Quite the opposite actually. The issues raised are industry wide, so there's no escaping them by simply changing companies. And with the way the Activision Blizzard employees (of all companies under the holding) are banding together and forming a pseudo-union, and potentially a true union, Activision Blizzard is the best place to be at the moment if you're looking to help change the attitude of the industry and shape the future of diversity in it.
I'd be more suspicious of those leaving, because they could very well be racist, sexist, or guilty of the crimes in question and are trying to escape before the axe falls on them.
The way players are making this whole issue, which is about the employees and work conditions, about themselves and their petty grievances over one aspect or another of one of the games is, quite frankly, sickening, and shows that while the employees are certainly working on reducing toxicity amongst them, it seems the playerbase is still a long ways off from reducing it amongst ourselves. The threads over the past week on here have been testament to that.
speculating about why a blizz employee has left right now is more pointless than usual. we can't tell if someone decided to turn in their notice just before all the recent allegations (though with an investor lawsuit as well, this is basically confirmed) or if they are being outed as problems. only time and the revelation of evidence can clear this up.
If he was a system designer all I have to say is good riddance.
I like people are like.. you cannot know he left for the reasons everyone is leaving! But then like.. if that is the case.. how do you know that isn't the case? Just seems like a dumb debate that you might as well take his word on it. Sounds like his departure was going to happen and he didn't want to throw his name in the hat of the situation that is currently ongoing. If that isn't the case I am sure California will come knocking. No reason for us to really worry about it at the moment beyond that.
But it is sad to see him go. He did some pretty decent work even if he wasn't one of the front facing folk that hung out in the Coz. Which.. probably is a good thing right?
As Afrasiabi's direct superiors, Morhaime and Metzen could be perceived as his most significant enablers. Jeff Kaplan, who also left, has long history w/ Afrasiabi going back to their EQ days and, while he also was never directly named, would not be surprising if he turned out to be another enabler. This is all hearsay of course and it's better to just let the facts come out than make kneejerk assumptions about why so-and-so left.
Last edited by Nero Duskwind; 2021-08-05 at 02:37 AM.
The default is that it's unrelated, because in a huge company in this kind of industry there is a natural turnover rate that has people coming and going all the time.
If you think it is related, it's incumbent on you to provide supporting evidence. It could very well be true, but we don't know until we get data to indicate it; until that time, the only reasonable assumption is that it's not related to the lawsuit.
Nobody can know what some departures may mean now. He might have "jumped ship", but he might also have been a part of the problem and got yeeted.
Or he might have felt his ass was about to be on fire next and bailed to find shelter somewhere else before blowing up.
/shrug
Corey stockton’s linkdin and twitter account have been deleted aswell. I guess that whole thing with the suite and his comments where the end of his role within blizzard.
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Metzen already said that he never directly worked with alex as metzen had nothing to do with him within the company and only went back and forward over lore sometimes.
Last edited by Vestig3; 2021-08-05 at 11:22 AM.
- Vanilla was legitimately bad; we just didn't know any better at the time - SirCowDog
I'm not agreeing with you, no. Your earlier post tried to invert the burden of proof. This is how weird rumors get started - people operating on assumptions they think are justified, without any actual data to justify them. It could very well turn out that it was related in this case, but until we know anything more it's not a reasonable assumption to make given the long leadup time and high natural turnover in the industry.
Those details aren't "pointless". It's how proper arguments work. If you're not interested in proper arguments then, fair enough, you do you.
The problem with your case study is I said "we don't know do the conversation is pointless so leave it to investigators" so in fact I was defending him from allocations. Thanks for more fancy words built on a foundation of fundimental lack of reading comperention. Now, go crop out a few individual words removing context to make yourself feel merited when in reality it will just be marketed.
tbh everyone should jump ship, people who work there and dont look for alternatic workplaces have only themselves to blame.
I did the same, my old place was toxic, changed my workplace and get more money and no headache after work.
This "evil Activision" doing bad things to poor Morhaime, Metzen and Blizzard is nothing more than a forum fable.
It's really about time people start to have reality sink in that Blizzard's fuckups are in fact their own. And yes it includes our Holy Saint Morhaime who in last years of his tenure pulled disaster after disaster and left a company with nothing in the pipeline for years.
These are the guys who practically killed off Starcraft, HoTS and Diablo, brought WoW low, while they were sitting on their asses milking their card game and WoW.
Imagine that last 5 years Blizzard did not release even one new game. That's not because Activision held them back, it's because Blizzard fucking lost it.
And if there is one good thing about this whole lawsuit and slump, is that I legit hope Activision takes over for good, so Blizzard can get new blood in - people who actually would want to make and release new games instead of living off their parents (WoW).
I think I'll have to bow out, this gave me too much of an ironygasm.
In all seriousness though, I do expect a genuine wave of quits in the wake of these events. I'm sure rival companies are mailing out offers to prospective poaches every hour at this point, and no doubt some people will also just be fed up with it all. But these things tend to take time, so it'll be a while until we get a better picture of what the personnel situation is going to look like.
In any event, I find it unlikely that there'll be fatal hemorrhage; the activism from the Activision workers speaks, to me, of a genuine desire to make it work. Make changes, absolutely, but make it work nonetheless.
I mean -- every game Morisson worked on turned into shit. So its a net positive.
Haha. It's funny how people will immediately take the word of people they like. Afrasiabi is referenced in the Vanilla WoW game about 15 different times. He is literally in the game as a character. He was one of the first people Blizzard hired onto WoW as a project, and he designed entire zones full of quests. You honestly think Chris Metzen had "nothing to do with him"? Really? What if Afrasiabi decides to write up a quick statement saying he "doesn't know" any of the men/women/other that are accusing him, do we just believe him too?
Even assuming you can stare in the face of reality and deny it, there's some obsessive culture around here that if you are in any way superior to someone else in a workplace, you are 100% responsible for everything that person does. Metzen was superior to every single person you've seen in any of the pictures or messages that have come out about this situation. He directly profited off their work, left before the cards came tumbling down, and now people like you are letting him off scot-free because he's gone to make board games or something. Grow up. If you want to LARP about caring about workplace culture in a company you don't work at, you don't get to half-ass it.