The Giant Beastcast: Episode 164

Uh oh I get that too. I get sleepy after coffee sometimes. My bodies creating too many anti-caffeine cells or something.

Wow, I think Dan broke Alex there at the very end....and for good reason. I am just shaking my head over here...

It remains unfathomable to me that someone could be a functioning adult in their 30s and not understand the most goddamn basic concepts of cooking.

Haven't really looked into anything about the ArenaNet stuff besides what I heard on the Bombcast and Beastcast this week. I wouldn't side with a mob of people saying she should get fired, that's just not my business. However, I don't really think what ArenaNet did was terrible.

I'm also a Software Engineer like @tr0n...deal with customers and feedback from them on features a lot and you have to be super polite even if you are rolling your eyes in the back of your head. There's no training for that...it's just kind of like expected.

Maybe also it's not a devs job to interface directly with players/customers. At companies we have PR and Community Mangers for gaming for this exact reason...they're trained to deal with asshats on the internet and interface with the customer. Not engineers and developers, so maybe it's on ArenaNet to say "hey you're not qualified to be the public posting face for our product, that's not your job you're not trained for that"....or maybe they have idk I don't work at ArenaNet

@oueddy:I think one of the most interesting things regarding comments and anonymity is how quickly the idea of "Well, if we just make people identify themselves then they will be civil" (as presented by Google and Facebook) was demonstrated to be completely false. (Ie, people who are rude idiots are rude idiots even if they log in with their real Facebook account.)

Personally I'm thinking that what might work regarding online dialog is a chain of trust. Consider the commenting systems on Slashdot (or the now defunct Kuro5hin). All comments start out with a 0 rating. If you log in you get an added +1 to that score. And then other people can add points using tags (like interesting, insightful, funny) or subtract (trolling, harassment) from the score. As you read a thread you can decide what level of comments you want, so you can read at a level of 5 and only get a summarized view of the discussion. (The algorithm did sometimes bump other comments if you responded to something and stuff like that.)

What might be interesting to try is to start from that and then add individual chains of moderation. Say I trust the people of the site, so anyone they vote for (or is in their trust chain) is slightly increased (for me). It might just be that this would rely too much on other people's work to be worthwhile though.

I think you're being a bit blinded by whatever her tweets reflected in her character to not see what @hasuto is saying. Neither of us know her or followed her, I'm sure there's a lot of internet research out there to try and prove who she is, but the only things we truly have are that a game company fired two people in large part to a mob mentality and made a really bad job of it - ultimately setting a precedent to remove dev (and maybe media) voices from public spaces like Twitter. Anything else is conjecture because we just don't know the inner workings of the company beyond their terrible statements or the people involved.

I suppose this is why its such a shitshow for everyone.

The mental gymnastics on display here are hilarious. Not to mention just changing the timeline of events to suit your conclusion. I hope you never work at a place that fires you for something so innocuous.

It's hilarious to me that people think Arenanet did this without the urging of the mob. If you believe that, then you agree they're basically the worst company alive then, right? Who fires someone for saying "the next rando asshat" without a conversation? People that think that that is rational, normal behavior for a good company either have never worked or have never had a good job for a remotely caring employer.

@moregrammarplz: Did you miss the part where more than half of them addendum'd their take on the situation with "There's probably more to this beneath the surface, but we don't know?" Were we listening to the same podcast? Moreover, Jessica Price is one thing, but Peter Fries being dismissed as well is just baffling, unless he was downright nefarious behind the scenes.

What other job was she fired from? Was it the job that, pointed out elsewhere in these comments, she tried to speak out against sexual harassment, and the company told her not to, and then that company had serious problems with its volunteers being groped and physically assaulted at its events that it tried to cover up with an NDA without actually doing anything about?

Cause I'm not aware of any other job, and if you're saying we should blame her for being hostile to those bosses, I think the question on who's side YOU'RE willing to take and why should be looked at.

Wow, I was really expecting a better take on the Arena Net stuff. Tbf the comments made to Jessica were presumptuous and patronizing but seemed to be made in good faith and the comment maker apologised once they realised offence was taken.

The insinuations she made towards what seemed like a well meaning, if misplaced/misjudged, comment were pretty unjustified imo. Her frustrations are understandable but (rightly or wrongly) people have been fired for less. I also wonder whether her firing was just down to this incident or whether it's a further strike following previous comments made which a very public company might not want to be associated with (not wishing to go into details)

Wild that Abby had no idea Blockbuster rented out games. Pretty sure she’s only a year younger than me, and I rented the hell out of N64 games. Renting still definitely continued on into the PS2/GCN/Xbox gen, by the way.

Who the hell considers Diet Coke an energy drink, Dan?

Well Giantbomb is great for coverage on actual videogames, when it comes to covering controversies around video game they generally retreat back to their tribe and parrot their narrative, regardless of how well it aligns with the actual facts. I Also don't believe that it was brought up that the person she attacked was a partner of areanet.