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Jaytan posted:I don’t believe any allegations of misconduct have been offered for Mr Hazzokostas, but I will take this opportunity to point out prior to him joining Blizzard he was a member of Elitist Jerks which started as an offshoot of the beta Goon Squad guild. It’s full circle y’all. goons ruin everything
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Sep 18, 2021 03:20
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Cythereal posted:They're allowing mods for single player. Can't play multiplayer with mods. Which might as well be no mods period, imo. Beyond really simple stuff, I can't see the huge stuff like Median XL or Path of Diablo going through all the trouble of porting it over to D2R when you'll never be able to use it to play online.
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Sep 18, 2021 04:52
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I just don't see how California law can unfuck Activision Blizzard. How many people need to go to prison? What does it take for a company like this to be forcefully liquidated in such a thorough way that it can't just come back with the same culture and business practices but under a different name? Hopefully someone somehow grafts the new controller functionality onto the old game so I can finally play D2 again with my busted rear end hands.
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Sep 18, 2021 06:08
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Ra Ra Rasputin posted:What are the player numbers like on WC3 reforged? did it ever recover from gutting their custom games and constant crashes? I don't know what they are like now or what they were like at the start but from personal experience I'm not sure Reforged ever took off. When the hype was still there (in the first few days of release) I tried multiple times to get UMS games going on Battle.net and it was an impossible exercise. Just about every game you joined or created would kick you back to the menu, which I think was a case of a map broken by the Reforged update. But even playing the maps included with Warcraft - like Skibi, for example - the lag was insane. In the end, I don't think I played a single custom map, and between that and the dire state of the rest of it, I dropped and refunded it. I can't imagine it ever recovered at all. Dreylad posted:Brood War reads like there were 14 writers, 5 who had recently watched Starship Troopers. As best as I can tell, Phinney was responsible for the "script and story" of the original Starcraft. The only credited writer on Brood War is Metzen himself. Comparing Starcraft to Sacrifice, I feel like it's safe to assume that Phinney was responsible for a lot of the more mythological/grandiose moments in the writing, whether it's the Overmind or the Protoss or Mengsk's speeches. When I played through the two games when the remaster game out, it really was quite striking how things changed between the original and Brood War. That's not to say that Starcraft's writing was perfect. I think I had a conversation with Lt Danger on these forums a few years ago where the original can't even agree on some basic aspects of the setting (how many planets in the Confederacy, where the planets are located, etc.) and how some elements of the first game arise from it being written as they went (The Overmind creates his ultimate anti-Protoss warrior... and then leaves her on Char for some reason. Because Infested Kerrigan was seemingly a late development.) Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Sep 18, 2021 |
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Sep 18, 2021 06:31
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It takes less than you would expect for an overall corporate culture to change, unfortunately the change is usually negative-- either as people who are harassed leave and harassers see a safe haven of a company to be at, or as the finance vultures swoop in and gut the company overall. There will always be "Blizzard" as IP but I honestly don't know how much longer they'll exist as a proper studio, especially given the "lovely releases, lovely PR, poor internal morale for many reasons" death spiral they appear to be in from the outside. They won't die for lack of players per se, but with how many game support plugs they yanked out before the lawsuit dropped despite fairly active playerbases for ostensibly "underperforming", I wouldn't be surprised if some Activision C-levels are eyeing the "cannibalize and eject" button. Doubly so given that Bliz seemed to go all-in on trying to monetize esports but the rest of ABK is making megabucks off the mobile market that Blizzard's still not even got a single entry for. (The fact that they massively flubbed the PR for their singular attempt at entering into it and have had it sitting in the wings unreleased for 3 years running probably isn't making the important shareholders happy, either, especially with the largest planned market for that game cracking down on allowed game duration for kids, and all Bliz's games are online-only so....oops.)
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Sep 18, 2021 06:41
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Not to mention Blizz are pinning all their hopes on Diablo 4 of all things, a franchise that's been dead since the early 2010's when upper management decided the game (Diablo 3) was done just as the big problems had been ironed out and it had a hugely successful launch on consoles.
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Sep 18, 2021 06:46
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The biggest problem (as far as the suits cared about it) wasn't ironed out, specifically "they couldn't figure out how to micromonetize it after the RMAH was removed", which is why they pivoted into mobile for the sequel unfortunately the "pivot" involved stepping on rusty nail and also slamming their face into a wall, and the handling of Diablo Immortal/Diablo 4 compared to Fallout Shelter/Fallout 4 has probably been the subject of marketing presentations as "what to do"/"what not to do" ever since
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Sep 18, 2021 06:51
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BisbyWorl posted:Which might as well be no mods period, imo. I very much doubt they will. Median XL in particular is basically operating its own version of the d2 executable with a bunch of QOL features and support for modern day resolutions blizzard meanwhile, stubbornly refuses to support any ultra-wide screen monitor resolutions because "they don't want people with those monitors to have a competitive advantage in multiplayer"
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Sep 18, 2021 08:57
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Shooting Blanks posted:I kinda respect the honesty. I've had so many recruiters blow smoke up my rear end (entirely different industry) that I'd be pretty happy if one were to just lay out expectations bluntly - good or bad - and let me make a decision to move forward. Let's not talk about ownership or passion, let's not talk about creativity or work/life balance. Tell me what the pay is, what's expected of me, what the metrics are, let me meet the group I'd be working with to understand team dynamics and let's go from there. Yeah, this is a sign of a good recruiter. They should lay out realistic expectations in the hopes you stay there. You're the product for a recruiter, and if they have to reassign you it's more time and effort spent. Good fits are in their best interest. Also, gently caress anyone who sugar-coats Blizz at the his point.
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Sep 18, 2021 11:19
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I think Blizzard have said that mods that modify the executable will not work/be banned for "security", even in single player, so that excludes all the interesting mods (Median, PD2, Plugy) right off the bat. The reason those mods work that way is that D2 doesn't have an official modding framework similar to what you get in XCOM 2, and Blizzard haven't mentioned anything about creating such a framework for D2R. The "mod support" they've said they actually have is that you can change various numbers in the game via ini files, and probably also change various textures/assets by replacing some files. Unless they have a modding framework they're not talking about, I would expect modding for D2R to be very limited.
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Sep 18, 2021 11:26
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Jaytan posted:I don’t believe any allegations of misconduct have been offered for Mr Hazzokostas, but I will take this opportunity to point out prior to him joining Blizzard he was a member of Elitist Jerks which started as an offshoot of the beta Goon Squad guild. It’s full circle y’all. Lol short history fun. Dextor and myself formed Hooligan Syndicate as we split off from goon squad because we wanted to have a guild with more “serious” raiding type folks. Goon Squad called us elitist jerks. So we called ourselves that as a joke and away we went!
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Sep 18, 2021 17:48
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tithin posted:I very much doubt they will. I've heard of Median XL before. If you're looking to just play through Diablo 2 single-player (which is what I'm doing), can you run it with just the QoL and high resolution stuff, or do you have to also play with the new custom content? I ask because I still need to strike Diablo 2 and LoD off my backlog, but the only options to play it are in fullscreen or in a window (and the default window mode is small and doesn't play cinematics).
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Sep 18, 2021 22:21
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Max Wilco posted:I've heard of Median XL before. If you're looking to just play through Diablo 2 single-player (which is what I'm doing), can you run it with just the QoL and high resolution stuff, or do you have to also play with the new custom content? I ask because I still need to strike Diablo 2 and LoD off my backlog, but the only options to play it are in fullscreen or in a window (and the default window mode is small and doesn't play cinematics). Just get the hires mod for d2. It doesn't make it like super high res, but running it even in like 1600x900 is a big improvement. I'd also suggest the mod plugy for the qol stuff if you still want the generally vanilla experience. Median XL is cool but it's like 80% an entirely new game built on the back of the d2 story and engine.
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Sep 18, 2021 22:57
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'Funny' story: right after I made that previous post, I decided to go ahead and download Median XL to give it a shot. 3/4ths of the way through downloading it, the power goes out. Once it finally comes back on, I try to uninstall the mod, then reinstall it, but the internet service hadn't been restored yet, so I couldn't download the mod files. I just booted up D2 a couple of minutes ago, and I realized that in installing the mod, I wiped my character save (a Sorceress). I had only made it to the start of Act 2, but that means I've got to run through Act 1 again.  .Herstory Begins Now posted:Just get the hires mod for d2. It doesn't make it like super high res, but running it even in like 1600x900 is a big improvement. I'd also suggest the mod plugy for the qol stuff if you still want the generally vanilla experience. I'll try the hires mod and PlugY, then try Median XL later. Question: what's the difference between a regular character and an expansion character? EDIT: The Hi-Res patch wasn't working right, so I just uninstalled the whole game. Will try doing a fresh install later to see if I have better luck. Max Wilco fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Sep 19, 2021 |
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Sep 19, 2021 06:01
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Just a few days until d2r comes out and conspicuously we have seen literally nothing from after act 2. Starting to get a bit alarmed
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Sep 20, 2021 19:54
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Just a few days until d2r comes out and conspicuously we have seen literally nothing from after act 2. Starting to get a bit alarmed Isn't the expansion supposed to be in, too? Act 5 had plenty of "oh drat" places, you'd figure they'd want to show those off. I can understand not showing off act 3,(who liked act 3, those little blowdart assholes were the worst) but 4's bleak and grey take on hell and 5's snowy mountain slowly turning into a fiery version of hell are cool and people have good feelings about them.
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Sep 20, 2021 19:58
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-is-investigating-activision-blizzard-over-workplace-practices-disclosures-11632165080
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Sep 20, 2021 20:30
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https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1440032380564099075 I hate to keep retweeting this dude here. He's a huge rear end in a top hat to indie devs.
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Sep 20, 2021 20:36
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That's a new investigation, to be clear, separate from the other two big ones currently running against them.Grondoth posted:Isn't the expansion supposed to be in, too? Act 5 had plenty of "oh drat" places, you'd figure they'd want to show those off. I can understand not showing off act 3,(who liked act 3, those little blowdart assholes were the worst) but 4's bleak and grey Yeah that's my understanding. I imagine they are naturally busy as hell, but we've seen literally nothing of it. The act 1/2 stuff did look good, but it was getting basically full AAA resources thrown at it since it was literally the main D4 team working on it. Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Sep 20, 2021 |
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Sep 20, 2021 20:38
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Grondoth posted:Isn't the expansion supposed to be in, too? Yes, its’s the whole package and the devs have said they’re “not ruling out new content”, whatever that means.
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Sep 20, 2021 20:42
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Imagine releasing an expansion so bad that the domino effect brings down not only Blizzard but also Activision
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Sep 20, 2021 21:06
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ErrEff posted:Yes, its’s the whole package and the devs have said they’re “not ruling out new content”, whatever that means. Buy a hat for your Grizzly summon!!!
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Sep 20, 2021 21:13
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For non-Americans, the SEC investigating is very bad news for Blizzard. The Securities and Exchange Commission being involved means that they have reason to believe that Blizzard's been loving with investors' money, and that is something this particular federal agency takes very seriously. And they have a lot more teeth than the NLRB (the previous federal investigation).
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Sep 20, 2021 21:18
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I don't know what they are like now or what they were like at the start but from personal experience I'm not sure Reforged ever took off. When the hype was still there (in the first few days of release) I tried multiple times to get UMS games going on Battle.net and it was an impossible exercise. Just about every game you joined or created would kick you back to the menu, which I think was a case of a map broken by the Reforged update. But even playing the maps included with Warcraft - like Skibi, for example - the lag was insane. In the end, I don't think I played a single custom map, and between that and the dire state of the rest of it, I dropped and refunded it. I can't imagine it ever recovered at all. It's incredibly sad, I still occasionally played customs and one discord channel I hang out in was pumped for a bunch of new blood to show up with Reforged. The tools and maps have only continued getting crazier and cooler with time, even though the number of people actually playing them dropped like a stone. Then Reforged actually came out and, welp. The scene is still fairly active, but of course now there's a rift between maps made for Reforged and maps that can't be played in Reforged. There are still ways of getting the pre-Reforged version and I'm pretty sure there are still maps being developed with that in mind, even. The death of WC3 is a blip compared to all the actual harassment at the company, but it's insane how they managed to not only release a bad game but kill a classic in the process.
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Sep 20, 2021 21:18
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Reforged absolutely obliterated the 15 or so people that I knew that still did WC3 maps. Just utterly gutted an entire community of people that basically worked for Blizzard for free.
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Sep 20, 2021 21:33
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ErrEff posted:Yes, its’s the whole package and the devs have said they’re “not ruling out new content”, whatever that means. A Sylvanus Windrunner skin for your Amazon, only $12.99
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Sep 20, 2021 22:40
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webmeister posted:A Sylvanus Windrunner skin for your Amazon, only $12.99 For a brief second absent of context, my mind jumped to the delivery service instead of the game and the idea of "paying extra to have your doordash driver show up in cosplay" seemed like an inevitable eventual step in gig economy hellworld
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Sep 20, 2021 22:50
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Bentai posted:https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-is-investigating-activision-blizzard-over-workplace-practices-disclosures-11632165080 Can anyone post the whole text of the article? The SEC investing ABK is VERY big news, and very bad news for ABK. The board needs to fire Kotick if this is the case.
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Sep 20, 2021 22:54
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Lazy Fair posted:Can anyone post the whole text of the article? The SEC investing ABK is VERY big news, and very bad news for ABK. e: it's barebones
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Sep 20, 2021 23:13
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SubponticatePoster posted:NY Times article w/no paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/20/business/activision-blizzard-sec-investigation.html There's an Ars writeup too but it's like 10% "now the SEC is involved" and 90% "what's happened so far" by volume, so I don't suspect there's much meat to the WSJ article itself that isn't already addressed in the OP-- just the SEC announcing they're investigating it and ABK confirming that they're "cooperating with the investigation".
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Sep 20, 2021 23:27
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Lazy Fair posted:Can anyone post the whole text of the article? The SEC investing ABK is VERY big news, and very bad news for ABK. They've subponeaed Kotick. Firing Kotick at this point would be inadvisable, legally speaking. 
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Sep 20, 2021 23:32
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Existing charges of destruction of evidence from CA, and an investigation by the SEC is not a good combination.
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Sep 20, 2021 23:32
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Blizzard's chief legal officer has resigned.
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Sep 21, 2021 02:05
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I wonder if her desk has several forehead-shaped indentations after several dozen "you did what" meetings over the last couple months
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Sep 21, 2021 02:10
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Ursine Catastrophe posted:I wonder if her desk has several forehead-shaped indentations after several dozen "you did what" meetings over the last couple months If it's anywhere like the places I've worked it's "I've directed you all to destroy evidence, now I'm getting out."
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Sep 21, 2021 02:12
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Was this the war crimes lover?
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Sep 21, 2021 02:15
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lol, lmao
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Sep 21, 2021 02:30
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This person's job description was global legal functions, global data protection and the business division in Asia.
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Sep 21, 2021 02:34
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Cao Ni Ma posted:Was this the war crimes lover? Possibly, but Fran Townsend is still there
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Sep 21, 2021 02:37
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sharknado slashfic posted:Imagine releasing an expansion so bad that the domino effect brings down not only Blizzard but also Activision i think as long as activision can keep making GBS threads out a call of duty every year they're probably safe, although a lot of their secondary concerns (including, uh, all of blizzard) are likely to bite it in the interim ErrEff posted:This person's job description was global legal functions, global data protection and the business division in Asia. even so i can't imagine "worked in the legal department of a company during Legal Fuckup Jamboree Supreme" looks good on her resume, so it makes sense to pull the emergency parachute and gtfo
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Sep 21, 2021 02:42
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