Does the Torghast timer progress while on floor 3? What about in the "preparation areas" at the start of floors? Is there any place that has all these sorts of details worked out that I can look at?
I'm pretty sure Torghast par times are floor-by-floor and you get points for each floor you complete under time. Floor 3 and 5 don't have par times, so you can't score or fail to score for them.
Thanks. I did not realize that's how it worked. Since the final score shows a par time for the whole thing I thought it was overall. Good to know I can take my time on floor 5 as well.
Throughout my time at Blizzard I was constantly treated by men like a sex object. Men in positions of power would offer me trips and money if I would just go out on a date with them. A coworker would constantly 'neg' me as a way of flirting and just generally harass me. When I stood up for myself they would play the victim and tell me to calm down. Another coworker lured me into his office, closed the door and turned the lights off. He then sat next to me on the couch and started talking to me about sex and tried to pressure me to sleep with him. I was harassed by both my senior and lead in CS to the point of openly sobbing at my desk. I have heard from my female friends countless times about instances of men speaking about my body and being generally lewd about me. Some men had the audacity to straight up ask me if my breasts were real to my face and would argue with me when I said "yes". These are the types of things that I dealt with on a day-to-day basis.
I want to point out a few specific instances of sexual harassment by people in positions of power who should have known better. A Battle of the Bands event (a rock band competition that is attended by much of the company) was judged by a panel of senior Blizzard employees. I was playing guitar and just generally rocking out for our performance. During the judging portion of the event one of the judges commented on a microphone in front of the entire company about my breasts. He liked how much I was jumping up and down and thought I had "big talent". Everyone laughed. It was a joke and I was forced to laugh along with it.
Jeff Donais, who at the time was the head of CDev, was shaking a shake weight in his office when I walked past in the hallway. He stopped to make a joke about how I should give the shake weight a try in case I ever needed the talent for giving hand jobs in the future. I am naming this person specifically because he should have known better. He was in a position of power of a small department. This kind of behavior from Men In Power ™ was not just exclusive to dev teams. It happened on the satellite and support teams as well. I was lucky enough to have a direct supervisor who heard this comment and stood up for me. It was the first and only time anyone in a position of power stood up for me. He made it okay for me to be upset by what was happening. Without him I would just have had to take it as a joke and smile.
When I first started working at Blizzard someone found my DeviantArt page. I was a nude model during college and posted my work there. They started an email chain with a link to my modeling and shared it around the office. By my second week at work everyone on the floor had seen me naked. The rumors about it followed me for the rest of my time at the company.
The harassment didn't stop at work and it wasn't just harassment. Assault happened too. Men would pretend to be your friend and then assault you when you felt safe. I have been groped, coerced, and forced into sexual situations at the homes of coworkers and Blizzard events like BlizzCon and holiday parties. Men not taking "no" as an answer and pushing for sex once they had me alone with them. These are the kinds of people that Blizzard would hire. These are the kinds of people who got promoted and were put in positions of power. These people were the main culprits for the toxic culture of Blizzard.
[...]
I believe this culture was fostered by Blizzard's hiring practices. Hires happened based on a "culture fit" more than anything else, and as we can see, the culture is toxic and one of sexual harassment and assault. For my own part, I'm not sure if my transfer into CDev was based on merit alone, as I was told multiple times by those around me that I was only hired because of my body and for the opportunity of sex. Imagine being told you're a trophy hire all the time, only to be laid off when Blizzard thinks it's time to cut the budget. The imposter syndrome was overwhelming.
[..]
So, yeah, pretty much everybody would have known how bad it was.
I don't have much to add but I feel pretty icky continuing to support this company right now. I may walk, at least until they get their fucking house in order and commit in a big, big way to ensuring this shit never happens again, beyond the eyeroll-worthy "we hear you" bullshit corporate-speak responses we've been getting.
the current plan to address matters seems to be have the bush administration torture PR lady they hired a year or two ago while this investigation was already ongoing deny everything and deflect onto "actually the state of california is being mean to us"
the current plan to address matters seems to be have the bush administration torture PR lady they hired a year or two ago while this investigation was already ongoing deny everything and deflect onto "actually the state of california is being mean to us"
I'm heavily skeptical that there is a plan to address anything at all given that everybody is giving a different statement to cover their own butts. So will see how that goes.
"I'm so glad I cancelled my WoW sub and moved to ffxiv! A much better studio that never has reports of harassment"
Me who worked on ffxiv arr: ok.gif
Spoiler alert no studio is safe from this toxic culture
Like seeing that take makes me laugh and relive some traumatizing shit but glad you're enjoying your game and not thinking how pervasive and widespread this is 🥴🥴🥴
Second, both staying subbed or not are perfectly valid choices and is not cool to attack people for having a different choice. If you can't even look at the screen without feeling disgusted and want to unsub just for a minimum of mental peace, go ahead. There's also women directly affected for this that continue to have a World of Warcraft suscription because they put effort on both the game and the communities within it and don't want to let a bunch of dude bros take that from them, and if you wouldn't give them shit for it, well, you shouldn't give shit to anybody for it.
EDIT: Also the bunch of posts trying to turn the outrage from being about the women affected to being about themselves being mad at Torghast or whatever are super gross.
It absolutely is endemic yes. Anybody going "glad that's not MY game developer of choice" is a dupe.
+16
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
Yeah with regards to "should you unsub or stay subbed and which is ok" I think Tali explained it very well. Also makes me super sad how hard it is for him to make that decision.
I always tend to be on the same page with the dude and also feel the way he went over the issue and how to handle it is spot on
Even Asmongold had some pretty good insight in the situation.
One thing I took away from one of Asmon's videos was something like (paraphrased from memory here): "The game itself suffered because of this, because the women who were subjected to the harassment and bullying and awful behavior were not ever going to be able to do their best work in an environment like that. So the product they (Blizzard) were trying to make was being sabotaged by their own inappropriate antics."
Basically, saying that anybody who is in that situation, anybody who is under physical/emotional distress is going to be distracted and not at their best. Understandably so. As a result, the team as a whole is weaker for it.
There's just layers and layers of problems. And this is just another one of those layers.
I mean writ small it's one of the central questions of the modern era, i.e. how does one ethically participate in capitalism?
and the answer is, you can't really: the whole endeavor is based on exploitation some way or the other and unless you're gonna go live in the woods the absolute best (especially w/r/t entertainment products) you can do is decide which forms of exploitation you're willing to support with your money
if you want to unsub then fair enough, but if you're replacing one entertainment with a similar one the odds are pretty good you're enabling the same kind of behavior, just unknowingly this time. The best thing to do probably is stay engaged and at least try to make sure that the businesses you're patronizing aren't the worst of the bunch
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
+3
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I think it does no one favors to tell them how to handle a bad situation. Everyone makes their choice for their own reason. There are valid reasons to keep subbed and end your sub.
I could do without MAGA-chud Asmongold take, of all things, even with broken clocks being right twice a day.
Also that's explicitely what I mean about taking what happened to those women and trying to make it about (generic you) issues with the game.
It’s been floating around that big content creators like Asmongold knew to some degree about this shit. Bellular or whatever his name is strongly hinted at it when he tweeted “Ah, it’s public now.” And I liked the latter’s content for the most part, so this is less personal crusade and more about people who could have at least done some more digging but decided to just keep being free advertising for the monsters.
I interpreted Bellular's comments more along the lines of him having received some sort of advance warning about the lawsuit. He was probably asked to keep it under wraps until the suit went public. I did not in anyway interpret his comment to mean that he knew of the issues enough in advance to report on them.
I’m skeptical that either of them actually knew anything prior to the public announcement, it’s just cool to know stuff and it’s an easy lie to try and gain some cred for the next time you post a video about story speculation or whatnot. The people who know and could call them out, aren’t, either because they don’t pay attention to wow streamers, or they aren’t commenting under the advice of their attorney.
I could do without MAGA-chud Asmongold take, of all things, even with broken clocks being right twice a day.
Also that's explicitely what I mean about taking what happened to those women and trying to make it about (generic you) issues with the game.
It’s been floating around that big content creators like Asmongold knew to some degree about this shit. Bellular or whatever his name is strongly hinted at it when he tweeted “Ah, it’s public now.” And I liked the latter’s content for the most part, so this is less personal crusade and more about people who could have at least done some more digging but decided to just keep being free advertising for the monsters.
I don't know what they know but I do know they're both quite open about their disdain for Blizzard, so I'd read that more as a "ah ha I knew there was something rotten in there, it explains everything" than a "I knew about everything and just chose to remain silent because reasons".
Yeah with regards to "should you unsub or stay subbed and which is ok" I think Tali explained it very well. Also makes me super sad how hard it is for him to make that decision.
I always tend to be on the same page with the dude and also feel the way he went over the issue and how to handle it is spot on
I found his take on this stuff interesting (I watched most of it but haven’t seen the end) because I recently unfollowed them on twitch because of his consistent smutty innuendo comments directed towards his wife. It came across as disrespectful and a bit juvenile.
Last night my guild completed Normal KT and Normal Sylvanas.
Between the two of those, KT is a much more fun and epic feeling fight. We got that one in around 6 pulls or so. We got Sylv in about 4. And honestly her fight was very disappointing. None of it really felt epic at all. It didn't feel like it rose to the quality of a fight that's been building for as many as 6 years now and is the culmination of a 3 expansion character arc.
First of all, the boss arena is so plain that it is completely uninteresting. A big round platform with nothing visual in it at all is super boring. Jaina's boss arena was so much more visually interesting. Same with N'Zoth. His was just a round room too, but at least there were spikes and tentacles and stuff to give it a bit of visual flare. Sylvanas's boss arena is the most sterile boss arena I've ever seen.
Her phases all feel disjointed and the fight doesn't have any sort of natural flow in it. It feels like 3 very segmented parts. You have the round room phase, the bridge phase, and the exploding platform phase. But they feel completely unlinked from each other and disjointed. I'm also not really a fan of any of those phases individually, or as a whole. The stakes feel really low. Maybe my opinion will improve when I do the Heroic version of the fight, but on Normal I was completely disappointed and underwhelmed.
For being the culmination of a 6 year character arc, I was left feeling apathetic at the end.
0
Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited July 2021
I heard a few more stories, including one that described the "cube crawls." It sounds like apparently a bunch of people would get drunk and go around the cubes messing with people. The person who talked about it suggested it was both men & women messing with just about anyone, so I guess that adds a tiny bit of nuance to the complaint, but at the same time I wouldn't be surprised if the stuff mentioned in the lawsuit did happen the way it was described (i.e. guys touching girls inappropriately and that kind of thing). The whole thing is pretty not cool in general IMO (even as a guy I know that kind of environment would make me super uncomfortable).
Looking at a lot of the stories, it seems like one really common factor in most of them was alcohol. It kind of makes me wonder if they didn't stupidly allow drinking in the workplace (which just sounds like a terrible idea) how many of these stories would be non-issues. I'm sure there would still be some (and certainly you can't easily control what happens outside work at parties and such) but I wonder if at least a good chunk of the harassment wouldn't have happened. Afrasabi certainly sounds like he would still have been a problem (and the fact that HR refused to deal with him) as well as a few other stories (like one about a manager basically unfairly calling a woman's work shit, but then she would have a male colleague present the exact same thing and he would suddenly love it), but maybe things would have otherwise been a little better for the women working there
Kai_SanCommonly known as Klineshrike!Registered Userregular
I mean even if those "cube crawls" were a universal activity, it would just be an excuse for predatory people to harass the women. Like some just act like assholes in general, others go the extra mile. Still shity.
Also I doubt alcohol is a reason. For some people drinking is just an excuse for when they act a way they would have acted regardless.
+5
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Alcohol doesn't make good people into abusive people, but it does make abusive people a lot more dangerous (by removing their inhibitions and fear of being caught) makes their potential victims more vulnerable, and makes witnesses more likely to doubt or excuse what they saw.
I enjoy alcohol, but I'm increasingly in favor of removing it entirely from any work or industry event, as when you consider how important networking is to career advancement you're effectively requiring people put themselves in danger to advance their careers.
tomorrow would be a good day to not play any blizzard or activision games in solidarity with the workers, even if you are not writing off the company forever at this point
+4
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
In a funny little coincidence, Tyrande's whole Night Warrior thing seems to have concluded for good this week, with Elune coming down from the heavens to deliver the moral of the story, which is basically "victims of wrongdoing should not pursue justice, they just need to forgive and move on".
In a funny little coincidence, Tyrande's whole Night Warrior thing seems to have concluded for good this week, with Elune coming down from the heavens to deliver the moral of the story, which is basically "victims of wrongdoing should not pursue justice, they just need to forgive and move on".
...wow
+7
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
boy i know that wasn't planned but that's a little on the fucking nose
+7
Tynnanseldom correct, never unsureRegistered Userregular
At one point she refers to the night elves as “her favored children.”
Within the same monologue she also says she allowed Teldrassil to burn so she could send a bunch of souls to Ardenweald. I guess maybe for infinite cosmic beings who clearly do not value life, it’s acceptable to let your favorite things die a horrific, tragic death.
0
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
At one point she refers to the night elves as “her favored children.”
Within the same monologue she also says she allowed Teldrassil to burn so she could send a bunch of souls to Ardenweald. I guess maybe for infinite cosmic beings who clearly do not value life, it’s acceptable to let your favorite things die a horrific, tragic death.
I mean...kinda, yeah, I actually see it. If you're a being that wholly transcends life and death and for whom they're just two different parts of a complicated, multifacted existence, I could easily see your viewpoint being that this is actually a boon for them in the long run.
Like, this could actually be an interesting thing to delve into: how mortals view life vs. death compared to how gods and beings that hop between the realms view life vs. death. Is there even a difference to a being that exists in multiple universes simultaneously? Could they even perceive that to mortals there is a difference?
Unfortunately it's main plot WoW writing which means this will never come up again.
At one point she refers to the night elves as “her favored children.”
Within the same monologue she also says she allowed Teldrassil to burn so she could send a bunch of souls to Ardenweald. I guess maybe for infinite cosmic beings who clearly do not value life, it’s acceptable to let your favorite things die a horrific, tragic death.
I mean...kinda, yeah, I actually see it. If you're a being that wholly transcends life and death and for whom they're just two different parts of a complicated, multifacted existence, I could easily see your viewpoint being that this is actually a boon for them in the long run.
Like, this could actually be an interesting thing to delve into: how mortals view life vs. death compared to how gods and beings that hop between the realms view life vs. death. Is there even a difference to a being that exists in multiple universes simultaneously? Could they even perceive that to mortals there is a difference?
Unfortunately it's main plot WoW writing which means this will never come up again.
Yeah it's interesting if it's part of the core plot *waves at FFXIV* but in this case it's just a barely-relevant NPC rambling at another barely-relevant NPC while everyone just sits around going, wait if life and death don't matter why do you give a shit if Tyrande goes HAM on somebody?
(I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I had to get it out.)
I would argue that even Tyrande herself is barely relevant. She has been off-screen for 97% of the expansion.
Her arrival in the Battle of Ardenweald was so unexpected and so out-of-left-field, not because it was a clever twist or a brilliant piece of storytelling by Blizzard, but because she's been out of the story for so much of it that we all forgot about her.
Blizzard's writing staff seems to think that "off screen storytelling" is an acceptable way to move the plot along. We'll just push her off screen for 2 years and insinuate she's been doing stuff every now and again.
The number 1 most important rule of storytelling is "show, don't tell" and apparently Blizzard's entire writing staff missed that day in writing class because they do the opposite. They don't show us anything and they make all of their character narratives happen off-screen and out of sight of the players. And then when they bring them back in for these big moments they expect us to care, even though they have given us no reasons to do so.
+1
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
I covered that! I said barely-relevant NPC rambling at another barely-relevant NPC! :P
Blizzard's writing staff seems to think that "off screen storytelling" is an acceptable way to move the plot along. We'll just push her off screen for 2 years and insinuate she's been doing stuff every now and again.
"Buy our <latest novel> off of Amazon to find out what actually happened there, btw."
+2
admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
Posts
I'm heavily skeptical that there is a plan to address anything at all given that everybody is giving a different statement to cover their own butts. So will see how that goes.
Second, both staying subbed or not are perfectly valid choices and is not cool to attack people for having a different choice. If you can't even look at the screen without feeling disgusted and want to unsub just for a minimum of mental peace, go ahead. There's also women directly affected for this that continue to have a World of Warcraft suscription because they put effort on both the game and the communities within it and don't want to let a bunch of dude bros take that from them, and if you wouldn't give them shit for it, well, you shouldn't give shit to anybody for it.
EDIT: Also the bunch of posts trying to turn the outrage from being about the women affected to being about themselves being mad at Torghast or whatever are super gross.
I always tend to be on the same page with the dude and also feel the way he went over the issue and how to handle it is spot on
One thing I took away from one of Asmon's videos was something like (paraphrased from memory here): "The game itself suffered because of this, because the women who were subjected to the harassment and bullying and awful behavior were not ever going to be able to do their best work in an environment like that. So the product they (Blizzard) were trying to make was being sabotaged by their own inappropriate antics."
Basically, saying that anybody who is in that situation, anybody who is under physical/emotional distress is going to be distracted and not at their best. Understandably so. As a result, the team as a whole is weaker for it.
There's just layers and layers of problems. And this is just another one of those layers.
Also that's explicitely what I mean about taking what happened to those women and trying to make it about (generic you) issues with the game.
and the answer is, you can't really: the whole endeavor is based on exploitation some way or the other and unless you're gonna go live in the woods the absolute best (especially w/r/t entertainment products) you can do is decide which forms of exploitation you're willing to support with your money
if you want to unsub then fair enough, but if you're replacing one entertainment with a similar one the odds are pretty good you're enabling the same kind of behavior, just unknowingly this time. The best thing to do probably is stay engaged and at least try to make sure that the businesses you're patronizing aren't the worst of the bunch
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I don't know what they know but I do know they're both quite open about their disdain for Blizzard, so I'd read that more as a "ah ha I knew there was something rotten in there, it explains everything" than a "I knew about everything and just chose to remain silent because reasons".
I found his take on this stuff interesting (I watched most of it but haven’t seen the end) because I recently unfollowed them on twitch because of his consistent smutty innuendo comments directed towards his wife. It came across as disrespectful and a bit juvenile.
Between the two of those, KT is a much more fun and epic feeling fight. We got that one in around 6 pulls or so. We got Sylv in about 4. And honestly her fight was very disappointing. None of it really felt epic at all. It didn't feel like it rose to the quality of a fight that's been building for as many as 6 years now and is the culmination of a 3 expansion character arc.
First of all, the boss arena is so plain that it is completely uninteresting. A big round platform with nothing visual in it at all is super boring. Jaina's boss arena was so much more visually interesting. Same with N'Zoth. His was just a round room too, but at least there were spikes and tentacles and stuff to give it a bit of visual flare. Sylvanas's boss arena is the most sterile boss arena I've ever seen.
Her phases all feel disjointed and the fight doesn't have any sort of natural flow in it. It feels like 3 very segmented parts. You have the round room phase, the bridge phase, and the exploding platform phase. But they feel completely unlinked from each other and disjointed. I'm also not really a fan of any of those phases individually, or as a whole. The stakes feel really low. Maybe my opinion will improve when I do the Heroic version of the fight, but on Normal I was completely disappointed and underwhelmed.
For being the culmination of a 6 year character arc, I was left feeling apathetic at the end.
Looking at a lot of the stories, it seems like one really common factor in most of them was alcohol. It kind of makes me wonder if they didn't stupidly allow drinking in the workplace (which just sounds like a terrible idea) how many of these stories would be non-issues. I'm sure there would still be some (and certainly you can't easily control what happens outside work at parties and such) but I wonder if at least a good chunk of the harassment wouldn't have happened. Afrasabi certainly sounds like he would still have been a problem (and the fact that HR refused to deal with him) as well as a few other stories (like one about a manager basically unfairly calling a woman's work shit, but then she would have a male colleague present the exact same thing and he would suddenly love it), but maybe things would have otherwise been a little better for the women working there
Also I doubt alcohol is a reason. For some people drinking is just an excuse for when they act a way they would have acted regardless.
I enjoy alcohol, but I'm increasingly in favor of removing it entirely from any work or industry event, as when you consider how important networking is to career advancement you're effectively requiring people put themselves in danger to advance their careers.
tomorrow would be a good day to not play any blizzard or activision games in solidarity with the workers, even if you are not writing off the company forever at this point
...wow
Can’t help hut think about the Vulpera recruitment questline where you so some good old fashioned union busting
At one point she refers to the night elves as “her favored children.”
Within the same monologue she also says she allowed Teldrassil to burn so she could send a bunch of souls to Ardenweald. I guess maybe for infinite cosmic beings who clearly do not value life, it’s acceptable to let your favorite things die a horrific, tragic death.
I mean...kinda, yeah, I actually see it. If you're a being that wholly transcends life and death and for whom they're just two different parts of a complicated, multifacted existence, I could easily see your viewpoint being that this is actually a boon for them in the long run.
Like, this could actually be an interesting thing to delve into: how mortals view life vs. death compared to how gods and beings that hop between the realms view life vs. death. Is there even a difference to a being that exists in multiple universes simultaneously? Could they even perceive that to mortals there is a difference?
Unfortunately it's main plot WoW writing which means this will never come up again.
Yeah it's interesting if it's part of the core plot *waves at FFXIV* but in this case it's just a barely-relevant NPC rambling at another barely-relevant NPC while everyone just sits around going, wait if life and death don't matter why do you give a shit if Tyrande goes HAM on somebody?
(I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I had to get it out.)
Her arrival in the Battle of Ardenweald was so unexpected and so out-of-left-field, not because it was a clever twist or a brilliant piece of storytelling by Blizzard, but because she's been out of the story for so much of it that we all forgot about her.
Blizzard's writing staff seems to think that "off screen storytelling" is an acceptable way to move the plot along. We'll just push her off screen for 2 years and insinuate she's been doing stuff every now and again.
The number 1 most important rule of storytelling is "show, don't tell" and apparently Blizzard's entire writing staff missed that day in writing class because they do the opposite. They don't show us anything and they make all of their character narratives happen off-screen and out of sight of the players. And then when they bring them back in for these big moments they expect us to care, even though they have given us no reasons to do so.
"Buy our <latest novel> off of Amazon to find out what actually happened there, btw."
PSN: ShogunGunshow
Origin: ShogunGunshow