The Giant Beastcast: Episode 164

Beastie time.

But what about the anime, I say!

So The Division > Mass Effect 2?

...what if I hate video games?

I love the GB crew so much. Despite the bootlickers and low empathy response to the controversy, they have big hearts and focus on the people affected rather than a gated gamer mob and people comfortable being associated with them.

FIFA 18 is my favorite classic game

Thanks Beastcrew. Y'all are the very best.

I was waiting ALL day for this yesterday... until i realised it was Thursday

Please give ArenaNet some credit.

They didn't fire both of them because the community demanded it. They fired them, because that's not how you interact with your player base (a customer) and especially Jessica's behaviour was out of control using the sexist and misogyny card to delude the facts (check out the Polygon article on that, it's quite rich to say the least).

Whatever Jessica and Peter felt internally about the situation, this was objectively a customer engaging us respectfully and professionally, presenting a suggestion for our game. Any response from our company needed to be respectful and professional. A perceived slight doesn’t give us license to attack.

We’ve all dedicated our careers to entertaining people, to making games for the purpose of delighting those who play them. We generally have a wonderful relationship with our community, and that’s a point of pride for us. We want to hear from our players. It’s not acceptable that an attempted interaction with our company — in this case a polite game suggestion — would be met with open hostility and derision from us. That sets a chilling precedent. -Mike O'Brien

I was frankly surprised that both GB and Waypoint didn't put any investigative effort into what kind of person Jessica actually is, before throwing ArenaNet under the bus with nothing but hearsay.

@misterreese: hear hear!

The video game industry must be a beautiful place to have a job because the indignation about eating crow and losing personal autonomy in regards to customers is wild.

As someone who worked for a company that rhymed with Bombcast, I saw droves of people walked out for way less offensive terminology than "asshat."

Hell, my fiancee has a job in the medical field that requires a doctorate and her work is still 50% capitulation.

Sure, she shouldn't have been fired, but.. welcome to dealing with customers since the dawn of time?

Pro-tip: Make your complaints outside of places plastered with your employer's name and role within the company.

Guild Wars 2 drama discussion from 35:00 to 53:00, if you'd like to avoid it. Nothing really new here from the Beast crew - mostly just choosing to ignore the very real possibility that the fired developer's past behavior contributed to the 'sudden' firing, in favor of the "ArenaNet is slave to evil gamers" narrative. Rest of the episode was good!

@smokebreaks I'm a lead software engineer and don't have a customer facing job, but no way in hell would I ever call a customer ANYTHING that would even resemble an insult or demean them in any way, shape or form.

And if I did, I would be out on the street the next day, and wouldn't have anyone to blame but myself.

That kind of behaviour is just unthinkable to me. Not in a million years!

@tr0n: It's wild. I came up through telecommunications, so maybe it's because my soul has been ripped from my body, but when it comes to uneducated and unsolicited solutions from customers, the answer is always the ol' ersatz "I'll send that up/I'll definitely consider it."

It's Twitter, sure, but.. companies don't exist to parse meaning from conflict on social media, they're there to sell shit.

Nice PR move after the last podcast to open with "What if we turn off comments for stuff?".

And I thought I would find *premium* comments here.

@moregrammarplz:

Thanks man, love the guys but cant stand that kind of talk.

Absolutely terrific discussion on the ArenaNet situation.

FIFA 17's story mode is not worth going back to imo.

Since everyone and their cat is throwing their 2 cents into this here are mine:

- If you put something on twitter on a public account with lots of followers there is going to be a response. You can't have it both ways by leveraging your following for outreach and then be upset if that outreach isn't what you wanted it to be.

- Jessica Price was kinda of a dick about this but everyone's a dick occasionally. You can't ever really know the full context of a person but I don't think it's controversial to say that women have it harder then men in the gaming scene, so maybe this was the proverbial drop that spilled the bucket.

- But even if it wasn't or even if she were genuinely a terrible person it wouldn't matter either because arenanet's response to this is just objectively awful. Not only is it completely disproportionate to what was actually said it just opens up a massive, foul smelling can of worms that is certainly going to haunt arenanet, if not the entire games industry.

tldr: She was being rude to somebody who was trying to start a conversation about something they both cared about instead of just ignoring him, in common parlance this is known as a "dick move". The internet responded by being the biggest asshole possible and attempting to torch her life for something 90% of them do every day. Welcome to humanity, everyone sucks.

@alive75: I support the movement, my man. I just hope the service industry follows suit. I am ready for whoever runs the Arby's twitter to operate with absolution.

So you are allowed to call customers asshats or demean them at your job?

I know I would get fired pretty much immediately if I ever did that, and I'm not working in the gaming industry.

That's just not something you do to people who pay your bills. Ever.

@moregrammarplz: Exactly. Just a number of weeks ago she attracted a lot of attention celebrating TB'd death on Twitter. Agree with her if you want, it's still the second crappy outburst in recent memory that ArenaNet was definitely aware of. Maybe those two things are isolated and she's a phenomenal employee, but we don't know and personally I think those two things were crappy enough to make me assume otherwise. And in their defense that's the thing with these convos, you end up ignorantly assuming she did nothing else wrong or ignorantly assuming the opposite because we just don't know those details.

@tr0n: I'm not saying "asshat" was an enlightened word choice but if you're telling me that your boss would fire you instantly if you're ever rude to a customer you're either working in some very high-end customer service, some very low-end customer service or your boss is a dick. Like are you telling me you have never EVER in your entire life been less then 100% courteous no matter who the customer is or what's going on in your personal life? Because I think that's a tough sell.

edit: Also let's not forget that community outreach is not her job. But this segues into a larger conversation about modern social media that this is not the right forum for and I'm not sure I'm equipped to handle tbh.

I wonder how Hideki Kamiya has managed to keep his job, he's 10x meaner on twitter daily than anything that girl at Arenanet ever said. Why is no one who called for her resignation doing the same for him?

The Fifa storyline has some good twists and turns.

Let's take a step back, also, and remember Peter Fries was exceedingly polite and beloved by the community yet also sacked. What's the defense there? "Oh well, guess that's what happens when you courteously try to defuse the situation"? This was escalated so far from where it needed to be. People are going on and on about civility and kindness but the civil and kind thing would have been a good faith attempt to work it out, which isn't possible when you rush to fire as quickly as possible (which Arenanet has copped to).

@adoggo: Has Kamiya ever been in an equivalent situation where a content creator/community partner of Platinum tried to interact with him, and Kamiya exploded on him and accused him of discriminatory behavior, perhaps racism or sexism? I don't know much about Kamiya or Platinum.

@tr0n: I think you raised a pretty valid point here. anyone in the service industry or retail would not dare to say anything disparaging about their customers because the customer is who is essentially paying you for your service or the goods you provide.

I rarely comment on anything here, or anywhere else really. I have a twitter account that I never use and realistically comments on youtube or anywhere can be ignored.

Why would they read them? They probably shouldn't be if we're honest.

The feedback for the Giant Bomb guys should be in subscriber numbers, podcast downloads and how many views their stuff gets.

Not who says what in these comments or anywhere else on the internet.

None of the above. A lead software engineer at a pretty standard software company making business software. Loyal customers, our relationships with them and the company's reputation are the bread and butter of our existence, not unlike a MMO that's a service product. Why in the world would you ever want to demean a person, let alone a customer, is just beyond my ability of comprehension.

Like are you telling me you have never EVER in your entire life been less then 100% courteous no matter who the customer is or what's going on in your personal life? Because I think that's a tough sell.

Never ever. I would talk or "vent" about customer requests or comments internally to a co-worker or boss, but never to the customer directly.

I'm glad the commenters have moved on from hating on Dan's love of America to this Arenanet hub-bub. Seriously the comments on this site are so depressing to read lately.

@puchiko: Tell me about it. Can't wait for 8 pages of takes here just like on the Bombcast comments.

You can choose to partake in this discussion and not just label it as depressing and move on. I would like to hear what you have to say.

Does any of your customer interactions take place on a public forum, say Twitter, where hundreds of people are trying to get their opinions heard by you at the same time, and are also seen by everyone and get responded to? If the answer is no, then this is not really a comparable situation.

@alex Nicely done re: the mess that is describing Ireland/Northern Ireland to Dan. I think we need you over here. There are some jobs open.

THANK YOU. All these people who are falling over themselves to defend ArenaNet and throw Jessica Price to the wolves seem to conveniently forget that TWO people were fired. Maybe that's because Peter Fries' firing has no real explanation other than 'knee-jerk chickenshit move by ArenaNet'. Gimme a break.

It doesn't really matter if you are demeaning on twitter, forum, email, phone or in person. You just don't do that sort of thing to a paying customer.

Maybe I'm just getting old and it's now OK to do that, who knows.

@toxicantidote: It's always a comparable situation in a world with such freely digestible, consistently recorded interaction. In a micro sense, let's say I am Joe the gardener, you contact me by e-mail, text or any other freely documented medium, I end your suggestion chain by stoking conversations of sexism or calling you an 'asshat.'

This is then leaked to any number of public forums.. well, my landscaping business might take a knock, aye?

Firing's egregious, but everyone in here pretending her tweets weren't some reeeeealllly dirty optics for a company, obviously doesn't run a company that sells things to people.

Anyone defending the firing of Jessica Price and Peter Fries is effectively siding with the hate mob that got them fired and are supporting an industry that tolerates this sort of behavior.

Great discussion, Beasters! It's a shame some people aren't willing to listen.

Any boss I've ever had would absolutely fire me for calling a customer an asshat and accusing them of being sexist in a public setting for no reason. I have worked numerous customer service jobs and have never been rude in front of customers no matter how frustrated I got with them or with my life. Thats just not something you do because in the end they're how you make money.

Community outreach is not her job but its very easy to not be a jerk to a customer who did you no wrong.

I didn't comment on it on the Bombcast, but since this topic seems to be everywhere, I wanted to say something about it.

Unless there were more issues behind the scenes, I totally agree that firing Price is an overreaction and should have been handled differently.

The mob mentality even though horrible, was not unexpected. A controversy, even a still developing one, involving a female developer and claims of sexisms is like a magnet for those idiots. I want to give the GW2 community the benefit of the doubt. A subreddit can quickly be overrun by people with an agenda and some of the most egregious posts I have seen floating around have been downvoted by that community heavily.

What doesn't sit right with me is the way in which everyone seems to be bending over backwards to avoid putting any kind of responsibility on Price. It seems especially weird in an episode in which you discussed the multitude of options to interact with a social media audience earlier on.

Of course she's not at fault for the harassment she received, but claiming she has in no way disrespected the GW2 community seems overly simplistic. Even if you think Derior's comment was rude, retweeting it and stoking the flames while he repeatedly apologized is not the behavior I would want to see from an employee. I wish we could seperate the two issues. Only because she got treated horribly afterwards doesn't magically make everything she did above reproach.

@mattdeleted: It's impossible for me to see this as anything but gamers being embarrassingly thin skinned when that dimension to the controversy isn't brought up and, to be frank, validates Jessica Price's initial rancor about the treatment of female gamedevs.

I just don't see this as an interaction between a customer and a company representative. This was just an public interaction between two people, one of which was known for working at a company the other personen bought a service from. And from what I understand of this situation, Jessica wasn't targeting one specific person. She was expressing in general her feelings on how tired she was of getting told by people, through a public forum, that she wasn't doing her job correctly.

Also, it doesn't seem like ArenaNet have talked to their employees about any kind of social media policy, if they even have any.

I just played and finished Inside for the first time. I really don't see what's so special about it. All the praise it got in 2016 just seems odd to me now. Seems like it was heavily inspired by Akira, so that's neat.

It's just a fine game, it doesn't do anything exceedingly well. Though playing as an amorphous blob was fun.

I don't think this sort of labeling is constructive, or has ever been constructive, towards establishing a common dialogue. Out of everything that's happened, I only wish that people would stop becoming so embattled in these issues.

There are a couple of thing that make "the topic" interesting to me.

1- That this was about a discussion about branching dialog.

2- That the firing was about "getting rid of people who would make trouble for Arena net publicly". And by doing so, making more trouble for the company. Publicly.

By that logic the person who did the firing would be the better candidate for termination, since he made the most trouble. But that not the logic, we are trapped on the "costumer is always right" mentality. And we like it when we can put our dicks on a table and feel important...but we hate it because we are all subservient unless unemployed. Happiness is unattainable unless found on the hope that future generations will figure this shit out.

Edit: This was a very fun pod btw. Thanks Beasters for giving me some extra fuel at the end of the week every time.

@stereotype: So many people seem think it's impossible to have the opinion that Price deserved a reprimand for her actions, but at the same agree that instantly firing her and Fries with no attempt at other ways to resolve the situation was a massive overreaction, terrible for the industry and only serves to embolden the worst parts of the internet.

Price should have apologized, and I think still should, but that's all that should have happened. No one needed to lose their job over this. The fact that so much of the conversation is still about to what degree Price was justified to make those comments is a travesty when the conversation should be about what this means for game devs both at Arenanet and the rest of the industry going forward.