Jeff’s guild was Legacy of Steel, wasn’t it? But yeah, he and Alex were seemingly very close, given the number of shared items referring to their EQ characters together.

Speaking of being optimistic, I think it bears mentioning that in 2014 a new art director took over for WoW and in the years since, there has been an obvious effort made to redesign and desexualize female character designs and armor sets. Used to be that nearly all the female characters, up to and including marquee…

Huh. Are you sure the items are p2w and not, what was it, "fun little prizes?" 

Yeah, saw that after I posted. A lead game designer, they'd have several in that position.

Well, McCree already has an alias in-universe, Joel Morricone. But it would be a lot of work to change the name, it’s not something they could just change overnight. There’s hours of dialogue in several languages, plus animated shorts, comics, a recent novel...

Yeah, I think it’s probably just an ironic coincidence, since I’ve heard they’d been doing this for years at Blizzcon, and that the portrait was just a random piece of decor in the suite Afrasiabi regularly reserved for his Blizzcon after party. And I can’t find any references to it from after very early 2014.

FWIW, the anecdote I heard on a WoW message board a while back was that it’s the hotel room at the Anaheim Marriott where some of the senior WoW leads held their drunken Blizzcon after parties, and the name came from a framed portrait of Bill Cosby that was “inexplicably” part of the decor. IIRC they used the same…

It has, yeah. The Blitzchung stuff for example. While the outcome wasn’t perfect, pressure from employees and some of the leads caused them to reverse some of their decisions and to make policy changes going forward. And that seems pretty quaint in retrospect, in light of what’s currently going on.

The harassment complaints seem to be directed entirely or almost entirely at the WoW and the Battle.net teams, which each have hundreds on staff, so it’s really not clear how pervasive a problem that was company-wide. I don’t think it’s correct to assume that “most” workers are culprits, or that those who didn’t speak…

Yes. And a recent hire. And part of Activision Blizzard corporate, not the WoW and Battle.net teams at Blizzard, where the complaints seemed to mainly be concentrated. So, basically, she was in no position to talk about it.

I mean, if nothing else it’d be an excuse to change leadership. It’s not like players have been thrilled with the direction WoW has taken over the last two expansions.

1.) Fuck Bobby Kotick.

I mean, I really don’t think that’s the case. He was pushing the limits of what was possible to render on the hardware at the time in term of designs, and they were pushing the hardware to its limits in pursuit of that. There are always going to be challenges with realizing 2D art in 3D. I don’t think he did anything…

Yeah, in the time since my initial comments there have been a couple other statements from people employed currently and formerly that strongly indicate that he was absolutely made aware of the conditions before he left. And he stayed on as an advisor until early 2019, so it’s extremely unlikely he’s only just now…

Cher Scarlett, an ex lead on the software side in 2015-2016, says she tried to contact Morhaime about harassment she received and was reprimanded for it (not by him), and now believes he was kept in the dark (by upper management?) after talking with him about it at length today.

NEWY would also be good.

“Nomura = belts & zippers” is an old, outdated meme. He hasn’t really focused on that since the PS1-2 days, and back then he including them in designs specifically to push the 3D character artists, since they were difficult to render at the time. He also incorporated a lot of asymmetry into his designs at the time for…

It bears mentioning that Nomura has been doing character design work since FFV. He did the monster designs for FFV~FFVIII and started designing some of the characters in FFVI, as well designing all the SD versions of characters that Kazuko Shibuya based her pixel art on.

After the responses to that article about Nintendo going after those guys who leaked photos of a Pokemon strategy guide on the internet, I’m curious to see how people justify this obvious, massive overreach of IP law to excuse this horseshit. This is like Coca Cola suing the shit out of a guy for selling rafts made…

I just don’t know why they haven’t given them the HD-2D treatment. From the moment they unveiled Octopath Traveller I think it’s what everyone has wanted.