I find it funny devs on social media, mostly on Twitter, got verified because of their status at Blizzard Entertainment. But then put up a “my thoughts are my own” next to their job occupation at Blizzard Entertainment and the reason they got their so important blue twitter checkmark and verification status.
But does that really mean they can demonise the playerbase and write about whatever they want?
Does that mean they can use that account more for politics than actual game issues?
Why can’t they seperate these things on two accounts. I suppose the Blizzard verified one should’ve been for work related stuff. But that means no one is going to look at what they write on their personal one which beats the issue they have…
I find it also funny that they decide to make their profile public but then cry out about players voicing their criticism. An easy solution would make your profile put on private.
Really this whole thing is unprofessional. They behave like teenagers.
Don’t come @ me with “they shouldn’t have to put their profile on private!!!” Grow up and realise there’s more in life than dumb social media. The world doesn’t revolve around it.
If I could make one change to English grammar and usage, it would be to make an unquantified attribution to a group ungrammatical, unsayable.
I am so sick of reading “Scientists today said …” or “Teachers are angry …” or “Blizzard devs are unprofessional.”
This kind of low-definition thinking and speaking does nothing good.
If you want to make that sort of statement, specify WHO said, or WHICH exact people are angry, or WHAT Blizzard devs behaved unprofessionally.
There are inherent risks in having a personal public presence - whether online or offline - that is in some way associated with your (current) employer. No person fully identifies with another, and certainly not with a company. Eventually, a conflict can be uncovered, or engineered.
There are also pitfalls for the weak-willed and those with a lack of self-awareness in creating social media accounts. That makes it far too easy to shoot off an impulsive messsage.
But these damgers are not specific to Blizzard devs.
They are afraid and scared that they will lose their livelihood. People deal with problems different way. Players have been asking years to improve WoW pointing out bad desing decisions. Call it karma.
It is their personal account. They can use it for whatever the hell they want to. They worked for their position within Blizzard, earning their verified badge on twitter aswell. They don’t work for blizz to get a twitter badge.
Because the twitter ToS says a single person may not have two accounts. One might control a personal account, and a role account at a company or something similar, but two accounts for the same person is against the twitter ToS.
Perhaps if certain players would stop being whiny, entitled idiots, the devs wouldn’t have to fend them off. Just a thought.
I mean, there’s a huge difference between valid criticism and puring nothing but hate at the devs. They don’t have a problem with valid, appropriately articulated criticism. They have a problem with pure hate thrown their way. Often for things they have nothing to do with.
If Devs had any balls they would post on WoW Forums with Blue icons with real names and respond and argue. They are cowards. They got the job and only thing thats keeping them there is their ego.
But fortunately ego has a built in psychological self-destruct mechanism. And they are going off on Twatter. Californian boys are about to crack. This lawsuit is best thing that has happened to Blizzard in a long long time.
While the personal rescue team and advocates for Blizzard devs have already arrived, I indeed DO think they need to be professional. Everyone with a job or intending to get one has to. Because your social profiles most likely will be checked these days in the course of an application. An unprofessional profile will not only damage your and your company’s reputation (as we all just witnessed the past few weeks) but also ruin your chances to get a job.
Also, depending on what you call a celebrity, people of public interest earn their money thanks to public attention and participation in their product. It is just fair to follow the public etiquette if you wish to continue to do so.
Every company has their own policy on this, so to say “if I do it at x company I’d be fired “ is irrelevant unless x company is blizzard entertainment, whom appear to have a policy where they consider Twitter handles as not reflective of professional handles.
We can call the policy bizarre, but that’s how it appears to be. Every company makes their own stance on this.
If you don’t think the contract at Blizzard has a clause like every other company in the world about bringing the company into disrepute then you’re crazy.
Just being unprofessional alone would be a violation of Blizzard’s social media policies. As has been confirmed by the noise from Blizzard about their developers being told to shut up.
Going on social media and insulting your customers publicly would get you fired anywhere else. Because it’s the stupidest thing to allow, and makes your company look awful.
The reason why these developers do it is because they’ve never faced consequences for it. Which is also why they generally felt they could abuse other Blizzard staff with impunity - because there were no consequences. Time they experienced it.
What these developers fail to remember is customers are the only reason they have a job. They are nothing without it.
Some of my customers drive me crazy. Yes I’ll go to a colleague or a boss and say how unreasonable they are. But what I don’t do is insult them over the phone or social media, because I am actually a professional. And I have enough sense to realise that no customer, no job.
But my God am I sick of his speeches every God damn day this week, pulling up Blizzard dev twitters.
Asmongold thinks he can dish it out and remain professional, probably because he’s a one man band, but when a check marked Dev responds / says something equally “toxic” to him, he freaks out and says it’s unprofessional and a personal attack.
Sorry for bringing up Asmongold, but your first paragraph is pretty much word for word on a clip from Asmongold yesterday. I assume that is where this topic is rooted from.
That is a weird way to end a post you made complaining about some peoples social media presence.
I’m not crazy. I’m going by the recent evidence of a dev railing on Asmon and the blue response being “The Twitter handle is not reflective of the views of Blizzard Activison and only represent the individual views of the person in question”. What are you going on?
I imagine the blues would take action if the personal expressions were tantamount to a employee defaming the company itself or spilling company secrets. But for exchanges with players, apparently not so. The above incident in question is only a month or so ago which gives me a good enough point of reference.
This may change under the new management however.
Just to be clear: I do think the individuals should retain a more professional behaviour. I don’t agree with how cavalier they are and I said as much in the original Asmon thread regarding it how I thought it was completely out of order. I’m just saying what I think their policy is.
Neither of us know for sure, but I’m looking at evidence of behaviour and blue responses. What are you judging your stance on? “They should” isn’t evidence that they do. We need to only look at the sexual misconduct allegations to know that. “They shouldn’t” harass employees on basis of gender nor discriminate owing to this, yet they did.
Oughts are only as good as the will to implement them and would you really put it past blizzard to have a terrible policy for this sort of thing? Their customer interaction is one of their weakest areas so I find it totally believable they don’t have a decent “social media interaction” policy in place, or if they do they don’t enforce it.
The people that take issue to what I said clearly behave the same way on social media. They think they can post whatever without any consequences whatsoever.
Sorry but Blizzard holds most of their communication on Twitter. What else are players supposed to do?
By the way weren’t you going to quit? What happened to that thread?