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gamergate is the gift that will never stop giving.

RANDO ASSHAT DON'T EXPECT ME TO CARE ABOUT YOUR HURT MANFEELS THIS IS MY PRIVATE SUBREDDIT

I don't even feel that comfortable posting that on a semi-anonymous account.

Gamergate is the only thing propping them up. Without it they don't have a scapegoat.

Gamergate is their religion at this point.

God I love the internet.

Oh buddy, I linked the clip of Deroir stream on July 3rd were he calls JP the god of AMA's and goes on how big of a fan he is to the GG thread.

Banned from trolling for pointing out that they were wrong, Deroir instantly tried to aplogize and bow out, and was telling people to stop ASAP. But nope, despite it being out of his hands they feel that unless he devotes himself 100% to getting her re-hired they think he should be attacked on every platform.

Dude was 100% nice and trying to have a talk with his fav dev. Honestly, the way he talked about her it wouldn't surprise me to find out he's got a bit of a crush on her too.

Dude got caught up in a twitter autism detonation through no fault of his own. It's a cautionary tale for anyone feeling the pull vidya and twitter's degenerate siren songs.

User Banned (Permanent): Demonstrable misogynistic double-standard as contextualized by infraction history; accumulation of severe infractions

A lot of fragility going on in that thread.

It's pretty funny how they dictate how you're going to act in bold red letters at the beginning, otherwise you're getting the boot.
God ResetEra is such a joke.

It’s Reset Era?! I had always assumed it was just a shitty made up word?

It's because they have to reset the clock every time a male feminist turns out to be a rapist

http://resettheclock.net/

Eventually there will be no one left to ban as everyone who isn't a male feminist will be banned and those who are will eventually get arrested.

😴😴😴

Please stop Ed. Video games are serious business.

Metafilter finally got around to having their group cry about it.

I almost wish that I was a customer of this sort of game so I could meaningfully boycott them, but fuck those cowards anyway.

This beautifully sums up in one short sentence the lesson that I hope companies can learn from this. You can fire toxic employees like Jessica Price and suffer no negative financial consequences at all.

The people who are squealing the loudest about this by and large don't even play the game anyway - so who gives two shits what they think.

castigated ArenaNet managers for their “highly unprofessional” reaction to a social media controversy.

Talk about pot and kettle. She created the alleged "controversy" through her unprofessional behavior, but of course its their reaction which is unprofessional.

No we need to vote with our actual votes for people who will enact legislation that levies criminal and civil penalties for gendered terrorism that is commensurate with the damage it causes.

Wew, lassie.

It took 185 replies for the first user to be banned. Holy Shit, that's a record for Resetera.

Either there's only the absolute hive mind core left or the mods are getting soft/lazy.

cue the onslaught of posters who still doesn't see that Arena.Net has catered to a hate mob and the implications it has on all game developers

The implication that if you're an obnoxious asshole on social media while advertising the work you do for a company that they can fire you for it?

It's the fucking year of our lord and savior jesus christ 2018, how have these retards not figured this shit out yet?

One-sided moderation?

I was under the impression that ResetEra was created by super hardcore SJWs from already pretty SJWy NeoGAF because that site's owner got #MeToo'd so they all left to create their own site that is staffed exclusively by Queer People of Color or something like that? So why would anyone who goes to that site dare disagree with the fired developer? Did some mentally healthy (as much as anyone who plays video games can be considered mentally healthy) people accidentally end up on that site as well?

Speaking of ResetEra and NeoGAF, now that some time has passed since the split, how are the sites holding up? Is NeoGAF dead? Which one of the two gets more traffic?

From the OP on that post

It's simply not accurate to suggest that Jessica only became a target of harassment after she was already fired.

I wonder, do they still think that after Jessica herself insinuated that anet sent a mob after her.

Also, I have no idea what resetera.com is so maybe I'm barking up the worng tree

The only chilling effect this decision has is the involuntary goosebumps I get from seeing delicious drama.

As if we needed more evidence that mansplaining is not really a thing men do, but rather a thing wahmen feel.

Since I spent all kinds of time saying it on a Reddit AMA, and I haven't talked about actual game dev on Twitter in a while, here's a thread about writing for the PC character in an MMO.
The dirty secret is I'm not sure if it's possible to make an MMORPG (or CRPG) character compelling, because people have different expectations about what that character will be, as opposed to a pre-designed character in a single-player game.
People booting up Bioshock know they're playing Jack. People starting Dishonored know they're playing Corvo. People beginning Tomb Raider know they're playing Lara Croft. So in those games, you have more wiggle room to make the protagonist an actual character.
Whereas in an RPG, where the player chooses all kinds of character options and names their character and designs their face and so on, they feel more ownership over that character. They're not playing a character YOU designed--they're playing a character THEY designed. So if Jack or Lara or Corvo says or does something the player doesn't feel that THEY would say or do, the player's more forgiving, because they have the expectation that they're piloting a character someone else created.
N.B. that I'm not talking about overall plot objectives/quests. Players know going in that the game is going to be telling them what to do, and their character is going to do it, and that holds true even when they've "created" the character.
But the interpersonal stuff, the PC's REACTIONS, players respond strongly to. Some people don't like it if they think their character's responding in ways that make them too much of an asshole. Some don't like it if their character's responses seem weak.
So, basically, most things that you'd do writing-wise to give a character, well, CHARACTER, are going to upset a large contingent, maybe even a majority, of your players.
So--I know I've said this before on Twitter, but it's still going to weird people out, but please bear with me--you have to construct your MMO/RPG's PC character's dialogue as if they were Bella Swan from Twilight.
To be clear, I don't think Twilight is good writing. I don't think Bella Swan's a well-constructed book character. And I think people who criticize Twilight for the latter are correct but also missing the reason for Twilight's popularity.
Because Twilight isn't the love story of Bella and Edward. It's the experience of being loved by Edward. Which is why Bella's constructed the way she is.
Bella Swan is a carefully constructed blank space, with JUST enough personality to function. All of her personality traits are chosen to avoid preventing the reader from inserting themselves into the space she holds in the story.
She's a bit of a klutz, but JUST enough to make her endearing, not enough to prevent her from actually doing anything the story needs her to do. She's a little bit awkward. JUST enough to be relatable but not enough to actually hinder her. And so on.
And essentially, we have to write the player character in an MMO/RPG the same way.
Specifically in GW2, in the Living World, we can write the Commander with a bit of wry exasperation, a hint of impatience, a touch of "okay, I'm done fooling around with this crap and I'm going to take charge," but most of their lines have to be pretty devoid of personality.
Because if we give them too much personality, it might clash with how the player is imagining Their Commander.
So, how do we tell a TV-like season of story with a protagonist who can't really have a personality?
The answer to that, and I dunno, maybe this is too much of how the sausage gets made but whaddaya want from me, any sense of shame I had burned out a long time ago: SLEIGHT OF HAND.
We SUGGEST that the Commander has a personality in how the other characters interact with and react to them. Even there, we have to be super-careful. We can't even have THEM directly characterize the Commander.
You'll rarely hear a character say anything about what the Commander always does or doesn't do, except when it's PURELY factual because it's something the game design FORCED the PC to do.
E.g. "the Commander always finds a way!" because literally if you don't we'll resurrect you until you do.
We have NPCs react to you with affection, or irritation, or leeriness, or whatever, to suggest that your character has regular habits and ways of interacting that build these relationships. But for the most part, they don't.
The PC is who you imagine them to be, and the NPCs react in ways that have to FEEL personal, and build a story, while not conflicting with whatever you're imagining your character's personality to be. We WANT you to project.
Which makes writing the NPCs' relationships with the PC basically like writing horoscopes. It has to feel specific and personal while actually being universal.
So: A) VERY delicate sketches of non-objectionable personality traits (like a hint of wryness or world-weariness) B) NPCs that behave as if your character has a distinct personality while not doing so in ways that actually identify what it is C) one-sided relationship-building
Voila. An MMO/RPG character.
Needless to say, a lot of the color comes from NPCs' relationships with EACH OTHER, even though we try to keep it centered on the PC as much as possible.
It is a constant, very fragile calibration. We don't always get it right.
Incidentally, if you've played Ep 3 of this season of GW2's Living World, you've seen this sort of writing taken to an extreme in Joko's final monologue.
Almost everything he says is about actions the game has forced you to take, not your own character traits, and he's clearly projecting when he talks about what you were thinking, but it's--hopefully!--constructed in a way that feels personal, like he's twisting the knife.

Really interesting thread to read! 👌 However, allow me to disagree slightly. I dont believe the issue lies in the MMORPG genre itself (as your wording seemingly suggest). I believe the issue lies in the contraints of the Living Story's narrative design;
When you want the outcome to be the same across the board for all players' experiences, then yes, by design you are extremely limited in how you can contruct the personality of the PC.
But, if instead players were given the option to meaningfully express their character through branching dialogue options (which also aren't just on the checklist for an achievement that forces you through all dialogue options),
hen perhaps players would be more invested in the roleplaying aspect of that particular MMORPG. Nonetheless, I appreciate the insightful thread!

Today in being a female game dev:
"Allow me--a person who does not work with you--explain to you how you do your job."