341–350 of 379 posts
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At 19? Getting an engineering degree and all the hours of work that entailed while avoiding getting roped into MMOs by classmates as if it was Corrupted Blood.
We're all very proud of you.
The Steve Jobs quote on why Xerox failed [1] strikes again. The finance people have taken over Acti-Blizzard and they've been coasting for 10+ years on their original franchises. All we have is annual CoD releases and Blizzrad coasting on their old properties where Blizzrd hasn't had a significant original release in 10+ years. This effort seems like it's part of the ruthless approach to controlling costs that slowly…
Let's talk about Heroes of the Storm. Not as a counter to your argument, but as a perfect illustration of your points.
First thing to know is that HotS started out as a Starcraft II arcade game. It uses the Starcraft II engine. Nothing new there.
Next, for those who don't know, HotS is a MOBA. Just like DotA (and DOTA 2), and League of Legends. DotA was a mod of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, created by the community. League of Legends is a standalone game inspired by DotA.
In HotS, all the player heroes are Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo heroes. It's free-to-play. After a brief legal spat with Valve over rights to the name DotA and Blizzard trademarks, the two companies settled.
It's a decent game, but it's just repackaging Blizzard assets for a type of game that emerged out of Blizzard in the first place. To me, HotS is exactly the sort of thing a company coasting on its franchise would release.
Epitaph: AB completely abandoned the game three years after release, to the complete surprise of the small esports community that had grown up.
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> only played the role she was brought on to do How is that different from losing? Just because she was set up to lose?
No more than a contractor with a fixed length term loses at the end of the contract.
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> Collective bargaining takes away my right to bargain for myself But it doesn't, you can choose to not be part of the union
In the US, unions fight hard to take that choice away from people. "Right to work" laws in many states allow people to opt out of union membership and fees. Unions hate these laws and fight relentlessly to get them overturned.
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In the US, unions fight hard to take that choice away from people. "Right to work" laws in many states allow people to opt out of union membership and fees. Unions hate these laws and fight relentlessly to get them overturned.
"Right to work" laws force unions to represent workers who are not union members. The truth is that no one is forcing you to work a union job.
That's pretty disingenuous. Try working for government at any level without also working for a union. I could turn your argument around and say, "if you want a union job just go find one!"
Regardless, that choice you speak of represents a profound injustice according to union leaders. The ultimate goal of mainstream political labor movements is universal unionization. They would very much like to make it so that everyone is forced to pay union dues, no matter where they work.
I've never understood why people are confused or upset by these kinds of things. It's almost literally not in the companies best interest to just "let it happen" so why wouldn't they fight it?
Not trying to be smart by using your words: I legitimately have never understood why this comment is so common, considering how apparently obvious the fallacy of it is. You didn't imply "the company must do X", you implied "people shouldn't be upset that the company did X". The former is a totally reasonable argument to be made. The latter makes absolutely no sense (without extenuating context). You're not really con…
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Blizzard has been under a lot of bad press because they have screwed game releases lately (mostly because of shitty management?). They've also had bad press on political issues like the hong kong esports things and others iirc. for warcraft3: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/blizzard-botched-warcraft-iii-re...
This article has quite conveniently _lost_ some important words: >Blizzard also faced widespread criticism and calls for a boycott after banning a player who . >In lieu of official support, a group of fans began writing their own patches for the game, building a service called that aims to add back missing features.
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The supply being massively saturated is also what makes a union impossible to form. The over-saturation of supply means there's plenty of people willing to work a non-union game dev job because the alternative is no job. Also the EA-Blizzard-Activision-Ubisoft studios do consistently deliver quality games: COD, Battlefield, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc. Formulaic, perhaps, but it's tough to claim that these aren't…
the alternative isn't "no job", it's a higher-paying but perceived-as-boring web dev job
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I actually elaborated on that in another comment in this thread. Unions are bureaucracy. Adding politics, people and power to any structure inherently adds inefficiencies. If individual bargaining is working just fine in an industry, then I would not push for collective bargaining. Because, it is tradeoff is between 'bridging the information asymmetry between how much power you think you command, vs what you actually…
Inefficiencies aren't always bad. Efficiency, for example, is often the opposite of robustness. Many companies have learned that the hard way when COVID hit, even though they had an efficient supply chain and production pipeline, it was not robust.
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Learning from an “awful” person helps you grow as a person. Also understanding the enemy. Also not all “consuming” of work is for “entertainment”.
Does it, though? Does it do that in a way that's better than just paying attention to people who aren't awful? I'm really not convinced here.