blizzard is not part of developing it that is a flat out lie, since the announcement was of them testing it.
What are you talking about? They laid off 600 CS folks in 2012. There have not been layoff of CS since then and they have re-hired or replaced those folks. They had to. They released a lot more games and all of them also require support.
They could do a lot better job on enforcement and being consistent, but they do have a CS department still.
This is concerning coming from a yellow post that you don’t remember in 2019 when they laid off 800 “non dev” employees many of which included CS. Mind you after posting $1.8 billion in profit. Don’t think a billion dollar corporation needs anyone shilling for them but do go off.
Hate crime laws were first passed in the US in 1968. https://www.justice.gov/crt/hate-crime-laws Other countries had laws well before that. Again, this is not new. Blizzard has been covering hate/ful speech since 2004. It is explicitly in there. Gender hatred is not specifically called out in the old rules, but falls under the broad category of hateful speech. This covers pretty much everything under the sun:
Transmit or post sexually explicit images or other content or language which in the sole discretion of Blizzard Entertainment is deemed to be offensive; nor shall you transmit any unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable content or language, nor may you use a misspelling or an alternative spelling to circumvent the content and language restrictions listed above;
Tokenism has nothing to do with the Code of Conduct. Tokenism would be putting in a character as a “token” to represent a group - without that char having any real purpose to the story. Avoiding token characters is a good thing.
Slightly off topic, but their CS responses are a lot like the old insurance company with a default policy of deny all claims with a form letter then only actually contend with the ones that appeal repeatedly. The days of a GM actually contacting you in game on a first contact basis and resolving something are pretty much over and gone. It took me several contacts to get a documented stalker dealt with and last I knew his account is technically still active and playable.
Toxic Avenger was the best movie ever! Academy award material I say!
CS was not the group really impacted in 2019. That is why I was pointing out the last time CS was really laid off.
The folks laid off in 2019 were front facing folks in esports, Publishing, Marketing, Community Management. CS was not really impacted. We lost our CM Ythisens to the layoffs
ATVI as a whole laid off 800. Blizzard laid off a bit over 200. By law they have to submit the list, and positions, to the state of California.
At the very bottom is a list of every position laid off. I can find 17 that are GMs or customer service champions.
The 2012 layoff was the one that devastated the CS department with 600 layoffs there. 17 GM sorts in 2019 is not comparable.
blizzard deosnt enforce anything anyway.
Correct. They don’t usually contact you in game in a live chat type scenario anymore. Most tickets don’t need it so the policy is not to do it. This can be an issue on complicated cases, like your situation you described.
For ongoing harassment it takes several steps to prove it and quite a bit of documentation. It sounds like you were able to put them on Ignore then prove they were circumventing it - and that they no longer bother you. That is good. However, even if their account got closed, Blizz does not stop people from making another account and playing - so long as the new account follows the rules.
This is damage control. Anyone who remembers talking to a live person responding to a ticket when the game had millions of more players than it does now, knows that the CS has been reduced significantly in quality.
Support is the first thing to get cut as it’s easily replaced by automation which is 100% what happened. You wanna argue my hyperbole semantically fair enough, but everybody knows the quality of the CS has been in decline for years now. To suggest otherwise is kiiiind of an insult to everyones intelligence.
I am not going to change how I think or what a say or do. Over some virtue signaling from companies a care little if any about.
it dont seem, they are
The policy decisions they have made have greatly reduced quality. Yes. Certainly that in-person interaction is gone and that is not for the better from a player point of view.
They did not do that as a result of lower staff though - they released more games so have an increased support need. As in they need to hire more people. It is not the result of any recent layoff though as you had tried to say.
You seem to think I approve of the current support levels - I don’t. The system is hard to use, alienates people who are already frustrated, and does not get players fast or accurate results. Moderation is also hit or miss and not consistent.
I can both not be happy with current support and also correctly state we did not get to this point with layoffs.
lgbitieie8959r399269g9s9 didnt exist in naz1 germany cuz they didnt have CNN to tell them what lgb90459659296290620 was