Blizzard fires WoW Classic lead after he protests employee evaluation policy

[Oakshana]

Yeah, no shit. Wotlk is running worse than a polish private server.

What the hell does polish have to do with anything?

[Dalinos]

What the hell does polish have to do with anything?

I have no idea what he's getting at, the last time 4 Poles teamed up in a garage and started developing we got the first game of the Witcher series.

[khazmodan]

The cognitive dissonance in this post is astounding.

If you think that then you are either not comprehending what I am saying or you don't understand the definition of cognitive dissonance.

[NoiseTank13]

I have no idea what he's getting at, the last time 4 Poles teamed up in a garage and started developing we got the first game of the Witcher series.

WotLK Classic has bugs that haven't been addressed since launch and we just got Ulduar which also has some bugs in it that weren't there in Vanilla.

Plus he had a warped view on why people like Classic and was dumbfounded when RDF proved to be more popular than he realized, which means he lives in a bubble.

[Oakshana]

WotLK Classic has bugs that haven't been addressed since launch and we just got Ulduar which also has some bugs in it that weren't there in Vanilla.

Plus he had a warped view on why people like Classic and was dumbfounded when RDF proved to be more popular than he realized, which means he lives in a bubble.

He was responding to my question to an previous post. What the hell does it have to do with being polish?

Yeah, no shit. Wotlk is running worse than a polish private server.

...because that just sounds derisive as fuck.

[Dalinos]

WotLK Classic has bugs that haven't been addressed since launch and we just got Ulduar which also has some bugs in it that weren't there in Vanilla.

Plus he had a warped view on why people like Classic and was dumbfounded when RDF proved to be more popular than he realized, which means he lives in a bubble.

Yeah and he compared it to a private Polish server...I rebutted with the fact that the last time 4 Polish dudes teamed up, pooled their resources and started developing a game we got one of the best RPG series ever - the Witcher series. Meaning, being Polish has absolutely nothing to do with buggy servers. On the contrary, due to the Witcher series, Polish developers have gotten a pretty good reputation lately.

[Kilpi]

Typical toxic blizzard still being toxic to employees

Toxic Activision Blizzard tbh. Should be pretty clear now that even if Blizzard is doing shitty things, the most toxic things come from Activision Blizzard, and it is NOT the same entity, at all. Activision Blizzard != Blizzard Entertainment.

https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/sta...1hn1IHcDQ&s=19

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

It is amazing how every time I'm almost drawn back in they do more stupid bullsit.

Like eventually you'd expect them to stop digging but the entire damn culture from the top down is corrupt.

[Puri]

I am genuinely intrigued that a (you would assume modern tech) company uses something like a static stack ranking employee evaluation in 2023. When I read something like that I can only say that I am happy to live in a country where some forced ranking against your co-workers is illegal.

[Nzx]

Why does everyone act like this is a Blizzard problem and not something that exists across just about every corporate company on the planet? This isn't 'typical toxic blizzard' it's 'typical corporate employment' and isn't even really that bad. I'm sorry, but if someone else performs better than you do they deserve a greater share of pay increases/promotion opportunities/whatever. If you were raised on participation trophies, welcome to the real world. If everyone in your team did well, someone did less well than the others, and it's your job as a leader to explain that to those above you and to front foot it with the person themselves.

tl;dr this is someone complaining that they are incapable of managing a team very well and an internet full of unemployed teenagers jumping at the chance to jerk each other off about 'big company bad'. If this hurts your feelings, thanks for proving me right.

[Dalinos]

Why does everyone act like this is a Blizzard problem and not something that exists across just about every corporate company on the planet? This isn't 'typical toxic blizzard' it's 'typical corporate employment' and isn't even really that bad. I'm sorry, but if someone else performs better than you do they deserve a greater share of pay increases/promotion opportunities/whatever. If you were raised on participation trophies, welcome to the real world. If everyone in your team did well, someone did less well than the others, and it's your job as a leader to explain that to those above you and to front foot it with the person themselves.

tl;dr this is someone complaining that they are incapable of managing a team very well and an internet full of unemployed teenagers jumping at the chance to jerk each other off about 'big company bad'. If this hurts your feelings, thanks for proving me right.

Did you miss the part where this strategy/policy has been denounced by many, many companies? Microsoft tried it in 2012. They saw people sabotaging each other's projects and withhold information from each other so that THEY are not the lowest 5%. Microsoft scrapped this by 2013. Noone said anything about managing people correctly. Simply the fact that you need to grade someone badly BECAUSE there is a quota and the "Worst performing 5%" needs to be "disciplined" is asinine. Also, do me a favour will ya. Quantify for me the hours of work a developer puts in a video game. Is it lines of code? Assets created? Tooltips edited? Number of bug fixes?

Your "theory" works only in like...a factory. That produces chairs. And you can clearly grade your employees performance, since it is simply "How many chairs did X make?" But for coding? Game development? Not that simple my dude.

This reminds me a bit of some educational institutions that decide to "Grade on a bell-shaped curve" (damn idiots don't even call it by its real name, the Normal Distribution). You know what that means? Doesn't matter if the whole class scored 90%+ in an exam. The students who scored in the 90's and 91's are gonna get a fail. Because they are the lowest of the bunch. Even though they answered 90% of the questions correctly. So, when you "grade on a bell-shaped curve", you can give actual F's to people who scored 90%. Let that sink in a little. You can FAIL a student who studied, learned the material and answered NINETY PER CENT of the questions correctly. Sounds stupid, no?

Before you call me an unemployed teenager, I'm a 31yr old Economist with a Master's degree in my field who works in Asset Management.

[Exkrementor]

He was responding to my question to an previous post. What the hell does it have to do with being polish?



...because that just sounds derisive as fuck.

Not everything is racist, little busybody. Its about polish private servers because the biggest private servers are polish. Their Homepage ends on .pl.

I played the shit out of those servers and they had a good amount of bugs but I think classic is worse. Also private servers ban bots pretty quickly. I dont know if anyone has been to outland recently but there are a lot of DKs with strange movement there.

[salate]

I have mixed feelings here. On the positive side, he seems to have been fired for being a stand-up guy towards his employees.

On the negative side, he was a terrible Classic dev. He didn't make a tweet or blue post about Classic WOTLK for like three months and the whole WOTLK Classic xpac seems to be on maintenance mode. He obviously cared more about the whole "woke" and "body type 1/2" thing than he did making a fun game and keeping his promises like race/faction change.

Actually as a guy who works with the same evaluation system, I can say that this system can really fk up alotta processes. It seems like "Put a D-mark for John Dorian" but it takes like a month. for example I put B mark for an employee, then my lead says "okay", the lead that higher than that lead says "its not ok, fix it" because someone from tom management said "we should have X marks... BUT not more FIX IT NOW". And then this system puts on hold alotta management processes just for sake of stupid evaluation.

[tikcol]

I have mixed feelings here. On the positive side, he seems to have been fired for being a stand-up guy towards his employees.

On the negative side, he was a terrible Classic dev. He didn't make a tweet or blue post about Classic WOTLK for like three months and the whole WOTLK Classic xpac seems to be on maintenance mode. He obviously cared more about the whole "woke" and "body type 1/2" thing than he did making a fun game and keeping his promises like race/faction change.

After seeing this do you actually believe he even had a choice in the matter..?

[fazaim]

Blizzard just can't stop taking all these Ls.

Read the article first, it's not Blizzard. It's ABK policies forced on Blizzard developers. Also, from his own Twitter:

"Brian Birmingham

[Garymorilix]

Actually as a guy who works with the same evaluation system, I can say that this system can really fk up alotta processes. It seems like "Put a D-mark for John Dorian" but it takes like a month. for example I put B mark for an employee, then my lead says "okay", the lead that higher than that lead says "its not ok, fix it" because someone from tom management said "we should have X marks... BUT not more FIX IT NOW". And then this system puts on hold alotta management processes just for sake of stupid evaluation.

The whole premise of this is just stupid.
If there is a quota for anything it automatically doesn't work in reality because it purposefully generates false positives/negatives, hence, ruins the whole purpose of any form of evaluation or database.

A manager's job should include identifying parts of his team that doesn't pull thru and action on it. This is nothing new, that's why managers exist.
When your manager is just your son-in-law or some high-school buddy who has zero experience or knowledge about managing then of course instead of firing his sorry-ass you turn to systems like these.

Of course these systems never affect upper management, cuz why would they, fucking gross.
Corruption is fucking rampant but people would rather stand in line for 1 extra dollar than talk about it. If there is no public knowledge of these things then companies will keep using them and fucking everyone over.
But of course this guy was also like "I didn't want to go public" fucking unreal. Feed into the system more.

[DarkAmbient]

https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/sta...88557367488512

When he says "They put us under pressure to deliver both expansions early" is he talking about TBC and Wrath, or Wrath and Dragonflight?

[Nite92]

In theory, it seems a good idea.
In reality, it only works when the job market is very bad.

Even that, there are always people only work when the job market is good.

Wtf, this seems like a good idea to you?
Thank fuck, I live in a different country.

[Baine]

Typical toxic blizzard still being toxic to employees

Well, it seems it comes from above Blizzard.

[Kralljin]

the same ppl who always shit on blizzard though are also the same ones who are all like anti pc as their persona and think that society needs more things like the policy he left over

I rarely saw anyone hailing those policies as great, if anything, it's done out largely out of spite.

However, one quick visit to his Twitter profile and the fact that they even added stuff such as Bodytypes or even the Incubus (despite the fact that this model stands out in Classic) reveals why some may not like him as much.
As far as i can tell, people are less divided about the business practice, but rather about his political opinions and how they influenced changes within the game.

When he says "They put us under pressure to deliver both expansions early" is he talking about TBC and Wrath, or Wrath and Dragonflight?

Yes, yes and yes.

TBC was absolutely sped up, they cut Phase 3 rather short with an early ZA launch, then SWP also came out rather early (the actual launch was announced with like a one weand also cut short by a september release.

Like, think about it, the enterity of TBC was wrapped up within less than a year, that's damn quick.

If you however look at the release schedule, things start to add up:
They wanted to have DF in 2022, which was only doable with a Q4 launch.
If TBCC however ran its full course then it also would've launched in Q4 (and Wotlk would've had more time).
So they put the pedal to the metal, breezed through TBC and shoved Classic Wotlk out in late September (which incidentally is the last month of Q3).

Remember how people were surprised about the announcement that DF comes out in 2022? That's the blowback of that decision so to speak.