Okay, before I get into my post, I’m just going to say this thread isn’t about spite or anger. I’m angered, but more disappointed and betrayed. This thread isn’t to drag down Blizzard, but to raise awareness of its problems, and hopefully force them to improve themselves. I really love this game, and the length of some of my posts (like this one!) only stands as testimony to that. It’s just that right now, I’m just terribly disappointed with what’s going on. Am I going a bit online revolutionary with this? Yes, perhaps you could say that I am. But I just hope this can make a change, or at least bring this to somebody’s attention
Okay, quick tl:dr- Basically, among those Fired recently was the new Blue Lore Guy, Nyorloth. He has been an important figure in the lore community, and yet we weren’t even told in a blue post about his departure. His loss is not only a great loss for the lore community, but suggests a lack of concern for our problems, and the silence surrounding it shows a level of disrespect for the whole wow community. And yet it is only one of a long list of problems I have seen with the company, and the fading relations between them and the consumer.
Okay, as I just said, basically, the new Blue poster, Nyorlorth, was one of those 600 recently laid off as part of downsizing. Among others, his accomplishments have included creating the story forums, the global writing competition, and the Ask the CDevs threads. He had also just started communicating with the story forums, and as such one of the most disenfranchised sections of World of Warcraft’s player base. At a time when lore has been mediocre at best, he was a way of getting communication between the developers and the players, a way to really improve Warcraft for everyone.
As such an important figure, one would have thought him one of the people who should’ve been kept, right? Indeed, Morhaime said that the development of the games shouldn’t have been affected by the lays offs. So why fire him, somebody who was so vital in the communication between developers and the community, and so somebody important in the quality of the game? The global writing contest is where Blizzard picked up Sarah Pine, and indeed, one of their canonical short stories. Now it is looking doubtful that there will even be a global writing contest this year. More importantly, hearing about his forum presence gave great hope to the lore forums that yes, there were people at Blizzard listening to their concerns. Now we’ve lost that.
But it’s more than just a story forum issue. It’s an issue to everybody. Thing is, we were never told about his departure. We found out from his twitter feed, with confirmation for Sarah Pine. Blizzard never told us that we lost our blue poster, a champion for a major section of the game. Other community figures have been given a farewell. He wasn’t. This to me feels like a betrayal of trust from Blizzard. Even if you cannot share my displeasure of losing an important voice for your concerns, you can at least be angered at how it was handled. It feels like Blizzard didn’t think we cared enough to tell us. They just tossed him away, and we’d find out sooner or later, but it wasn’t their job. It wasn’t important that we knew about it. We didn’t deserve to know, or couldn’t be trusted.
It is no lie that Blizzards community relations have been going rapidly downhill the past year or so. Things like the Ask the devs answers being next to useless, only telling us minor, easily discerned things, as opposed to the really important things the players needed to know, and sometimes even outright belittling the community, even when they were hardly doing any better themselves. It was portraying the new Gilnean mounts, a simple reuse of a skin that should’ve been in launch, as a major patch feature.
It was playing a video of a man using homophobic slurs like punctuation, and telling half of the playerbase to die at Blizzcon, even after a question about GLBT presence in Warcraft. It was a faction favouritism thread that not only ignored the community’s major concerns, but showed even more faction bias in the post itself. It was a post about cataclysm questing, when they described a patch that saw a previously popular character become utterly reviled as having a good story, and a story where a competant woman totally enthralled herself to a man as a “good love story”. And then completely ignored a new race not even getting to see a good third of its lore.
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