Three Genuinely (Mostly) Positive News Items About WoW
It’s been fairly obvious as of late that I have been disenchanted with WoW (generating an Eternal Crystal in the process), but I do think there are positive movements worth documenting, both within the game itself and the company at large. To that end, as a Sunday wind-down post, I figured I’d discuss three things from the last week or so that have been positive – one of these still has a downside (I guess two, technically) but overall, represent good movement!To get more news about Buy WoW Retail Gold, you can visit lootwowgold.com official website.
Item 1: Raven QA Unionizes
On Friday, it was official – Raven’s QA team announced that a majority of workers had opted to start the Game Workers Alliance union, after more than 80% of the 34 employees in Raven QA elected to start the union. This is genuinely great news and represents an interesting inflection point in the labor crises currently embroiling gaming as a whole but ABK in particular, a company with particularly egregious layoff practices to hit ever more ambitious share price goals.
I am very much pro-union and believe that the best way for employees to get a fair deal is to be able to collectively bargain, to have the power to grind the machine to a halt if company bosses propose an unfair arrangement (as they so often do), and while it might be easy on the surface to write off a single division of a division of a division of an international games conglomerate as a drop in the ocean, the ripple effect can turn to waves very quickly. Just recently, Starbucks has dealt with a single store electing to unionize, which has caused a chain reaction across the US with many more stores going through the same process. If nothing else, the reaction from management is always enjoyable.
The next step, and perhaps a negative, is that Activision Blizzard must now choose if they will voluntarily recognize the union or force a vote among employees. This process is the one legally allowed by the National Labor Relations Board, but it also serves as a point of friction. ABK can force the vote, which defers the process into the future and allows time for anti-union efforts to take place, and American companies are often scummy with these things, as there’s never really been a truly pro-labor US president, the NLRB often has limited enforcement mechanisms, and the amount of things a company can do to indirectly (and sometimes directly) interfere with the voting process is, frankly, saddening.
Scariizard, a developer on the WoW team, has been taking more of a point role in the forums and community discussions as of late, discussing a lot of the process and goals behind the development of the new tier sets for patch 9.2. He’s been doing this since mid-December, and it has gone a long way towards understanding Blizzard’s rationale on certain design and development choices with these sets and the changes they’ve undergone on the PTR.
While this is a narrow topic to focus on, I’ll remark upon it as an unvarnished good. I’ve made no secret that my favorite era of WoW is when Ghostcrawler was the public face and voice of the game team, because even if I disagreed or thought he was off-base, he at least gave the reasoning behind certain choices and allowed me to better understand them and how it was that Blizzard saw the game developing.
It’s been fairly obvious as of late that I have been disenchanted with WoW (generating an Eternal Crystal in the process), but I do think there are positive movements worth documenting, both within the game itself and the company at large. To that end, as a Sunday wind-down post, I figured I’d discuss three things from the last week or so that have been positive – one of these still has a downside (I guess two, technically) but overall, represent good movement!To get more news about Buy WoW Retail Gold, you can visit lootwowgold.com official website.
Item 1: Raven QA Unionizes
On Friday, it was official – Raven’s QA team announced that a majority of workers had opted to start the Game Workers Alliance union, after more than 80% of the 34 employees in Raven QA elected to start the union. This is genuinely great news and represents an interesting inflection point in the labor crises currently embroiling gaming as a whole but ABK in particular, a company with particularly egregious layoff practices to hit ever more ambitious share price goals.
I am very much pro-union and believe that the best way for employees to get a fair deal is to be able to collectively bargain, to have the power to grind the machine to a halt if company bosses propose an unfair arrangement (as they so often do), and while it might be easy on the surface to write off a single division of a division of a division of an international games conglomerate as a drop in the ocean, the ripple effect can turn to waves very quickly. Just recently, Starbucks has dealt with a single store electing to unionize, which has caused a chain reaction across the US with many more stores going through the same process. If nothing else, the reaction from management is always enjoyable.
The next step, and perhaps a negative, is that Activision Blizzard must now choose if they will voluntarily recognize the union or force a vote among employees. This process is the one legally allowed by the National Labor Relations Board, but it also serves as a point of friction. ABK can force the vote, which defers the process into the future and allows time for anti-union efforts to take place, and American companies are often scummy with these things, as there’s never really been a truly pro-labor US president, the NLRB often has limited enforcement mechanisms, and the amount of things a company can do to indirectly (and sometimes directly) interfere with the voting process is, frankly, saddening.
Scariizard, a developer on the WoW team, has been taking more of a point role in the forums and community discussions as of late, discussing a lot of the process and goals behind the development of the new tier sets for patch 9.2. He’s been doing this since mid-December, and it has gone a long way towards understanding Blizzard’s rationale on certain design and development choices with these sets and the changes they’ve undergone on the PTR.
While this is a narrow topic to focus on, I’ll remark upon it as an unvarnished good. I’ve made no secret that my favorite era of WoW is when Ghostcrawler was the public face and voice of the game team, because even if I disagreed or thought he was off-base, he at least gave the reasoning behind certain choices and allowed me to better understand them and how it was that Blizzard saw the game developing.