#alex afrasiabi

[blizzweirdo]

Hey, so the news finally hit that Steve Danuser left Blizzard last year.

I'm sure that had NOTHING to do with Metzen coming swinging in and everyone blaming Danuser for Shadowlands.

The truth is that blaming or giving credit to any one person for an expansion is myopic at best. Expansions are made by hundreds of people in a myriad of capacities.

On top of that, Shadowlands was made during the worst part of the harassment suites with one of the main, powerful harassers at the helm of WoW--Alex Afrasiabi--who was accused of assaulting both men AND women, destroying property, and was a notorious, barely-functional alcoholic. He finally left during Shadowlands' development and based on my experience with MMO cycles, probably left the team a pile of incoherent shit. If anything, the fact that Shadowlands has a story AT ALL is a testament to Danuser and the remaining WoW team.

If you liked Dragonflight, you like Danuser's writing and his story choices.

And now out with Danuser and back in with Metzen. You'll probably never see something like Dragonflight again. Under the hood are the same people, but the driver is again different. Will The War Within be bad? No, probably not. Will it be better than Dragonflight? Perhaps... if Metzen doesn't let his ego get in the way.

But what it will probably be is just different and that's a sad reason for Danuser to have left or have been forced out.

[fitzefitcher]

Out of curiosity why is Cataclysm worse than say, Shadowlands?

every single bad awful character, lore, and story-destroying thing that has ever happened in warcraft ever is either a direct result of alex afrasiabi taking over the creative lead for cataclysm or can be traced back to it and his stupid rotbrained fuckboy decisions

I have been screaming about the sins of cataclysm since the expac itself and will continue to pin the majority of warcraft's sins on it or on afrasiabi himself for all of time

shadowlands had the misfortune of being the last of his victims and ergo never had a chance to begin with, but cataclysm by all accounts is patient zero. SL in the form it is now could never have happened if not for cataclysm's storyline radically, irreparably derailing every single facet of warcraft's lore.

[swampgallows]

I've been following you for a few days. I don't know if it's a good idea to talk to you by asking questions, but I did it anyway. I feel that most people on the Internet don't have a good opinion of Garrosh (it's true that he did a lot of bad things in the later plot), but these people have gradually evolved into attacking you 100% if you say something good about Garrosh. They even send some vulgar meme expressions to attack this poor guy 😢. So do these people really understand the shaping of Garrosh's character? Maybe they only know the later version of Garrosh's blackening to curse him as a complete villain, or maybe they just want to curse this character for the sake of cursing? I really can't accept this kind of thing. If they really haven't understood Garrosh enough and come to attack him, then I think they are completely lacking in connotation, either stupid or bad. I just started playing World of Warcraft recently and immediately fell in love with Garrosh. Now I'm trying to learn about Garrosh from the TBC version and through some veteran players' stories. I learned that this character was messed up by internal struggles among the screenwriters. He was essentially supposed to be a positive and heroic character, not the big villain who collapsed later. But there are always people who don't want to analyze the core of this character, but simply attack him from the worst version. I feel very uncomfortable 😭 and this kind of misunderstanding is particularly serious on Twitter. I'm very sad 😢 and sometimes I'm even influenced by this kind of misunderstanding and have self-doubt. I really can't stand it. They say Garrosh is a tumor, but I feel that they are the real tumors and even more toxic than tumors. Oh...I really feel sorry for Garrosh 😢 and hope to eliminate this misunderstanding 😭。

first i want to say that anyone is welcome to talk to me in my askbox, that's why i have it open and have anonymous on! i can be a bit caustic in my interactions with online strangers however, and that's my fault. i am sorry if i had ever made you feel like you couldn't talk to me; it is one of my major weaknesses. I am trying to get better at reining in my emotions, but i do have a hard time with it.

Second, I apologize because as a newer WoW player, this may all be a bit overwhelming to you.

The situation with Garrosh is complicated because yes, it is true that his story was changed partway through, but yes, it's also true that Garrosh's "worst version" is his canon, or "true in WoW" version of himself. He has zero regret or remorse for his actions, and his fictional villainy has inspired violence and hatred in real life (mass shooting trigger warning at this link).

Garrosh is characterized as a fascist—by both fans and by Blizzard themselves—and many people have drawn parallels to real world hateful, racist leaders like Trump and Hitler. Also, the Blizzard (ex-)employee most responsible for Garrosh from the very beginning is Alex Afrasiabi ("Garrosh was my guy"), who is one of the main perpetrators of the sexual harassment and discrimination mentioned in the recent Blizzard lawsuit. As a result, Garrosh as a fictional character and Garrosh as a representation of real-life hatred and violence across history and behind the scenes at Blizzard bleed together, which is why so many fans (appropriately) have such a strong negative response to him. Many fans also played through the years of Garrosh's character shift and felt betrayed for ever having believed in him, or they started playing later in his story and know him only as the incredibly evil character that he is. That impact may be lost on a newer player; although that culture shock is one of the reasons I became so fixated on Garrosh.

Therefore, many people are right to be wary of die-hard Garrosh fans (or "Garrosh apologists") who say things like "Garrosh did nothing wrong". The "[x] did nothing wrong" meme is originally "Hitler did nothing wrong", after all, and there are many people who believe Garrosh truly "did nothing wrong" despite the canon itself saying otherwise (again) (and again). It's also why I try to make it abundantly clear that I may like Garrosh as a character, but my love for him is only as a fictional character. It's fine to be a fan of the character and wish he turned out differently; the game itself acknowledges his wasted potential. But it's also important to know why people dislike him and may react strongly, although that does not give them any excuse or right to be cruel to you.

Oof. I really ought to make a video essay about all my complicated Garrosh feelings one day, lol. Anon, I am always happy to talk about Garrosh any time and at great length, so you are free to send as many asks as you like :)

[the-nerd-beast]

I honestly feel like I owe Steve Danuser an apology, he is just a puppet when it is Alex Afrasiabi who is far more guilty and deserving of our hatred and ire.

[characterrevolvingdoors]

Okay...this is just shitty...

Instead of removing Afrasiabi's NPC in Stormwind they turned him into a fucking female character. JUST REMOVE THE NPC AT LEAST UNTIL THE CASE IS RESOLVED!

[chroniclerwabba]

what does this even mean

[thecinematicbandicoot]

Concerning the 2021 Gaming Industry

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[legitgamersgaming]

More Details Surface on Alex Afrasiabi's "Cosby Suite" and Lawsuit Allegations

More Details Surface on Alex Afrasiabi’s “Cosby Suite” and Lawsuit Allegations

Kotaku has published a detailed report on Alex Afrasiabi’s “Cosby Suite” mentioned in the Activision Blizzard Lawsuit allegations, as pictures and chat messages from a 2013 group chat called the “Blizzcon Cosby Crew” have surfaced. This report, published Wednesday morning, comes alongside a walkout organized by Activision Blizzard employees in protest of the official handling of the…

[swampgallows]

Frankly I find it hilarious that Garrosh has had two on screen 100% totally final this is it for real deaths, and I can only imagine it's because someone at Blizzard is Big Angy that he's still managed to be a wildly popular Did Nothing Wrong character despite everything he's done. Meanwhile Sylvanas is lying in a puddle of her own vomit, being showered with redemption arcs, and her new BFF Uther of ALL fucking characters, and she's STILL enemy #1.

you have this backwards. the someone at blizzard who was "big angy" was alex afrasiabi, who is credited with dragging sylvanas through the mud specifically because his knockoff metzen self-insert, garrosh, was unpopular and generally disliked for the majority of his existence UNTIL he became the final big bad in pandaria. what people (who are not freaks) like about garrosh's "did nothing wrong"-ness is that it makes him King Asshole, and it is fun to hate people who are giant assholes. garrosh being unapologetic for literally anything he did gives everybody a free pass to hate him and makes him unquestionably a villain, and it is therefore "on brand" for his character to be a domineering unrepentant asshole.

meanwhile the current team is just trying to clean up the self-absorbed shitheel mess that afrasiabi left in his wake, doing damage control on characters like sylvanas that he shafted for his own ego, and purging as much of his poisonous influence as they can from the game, externally and internally. that includes utterly obliterating garrosh from the storyline and condemning him eternally for being the racist violent scumbag asshole he always was.

i love garrosh and despite being a lifelong undead main i have barely given two shits about sylvanas. but if youre gonna accuse the team of altering lore to save face then you need to acknowledge who on the team royally fucked it over enough to warrant damage control in the first place.

[ilikedetectives]

One ex-Blizzard source familiar with the people presented in the pictures identified an HR representative as one of the Blizzard employees present in the hotel room. Another image from the same Facebook album shows a screenshot of a 2013 group chat called the “Blizzcon Cosby Crew.” In it, former Blizzard designer David Kosak writes, “I am gathering the hot chixx for the Coz.” “Bring em,” replies Afrasiabi. “You can’t marry ALL of them Alex,” Kosak writes. “I can, I’m middle eastern,” responds Afrasiabi. Jesse McCree, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, then writes, “You misspelled fuck.” Cory Stockton, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, and Greg Street, former Blizzard developer currently working on a new MMO at Riot Games, were also present in the chat."

[askagamedev]

Let Them Burn

On Tuesday, the California State Government’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard alleging a long history of sex-based discrimination, harassment, and retaliation against female employees. This lawsuit is the result of a two year investigation conducted by the DFEH. The work culture on the World of Warcraft team at Blizzard was mentioned specifically in the legal complaint. I wanted to break the situation down a bit and then offer my thoughts afterward.

[Click here for the full legal complaint]. I rarely feel the need to do this, but I will say right now because it is absolutely necessary - STRONG CONTENT WARNING - SUICIDE, SEXUAL HARASSMENT, REALLY BAD STUFF.

First, we can go over the actual issues at hand - discrimination, where they would favor male workers for promotions despite better contributions, qualifications, and more experience from their female coworkers. Harassment, by making jokes of sexual- or rape-related nature, creating a hostile environment where female workers felt forced to police their own speech in order to avoid punishment. And finally retaliation, where women who complained about such behavior would be the ones let go in layoffs. The leaders perpetrating the bad behavior would get a slap on the wrist (and maybe a stern talking-to) but no other consequences and have no other career consequences, often going on to continued career advancement and no lasting change to their behavior. This issue of condoning of bad behavior specifically named [J Allen Brack, Blizzard’s current president], and Alex Afrasiabi, former WoW Creative Director, as major examples of the problems (though we should not think that this begins and ends with just these two).

This is not the time to complain about company business decisions as a player. Dissatisfaction with game design decisions or microtransactions/monetization of games have no place within this discussion. This is the exact systemic situation that we saw with Riot and Ubisoft and all the others where those in power perpetuated an environment where sexual predators like this could thrive. Without systemic environmental change, it won’t matter in the long term if these particular sexual predators get kicked out. If an environment is good for sexual predators, then new sexual predators will eventually stumble upon the cozy unoccupied lairs that were chased out, think “wow, this place is great!”, and settle in right where the old ones used to be. The only way to get rid of this problem permanently is to make the environment clearly hostile to them so they have no place to make their homes and settle in.

Finally, my thoughts on the matter are exactly what I wrote in the title - Let Them Burn. This has proven to be a systemic issue with the top leadership either participating or condoning the behavior. Similar to what happened at Ubisoft and Riot, they deserve to be dragged out into the public and shown exactly what they did and allowed to happen. These bad actors absolutely deserve to be branded with this for the rest of their careers. Clear them out. Get rid of them. Scour them out of the company and let them know that they have no place here. Make systemic changes to make the entire environment hostile to sexual predators so they don’t just hire new predators to replace the old ones. Then, in a year or two, go back through and scour it all over again to all of the hidden allies that we missed in the first scrubbing who thought that the coast was clear. If they don’t or won’t change, then I put my money and my pencil where my mouth is - drop all Activision-Blizzard games and be very outspoken as to exactly why.

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[official-alan-dabiri]

Was digging for Heroes of the Storm content to put my grubby little hands on, which is understandably challenging right now. Most Blizzard-adjacent blogs and tags are flooded with anger against Bobby Kotick and the abusers he protected, and support for the employee walkout. (And about half of the Overwatch community still being shitty about the Cole Cassidy rename.) And while I don’t want to talk about the issue - it’s been better covered by more dispassionate and informative people than me - I saw a tag that was definitely something worth drawing attention to:

Soak that up for a second. The Blizzard Of Yore. This wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this sentiment. People talk about Blizzard’s good old days. That the company went downhill, and that’s why these things happened. None of these abusers would have been allowed in the presence of the great Auteurs who brought us SC:BW, WC3, and that one good expansion for WoW. We all know which one, I don’t have to specify. But the guys who made those games were above this kind of behavior, and wouldn’t have tolerated it.

I don’t know why this needs to be said, but this is, obviously, bullshit.

Putting the rest under the cut for the benefit of those who might be particularly upset by what’s gone on at Blizzard.

These abuses happened because Blizzard had - since the beginning - a “frat boy culture.” Women employed at Blizzard in the early 2000s have come forward and said that they were treated as a sex object from the moment they were employed. This culture didn’t just start yesterday. Years of work was done at Blizzard to foster this environment, and those who didn’t work to build it chose to ignore it. Abusers spent years developing a workplace where they could have free reign. They made misogynist jokes to identify coworkers they could trust. They worked to inure HR to reports of little shitty behaviors to mask the big problems. They developed a pattern of behavior so that any women in the environment could be isolated, surrounded by like-minded assholes who would let the abusers have their way.

Yes! Even when they made that one game you like! This was happening then! Yes! Even when Dustin Browder and all the Dreamhaven people were still there! Yes! Even when Metzen was still there! This has been happening for as long as Blizzard has existed! In the Golden Age of Blizzard, Blizzard was full of shitty people, making a shitty environment so that they could be shitty to women. (And cowardly people who didn’t stop it.)

Alex Afrasiabi - one of the worst offenders - was hired at Blizzard in 2004. He was slotted into the WoW quest development team, and worked on the vanilla game along with all the expansions you love. He was, by all current accounts, a shitty fucking dude, and plenty of people knew it - whether or not they qualified his behavior as shitty. But no one in authority there saw any problem with naming numerous NPCs and items after him. The people he hurt were isolated, surrounded by people who thought his behavior was okay. And that environment was one that had been built from day one to accept him and his behavior. To give him access and control, and protect him from consequences.

This happened when Blizzard was still “Blizzard of Yore.”

There was no perfect iteration of Blizzard. Stop fucking talking like Blizzard 20 years ago was above this. It fucking wasn’t. Blizzard 20 years ago was the soil that nurtured all the shit you’re hearing about right now. Blizzard 20 years ago was where these events physically happened. Yes. It’s absolutely true that Blizzard made better games back in the old days. But just because they were making better games back then doesn’t mean no one was being harassed. When you talk about those games as some sort of golden age that Blizzard should return to, you’re not asking them to go back and be better.

You’re asking them to go back and be better at hiding it again.

[asklittlepip]

A quick comment on the whole situation going on at Blizzard; I doubt I even have to say this to anyone here, but do not harrass the folks working there. There’s a lot of people in the industry who have friends, family and (sometimes former) co-workers at their facility, with myself in the latter category; not to mention how difficult this is for those dealing with the aftermath of the recent lawsuit announcements. And the actual, ya know, sexual harrassment.. and worse..

All we know for sure is that Alex Afrasiabi is responsible for a lot of it, and that there was a ‘bro culture’ which festered beneath the surface, along with some higher-ups being ignorant at best or participants at worse, but please don’t go jumping to conclusions beyond that. Some folks are blaming every project leader or even writers because they don’t like some decision they’ve made, but there’s a big difference between someone nerfing your class or making a poor plot choice and having a goddamn Cosby Suite.

Yes, they called it that, for fuck’s sake.

I am going to say that this makes me think of another reason we need a game maker’s union, because this isn’t the first, nor will it be the last time that something like this happens. From virtually every major publisher & developer forcing folks into excessive periods of crunchtime to denying them benefits and doing things like firing them and then having the gall to try and re-hire them later as though all their past entitlements no longer count..

It’s time to stop.

Oh! But a big fuck you to mouthpiece Fran Townsend for not only making things worse and giving an empty response that pissed off at least a thousand people actually affected, but for also working for, perpetuating and shamelessly supporting some of the worst acts of several prior Presidents; including that one too. Goes to show you what kinda person they are, whether in a government office or a corporate one..

[guettaes]

Overwatch players demand McCree name change after damning Blizzard report.

Overwatch players are calling for Jesse McCree to be renamed after a developer the hero is named after was featured in a Blizzard report outlining allegations against the company.

On July 27, as Blizzard employees staged a walkout protest, Kotaku reported on the infamous “Cosby Suite” at BlizzCon 2013 – a nickname given to Alex Afrasiabi’s booze-filled hotel room.

The report featured a photo of a group chat screenshot that had been uploaded to Afrasiabi’s Facebook. In it, former designer David Kosak wrote “I am gathering the hot chixx for the Coz.”

“You can’t marry ALL of them Alex,” he added, which prompted Afrasiabi to disagree. “I can, I’m Middle Eastern.”

Following this, WoW Level Designer Jesse McCree chimed in with “You misspelled f**k.”

Read More: Overwatch Bastion skin concept starts Halloween Terror early

Jesse McCree, of course, is also a character from Overwatch who seems to have been named after the dev. In a 2019 BlizzCon panel, McCree the developer claimed his parents were “big Overwatch fans.”

Players want Jesse McCree renamed in Overwatch

Following this news, players have begun calling for Blizzard to rename the cowboy hero.

“Petition for Overwatch to rename Jesse McCree to Matt Mercer in light of the real life Jesse McCree being a greasy ‘Cosby Suite’ dwelling scumbag,” one player wrote on Twitter.

Read More: Seagull explains why Overwatch 2’s 5v5 change is good for its future

Others went as far as calling for the devs to kill off the character. “Kill off Jesse mcCree or give us his real name for Overwatch 2, I’m never speaking that PoS name again.”

With so many players calling for change, it will be interesting to see what actions are taken. Previously, the WoW dev team stated they would be removing references “not appropriate” for their world following the allegations.

Of course, removing McCree’s name would also mean redoing multiple in-game interactions and voice lines, so it’s not as simple as it may sound.

Whether or not the hero ends up being locked until changes are made or even killed off in Overwatch 2 remains unknown, but the idea of Jesse McCree not really being the hero’s real name seems like a plausible route.

The Overwatch devs have not yet commented on the situation.

Information: dexerto web. not name sorry.

Me: what the hell is wrong with you now?! now with Blizzard stories "I know what happened" you're doing this smoothly for blizzard and overwatch fans and Jesse Mccree character names!

smoothly I could say that "we have to change Mercy's name, Gabe, Jake, Mei, Moira, Hanzo, etc." almost they have real names too, no matter who we find a name will exist without our knowledge.

on this you will greatly spoil the thing to change your name, Scandal It will be. you know why?

notice, when the game wasn’t done yet and the names were thought about, they should have changed smoothly at the very beginning, but they still didn’t do it because everyone accepted it.

and now the fans.

Jesse Mccree fans, Mchanzo fans, Mccree x Asher, Mccree x Gabe, etc. which I know.

we are already used to this name and we love why we should spoil the overwatch even more.

And

was his name a problem over the years? No.

now for those who are fans. give their opinion. do you want to change Jesse Mccree's name? because I do not want to.

[kargathbladefist]

ASMR : Grommash Hellscream breaks all the bones in Alex Afrasiabi’s body