Greedy Goblin

Monday, June 5, 2017

Goons are throwing stones in a glass house

I didn't understand why multiple people recommended me to read an article on Imperium News. This is the official Goon propaganda site, which took up this name and credo after their attempt to make "fair gaming journalism" failed horribly - since they were running a propaganda site for Goons. My days of Goonbashing are behind me and I avoided commenting on their issues. Why should I care what the Goons are up to today?! Also the article is looong. I mean Sion - James314 long, without the entertaining value of the latter.

The story is about how the creators of World of Tanks tried to silence a youtuber I haven't heard of. But soon I started smiling on the obvious blindness to their own history. And around the middle, I couldn't help but giggle:
In many cases the PR department is staffed with people that have no prior experience or training other than what they got at that job. This doesn’t only apply for the junior levels, but at all rungs of the ladder. In some indie studios, the PR head will be a coder that didn’t scamper out of the way fast enough. In some cases it will be a highly visible member of the player community that gets hired to manage the community. I’ve talked to a fair number of these people. They start out posting on the forums, then get some sort of volunteer moderator ability, and finally get hired on as a community manager without any real idea of what PR is about. This amateurism leads to a lot of meltdowns.
For those, who aren't following old history, here is a meltdown from a community manager who was a highly visible member of the community who got hired without any idea of ... anything:

Goons built a space empire and a real world business on manipulating this clown and his buddies into constanly buffing ratting so Goons remain competitive, cover up a real world crime to protect their image, directly intervene in the MoA vs Goons war to save them and finally to give them corporate IP and PR support for a $150K scam. And now they - as independent observers - criticize this practice.

Sure, sometimes the best critic is a reformed scoundrel, like the Wolf of Wall Street. But there is nothing like that in the article. No remorse over their wrongdoings, no reflective exploration of misdeeds, no catharsis. Instead a moralizing story about other people who - while misstepped - were much less bad than they were - and probably are.

And when someone is throwing stones in a glass house, hilarity ensues. Please compare the statement of the "journalist" with the statement of her boss:
JOURNALISTS ARE NOT SERVANTS
There seems to be an attitude among the PR and media relations employees at games companies that the games journalism industry is a servant to their wills.
(3:44:41 AM) the_mittani: so when idiot apoligizes for the first thing
(3:44:46 AM) the_mittani: we hit him for the second thing, the name
(3:45:19 AM) the_mittani: just to make sure there’s no question of ned’s apology to us i helpfully cc’d his boss and seagull
(3:45:23 AM) the_mittani: because i’m a fukken helper
(3:45:32 AM) the_mittani: and the internation business times is eager to print whatever i tell them Source

Or shall I point to the AMA of a former top editor of the site complaining how the contributors were treated as servants by The Mittani? I have trouble deciding if the author overdosed Kool-Aid or simply lying.

There aren't much moral to this story besides "Goons will be Goons", so sorry for the somewhat self-serving post. And if you already read this long about old EVE stuff, here is some new EVE stuff:

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

In eve-offline zooming to one year allows one to see the periodicity for number of players - in the beginning of period is almost the same number as in the end of it. I believe that waiting for at least three additional months are required to reach the conclusion that EVE will die in December 2017.

Randomus271 said...

@Anonymous: I sincerely doubt that EVE will die in December 2017...

They will drag it along until they stop making any profits whatsoever (after staff layoffs/etc to cut costs).

It will take longer than 6 months to hit that point - and games have struggled along for years with only a few thousand players for years before this.

The best sign they are on their last legs will be when they start laying off extraneous staff members, and stop repairing/replacing servers that die (which may not be noticed immediately if there aren't enough players to require them to boot up all of the systems (like they do on the test server).

My guess is they'll drag it out to at least 2020. Time will tell.

Gevlon said...

@Randomus271: the question isn't when the server is turned off. The question is when will we reach the point when the death of the game becomes inevitable. I mean "from this point every month will be worse than the previous and we can draw an extrapolation line when it reaches zero".

For WoW, I can't do that and I wouldn't be surprised if there would be WoW 30 years from now. But I'd be VERY surprised if EVE would be around. Or Star Citizen would even "launch".

Anonymous said...

You will know when they are truly desperate, because that is when they will launch their "fresh start" server where everyone can start from scratch.