Blizzard fires WoW Classic lead after he protests employee evaluation policy

[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.

[nvaelz]

Dragonflight is trash, it's developed out of SL - keeping all the horrible CD/Combo based combat mechanics introduced in SL, adding a bit more proc gameplay which is "imo more fun" but it's just the cherry ontop of the shitcake which was SL.

Was hopelessly reporting a bugged! talent which doesn't work, and I just know since I'm passionate that if my game has a broken talent choice I'll not take months to fix it, which really is the trend for Blizzard nowadays, they change alot of "numbers" and introduce garbage content to give the WoW community something all the time, no respect for our love for WoW but a successful attempt to abuse us.

Make the game frustrating, anti social, ultra competitive and negative, feed on our despair so that while we do want to play the game we love(cuz of the social/achievement/cosmetic/old wow implications). They've found a way to abuse that, and if you can't see it, open your eyes?

And they've stated that this "new modern era" of WoW will keep going, like that's a good thing, have to be in realllllly high positivity to enjoy WoW but entering that place now is such a frustrating endeavor, I'll be inspired and excited to play the game I love but it will be sucked out of me by the people that play the game all the time, who consistently embrace the negative culture of WoW.


And people live in such copium/despair, it's the only way to play the game is by pretending it's not bad, so thanks for this thread, thanks to Brian for letting me know it's not all in my head, which is hard sometimes considering how many people pretend it is.

I was really excited for DF I was in great hope that it would be amazing but I was so terribly wrong, I did have a sense that it was just SL 2.0 early, and the release itself had alot of content which must have been a blast for soloist players that just want to do quests and explore the world, to a point when the real endgame begins and it's a horrible broken husk of a game with terrible gameplay, meta unbalance(cuz ultra competitive culture), infinite bugs and really nothing to do but compete for ladder positions and epeen lol.

Terrible game. Also I love BGs and oh man, Dragonflight has worse BGs than Shadowlands, what a surprise.
I suppose the new weekly gated activity is farming profession skill upgrades until its maxxed and useless.

[youswas]

Dragonflight is trash, it's developed out of SL - keeping all the horrible CD/Combo based combat mechanics introduced in SL, adding a bit more proc gameplay which is "imo more fun" but it's just the cherry ontop of the shitcake which was SL.

Was hopelessly reporting a bugged! talent which doesn't work, and I just know since I'm passionate that if my game has a broken talent choice I'll not take months to fix it, which really is the trend for Blizzard nowadays, they change alot of "numbers" and introduce garbage content to give the WoW community something all the time, no respect for our love for WoW but a successful attempt to abuse us.

Make the game frustrating, anti social, ultra competitive and negative, feed on our despair so that while we do want to play the game we love(cuz of the social/achievement/cosmetic/old wow implications). They've found a way to abuse that, and if you can't see it, open your eyes?

And they've stated that this "new modern era" of WoW will keep going, like that's a good thing, have to be in realllllly high positivity to enjoy WoW but entering that place now is such a frustrating endeavor, I'll be inspired and excited to play the game I love but it will be sucked out of me by the people that play the game all the time, who consistently embrace the negative culture of WoW.


And people live in such copium/despair, it's the only way to play the game is by pretending it's not bad, so thanks for this thread, thanks to Brian for letting me know it's not all in my head, which is hard sometimes considering how many people pretend it is.

Jesus dude touch some grass or something. It just isn’t that serious and if it is to you, make some changes in your life.

[korijenkins]

People really believed the company changed, or made any serious efforts to?

They were literally removing NPCs in WoW. All they wanted was to satisfy the twitter mob. They had no intents of improving culture.

[loras]

https://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-fir...uation-policy/

Brian Birmingham was fired before he could quit. He refused to go along with "stack ranking".

Firing is the better option i'd imagine, since Blizzard's the one technically terminating the contract the consequences of any unmet obligations or expectations fall to them.

It might not look nice from the outside the practice is likely not so bad.

[Icechaosss]

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.

Perfectly spoken by someone who has never worked within the corporate world to see how degenerate this type of behaviour and performance appraisals actually are. Good on ya kiddo!

[Relapses]

Either find a way to make capitalism work or watch 50+ million die under a communist dictatorship, and dictators kill the best of the human race because they are talented and motivated, therefore a threat to the dictators power.

A communist dictatorship is not the only alternative to capitalism. Our society's latent greed and inability to implement socialism without leaning into authoritarianism is what supporters of capitalism use to prop up their preferred economic system. And while I understand that take, I find it rather dismissive since we've never seen true socialism attempted on a global scale (and likely never will). (As an aside, my personal politics align most with social anarchism, though even I admit some of the tenets of this philosophy are a bit too extreme.)

Regardless, corporations and the endless pursuit of profit at whatever cost (a purely capitalist endeavor) is what drives them to implement the types of policies that our boy Brian objects to. Somebody has to win and somebody else has to lose. You can't simply have a team of employees who are all high performers, that's impossible. You have to pick and choose. You have to play favorites, even if you don't want to. This is a fundamentally flawed system and while I think it's kinda silly to throw away your livelihood to make a stand like this, it also sheds some much-needed light on one of the more aggressively negative aspects of capitalism. More power to him, I guess. I doubt anything will come of it, though.

[FelPlague]

Firing is the better option i'd imagine, since Blizzard's the one technically terminating the contract the consequences of any unmet obligations or expectations fall to them.

It might not look nice from the outside the practice is likely not so bad.

Yeah pretty much this, he told his colleagues he was quitting, he told the company he was quitting, but would stay, but refuse to work.
smart dude, he said "You are gunna have to fire me" so that they would have to, and with that he would get all the benefits you get from being fired instead of quitting.

while yes they pulled the trigger, he basically FORCED them to.
but yeah I hope they undo this policy change, cause its disgusting.

[Orange Joe]

This looks like something the sociopath Bobby Kotick would impose, this is the kind of policy that punishes honest leaders and sets the company on the path of social implosion.

- - - Updated - - -



Either find a way to make capitalism work or watch 50+ million die under a communist dictatorship, and dictators kill the best of the human race because they are talented and motivated, therefore a threat to the dictators power.

I'll take made up shit for 500 alex......

[Flurryfang]

I really find it odd, that stacking is used in development, especially in games, since it is a very iterative process and therefore really hard to say people did alot or little. Its hard to "go the extra distance" when you are part of a larger team, that is directed by the possibilities put in front of them. Its not like you on your own can push content that much, unless the rest of the development team is ready to push ahead.

It would make sense in a waterfall development process, where you can measure hard output on what has been scoped, but with the agile nature of Blizzard, especially with its more hands-off approach to their employees, with large amounts of at-home work, its insane to put them inside a traditional stacks-performance system.

To be short, Brian Birmingham is right to critique the process in game development and i would understand if it would make him quit as the leader, who was forced to put his employees in that system, when they on their own might not be able to impact performance, yet have to have a ranking assosiated to them.

[Gracin]

Banking job I worked at for nearly 5 years had a pretty messed up evaluation system. The employee's direct manager(I loved mine) would perform your yearly evaluation leading up to your hire date, grading on a dozen or so categories from 0-5 with 5 being top. The big hang-up was that the managers were told by upper management that NOBODY is perfect or even marginally close to perfect. So even if my direct manager were to report that I performed amazingly over-the-top all year and gave me 4s or 5s, it would be submitted to her manager and HR, and they would bump everything down to 3s at best. This resulted in at best a 3% pay bump, which was nothing because the wages there were abysmal.

I finally had enough when my pandemic year evaluation/pay bump was less than the previous year, despite getting strong-armed by upper management to not only do the job I was hired for, but to also take call center calls because they refused to hire more staff for those positions. Fuck that place.

[Relapses]

Banking job I worked at for nearly 5 years had a pretty messed up evaluation system. The employee's direct manager(I loved mine) would perform your yearly evaluation leading up to your hire date, grading on a dozen or so categories from 0-5 with 5 being top. The big hang-up was that the managers were told by upper management that NOBODY is perfect or even marginally close to perfect. So even if my direct manager were to report that I performed amazingly over-the-top all year and gave me 4s or 5s, it would be submitted to her manager and HR, and they would bump everything down to 3s at best. This resulted in at best a 3% pay bump, which was nothing because the wages there were abysmal.

I finally had enough when my pandemic year evaluation/pay bump was less than the previous year, despite getting strong-armed by upper management to not only do the job I was hired for, but to also take call center calls because they refused to hire more staff for those positions. Fuck that place.

Yeah, I've managed under a similar system and it encouraged me to give poor marks to high performing employees because they'd occasionally come back from lunch one or two minutes late. It's absolutely ridiculous. These types of policies seem to coincide with workplaces that like to refer to themselves as "a family." Kind of makes my stomach turn a bit just thinking about it.

[agentsi]

Are people really under the impression that they can do a job that they're getting paid for poorly, and still not get fired? Is that the sentiment I'm reading so far on these posts? Sure a stack policy is fairly shit in most regards, but if what one person can do in 40 hours, it takes another 60 hours to complete, they shouldn't be rewarded the same. And they won't be in a company like Blizzard. But to expect poor performance to fly because you feel entitled to a job is bullshit. Devs know what they signed up for, its a highly competitive job, that tons of people dream of having. So, when workers become complacent and lose their passion for the work, for whatever reasons, its time to replace them.

"Standard operating procedure"

[Gracin]

Yeah, I've managed under a similar system and it encouraged me to give poor marks to high performing employees because they'd occasionally come back from lunch one or two minutes late. It's absolutely ridiculous. These types of policies seem to coincide with workplaces that like to refer to themselves as "a family." Kind of makes my stomach turn a bit just thinking about it.

Oh yea, they spouted the "community/family" bank nonsense, but they were far from it. Couple horrid pay scales, evaluations, write-ups, and the non-stop useless training calls/meetings and it's sickening. Ooooo and then the quarterly "hooplas" which are mandatory to attend. Even if you had a reasonable excuse you couldn't attend your region's hoopla, you would be required to go to another region. And then every other year was the all-associate where we were required to all go to one location and sit through more bullshit training and meetings.

[Relapses]

Are people really under the impression that they can do a job that they're getting paid for poorly, and still not get fired? Is that the sentiment I'm reading so far on these posts? Sure a stack policy is fairly shit in most regards, but if what one person can do in 40 hours, it takes another 60 hours to complete, they shouldn't be rewarded the same. And they won't be in a company like Blizzard. But to expect poor performance to fly because you feel entitled to a job is bullshit. Devs know what they signed up for, its a highly competitive job, that tons of people dream of having. So, when workers become complacent and lose their passion for the work, for whatever reasons, its time to replace them.

"Standard operating procedure"

The problem with this line of thinking is that we have no way of knowing which metrics these employees were being compared against one another on. There are a lot of moving parts to an organization and if one department is actively making another department's job a living nightmare, it's going to be incredibly difficult for management to stratify performance across the board. In theory, it encourages the commensurate compensation for your best-performing employees. In practice, it creates a hostile work environment where people who would normally want to encourage and prop up their coworkers are instead inclined to keep information away from one another or (in the worst case) deliberately sabotaging other people to ensure they get the highest level of compensation.

[HeatBlast]

Are people really under the impression that they can do a job that they're getting paid for poorly, and still not get fired? Is that the sentiment I'm reading so far on these posts? Sure a stack policy is fairly shit in most regards, but if what one person can do in 40 hours, it takes another 60 hours to complete, they shouldn't be rewarded the same. And they won't be in a company like Blizzard. But to expect poor performance to fly because you feel entitled to a job is bullshit. Devs know what they signed up for, its a highly competitive job, that tons of people dream of having. So, when workers become complacent and lose their passion for the work, for whatever reasons, its time to replace them.

"Standard operating procedure"

Breaking humans down into this level of cost/benefit analysis is part and parcel for why this shit just keeps worsening. Humans are not all built exactly the same, and expecting the same results (or forcing better through duress and anxiety) fucks with people. You don’t have to settle for being another mindless automaton for cash money, you are a human, and deserve better (probably).

[Daedius]

All the "look, we're progressive good guys!" PR and they're still a shit company, who knew?

They're a soulless corporation at the end of the day like any other big corp.