I think it’s reasonable to think that someone who has a significant platform, with income tied to it, is likely extremely biased here. At best, I think they’re not being honest with themselves and have rationalized to themself that this is the best course of action. At worst, I think they’re just outwardly delivering…

Literally the only reason why the “alphabet soup” exists is because “queer,” which had been the dominate label when the community was more fully coalescing in the mid-late 1900s, was weaponized against us by straight, cis people (started by TERFs trying to segregate trans folks out of the conversation).

Because there’s no longer real accountability.

To my knowledge, LoL has now made all those systems purely F2P. Some summoner abilities are locked behind levels, I believe, but they’re low levels and I don’t THINK there’s any way to buy your way up the tree?

Let me put it another way.

Yes, long term change is the goal here. Because this cannot magically happen overnight.

But the initial reactions of leadership at Activision-Blizzard is indicative of just how severe the problem is. So it’s fully reasonable to criticize actions which are, at best, a fraction of a step…

While I get where you’re coming from... this investigation took way longer than 2 weeks. It’s just that the lawsuit that appeared 2 weeks ago. Blizzard execs knew they were being actively investigated for sexual harassment and still continued to do nothing about it, despite their internal reports. Then their initial…

I will say that the game hasn’t tried to get me to spend money anywhere besides the battle pass. Which does include item leveling materials and such, yes, but the actual draw is the fashion items and skins.

Yeah, frankly, the impact of the items is not significant enough to matter. Yeah, if someone spends an ABSURD amount of money, you might feel it. But it’s really not going to close a skill gap.

I’m SERIOUSLY going to miss your work, Ash. You’ve written such great pieces here.

What really blows is how incredibly widespread this is in gaming. There are firms doing the good work to address it, but huge gaming studios are overwhelmingly toxic masculinity cesspools.

Yeah. It actually is just absolutely baffling that, in 2021, any PR team would have thought that was the winning response.

Totally agreed. I’ve seen this happen at companies.

When you hear the scope of this shit, Blizzard’s statement becomes even more infuriating. And that’s just one small fraction of the offenses, and against only one person.

I think they’ll feel pain from all this.

Would be nice, but what’s great to see about this specific petition is that it’s a huge sign of condemnation of Blizzard’s statement from people who actually live the truth of Blizzard.

Yeah, tbh, I find the game borderline unplayable because of how dated and frustrating some of the systems are. I get that it’s not a thing for some people, so the game might just not be for me, but... yeah.

The point is in the how they got hugely successful. They’re fundamentally linked.

You’re approaching this from a perspective of depiction of violence being the problem here, and that’s not it.

With the sheer exodus of its playerbase that WoW has been seeing over the past 2 years, I don’t think they’d even notice this, tbh. Which is unfortunate, but, yeah.

I think you fit the bill because of the language you used and the context you added it within.