Regarding the Activision-Blizzard layoffs. Some harsh words

Community General Discussion
44

I’m pretty sure the client facing members cared. In big corporations however, the hierarchies allow for very little flexibility and decision making outside of your very narrow area of responsibility.

The main issue usually surfaces from the middle management, where certain bad tactical decisions are made.

Example: Deleting Youtube comments as damage control on the entire Diablo debacle. The obvious thing any marketer and PR manager worth their salt would do is to change the conversation. However Blizzards community facing teams have demonstrated absolute incompetence in making these decisions or any decisions at all as of recently.

These are not the decisions that client facing employees get to make, but these are the people who will get laid off as collateral in these situations.

In this case we at least have the reassurance that the decision makers also got laid off.

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45

And there is your mistake.

You have no proof. Only your on biased theories.

46

You are wrong here. I base this off the information widely available to the public. I do not have access to internal or private information. Me saying otherwise would be a lie. You expecting me to go on fetch you links is lazy.

If you do not understand what is being said, then maybe this conversation is not for you.

47

Oh this conversation is for me.

But you stated that you don’t need proof. Well, sorry, you do.

If you don’t like that, maybe you should not have started this troll subject.

48

That is pretty accurate. The worst part is trying to sell that announcement as the main event. I’m pretty sure that people would have been fine with it, if they mentioned it as something they do on the side. While they work on the main game (and maybe show a teaser).

Regarding the layoff vs firing - as an employee it really doesn’t matter for you in the end. You had a job and now you don’t. It’s a mostly a technicality distinguishing whether you will get severance pay or not.

In the end it still boils down to: “It not profitable for the company to keep you on their payroll and you no longer have a job.”

49

I do wonder which idiot fired the single CM that actually did their job? GJ yet again Blizzard… while I don’t know much about behind-the-scenes stuff, Ythisens is value to us customers. While Lore on the other hand is just stoking the flames of hatered. I really don’t want to play the executioner here, am only setting examples.

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Being fired is way more extreme than being laid off.

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End result is the same. We get to stick with Lore’s BS.

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This is not the Blizzard Entertainment I grew fond of, back in 2006. Not enjoying any of their games anymore knowing that the fat bastard Bobby Kotick rolls in dollars, and will be rolling in even more dollars now that he made 800 people umemployed.

Unsubscribed today and probably won’t come back until Blizzard Entertainment (as it vas before Activision) frees themselves from the evil clutches of Activi$ion and reinstate Mike Morhaime as President. He knew what was coming and left in time…
As I wrote, this is not the same Blizzard Entertainment anymore…

Some times, I really wish someone would have invented a time machine so someone could go back in time, see Mike and stop this madness :frowning:

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54

They’ve clearly demonstrated they have the information in multiple Q&A’s and chose deliberately not to act on it.

It’s not the community team’s fault that Blizzard haven’t tweaked the GCD (although I actually agree with the team on this one), it’s not the community team’s fault that they keep doing personal loot, titanforging, dumbed down gems, enchants for 3 slots, BoP on all craftables, and on and on it goes.

The CM team has clearly communicated these concerns to the development team, and the development team is stubborn.

Furthermore, upper management appears to believe that one of the problems with WoW is lack of content. This is incredibly stupid and not even close to the truth. WoW has a metric ****ton of content, but the systems design leaves much of it irrelevant, boring, broken, or all 3, including literally the entire levelling game. Pumping out more content isn’t going to help if the underlying issue are the systems that govern how the content is consumed, which I will strongly argue that it is.

Agree, that was a mistake from CM’s, but management definitely played a big role in this one. Surely, SURELY, the CM’s have told Blizzard management that most of Blizzard’s players are on PC and that they don’t like massive amounts of microtransactions - especially those that confer an advantage. Hell, as far as I could tell, the developers had intimate knowledge of this just a year ago. Remember when SC2 went F2P and Blizzard’s ads made fun of pay2win?

No, you got me again

The CM’s can’t prevent leaks.

That’s their own stubbornness it seems to me.

It wasn’t the CM team that announced it, it was upper management. CM team had nothing to do with this miscommunication, if indeed it was one.

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Yes, of you. This is your argument, it’s on you to provide citations backing it up, not us.

Smh.

56

Would like to sum up this thread is one word: Conjecture.

You can speculate, guess, assume, think and predict. But you don’t know. And how you are presenting this comes across as quite ignorant.

Lay offs happened, to then say they deserved it because they weren’t doing their jobs with pure conjecture is just stupid.

Many others above have already proved your points wrong. My two cents.

57

Thats a fair point only a few CM ever post even in the NA. Lack of activity seems to be the order of the day. Losing your job not nice but even the CM losing their job and there are a few good ones will be re hired else where that’s for sure.

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Nobody has proved anything here. Bare in mind that every decision is always a conjecture to a certain degree. You will never have complete information in a complex scenario. You just need enough information to be capable of a decision.

While most of this is based on publicly available information, then some of this also comes from experience - having fired, hired, laid off, rehired entire departments in the past (obviously not to this degree). It’s not a great experience for either party. These kinds of decisions are always made for a very specific reason. The branch wasn’t bringing in the results as a whole.

The way Blizzard has communicated their actions to their ex-employees currently leaves them with an open ended situation. Not knowing why you were laid off is emotionally more damaging for the employee then knowing exactly what you were fired for.

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I am pretty sure that Blizzards business department ran some math and deemed the CM team not to be financially beneficial enough maintain in it’s current state. That is the main reason why all these people got laid off.

I appreciate the effort you put in constructing your posts.

We’re not disagreeing on this point. The CM team has not been adding enough value to the company, and they have been trimmed as a result.

What I was arguing against however, was my interpretation of your initial post - being that they were fired because the employees were simply “too lazy”. Which I feel is an unfair statement (assuming I understood the post correctly) - yes, Activision-Blizzard deemed the results of the team to not warrant the upkeep of its size. But I argue that it is not their inability to perform their job. Rather that Activision-Blizzard believes the value added by the team decreases exponentially past a certain size of the team.

I love to hate on Activision-Blizzard as much as the next guy, perhaps even moreso, but I understand their decision. The WoW community, and the Internet at large I suppose, is mostly an unstoppable force of people treating each other, and developers, like the heartless corporate swines they so claim to despise.

I can imagine they believe a smaller CM team has just as much influence over them as a larger team would.

The community should be ashamed of itself, allowing toxicity to build up so much to the point where the developers of the game face not only pressure from the heartless hellhole that is Activision-Blizzard’s corporate, but also the “fans” who so desperately cling to their wish for Blizzard to “return” to their “former glory”.

If we want anything to return to some form of glory, perhaps we should act like a respectable community that deserves having heart put into the products they consume - and instead of smack-talking the latest over-stressed community manager, direct our anger towards the people who polish balance sheets for a living.

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60

The only thing your wall of text told me is that you drastically misunderstand how this works. Top that off with clearly misunderstanding the employees tweeting what they feel and I can only laugh at your post.

The communication between the CMs and the Devs won’t matter if the ones controlling the reigns don’t want to apply those changes. Cutting off CM’s who are active in the community cuts communications which actually doesn’t help any more than just ignoring the players entirely (which is what they are basically doing now). And the ones who say it was their dream job or any of the like were hoping to help blizzard for a long time. not take naps in the building and slack off.

Honestly I have almost less respect for you than I do for Blizzard atm.

64

Not sure if US law is different but in the UK, you can’t hire a different employee to a role you made a previous employee redundant from. Technically, it is the job that is redundant, not the person involved.

Should the job suddenly not be redundant anymore and it’s within a number of years (i’ve forgotten how many) then the employer must offer it back to the original employee first.

You can obviously hire a new employee to replace a sacked employee.

So, if they have been made redundant because they suck (according to the OP) then they cannot hire replacements, they must sack them instead.

To me, this is more like a combination of streamlining and outsourcing.

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not sure it would work in wow but have they ever tried the eve online way of having actual players of wow as a coucil of members who take those player related concerns and stuff to blizzard and also from blizzard back to the playerbase via quarterly meetings. they people are voted for by all of the players and have to sign nda’s on certain issues but even with this we the players at least get someone on our side to say what we ask and blizzard have to hear it and we then dont get this continual cycel where lots of peiople think blizz dont listen

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Thank you for clarifying and for your thoughts. I cannot really say that any employees that were made redundant were lazy. That would be a inaccurate generalization across mutiple different teams/members inside a branch. From experience I can say that employees usually meet the expectations that managers set for them.

Often it is that companies or departments that grow really fast tend to dilute their culture down so much that decisions and actions are slowed down to the point of standstill. If employees don’t have expectations set for them or have a false understanding of what those expectations really are, then the whole department will run off course.

This tends to vary from country to country. In the UK there isn’t a specific law that prohibits you from filling the job immediately afterwards. However it is common for bigger corporations to wait a certain period of time. This is usually an internal policy because an employee who got made redundant can go to an employment tribunal. The tribunal can enforce certain actions on the employer if the redundancy was non-genuine.

In the US, redundancy laws will vary from state to state. Usually the local state law will superseed the federal law. Some states like Florida will have ridiculous laws preventing employees from doing overtime under any circumstances for example. While other states like California will have laws more similar to Europe where employees who work overtime are entitled to extra pay.

It will be difficult to say how blizzard handled the layoffs for each individual member, but if they choose to rehire for these positions then they will have a large variety of options available for them due to being an international company. They can get around local policies by hiring a person in a different country to work remotely.

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Yes there is, if this happens the employee has grounds for unfair dismissal.