I think it's safe to say now that
Lore was the person at Blizzard
blacklisting certain streamers like Asmongold from speaking to Ion for many years now.
Barely a
week after Lore leaves Blizz, Ion shocks the community with "Hey Asmongold, how about an interview? Great, book the time!"
C'mon...
I still have all the WoW Tankspot videos saved on my HDD going all the way back to Malygos up to Morchok, but as
Community Liaison goes, Lore left a LOT to be desired, and the state of the relationship between WoW devs and the community reflects this. If you were the person at Blizzard doing Lore's annual performance review, would YOU say the relationship between WoW devs and the community has been improving year after year?
In the real world (i.e. not a California tech company), Lore would have been replaced years ago for no other reason than metrics. But I think we all know that as far as million-dollar California tech companies go, performance and deliverables take a far back seat to management "supporting" you in your role, no matter your impact on the company... especially if you have a Twitter following.
Which is why people are asking why WoW's Senior Community Manager has gone AWOL, while Asmongold's interview with the FF14 lead game director gets
over 1 million views.
At that point literally anyone would be asking Lore "So, aside from mocking Preach on Twitter over the XP potion ban... what exactly do you DO here?"
You only have to look at the state of transmog over the decade. How the
Lead Rewards Designer still holds that position after all these years astounds me. Instead of successfully implementing bold new improvements year after year, he's notorious for
hating the entire concept (which is why there's only been eight updates since 2013, and most of those are "you can now hide X". Imagine delivering
that to your bosses every two years!).
So yeah, it's very telling that almost immediately after Blizzard's entrenched Senior Community Manager departs the company, not only does Ion start a whirlwind streamer interview tour including Asmongold, but the community response to his replies and mannerisms are
overwhelmingly positive, with everyone mentioning the noticeable difference between his likeable persona on Asmongold's stream compared to his previous years of monotone "lawyer-speak" on Lore's heavily scripted Q&A clips.
Extremely telling.