Nobody has anything to say about Blizzard?

"

Boem wrote:

"

xMustard wrote:

players are contracted etc, and in such they represent the franchise/organizations they're with - in this way they need to act appropriately and one logical and reasonable thing is to not get political. you don't take sides because the franchise you represent doesn't want to take sides.

its the same thing if you're a sports player and act inappropriately in a bar or something, you get fined or suspended by your team, because what you do reflects on them.

blizzard came out with a statement basically saying the reason why they punished the dude was because he got political and they want to squash that happening, essentially.

people constantly say they want politics out of their video games (especially right wing type people) but then when blizzard does this and says they want to stop it from happening, the same people cry and whine saying "bullshit bullshit you're just bowing to your chinese overlords". its hypocritical. its like they do want politics all over, just their own opinion on politics.

GGG is the same. the censoring they do isn't because they're backing china or because they're owned by tencent. its because the rules are to not get political in order to avoid all of this conflict.

so don't get political. when you get political (regardless of the view expressed) and you get censored, you cannot cry you got censored because of GGGs or blizzard's own political view. thats stupid. you'd be stupid if you did that.

Since when are people saying they want politics out of their games?

Do you remember the last century of games? 90% of them revolved around politics, from age of empires to tiberian sun and red alert and onwards.

People never cared what was being discussed in their games, gamers have had a "anything goes" attitude as if in a old cowboy bar for as long as i can remember and as far as i can tell ingame in non-global censored chats, they still do.

Don't bring this "especially the right" or "especially the left" group think into this.
It's baseless.

Peace,

-Boem-

Since when? Probably when it actually translated into the real world. The whole NFL fiasco had a lot of people claiming they didn't want politics in their past time, granted at the same time the reason it constantly became a thing was people wouldn't stop bringing it up.

But when money is involved, politics do get touchy, especially given the different markets and cultures. Like with Fallout 3, they removed the Megaton quest that offered to set off the nuke and name changes and so on out of respect for it's Japanese market.

With Blizzard, I think they were in a bit of a rock and a hard place - because of the Government any business getting established their has to play by their rules. In other words, it was risk the backlash for punishing the player or risk the backlash of a government.

The player community backlash largely depends on the press and hard to quantify. On the other hand, the losses from losing access to an entire market is a lot more predictable - I'm not the fan of Blizzard I was during the orignal D2/SC years but you really can't blame a business for acting in it's financial interests.

I mean all you folks with your iphones don't think about the folks working for Foxconn and most have probably already forgotten the suicides.

what do you want to hear? The guy has a contract that he chose to violate. Consequences happened. That's business. Or did you want some emotional whine against a company i couldn't care less about?

"

SeCKSEgai wrote:

you really can't blame a business for acting in it's financial interests.

Of course you can. I mean you probably shouldn't be surprised that they act in their financial interests, because they will consistently do that. But they are responsible for their actions like everyone else, and if you have a moral objection to those actions, then there's no reason that need evaporate because the company is making money immorally rather than, say, breaking even immorally. That isn't better.

I was done with Blizzard after D3, but now I'm extra-super-duper done with them.
I would say why, but that kind of talk isn't allowed here any more.

This:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxtbBaajyuQ

StarCraft and the Brood War expansion were awesome. Diablo II and LoD even more so.

Haven't bought anything from Blizzard since the disaster that was D3. I can't imagine ever wanting to buy anything from them again.

What Blizzard did was not a smart move, considering Blizzard already laid off 800 employees in February this year,
https://www.businessinsider.com/blizzard-layoffs-2019-2

and Forbes stated they weren't in a good place,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2019/01/04/in-2019-the-state-of-activision-blizzard-is-not-strong/

And their stock was downgraded by analysts at Bernstein a few weeks ago:
https://www.thestreet.com/investing/activision-blizzard-falls-on-analyst-downgrade-15112000

Blizzard would have been smarter to make a statement saying they prohibited such behavior in the future and would penalize appropriately after that.

Contrast that with GGG's policy - they made it clear that some topics were no longer allowed, but they did not penalize people for having talked about such things prior to that.

While I miss the spirited discussions on PoE forums, GGG still has my respect for how they handled it.

"

rootwilliamson wrote:

I love Blizzard.

You made an account just to post this?

dunno if ppl have been keeping up but from what i heard blizzard have given him back his $10k and reduced his ban to 6 months, and have now banned the american team for 6 months.

this comes after massive backlash obviously, along with politicians and human rights groups from around the world speaking out against them and contacting them, groups of their own staff quitting or walking out in protest etc.

people talk about blizzards previous actions, thing to note is that blizzard then is not blizzard now. since they merged with activision almost all the original people who ran blizzard have quit and been replaced with activision yes men. its not the same company, its not the same people, the way they used to operate, treat their staff have principals etc left with the founding members.

The Blizzard’s issue is the result of a specific selection of executives in overgrown corporations. After some time, in every such corporation, not very intelligent brownnosers land on all managerial positions, who are ready to follow even the stupidest commands of the supervisor, without any discussions and suggestions on their part. This is a standard evolution of the management in every corporation. Superiors choose people who will obey and fail to threaten their position as subordinates. As a result, the lower, the bigger the idiot.

Contrary to appearances, in the case of large corporations something like this works great. Their product is already on the market, so from time to time it is enough to repaint it a little to push it as a novelty to consumers. And the idiots in the management serve as slave herdsmen and are great at it. The problem only appears at the time of crisis, and in this case even the most nonsense turns into World War III.

In the case of this player raising political cries, it was enough to announce that such things would not be tolerated, because "code of codnuct" and punish him with a 3-month ban and collecting 10% of earnings. And declare that in the future bans and financial penalties will be more severe. Thanks to this, no one would know about the whole case, except professional players who would assess the situation properly. If, after doing so, someone would play politics again, Blizzard could ban him for life, take money and bring a lawsuit, and no one would write a word. Because a warning was issued earlier.

In this case, however, there was a classic "idiot crisis”. One of the above-mentioned idiots panicked and got a shit because "oh, our beloved Chinese market will be ruined, what will the shareholders say?". That is why he ordered one of the morons subject to him to "act with full firmness." The moron immediately looked through the list of possible punishments, checking whether the culprit could not be shot, but because he did not find it, he ordered his subordinate, an even larger idiot "to act firmly and severely."

As a result, the idiot did as he was told. And the whole process was repeated. The storm quickly reached the "superior moron", which panicked again and got a shit because "oh, our beloved Western market will be ruined, what will the shareholders say?". And again he ordered the subordinate idiot to act. As a result, they achieved an impressive effect. They hinted that they would do everything not to expose themselves to the Chinese, so the Chinese could now want anything they want. At the same time, they have not regained the friendship and trust of Western players who still perceive them as greedy servants of China. Idiotocracy in full bloom! :)