So everyone who understood the phrasing as intended is a lawyer now?
My wife will be thrilled to hear of my impending payrise.
4 Likes
Why the hell would they?!
Let’s back up here for a second.
These eSport tournaments are crazy expensive. With Heroes of the Storm they eventually shut down the HGC because the operating costs (millions!) weren’t feasible considering the small audience for the matches, let alone the smaller pro scene.
WoW is the same. The audience is small, the pro scene is smaller. The cost of running the AWC and the MDI is stupidly high though (it has to be higher than running the HGC for Heroes of the Storm). That’s not feasible for Blizzard to continue. So they crowd-fund parts of it, in order to sustain the quality for the audience that is still interested.
Remember, Blizzard’s interest in these eSport tournaments is advertisement and PR. Most eSport tournaments are funded through the marketing budget. So rather than spend the money on TV advertisements and such, they spend the money on eSport instead and validate it through the free media coverage the game gets through it.
But when the eSport scene for a particular game isn’t very popular, then it doesn’t attract any media coverage, and then it doesn’t act as advertising anymore, and thus doesn’t warrant the spending.
2 Likes
In essence, there is no controversy. Just some badly written message that people have misunderstood. Lets not turn this into another Blitzchung, okay?
If you can change the entire meaning of a text by adding 3 words, you are already making a good argument for why this is poor communication on Blizzards side.
Again, i will state, that the reason why i think this is a scammy move on Blizzard side, is because they could have been easily more clear about this, yet they weren’t and apparently never clarified it. They are making something seem charitable, while it is far from it, even to a point of being a money making scheme.
It’s very simple the way it’s was worded you could go 2 ways:
- The standard industry way of a quarenteed price pool + x% of the revenue
- They will atleast quarentee if not reached.
#1 is clearly industry standard and how everybody else does it, so we presumed this would be it. I expect salt on my fries if I buy them, it’s always provided for free and without they taste worse. Then when you open a snackbar and there is no salt on them (not even by asking) you broke industry standard. I can’t sue you but you can’t defend it with “But I didn’t say fries with salt!”.
Why even defend this laywer speak at this point? What’s up lately also with Bethesda scames the last years they were/are always defended? “They were just trying to make a profit!”, “You’re just ungratefull!” (canvas bags) and the best “Should have read small print!” when there was 0 present and they just cheaped out.
They broke industry standard and made us pay the the complete prize pool for their competition instead of allowing us to add it like every other event does.
5 Likes
Because that is how every other company have done…
The reason why it was made, was for companies to sell products, sure, but they could just have taken 100% of the sales and pocket it, yet they don’t. They give a % away to the prize pools, because it shows good faith with players and allows players to support their community of e-sports players. The company gives things up in the name of community, which is why it is so popular over at Dota2. Its not because the product is that great, but because it shows community support.
This thing had next to nothing to do with community support. If the 25% of sales had not exceed 500k, Blizzard would pretty much have pocked all the money and paid for the price pool themselfs, like they always do.
Blizzard tried to mimic a community thing from other games, yet forgot that the focus is the community and the revenue.
1 Like
I expect ketchup with my fries, but when I go to McDonald’s I have to pay for it.
I understand that, because I can read the price for ketchup on the menu.
I don’t presume. If I did, then I wouldn’t get ketchup for my fries. 
1 Like
The difference here is, that what was done here by Blizzard is not the fault of the public, but rather them actively wording it in a way to make it more easy to be misinterpreted.
This is like bringing a product named SUPER-SHEESE! on the markt and advertising it in speach as “the best cheese you will ever eat”(because in subtitels you could just write it as sheese). But it containes no cheese and can not legally defined as chesse, but only as a “cheese-product”. The consumer is not at fault for taking the cheese-product as cheese and it is illegal to sell sheese if it is not mentioned that it is infact not cheese anywhere in the fine-print.
Here we had no fine-print. We just had sheese and everyone thought it was cheese.
1 Like
If Blizzard’s current company wide target is to toss away pretty much the entirety of the community goodwill they have generated over the past 3 decades they are 100% killing it.
3 Likes
This is not about what you expect, but what other companies have set up.
If every other fast food place had free ketchup with your fries and they had done so for years before MacDonalds added fries to their menu, you would with good reason start to ask questions when you had to pay for it, without it being specificly specified.
Blizzard are late to the show when it comes to prize pool crowdfunding, which makes it impossible not to have to deal with the standard set by veterans in the field.
1 Like
Not really.
What a memorable experience, I am not happy with how today went
What a memorable experience, I am happy with how today went.
I have changed one word. By your reckoning, therefore in both instances I am not making my meaning clear as to how I am feeling. Yet I’d wager people can clearly tell what I’m expressing in both sentences.
It’s not word volumes, its where they are placed and their meaning that determines communication quality.
1 Like
That’s a false equivalence. In your example they are claiming it is something it isn’t, which their fine print contradicts.
Blizzard did not advertise the pot minimum as anything but what it is. That people interpreted it as “what they thought it meant” is miles away from a company advertising something as something else entirely. It might seem small, but in the world of advertising they’re worlds apart in terms of responsibility.
2 Likes
You clearly know it’s standard you put salt on fries but sauces are paid with a small fee. That I have to ask for it can happen but I don’t expect: “Sorry although all the other 999,999 snackbars provide free salt we are the only ones not! HA!”. You warn customers if you do it differently, they didn’t. Blizzard just worded it in such a way nobody is right but nobody is wrong either. You’re supposed to be 100% clear if you differ from standard (industry) practice.
Selling a remote with a tv isn’t mandatory, but yet people expect when they buy a tv the remote is included. Not when they open it up at home they find a flyer: “Buy a remote now!”.
2 Likes
Only where industry practice has a set of legislation guidance which sets such standards out. As far as I am aware there is no guiding legislure that purveys over what is standard crowd funding practice, it’s up to the individual digression of individual crowd funding providers. Ergo expecting blizzard to publish a “differs from industry standard” statement is bizarre. There is no industry standard. There’s just people who imitate each other in the wild west, but that does not make it an industry standard
Wow, it seems like we have a language teaching battle going on O.o
Yes, few changes matter little when you are working with few words. But when you are working with a large statement, that has to formulate a clear message, you have to make something that is hardened a bit more. You should do something, which is called recitify, where you repeat or enhance the understandment of your message.
Blizzards statement had really only one message to get through, yet it made that message unclear and with multiple interpretations. That is something which would have been given a D or lower at a high school English essay test.
1 Like
Yeah, but I bought the transmogrify toy, because I thought it was really cool, so I’m happy with the money I spent. If 25% of the money I spent went to the Blizzcon prize pool, then that’s cool. How much Blizzard ends up having to contribute, if anything, is not really anything I give a hoot about. Why should I?! I wanted a particular in-game toy. I got it. I’m happy. Blizzard gives 25% of my money to the Blizzcon prize pool. I’m a bit happier.
You make it sound as if we should somehow be angry that Blizzard got some of our money, and they only gave some of it to the Blizzcon prize pool.
But again, I willingly gave them my money, and I understood perfectly well that only 25% of that money would go toward the Blizzcon prize pool. That was the terms of purchase I accepted, and I was – and still am – cool with that.
Yeah, but saying that a prize pool for an eSport tournament ought to follow an “industry standard” is a bit silly when there’s hardly a huge awareness of how any eSport prize pool is funded in the first place!
I mean, it’s not like this is an area of common knowledge compared to salt on fries.
1 Like
They have to print on packages: “only 1 controller and no games are incldued with this console”. Because the packaging always shows 2+ controllers and game on a screen aswell. So why can Blizzard then get away with this? They should have been 100% clear they aren’t following industry standards. They weren’t, so we had to guess what they would and now plenty of people regret buying it (including me).
1 Like
Whenver people are trying to part folks with money it’s pretty typical to use language that doesn’t make it clear you want them to spend. At the same time there are standards in place that cause companies to be fined if they falsely advertise. So you end up in a place where they use language that says what they mean clearly enough but you have to really read it.
At the end of the day they’re not going to say in plain terms “just for clarity, if the sales of toys exceed 500k, we will pay no money ourselves” because that would make it obvious how cheap they are being. I maintain their meaning is clear, but they’re trying to spin it in a way that hides their frugality.
1 Like
Its okay if you think that the item is worth the prize. I also think that the transmog thing was cool enough to think about buying, but that is not the point. Some people say that subbing for Blizzard is a waste of money, yet i have done it for years being very happy about it.
The thing is, that Blizzard advertised, that they would only make 75% of the money from the sales of the item and giving away 25% to the esports community. That alone enticed some people to buy the toy, since they thought their actual dollars would go to increasing the prize pool. That is really were my problem is.
I don’t mind Blizzard making money from it, not at all. Every other game company makes money from it, but the problem is that they could somewhat pocket ALL the money. Instead of adding to a prize pool for e-sports, we instead helped Blizzard remove a cost from their esports event, as they no longer had to pay for price pools. Its about Blizzard being dishonest and hiding something behind a curtain of charity.
1 Like
And this is true.
This is also true.
I completely fail to see what your problem is.
Neither do I.
But they didn’t, so…?
Yes, that’s what crowd-funding means. The crowd funds. We are the crowd. We fund it.
2 Likes