squigiliwams

I played 14 1.0 and couldn't exit the first ship because apparently 'open door' was hidden behind an obscure menu system.

Thankfully i got to see 14 A Realm Reborn during its beta phase and I never stopped playing. I've been subbed to that game for 7 gdyears. I occasionally play with some 14 folks who wax nostalgic about 11, and over the years its given me SOME desire to see what 11 was all about. This blog post sealed the deal for me tho. I'm good.

I should probably just go back to lurking the forums and chat. My post from before has now made the rounds on the internet and gotten posted all over the place. Im not in trouble but i do wish my company hadn't seen such an expletive laden post. Its a bit awk.

Hope it all works out for everyone, bye yall.

@tonal: I haven't heard this interview, but i've heard the content before. I am NOT speaking for the company at all. I cant do that, but ill just drop how i personally take that. The whole 'go to zero' thing seems to me to just be a realization that he knows there are more important things to life than just pure profit.

Its almost like that 'work hard play hard' bullshit you see at other companies, except we dont do that. Its more 'when you're in the office, give it 110 percent, then kindly fuck off and live your life when you're not here please'.

I had a 1:1 with Ric a few months ago. First question? How was my team's mental health holding up w/ Rona + Police Brutality stuff. We talked about a bunch of personal stuff, and then he told me he didn't think i was taking enough time off and chided me for it.

Maybe its all some sort of real good reverse psychology and im a chump, but it made me happy. Again, i know corporations arent our friends. I don't think Mr. Elias is some sort of magical superhuman guru of business, he just seems like a REALLY GOOD businessman who gives a shit about his kids and family too. I assume the hudson crash has a lot to do with that, but i see enough day to day action from him to not think its a front.

@slow_pc:Dude, im as much of a Hamilton fanboy as one can get but man oh man do i wish they'd let Valtteri compete. I think Bottas would really make life interesting for Hamilton but Merc is still too afraid of Ham vs Ros to let them.

@afroofdoom: If you wish to interpret my 'i like what i do and i get to help people on company time, too' enthusiasm as drinkin the cult juice then :shrug emoji:

You do you boo!

@tonal: My foot is in this video.

@canadiancowz: Thats getting into 'dude i have no fucking clue and if i say the wrong thing im fucked' territory.

I think the closest thing we currently have to a GB would be ThePointsGuy. If you swap games for 'how do i game the credit card point system for trips.' I don't think its got a sub, but its got a cult like following.

Other than that, im not going to speculate on how things change. There WILL be change. I'm just praying its all good. Again, im a nobody on the other side of the company (and the country).

@conmulligan: Yeah, we were a medium sized deal LOCALLY 4 years ago. When i started i we all fit in one large meeting area. We now have like 14 offices around the fucking planet. If i didn't work here, i wouldn't know about us either.

You know how Jeff and company are always joking about trying to Slack famous people like David Letterman and such? I guess thats how ill feel about seeing @jgerstmann and @bshoemaker show up in MY company slack. I've been a GB fan/premium sub for a long long time, and its extremely strange waking up to all of this.

The cult comment above makes me laugh. I've been an engineer at Red Ventures for 4 years now. Aside from them giving us a lot of company tshirts (seriously, its how we celebrate. something gets launched? we make tshirts. someone takes a particularly good shit? we make tshirts.) i dont really feel the desire to drink too much koolaid.

I can't speak to how these changes will affect GB at all. A. I'm just an engineering manager in a division of the company far from where Gamespot (and possibly GB?) will end up. I dont know shit. B. Even if i DID have some knowledge about the purchase, i wouldn't speak on it anyway cuz i like my job. All i can say is:

1. The company is wildly different from how the local folks think of it. 5 years ago, it was basically a marketing firm for internet companies. We ran websites, knew how to SEO like the best of them, and basically said 'we'll sell your product better than YOU can sell your product'. And we did. We have a pretty sick campus by Charlotte, North Carolina standards. Since then we've taken that 'sell your shit better than you can' mentality and realized maybe if we sell our own shit we can be better off. So we started buying our own shit. So far, this is the biggest thing we've ever done. Most of the other acquisitions (bankrate, healthline, yada yada) are doing better now than they were before. The whole call center way of business is largely being downplayed infavor of all this new stuff.

2. Whats it like to work here? Pretty damn good. I've gotten offers for more money elsewhere in the area (lots of SF tech is making satellite offices in Charlotte rn like CreditKarma and others) but I stay cuz i like it a lot. The CEO came right out and said 'no one is getting fired due to covid.' We're not getting raises, but we haven't had any layoffs. Shortly into my career here, i started tutoring/volunteering at our Road2Hire program (https://roadtohire.org/) which takes people who haven't had opportunity (growing up poor usually) and teaches them to program and then gets them jobs in the area. This past year I helped a young man go from supporting his brothers and sisters with multiple gas station jobs to a jr. developer at Bank of America. Half of my engineering staff came up through this program. And WE pay THEM a monthly stipend to do this. Our CEO (Ric Elias) legit gives a shit. Hes stupid rich, but spends fucktons of his own cash trying to make Charlotte suck less. We have a huge scholarship program for DACA students https://www.goldendoorscholars.org/ and before lockdown we were growing https://lifesports.org/.

3. When the BLM stuff hit, the company response was pretty quick and damn good. CEO himself came out and said 'we hold you to a high standard, but we've been shit to you for ignoring this'. Since then they've made major major changes to our HR policy, put a ton of money in the right hands, gave us the opportunity to help the community in the right ways (i put on a Q&A panel with the Southern Poverty Law center and it was AWESOME) and now the company itself is pushing all of us to VOTE. Seriously, its awesome. I'm black, and never in a million years did i think the company i work for would come to me and go 'JESUS CHRIST WE FUCKED UP LET US HELP' and then actually do something tangible.

I guess most of that post makes me look like im sip-sip-sippin on the koolaid. I'm not an idiot. Corporations aren't our friends. The second im not contributing i know my ass is out. THAT SAID, if i have to crank the capitalism grindstone, i dont mind doing it here.

source: https://github.com/wesleyradcliffe Me.

@deathstriker: As someone who has played some of the preview material:

The structure destiny as shit. Patrol the open world for mats. Go on story missions. Do strikes. Are they going to put their own spin on it? Sure. But i've got 1000 hours in destiny and 300 in Division. Theres a reason people are continuing to describe it as such, esp those who have played it. Theres a reason the main youtubers covering Anthem are the same people with 1000 destiny videos, and 100 previews of Div2. Your opinions on how Destiny loot isn't satsifying aside (dont mean to sound agressive, but its an opinon. The structure is exactly the same, with MMO style tiers of stats and class lockouts and rarity and all that shit) doesn't make it less LIKE destiny in many many many ways.

Edit: Bioware also isn't doing it any favors on the story front. What im talking about is already plenty spoiled by the available preview material but holy shit if they didn't just look at destiny and go 'hmm. Traveler analogue? check. bad guy who wants to steal its power? check? High tech setting with weird mysticism bullshit in a last bastion of humanity? CHECK.'