Blizzard bans competitor who made political statement about Hong Kong

[Minusorange]

Well Blizzcon is certainly going to be interesting

Even more interesting their own staff walked out in protest

https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/9/...-ban-hong-kong-epic-games-fortnite-blitzchung

 

[Wucked]

It's flat out unacceptable to push your agenda on such a forum.

That’s where I got it from.

The Chinese government is bad news. Put aside the Tiananmen Square massacre and their worship of Mao Zedong, who is responsible for the most deaths in human history, for a moment... Now go and read about what they are up to right now. There’s plenty to be angry about.

 

[agnes]

That’s where I got it from.

The Chinese government is bad news. Put aside the Tiananmen Square massacre and their worship of Mao Zedong, who is responsible for the most deaths in human history, for a moment... Now go and read about what they are up to right now. There’s plenty to be angry about.

Ok, let's backup, I think you've gotten the wrong impression from my post. I in no way, at all condone nor agree with how the government is operating or treating it's citizens. And in no way defending the current actions including the past. I was and still am focusing on my points being centralised around the situation following a competitive gamer bringing in politics (which yes, I agree, they are not politics at this point but I'm using the term loosely) into a computer gaming event.

My quote: It's flat out unacceptable to push your agenda on such a forum.
My reasoning: In my opinion, it's unacceptable to use a given public forum such as a winning stage to shout out regarding a current political/government issue which is pushing an agenda. Protest that outside of the event. And again, I want to reiterate my opinion on the matter as a whole. I FULLY agree with what the competitor was disclaiming. I just strongly disagree with it leaking into a competition to such an extent.

Now, I'll lastly go into my feelings on the subject as a whole following more coverage and my knowledge on the current subject being updated having heard more of what's going on and what happened from Blizzard.

Blizzard are in the wrong, despite of how I feel about the competitor shouting out what he did. I didn't know about the broadcasters at the time, I do now. That was not justified by Blizzard. Did they use too much of a heavy hand on the competitor? Absolutely, did they react appropriately? Absolutely not.

The whole thing is a mess. All my points and discussion above are surrounding ONLY the incident at the gaming event, NOT the current on goings in China. That is a whole other subject which I simply don't want to get into.

 

[Wucked]

Fair enough. I did jump down your throat, I apologise for that. This is a subject that I’m passionate about. It’s a bad regime, to put it mildly, and my position is that selling out to them in this way is wrong on more levels than I wish to count.

 

[agnes]

Fair enough. I did jump down your throat, I apologise for that. This is a subject that I’m passionate about. It’s a bad regime, to put it mildly, and my position is that selling out to them in this way is wrong on more levels than I wish to count.

No problem! I'm glad we got it sorted, and having now educated my self more on the matter, I fully agree that it's horrible for companies such as Blizzard and others selling out to what is clearly a horrible regime just to keep more pennies in their pocket. It's disgusting and really eye opening to where their priorities lay.

 

[Rofflay]

Did Britain not make plans once for the relocation of 5.5m from Hong Kong to N Ireland?


The cheek!! Also China is a scary place best they stay there and fight the menace that is the Communists. They are not even Communists anyways they are Capitalists but that mental block is overpoweringly strong.

 

[Eurofighter]

Scre China free Hong Kong. Blizzard are on the wrong side here. They just care about money.

 

[dragonslayer]

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/bli...weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament
An update for everyone following blizzard has apologised and revoked his ban it's now a 6month suspension for both blitz and crew he's also got his winnings back

Edit added link

 

[Kelt]

Blizzard in damage control mode.

Too late methinks.

 

[LeMson]

Yep Wow classic sub cancelled, that'll learn them

 

[Destination]

Did Britain not make plans once for the relocation of 5.5m from Hong Kong to N Ireland?
The cheek!! Also China is a scary place best they stay there and fight the menace that is the Communists. They are not even Communists anyways they are Capitalists but that mental block is overpoweringly strong.

That would be utterly class, can we have the big hillside and malls too please!
How ****** off the local scum would be at being minority groups on both sides, and the politicians having no future role, I would love it!
We could be an economic and banking powerhouse

 

[CaptainRAVE]

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/bli...weekend-s-hearthstone-grandmasters-tournament
An update for everyone following blizzard has apologised and revoked his ban it's now a 6month suspension for both blitz and crew he's also got his winnings back

Edit added link

This is not an actual apology. It was very carefully crafted to not offend China while attempting to appease the community. The community does not seem to be appeased.

‘I want to be clear: our relationships in China had no influence on our decision.’

This is probably the biggest lie I have ever heard in my entire life.

They are still banning people who are simply defending basic human rights. Even their own staff are walking out. I won’t touch a blizzard product again.

 

[StriderX]

Might have been interested in Diablo 4, but **** that. This is literally the only time where i'd be happy if the machinations of US nationalism meant US companies were sanctioned for siding with an authoritarian state and hindering free speech, some sort of legislation for working with/for Chinese interests would be nice.

These monolithic media companies are a scourge, and it neatly aligns with the monetisation practices lately as well as it's all engineered for the Chinese market in essence.

Two birds with one stone please.

 

[Malevolence]

Scre China free Hong Kong. Blizzard are on the wrong side here. They just care about money.

True. But to be fair, Blizzard hasn't been Blizzard for years now. It's the scummy ***** at Activision pulling the strings.

 

[StriderX]

True. But to be fair, Blizzard hasn't been Blizzard for years now. It's the scummy ***** at Activision pulling the strings.

Maybe, but it was still a huge company before Activision "partnered" up, almost certainly would have ended up just as unprincipled.

It's just seems to be a natural law of large companies, less human, more machine, less artistically driven and more profit driven.

 

[Teaf]

I really don't get what the outrage is about.

It doesn't matter what Blizzards connection to China is. The guy used Blizzard's platform to spout his political agenda on a platform that is not only not designed for it, but has strict and clear rules against it. The commentators were egging the guy on and made no attempt to stop it, so they deserved punishment too. The only issue I had with the whole fiasco was that the punishment was too harsh - but this is typical Blizzard; they always knee-jerk react. This fixed this earlier yesterday by lessening the severity of it.

The hypocrisy on this topic is unbelievable though. People want to "boycott Blizzard" for seemingly dampening free speech and apparently bowing to the whim of China to not hurt their precious company, yet seem to forget or disregard the other companies, platforms, or services that have done similar (or worse!), or/and have ties to the Chinese government in some way; and they don't mind happily using those services on a day-to-day basis while throwing Blizzard under the bus.

But every other service is fine, right? Let's just focus on the alpha-evil that is Blizzard and ignore everything else while talking about it with friends on iPhones, or maybe use those iPhones to discuss this on Reddit who took a $150 million "investment" from TenCent... yeah, that company, the ones that have major political bias and actively help to censor criticism towards the Chinese government and assist in surveillance of the public, and who also have majority control, investments, or shares in Grinding Gear Games, Epic Games, PUGB, Activision/Blizzard, Riot, Clash of Clans, Frontier Developments, Paradox, and others.

Don't forget to pick up your free game this week on Epic Games' store while you're cancelling your Blizzard accounts before you head over to Reddit to jump on the bandwagon.

 

[StriderX]

I really don't get what the outrage is about.

It doesn't matter what Blizzards connection to China is. The guy used Blizzard's platform to spout his political agenda on a platform that is not only not designed for it, but has strict and clear rules against it. The commentators were egging the guy on and made no attempt to stop it, so they deserved punishment too. The only issue I had with the whole fiasco was that the punishment was too harsh - but this is typical Blizzard; they always knee-jerk react. This fixed this earlier yesterday by lessening the severity of it.

The hypocrisy on this topic is unbelievable though. People want to "boycott Blizzard" for seemingly dampening free speech and apparently bowing to the whim of China to not hurt their precious company, yet seem to forget or disregard the other companies, platforms, or services that have done similar (or worse!), or/and have ties to the Chinese government in some way; and they don't mind happily using those services on a day-to-day basis while throwing Blizzard under the bus.

But every other service is fine, right? Let's just focus on the alpha-evil that is Blizzard and ignore everything else while talking about it with friends on iPhones, or maybe use those iPhones to discuss this on Reddit who took a $150 million "investment" from TenCent... yeah, that company, the ones that have major political bias and actively help to censor criticism towards the Chinese government and assist in surveillance of the public, and who also have majority control, investments, or shares in Grinding Gear Games, Epic Games, PUGB, Activision/Blizzard, Riot, Clash of Clans, Frontier Developments, Paradox, and others.

Don't forget to pick up your free game this week on Epic Games' store while you're cancelling your Blizzard accounts before you head over to Reddit to jump on the bandwagon.

Blizzard made the wrong decision and is being eviscerated for it because they weren't explicit beforehand, a vague T&C is not explicit knowledge not to do something, especially when the consequences are unknown beyond speculation.

Had they just themselves not basically eviscerated the person and the commentators careers, instead used it as a warning to explicitly state they were going to be absolutely harsh in the future on political messages on their platform (entirely fair), it would not remotely have been anywhere near as bad. Now it's too bloody late for it, they've made the situation for themselves worse, deservedly frankly, because the perception of being biased towards China in context of how they responded is practically impossible to dissociate from.

The fact is that China is on a digital warpath and the West needs to respond at some point because it's having an impact on our interests, they're at the position of economical power that particularly companies can't just take a stance against because it would completely close off a huge market. We're already in a big discussion about the greedy nature of gaming in general, and this just compounds that to such a point that it connects the dots on why they're going so hard for games-as-services, mostly because it was huge in the Eastern market in the first place.

So an argument against monetisation is now heavily skewed into the political and you can't just remove it once it's there, because the rationale still exists and China is using it to spread it's influence.

There's no turning back now, what could have been just an ethical or moral qualm about financial abuse, is charged with national security concerns and political dogma bordering on McCarthyism.

 

[dragonslayer]

Blizzard made the wrong decision and is being eviscerated for it because they weren't explicit beforehand, a vague T&C is not explicit knowledge not to do something, especially when the consequences are unknown beyond speculation.

Had they just themselves not basically eviscerated the person and the commentators careers, instead used it as a warning to explicitly state they were going to be absolutely harsh in the future on political messages on their platform
.

But then people would say it's unfair if they got banned or whatever because Blitz didn't when he did it like a developer for blizz has said they are stuck in a rock and a hard place they either leave him unpunished and then get banned from china and lose out on money and cause people to lose their jobs or they punish him and lose faith from the gaming community

 

[StriderX]

But then people would say it's unfair if they got banned or whatever because Blitz didn't when he did it like a developer for blizz has said they are stuck in a rock and a hard place they either leave him unpunished and then get banned from china and lose out on money and cause people to lose their jobs or they punish him and lose faith from the gaming community

They would have the defence that they warned them and it would be very difficult to assault them on it, as the position is understandable. Riot Games did a far more sensible thing, and won't be having the same level of discomfort, even though they have a literal bias (being owned by Tencent).

If China was willing to just outright end things with Activision Blizzard on a single incident that had they been explicit would not be tolerated further (as long as it was written for any political event - equal opportunity), then i don't know, it didn't seem like they did however and really doesn't matter because it's too late in any event.

Realistically after the NFL thing these companies should have been more proactive in keeping things sensibly on topic, just a case of not being ready and due to that responding in such a way that they had to put up the facade of apology (the pro and commentators careers are probably permanently over).

This whole discussion isn't just going to disappear just because Blizzard announces something at Blizzcon either, because it's far bigger than them, they can probably rub it off honestly over time, but i highly doubt China is going to be any less assertive or the reaction to it any less aggressive.

In any case, Blizzard could have resolved this less stupidly, even if they lost access to China for a bit, they could have at least been forthright about it's policies to show it's not a politically charged company for taking part in China's market, even if i think it's ultimately pointless.

 

[Teaf]

Blizzard made the wrong decision and is being eviscerated for it because they weren't explicit beforehand, a vague T&C is not explicit knowledge not to do something, especially when the consequences are unknown beyond speculation.

They absolutely didn't make the wrong decision, they just overdid the punishment slightly; and even that though is arguable, since it's their enforcement of their rules on their platform with players who have signed and agreed contracts with them to not break those rules. If those rules are broken then Blizzard can deal with offenders as they see fit against situations that they deem as unacceptable (within the confines of the law). Also, this passage which they quoted from their "judgement" post:



is vague on what specifically constitutes as the "act" for a reason because they simply can't and shouldn't list everything. You'll get the exact same terminology in any employment contract in any country (if you're working in the UK I guarantee you'll see the same thing in yours) and you'll never see a giant complete list of what counts as misconduct. While they may gave some examples, it's at the discretion of the company to deal with issues on a case-by-case basis and that's exactly what Blizzard have done.

If Blitzchung or the commentators thought that using Blizzards platform to promote political agendas would not count as one of these acts, then their own ignorance is their fault as ignorance is not an excuse. At the very least they should have asked ahead of time with the event planners to make sure, but they didn't, and very likely knew it would have caused issues but did it anyway. Hopefully they will know better in the future.

Dragonslayer is correct in that Blizzard are damned if they do and damned if they don't. I bet no-one would be having this conversation to boycott Blizzard if Blitzchung was pro-Government. People would be wanting him banned, and would be lauding Blizzard for handing out sanctions and, in this flip-side situation I've described, Blizzard would have done nothing different. The fines would be as they were, the sanctions as they are, and all that changes is people praise of scold them based on our own personal political views and that's just idiotic when Blizzard are trying to enforce the same rules on players at both ends of the political spectrum.

I sympathise with what's happening in Hong Kong right now, and personally I support what the public are trying to achieve, and if I had my own platform to speak on I'd not be concerned about voicing it; but there is no way I'd be doing it on someone else's platform who've hired me to do a job and have rules in place to dissuade those actions. China's current happenings though are by-the-by in this case and we should be specifically focusing on the actions Blizzard took against anyone coming onto a live stream that Blizzard run and issuing political statements, regardless of what way said person leans in their politics, and how those actions conflict with Blizzards pre-agreed terms as being unacceptable and will result in action being taken.