#also jessica price works for the anet writing team now

[waywardworldhopper]

So uh, I guess I don’t hate GW2 anymore? My condition to start playing again was that they make some move to undo the whitewashing of the setting that happened between games, and finally, 5 years later, we are getting Elona again! Complete with GORGEOUS new faces and hairstyles.

I have zero regrets about shelling out for gems to give my ele main Clara the face and hair she was always intended to have.

[aqours-remade]

asheternal replied to your post “debating if i should give my own two centso n it tbh”

who the fucc is that

ok sorta long post bc now i’m just gonna talk about my opinions with some pics so under the readmore (i’m bored)

this is about 7 months old and as we can see yeah ANet did not just collapse and is still doing healthy but the tl;dr is that Jessica Price was a dev who was fired for her conflict with a partner of ANet which spakred some debate about sexism but i honestly. really think she was just kind of an asshole and got fired for it although it did bring up some good points about the industry and the whoel thing is, no matter where you stand on it, a very messy and complicated situation

although no matter what i think firing the other guy was uncalled for as ill talk about here below

so Jessica Price was a GW2 dev that to my knowledge did work for Living World and writing for GW2 in general. she’s an industry veteran with a dozen years. she had a twitter thread about the complications of writing an MMO main protagonist, in that you have to write them in a way without too much emotion or personality or it won’t feel like “your” character, which lead to this alteration with a streamer

Deroir is a paid affiliate of ANet: he is a streamer, but he also is paid to i think bug test GW2 and i think has an NPC named named after him in the game: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Deroir

maybe its mansplaining, maybe its not... it really doesn’t feel like it??? i really have the benefit of the doubt the dude was just giving his own opinion on this one as a (paid) content creator for the game with an opinion

then things really began to escalate as price made several more tweets and things got really out of control really fast

now I don’t watch Deroir’s streams so i don’t know much about the man himself, his attitude, or his personality, but this does seem to be the only conflict he ever had with her (so it wasn’t a series of little things blowing up). another dev publicly defended Price and things escalated, prompting ANet to fire them, announced by Mike O’Brien, CEO of ANet:

i don’t think it was particularly wrong of ANet to fire her at this point, as she was publicly an employed part of this company that acted extremely unprofessionally to a situation she could have completely ignored or civilly disagreed with. if Deroir had been a full-blown “sweetie, I don’t think you fully understand the writing of this game you work on :)” as far as i’m concerned this situation would be changed entirely and i’d be 100% on her side but i don’t think its hard to describe it as an appropriate reaction. the above is from the GW2 official forums on a thread concerning the incident.

i do think its worth really keeping in mind this wasn’t a conversation about gender as opposed to the writing of believable MMO characters, i really genuinely feel it was a genuine opinion that quickly devolved into something else. and everyone who knows me knows i’m usually completely on this side which is... why its. feels really weird of me to even type this because i don’t want to be against this side

i do however believe it was a bit too hasty to just fire them...? i think giving Price a chance to make up for it wouldn’t have been out of the question? it was definitely a tense situation that absolutely warranted being called into the boss’ office to say “hey. you uh. fucked up and made problems for us. you gotta fix this.” although considering Price’s attitudes i think she just would have used this against ANet later. it was a PR nightmare no matter how things would have gone down. i think Price would have blown any chance to make up for it, but I am surprised the guy was fired just for standing up for her. i would understand ANet saying “hey. you represent us publicly on twitter. do not support behavior that antagonizes our fanbase again.” but to fire him definitely seemed like jumping the gun, and that one i definitely don’t agree with. i think he (Fries) deserved a stern reprimand without consequences at most as long as it didn’t happen again, while Price should have at least been given a chance to make up for that incident

Price then reached out to basically any journalistic source that would reach out to her and decried the firing as based in sexism and harassment and basically bowing down to make gamergaters happy, and claiming that ANet’s public statement was directly harassing her by basically sicing a mob on her. it is true that the behavior she faced afterwards was unforgivable: i don’t have screenshots but you can probably imagine how it was with men like this. and Price has repeatedly blamed ANet as basically selling her out to make dudebro neckbeards happy and for not protecting her knowing what happens to a disgraced female dev in this modern day. however, to say ANet was “actively soliciting harassment” is an incredible stretch, and i don’t believe that was really the case. this was a very messy situation that ANet absolutely should have handled much better, but it still ultimately boils down to an employee acting in a way that’s unacceptable and being fired for it that... really doesn’t seem to have its roots based in sexism. she’s also gone on the record saying she’s being contacted by people who will “never work with ANet again” and milking that for what its worth. fast forward now to 7 months later and ANet clearly is still in a good place financially so... i really doubt there’s any permanent fallback as a result.

this is a video from one of the few ppl whose opinions i really like on video games so this is a good??? video to kinda help recap the events:

i just think she’s just an extremely white lady. the kind of person who demands to see the manager kind of white. i don’t have a good opinion of her nor do i think she’s “one of us” worth looking out for. i really doubt people are going to avoid working with ANet if given a valuable deal with it.

she should have been reprimanded and asked to apologize and given a chance to make up for it; although i think with the full story and conversation in mind its hard to really sympathize with her. white women are gonna white and this whole thing escalated out of control as a result and i absolutely wouldn’t want this woman on my development team for anything at the end of the day.