With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.

Guild Wars developer fires two employees after Twitter incident

UPDATED FOR CLARITY 7/9/2018

Earlier this week two employees of Guild Wars developer ArenaNet were fired due to an issue that that transpired on Twitter. The entire incident can be read about on The Verge article.

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.” https://t.co/lmK0yJWqGB

— Jessica Price (@Delafina777) July 4, 2018

Above you can see the tweet that started the storm that lead to the firing of both Jessica Price and Peter Fries as he defended a coworker on Twitter and got caught up in the indecent. The response from AreanNet is saying that “a [failure] to uphold our standards of communication” with the games community was the reason for their firing that you can read here.

Wiggin’s thoughts on the subject : So this is one of those incidents where it seems that both parties over reacted and ended up in hot water. We have ArenaNet firing writers because how they interacted with the games community and we have Pirce who goes off on someone because they disagree with her. I’d say there is fault on both sides here. She gets quite upset over a tweet where after she explains some of her job someone disagrees with her and provides another opinion (I’m not here to say if that opinion is valid or not) and she responds by Tweeting “thanks for telling me what we do internally, my dude” along with quoting his first tweet and replying “today in being a female game dev.” It would seem she saw an injustice and his quote insulting her ability to do her job so she reacted with sarcasm. If the original tweeter Devoir meant for it to come off sarcastic or not we don’t know.

You getting mad at my obvious attempt at creating dialogue and discussion with you, instead of just replying that I am wrong or otherwise correct me in my false assumptions, is really just disheartening for me. You do you though. I’m sorry if it offended. I’ll leave you to it.

— Deroir (@DeroirGaming) July 4, 2018

Jessica Pierce’s first response to Deroir

Now again I’m not sure if this is genuine as I don’t know this person personally but on the surface it would see they took the effort to apologize if his comment offended her. The rest of the thread devolves into some weird conversation on what we are allowed to comment on in a public internet space.

Things get kind of strange because Pirce may have been upset there were not any hostility said in the initial Twitter response that is shown above. She only became hostile after the response from Deroir and this is where she may have got herself into trouble. ArenaNet fired her along with Peter Fries whos Tweets have since been deleted so I was unable to get a direct source on what he said in defense of Pirce. It’s quite alarming how quickly they were both fired and seems some of the heat came from the Guild Wars 2 subreddit calling for her to be fired. This doesn’t help anyone and wishing someone to be fired over what they say on their personal twitter really makes you wonder what you have that is yours anymore. Deroir may have been the most recent Tweet in a long line of annoying tweets giving their opinion about something GW2 related but lashing out at him over it may not of been the best option. I’d also say firing the two of them based on the twitter exchange doesn’t sit right with me and I feel like there is something not being said about this whole story.

We really need to stop being so rude to each other and minimizing all interactions to Us vs Them. It only deludes the actual issue and makes it harder to have an actual conversation. We can disagree on things and not turn it into a microwar. I hope both writers are able to find new jobs and perhaps ArenaNet takes a step back from firing people over Twitter exchanges.

EU’s “Copyright Directive” fails final vote

   As posted by PCGamer EU’s internet copyright and “link taxing” law failed the final vote to become law.  318-278 was the final vote and now must go back to be revised and will be discussed openly instead of privately.  While the advocates against it celebrate, it will be voted on again after all the revisions sometime in September.  Advocates for the bill blame a “violent campaign” scaring MP’s into voting against it.

Source: edri.org

Ozzy’s Thoughts: As my previous was very much a “wtf is wrong with people nowadays” which was then posted AFTER the second to last vote passed, I can happily say I’m no longer angry.  Thankfully the EU parliament listened and voted against it.  Not everyone is happy about this of course and both sides are staying ready to for the upcoming September revisions.  Hopefully the revisions won’t be as horrible, maybe they’ll tone down the stuff they want to put in there or maybe with time even more backlash will happen and they’ll abandon the bill.  I don’t know, but ignoring us Americans and our stupid corrupt FCC (thanks shit-pai) the internet is a bit safer today.  Maybe in time we can get ours back.