The Giant Beastcast: Episode 164

I don't understand why people are so surprised by this Arenanet stuff. How many people have been fired due to single tweets in the last couple years? It sucks, but this is the hypersensitive world we live in. If you are a professional in an industry where customers seek you out, put that shit on private.

Turn the comments off.

@matiaz_tapia: Subservience?

She could've typed, "NAHH, but thanks." Or, hell, left out the thanks. Or just put a laughing emoji. Or, you know, not responded.

She was in control and she took it to sexism/malice town because some streamer from Denmark who plays too much Guild Wars 2 wanted to talk shop with someone who he felt connected to (via his affinity for the game) in the twittersphere.

@brackstone: Exactly this. All companies are different of course, but, outside of criminal activity, its very rare to get fired for a first offense (I know Price has had previous controversial interactions on social media, but there's been no indication the company ever talked her about them, so they don't count). Managers have so many tools they can use to reprimand and/or punish employees, and firing is almost always the last resort; if only because of how expensive and time-consuming it can be to identify, hire, and train a replacement. Price was in the wrong here, but firing her was not at all proportional.

I found this thread on the issue more eloquent than anything I could type

Not sure what you mean, but ArenaNet has an exceptionally well relationship with its customers. They have hosted a lot of fan meetups, they have internal forums for users to suggest features and comment on changes, they organize charities and are generally known to have a very good working environment. Every time someone in the industry was laid off, they were one of the first to welcome them.

That's why I'm surprised that GB, Waypoint, Polygon or any other media outlet has put zero investigation effort into this.

I think if you are posting stuff online in any capacity its incredibly rude to try to hide from the feedback, the very act of posting it publicly is soliciting feedback. The whole dont @ me meme on twitter is extremely grating, if you don't want to talk about it don't post it, you aren't more important than everyone else. I get that people don't want to deal with feedback because idiots are just going to fight you when you tell them they are wrong, but you are burning everyone and isolating yourself from real feedback by completely disengaging.

But the same applies to people giving bad or shitty feedback, they should expect to get no response or be called out if they are wasting peoples time, or even be blocked or banned. I'd hope that any disagreement was more civil though, calling people asshats and threatening to block them with no explanation crosses a line. But it shouldn't have required anymore than an apology. And gamergaters still need to be hounded off the internet entirely.

I really question how much people know about how business, particularly in larger companies, works if they think the firing was justified. All of the extracuricular stuff is just additional poop on the turd sandwich (whatever you think of Price, the situation has CLEARLY given a foothold to the seedy assholes that everyone was afraid it would when Arenanet fired her) of this situation.

I struggle to think of a high profile situation like this where the person involved didn't say something horribly offensive, and even in those cases it often leads to the person being removed from public view and quietly asked to resign with unspecified severance or something of that nature (outside of situations like the Netflix PR guy who actually got to make the same mistake more than once and what he said was FAR worse than anything Price ever said). Getting fired for being rude when the company doesn't have a clearly outlined policy and when the request for firing is coming from an angry, agenda-motivated mob is just a really bad way to run your business, in my opinion. God I can't believe I gave in to the lure of the hot take.

What hate/rumor mobs are you talking about? Can you back this up at all? I'm only aware of her warning people against known sexual harassers in her previous industries.

Should the devs have been fired? That's not for me to say as I've never worked with them. My main problem with this whole thing is the gaming media's coverage. A lot have completely misrepresented what happened and are just spoon feeding people Jessica's narrative of sexism when none of this ever involved gender. The only person to bring it up was her and it's sad that the media at large just went with this because it suits their agenda or something, instead of just reporting what happened; She was vile to a perfectly nice commenter on tweeter for no reason and got fired.

Most of the coverage just stinks of Fox News and it's terrible.

Considering how many Batman characters were in the first Injustice I think Jeff already got what he wanted.

I would love to see people of all political persuasions stop trying to get people fired. Trying to get someone fired from their job is a shitty thing to do. That applies to people on both ends of the political spectrum who seem to have adopted this tactic in the last few years.

You hit the nail on the head. They're media outlets, not journalistic ones.

I'm not watching nearly an hours worth of videos from a guy who, looking at his page, I immediately spot a video of his defending a serial harasser. If you have a reason you think he's particularly worth listening to in matters of sexism, I'd be happy to hear it.

Yinz people need to learn that if you expect others to watch an hours worth of stuff just to get some random dude who I don't knows opinion on an event I can just read, you have really unrealistic expectations on the amount of time others owe you.

Which... was the problem in the first place, here, so that's telling.

Yeah, he can generally analyze and breakdown bullshit and hypocrisy very well.

@tr0n: What I mean is people get fired over saying stupid shit all the time anymore., and that this whole situation could have been avoided by living in the now. If you are being harassed? Lock that shit down. If you don't want feedback from your customers? Lock that shit down. People shouldn't be losing their livelihood over hurt feelings.

You could have just typed "both sides are bad" instead of typing this long, weak equivocation termination of employment with being rude online.

You mean to tell me in an at-will employment, customer-service-based economy, an employee is fired for calling a customer a derogatory name?

I was going to post something about the Arenanet controversy but I realized I would just be adding my voice to the storm and not actually accomplish anything outside of upsetting somebody which is not what the GB community is about until recently.

Instead I am going to talk about my caffeine habits. I started drinking coffee at about 14, I came from a military family and they basically only drank it black. Outside of certain flavored coffee I now can't stand drinking coffee with cream or sugar. I'm also a software engineer in an office with unlimited free coffee so I often end up drinking 4+ cups a day. I sometimes also drink an energy drink. I think I have a problem.

@lannden: Ive always avoided coffee as a habit because I'm worried it would become a crutch. I am proud of this.

I'm ambivalent towards the whole ArenaNet thing, as someone on the outside it's not my business to speculate or guess about why or who said persons where fired. I'm just very tired of things like this coming to light and have every body and their grandma come up with their own personal views on it. And none of that noise is adding anything of value.

This issue is between the ex employees and ArenaNet as this point. Unless someone actually come up with something concrete about how and why it was justified.

I honeslty just wish they wouldn't talk about these types of controversies as they clesrly don't put in the effort of understanding both sides before making judgement. Calling case closed after a cursory reading of a polygon article is only going to anger people more.

Leave the social politics for a different outlet to cover. I'm sick of hearing about it tbh

@alex I feel ya, I have a two monitor setup on a desk and ever since my cat figured out that it's probably the warmest spot in the house, it has become his go-to napping place. Everything is covered in cat hair and playing games with a mouse and keyboard is basically impossible, I often have to unplug my keyboard to keep him from pressing random keys.

2:29:30 DANNN!

@maxxcanti said:

Wow, "celebrating" is completely exaggerating what she said. She said she was glad that someone who was causing harm wouldn't be able to do it anymore. Hardly a "hahaha he died, yes!" sort of sentiment. I'm not sure if you're somehow oblivious or you choose to ignore or not believe that TB hurt people by supporting a certain "movement" and using his social influence and position to attack people.

Thank you so much for your discussion on the ArenaNet garbage fire

@lannden: Do you still like the taste of it? Did you ever like the taste of it?

Now that's I'm done posting about that other shit, I want to underscore how fucking hilarious Abby is chatting about tossed salads while Alex screams at Dan.

Hey there champ, cool comment! :) But here's my 2 cents. Sometimes people investigate things and arrive at a different conclusion from other people. This is called a "perspective". If you didn't know, the definition of perspective according to Merriam-Webster (a dictionary) is "a mental view or prospect". It's a synonym for viewpoint and everyone has one!

Anyway, glad I could inform you of this, bye!

This. If you're not gonna do your due diligence, then just ignore the story completely. It just becomes a bummer to listen to. These controversies have become so tiring, I just cannot muster the energy to keep up anymore.

Extremely measured and insightful coverage of the ANet story. Real shame people here are going to try and put their fingers in their ears and skip that part of the podcast because they're tired of hearing opinions opposed to their own.

I feel like I missed something, or my hangover is obfuscating why this conversation started off talking about turning comments off.

I like comment sections, and really appreciated them when I was a published critic, but I suppose I was not a famous one, and I do not know what a comment section feels like with any measure of true fame.

I'll be forever sad ESPN got rid of their comment section, though it did give us Deadspin's fantastic headline,

ESPN Nukes Its Comment Sections, Unfairly Silencing Thousands Of Morons

The celebrities I do follow, particularly conventionally attractive ones, do seem to have incredibly toxic comment sections for sure.

@mardukgx: It depends a lot on the brand and type of coffee, but yeah, I do still enjoy the taste for the most part.

Man, I just need someone to chime in with "They should just stick to talking about about video games" and I'll have GB Bad Comment Bingo.

People even celebrate the guy dunking on random customers. I swear the fucking double discourse here is just exhausting. I hope none of the people who think this was OK ever have employees because they're going to be the worst fucking boss possible.

To the Beastcast guys: I am so thankful you approached this in the most reasonable way possible. You guys are the best.

it's too bad I like......kinda need social media lulz

Thanks for the warning <3

@sethmode:

Meh, that's what I come to this site for. I make my tiny voice heard by just choosing to not give a download to the stuff I don't like.

Not here for hot takes on social politics.

@dstopia: Is it really that unreasonable for someone to go "Yo, O'Brien really fucked up." but also go "Yo, Price probably should have taken a step back and not doubled down when the other guy back down."

It is because you're ignoring that one side (O'Brien) has an incredible amount of power over the other. Playing two-sideisms like this is bullshit.

I'm done by the way. I already said my piece.

This is just a warning that we have had to do quite a lot of clean up on this comment thread, and other recent threads. Please keep the comments on topic. We are getting into stuff that is way, way off the rails.

If you want to discuss other issues and other individuals that weren't touched on on the Beastcast, please take it to PMs and refrain from derailing the discussion.

Thanks, duders.

I'm glad Vinny actually read the tweet, while listening to the bombcast (west) and not knowing the details I was just wondering what the fuck had happend and it sounded like some trolling. (which it wasnt)

Overall I think people shouldnt lose their jobs over twitter drama but defending someone for being shitty over twitter (in this case Price) seems a bit off to me. Not something to lose your job over though.

He's better at gathering information than most, it is quite shameful how some sites only present the information that fit their narrative. This whole situation is shitty but the worst thing about it is sites like Polygon and Kotaku fanning the flames with misinformation.

@karrius: Where is the part that Deroir, a highly respected Youtuber who is pretty much always polite to people, is talking down to women?

If that's what he wanted to do, why did he immediately back off when she responded? How do you spin that to have it make sense?