Ff14 it could happen to you
World of Warcraft's toxic community was not influenced by Blizzard's internal culture, but that will have had a hand in enabling it The stakes aren't just "people are mad on the Internet", then they're measured in subscriber numbers and revenues and, ultimately, in some degree of impact upon how long WoW remains viable as a game service. Streaming has become a vital piece of the puzzle in terms of marketing and building profile for a game, especially for an online title - and that means that a very popular streamer getting into a heated public spat over how unpleasant the game's community is (and whose fault that may be) is a problem that will ultimately spill over onto the company's bottom line. WoW has had a hell of a run, for sure - it remains one of the most commercially successful games in history, and its record for subscription revenue will be hard to beat - but it's now struggling to keep subscribers engaged. But while the playground drama itself absolutely isn't worth your attention, the stakes in play behind the whole mess are of some interest. It's playground drama, honestly, and nobody involved comes out looking especially good - not the streamer, not Blizzard, and certainly not any of the crowd of idiots who escalated the whole mess by revealing people's identities and otherwise harassing one another. Things proceeded to kick off when a developer at Blizzard clicked "like" on a tweet suggesting that the streamer in question had himself contributed to WoW's community being so aggressive and toxic the streamer threw a giant public fit, somewhat proving the point the tweet was making in the first place and it all pretty much went downhill from there. In brief, however: a popular WoW streamer (with a history of promoting some pretty questionable behaviour during his time in WoW) switched over to playing Final Fantasy XIV on his stream and, totally enamoured of how welcoming and pleasant the community for Square Enix' game is, made some extremely negative comments about WoW's own community and its toxicity. The specifics of this all make for a weird, messy story that's perhaps best summarised in Ethan Gach's Kotaku article on the matter this week. The stakes aren't just 'people are mad on the Internet' they're measured in subscriber numbers, revenues and how long WoW remains viable In the past few months, though, there appears have been a significant downtick in the relationships between World of Warcraft's players, its streamers, and the company itself - at the heart of which lies the question of the game's toxic community and accusations of who bears the blame for it. The fact that World of Warcraft has a pretty unpleasant community isn't news, of course people have been talking about the game's problems with its community for many years, though in recent years perhaps some of the attention paid to WoW's community issues has faded as the game's player numbers have declined and other games - notably Riot's League of Legends - have struggled very publicly with their own toxic community issues.
The lawsuit filed against Activision Blizzard by California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing has torn a swathe through Blizzard's senior staff - albeit a swathe that many former and current company employees feel hasn't been remotely wide or deep enough as yet, and one that's left Activision Blizzard's C-suite suspiciously untouched, leading one to wonder just how many "The Buck Stops Anywhere But Here" desk signs Kotick's band of distinctly un-merry men and women own between them.Īt the other end of the spectrum, though, there's been a whole other storm brewing, yet one that's tinged with many of the same issues at its heart, the question of whether the company with the toxic workplace culture was also running a game with a toxic community culture.