[meibo]

> It's almost as if they've transposed their in-game narratives into their corporate affairs, with similar plot tension and dramatic arcs.

Funny you say that, a writer at Blizzard just got fired for writing a satirical "greedy CEO" character, after a high-level executive played that part of the game: https://twitter.com/covingtown/status/1663998815458951168

[SpaceManNabs]

All this stuff makes me feel pretty good about boycotting Blizzard games since the starcraft II cheating scandal. WCIII TFT is still my favorite game/game experience of all time because of normal AND custom games, and blizzard will never ever come close to that level of quality again.

Actions to save face describe Blizzard pretty well nowadays. The Vivendi sale announcement on their classic battle.net page really was the beginning of the end. Even me in middle school felt bad reading that garbage.

[stickfigure]

That seems hard to believe at face value. Maybe there's another side to this story?

[EatingWithForks]

Didn't a high-ranking guy sexually harass a woman to the point of suicide at this company? I can believe the company in which a person in leadership sexually harassed another employee to suicide can also have petty executives that demand firing when they feel thin-skinned about their wealth.

[falcolas]

And let's not forget the Cosby room - a room dedicated to rape and sexual assault of female employees by ActiBlizz leadership.

You might argue that "those" folks are gone, yet apparently their culture has not really changed.

[SketchySeaBeast]

The height of naming irony, given this was Blizzcon 2013 and the Cosby allegations came out in 2014.

[krustymeathead]

It looks like the naming was likely intentional, allegations about Cosby go back to 2004. Although Hannibal Buress didn't start talking about it in his routine until 2014.

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/bill-cosby-trial-comple...

[jwestbury]

There was a bit in 30 Rock about Cosby in 2009, too, written by Tina Fey -- who also took a shot at Cosby on SNL in 2005. Hannibal's routine was just the first to catch the public's attention.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I guess they were into knowing about celebrity sexual assault allegations before it was cool?

[willcipriano]

The part where they used it in ads makes it certain there is more to the story.

[vkou]

What makes it hard to believe?

[stickfigure]

The mustache-twirling cartoon villain implied by the narrative. People aren't that simple, not even tech managers.

[vkou]

It's not mustache-twirling villainy, it's just having a fragile ego and being pissed at a dig at you, which is common across all sorts of people, managers included.

[stickfigure]

That makes no sense whatsoever. Blizzard used it in an ad campaign "before, during, and after I was separated". It's not like the text was secret.

A simpler explanation is that an aggrieved party is not giving us the whole story. General advice: Be wary taking sides in nasty breakups even if (especially if) you want to like/dislike one or the other.

[vkou]

It's good advice when one person is pissed at another person, it's less good advice when that line of disgruntled people stretches down the block and around the corner.

It's naive to assume good intentions when one party has a well-documented, multi-sourced history of behaving poorly.

And a very simple explanation is that the people who got pissed at it weren't the people who worked on the ads, and even if they ultimately gave high-level approval for them, didn't notice the minutia at the time. Maybe the parts of it they had issue with weren't the parts used in the ad. "Back to the office" and "Another Yacht" could have been the trigger words, and they don't appear there.

[arp242]

Sometimes people really do mean-spirited petty things for petty reasons, and it really is "just" that simple and black/white. It certainly seems to me the story is entirely plausible, although of course I can't judge if it's also true, and I agree it's usually best to ignore these kind of anecdotes, but that's just because you can't easily separate the 'true' from the 'more complicated than that' ones.