Fired For Tweeting? - #59

Considering the title... I feel Im not gonna like this episode...

Loving Brian on the last couple of Episodes, cant remember if he featured too much before but he's definitely welcome addition the last couple of weeks, very funny + friendly guy with interesting opinions :)

I only play kingdom hearts games on proud

I just realized that I drop off these episodes so quickly because they always start with "what are you playing". I'm glad that it is a segment, but maybe it could be after the news? It seems like they talk about the same things week after week, and I just want to hear them discuss the news items Ashley's listed in the beginning. Curious if anyone else feels the same way, or if I am on my own on this? I guess I can start skipping ahead...

1:07:00 So happy to see you guys covering this the way you did. :) The hardest thing for some people to understand is that most of their problems are caused by decisions they make. She got fired cause what she was doing, telling people to F-off, calling people idiots and "asshat" is in itself an asshat thing to do while actively representing the company When you're doing a 20+ part tweet about how the company tells stories in there games just after a Reddit AMA all while having the company listed in her Bio, she was representing the company at that point. He wasn't even telling her how to do her job IMO, he just posted his thoughts on what she was talking about.....Almost like she was posting iton twitter or something. Like what did she think was going to happen? If she didn't want people to respond she should have posted somewhere else. When I read it all that comes across is he posted his thoughts on what she was saying to which she responded with open hostility. He opened with a complement ffs. I've even seen twitch clips of him praising her for the work she had done in the past with her AMA. He was a fan of her, talking about how she was a god of AMAs, which is just more proof that she was reading way to much into a simple tweet. She brought sex into this for no reason at all, then she doubled down and went on the attack instead of just putting down her phone and taking a break. Granted after a while it got "toxic" but that's 100% not how it started, she's the one who started it. "Today in being a female game dev:" tweet was so dumb IMO. All of this could have been avoided by just not responding to him. The comments that she made about Mike O'Brien were just stupid too, just so sad to see that she didn't take any responsibility for her actions. Peter fries "These are our "private" social media accounts..." May be of the funniest things I've read in a while though. Like Ashley said, should have protected her account if that's really what she wanted. I still have no idea why he got fired, like you guys were saying, wonder if something happened in person.... Keep up the great work all, till next week :)

With the entire situation surrounding the Guild Wars dev, I want to give the company the benefit of the doubt that maybe there's more going on behind the scenes that we aren't privy to, and to be honest I do feel like her reaction was maybe a bit harsh (though not necessarily unjustified), but based on the information available to us it certainly seems like they went too far in firing her. Doubly so for the guy defending her. I can understand why she reacted the way she did, though; considering the history of stuff like gamergate, I can't blame her or any other woman in this industry that interprets something as potentially being a veiled sexist comment or having those undertones. Given that, I can see why she'd make those conclusions, which is why I said it wasn't necessarily unjustified before. Would the guy have said the same thing to a male dev? I couldn't say, but I can't really blame her for thinking otherwise either.

Just as someone who casually animates and posts animations online for fun (ie, a "creator"), The internet is just volatile, though thankfully, that's the minority, I'm convinced. Everyone's got an idea of what they think is best, and with little buffer to prevent people from sharing ideas, you get... Well, the GW2 situation. Kind of just have to keep your head down, grin and bear it. Easier to ignore than get caught up in it.

Deleted my last comment because I accidentally posted it before I finished it. Bear with me because this is going to be a long one. :) I do think you guys are missing out on some of the nuances, which is easy to do if you're not part of the game's community. Over the years ArenaNet has done a very good job at establishing a sense of dialogue with the community - the primary forums are full of developer response and conversation. If a developer posts something like this on a public site with the companies name attached, it's not surprising that a player will apply the same logic that has been present in previous interactions with developers, a logic of open dialogue. While I do believe that some of the issues come from her playing the gender card, I also think that the main issue was the pure and unnecessary vitriol with which Jessica Price responded. I have to wonder if you guys missed the main inflammatory tweet because it was never mentioned. After the first few tweets, she posted his first tweet on her page while mocking him as a "rando asshat". This came across as very public mocking of someone who didn't really deserve it, in my opinion. I almost wish ArenaNet hadn't fired her just because of the continued negative spotlight the decision has put on the game, but I do believe they have the right to set a precident for the relationship they have with the community. Which, as I mentioned before, they've worked hard at cultivating. Also, language may have played a part of it. The game itself never really curses or has any explicit content. They might not want to present the last kind of image. Another thing that I would like to mention is the comment you guys quoted from Reddit. I don't use the site so I could be mistaken, but I've heard such comments were very heavily downvoted, showing the opinion of the majority of the community. I 100% believe that sort of disgusting behavior is evident of the culture of Reddit, not the culture of Guild Wars 2. The official forum would never tolerate or even generate such awful responses. It's really a shame because it makes the community look so bad when, in fact, it is one of the best communities I've ever been part of. I've spent a shameful amount of both time and money on this game and I only wish that this controversy didn't reflect so poorly on us as a community. Other news sites have also done us the disservice of cherrypicking the worst of us to use as an example. I'm female and ONLY play female characters, and this is the only MMO that I've never been harassed for it. But hey, that's my experience. Like you've pointed out in this episode, it's hard to walk in anyone else's shoes.

Fuck that dude talking about brigadier devs enough to fire them.

i commented on the new game plus for the last episode that the switch has a dark/night mode but i figured you be more likely to see it here

I like Brian more since he's been on the podcast. Seems like a cool guy!

I wonder if Price was a problematic employee before this point and this outburst on Twitter brought her to the attention of someone in power at the company. I just really get the feeling that her getting fired had more to it than a single Twitter outburst.