Message from J. Allen Brack

[eduwneso]

I realize that, but your analogy was dogshit which is why I asked what the fuck you were even talking about. You don't need 10 plumbers to fix 1 toilet, but you can need 10 CMs to fix a toxic or broken community. Your analogy doesn't fit the situation, so it's useless and asinine.

This community will be toxic to it's end, you can't fix people's entitlement and personality. If they see how the "community" treats Lore (even if he deserves it or not) the first thing they will think is "We have CM's for this?" and the first thing they will cut are CM's. It's because the community is so toxic that it's not necessary to have that many CM. Or at least I think that.

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By firing the only community manager we had. And for the love of God don’t mention Lore. That idiot hasn’t spoken to players in ages.

I wonder why?

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Which is why if as a company you find you have 10 plumbers to fix 1 toilet you let some of the plumbers go. Just as if you find you have to many CM's for what you need, or think you need, you let some go. Consider the level of toxicity you are showing towards Blizzard with out understanding basic concepts of business it is clear that no amount of CM's will fix the toxic nature of WoW.

Exactly this

[Shakou]

Imagine trying to argue a fact of life.

Are you high? This is a common corporate policy, it is not a law of nature.

[Eapoe]

Are you high? This is a common corporate policy, it is not a law of nature.

Technically, it is a law of nature. As something declines, it suffers effects of that decline.
You also just point out it is a common corporate policy but just tried to argue against it being such. Please, just stop now. You are now trying to pick out 1 comment from an entire post to argue to make yourself seem intelligent while coming off as willfully ignorant to seem smart.
I’m not saying you aren’t a smart person, but your responses are not coming off that way.

[Shakou]

Technically, it is a law of nature.

No it is not. It is 100% completely artificial. There are other policies they could implement instead, such as cutting the CEO's salary. I'm not saying you're a totally ignorant, intellectual lightweight who has no clue how anything actually works at all, but saying this is "just how it is!" is up there with signaling to Blizzard-Activision directly after firing and laying off all these people that you are not unlike Goatse and are ready to take it.

[apelsinjuice]

All the suits, higher ups and CFOs need their yearly million dollar salaries, company reported to make more profit than ever and they still layoff 800 people while the new CFO gets a 15 million dollar bonus

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"Our development pipeline is strong" not a single new game released since overwatch and nothing planned for 2019 besides Classic, maybe WC3 remaster and diablo mobile game.

[ArenaDk]

you can simply do this ...Learn from your past and build games the way you did with vanilla wow wc3 etch. where the hell is that pation and creativity?WE LOVED OLDSCHOOL blizzard ...now we are forced to accept a profit company (activision)

No? We didn’t ? Pls by the love of god blizzard never go back to vanilla design. Rather shut down the server before I press 1 button again and get pvp Titels just by grinding

[eduwneso]

Remember the outrage towards Mike Morhaime when they layed off 600 employees 7 years ago?
This biased bullshit is beyond compare.

https://www.engadget.com/2012/02/29/...hW0hHSM3lvFsjw

This is a thread of we are all CEO and know everything about a company, as most of them in MMO-C, your post is appreciated.

[Cæli]

cutting cost with "firing" is simply a result of bad management, also I'm not sure why it gets on the news, there's hardly anything more common in private companies

[Bulo]

gtfo Brack

[tankbug]

cutting cost with "firing" is simply a result of bad management, also I'm not sure why it gets on the news, there's hardly anything more common in private companies

Well, to be fair, there are many factors, bad management being one of the possibilities to why your business is failing. And since salaries is the highest cost a company has, letting people go is the most impactful cost cutting measure they have.

That said, Blizzard is not a wasteful company that has flopped, they make tons of money...just not enough to keep growing at the same rate. And shareholders want to the stocks to rise so they can sell and see a profit. If they can't make the company more valuable through higher income, they'll try to make up for it by cutting costs instead. The numbers will look better for a while, so they can get out at a higher price, and they don't give a damn about how it affects the company in the future. Indeed the darker side of capitalism.

[eduwneso]

Ythisens was a Blizzard employee. He was fired. You're wrong, and you're spreading misinformation telling people Blizzard didn't fire anyone.

In any case, obviously not every employee out of the 800 terminated was a Blizzard employee. I never said it was Brack who fired them.

The point still stands. They didn't have to fire anyone, they could've hired 20% more devs (probably about 100 people) and kept the other 800.

Why are you so dense? He says that 800 is not all from blizzard, is 800 across all under actvi, and some of those 800 are blizzard employees.

This is why he says that he thought you were smarter....

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Lay off the CM who supports classic WoW before the release of classic WoW. Classy AF Blizzard, hope your company suffers as a result.

*sarcasm on*It's ok!! the classic playerbase will be a rainbow cheerful non-toxic community!!, they all wish only to have the server so they can leave the retail toxic community. Blizzard is smart they won't need a CM for that! *sarcasm off*

[Ophenia]

Imagine trying to argue a fact of life. As companies lose money employees are let go to compensate.

But they said 2018 was one of their best year ever, financially speaking, that's why there are those huge bonuses for chiefs

[eduwneso]

there are quite a few positions in the news post about CMs, esports and PR jobs. i think that in these times, those are the people needed RIGHT NOW to talk to the community.

but that is it. this is the moment. this is what mike morhaime saw when he got overwhelmed by applause at the opening ceremony of blizzcon 2018. he saw all those passionate fans - and knew his diablo team would betray them. he saw many people from his company - and knew bobby nodick would betray them. he even saw the two destiny players - and knew that they would soon be free from bobby.

he saw all this and you can just see it on his face. the look of someone who knows what will happen in the next few months. and the whole diablo immortal debacle is probably one of the most important factors for the online hate and memeing about blizzard and subsequently the plummeting of their shares. that is all so sick.

What community? the toxic one? I love wow but this community is shit, I would prefer being CM of League of legends, that community is quite amazing outside of the game. No one want's to talk to this community, why waste money in it?.

P.D: I'm sorry for those CM's that lost their jobs, even if what blizzard is doing it's not wrong, some of them really wanted to retire there and were amazing.

[Jalatiphra]

bought destiny dlcs the moment they left activision

[Trumpcat]

While it does sound unfair if you look at it naively, that's just not how business works - or how any of these events really correlate. They didn't fire people to pay out that bonus, and to imply so is dangerously reductive. Companies are very complex structures with many moving parts, and you need to work hard to keep everything working efficiently. Carrying elements you don't really need anymore is not efficient. WoW, while still very profitable, has undeniably been shrinking. A lot of the support/service/community staff is simply redundant now. They had to go at some point, and an earnings call is simply often a strategically convenient time to do so. It does skew perception somewhat for people with low understanding of business, though, and it's no surprise this happened in this case - press releases like Big Bob's "we made more money than ever, so we're letting 800 people go" are just cringe to read, but investors tend to understand what this is really about. And they're the ones Blizz is worried about most.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not gleefully watching people lose their jobs. That always sucks. But I don't pretend that it's not a reality of capitalism. It's not a reflection on those people, or their worth as human beings. It's just what business have to do, sometimes. Whether or not them doing it was correct this time, well, that's a different question. I don't feel competent enough to answer that question, but a lot of people were involved in making that decision so it's unlikely to be completely inane.

Like I mentioned I have an idea of how corporations work. Yet sacking a 30k/year position is a drop in the sea compared to the multimillion sums over glorified accountants get. These money aren't high because they are of some omnipotent demigod ability and their work is magic and immaculate, it is the result of financial layering which is arranged so by these same over glorified accountants.

Either way I did not ask for an explanation of how business is misunderstood. I point that sacking people with micro salaries is squeezing the company for a few more cents which could be easily sourced through reigning in the ridiculous bonusing top positions accumolate.

That is not to say I support some sort of socialistic redistribution of wealth, but it is high management decision whether and how cost cutting can be achieved and mass layoffs in highly profitable companies aren't the only option.

[Clozer]

bought destiny dlcs the moment they left activision

looks like you are the only one xD

[valky94]

Bobby Kotick made over twenty-nine million dollars in 2017. Maybe they should cut from the top instead if they really want to save some money instead of turfing low-level desk jobs.

cuz they are japanese, and they still have somewhat of an ounce of honor in them

[eduwneso]

The biggest mistake these big gaming companies ever made was trying to 'get in touch with their playerbase' in order to 'listen to their feedback' and making sure 'everyone was heard'. For those detrimental tasks you need a large pile of paid forum-posters and 'social media strategists'. And then they realize that they've opened the floodgates and need more and more of these 'communication experts' to counter the ever increasing toxic cry-baby herds that live on those forums. You're paying good shareholder's money to an ever-increasing army of non-developers which bring in absolutely zero revenue for the game's investors, you know, the people who actually invest in the companies so they can make games for us.

Blizzard is finally cutting off the useless fat of the way too large group of paid non-developers so they can hopefully once again bring us decent quality content for the games we are paying money for to play. Too many people do not see that. Also, there are lots of lists of gaming companies posting jobs for the laid-off people. Those positions are not for non-developers, they're all about coding, designing and managing infrastructure. You know, useful stuff when you want to make games. None of these postings are about full time positions as 'brand-forwarding social media marketing expert strategists', whatever the hell that even means.

I do not want to say learn to code, because it is not a job everyone likes or wants to do and you have to respect that. And of course being laid off sucks and puts you in a financial situation. But you can not whine about a commercial stock-driven nasdaq company about wanting to make more money so they're restructuring staff to focus more on the departments that actually enable them to make money.

+1 here, I don't agreed 100% but I feel you.

[cface]

Gotta be stupid to play and dedicate yourself to Overwatch. It's just way too unstable to invest your time for these new lineup blizzard has. Casuals can do what they want ofc. But those who like to invest and get better, seeing tournaments and competition, forget about it.

[eduwneso]

I’m not complaining. Yes, it sucks people are losing their jobs, but it’s also a fact of life that sometimes these things happen. People have been hoping for the downfall of Blizz and making countless forum threads about the game dying and the company having problems. This is a side effect of those topics.
Guess what, sales go down, companies cut people.
I’m just honestly surprised we heard anything about it. Imagine all the other companies in the world that have fired employees we never hear about. 800 is a hell of a lot to us, but when you consider the company has some 9600 employees that’s less than 9% of their employees. A company I work for had to pay off employees due to budgets and we lost 6 people out of 45. Luckily we bounced back and were able to rehire some. That aside, as terrible as it is for those employees to lose their jobs, it’s a fact of life that these unfortunate things happen.

I agree, but, those 800 are not all of blizzard I guess you know that by the data you are providing here, and also, people forget stuff when convenient, Mike morhaime or how is written, laid off 600 employers FROM BLIZZARD in 2012, but hey, long live Mike, and we are totally not in a hate train direction shitshow and because 800 employees of Actvi, some brom blizzard, are being laid off now, this is a bigger shitshow than that was.