Good morning friends. So it isn’t so much that I want to talk about the horrific situation with Blizzard this morning, and more that I feel like I can’t really talk about my weekend without doing so. For those who have been reading this blog for a long while, you will know that I love Diablo 3. More importantly than loving Diablo 3, is the fact that I love doing seasonal starts with my friends. I go so far as to completely arrange my calendar around the fact that the Friday night a season opens, we are going to be spending that evening grinding until we fall asleep. Admittedly as we are aging… the point of falling asleep at the keyboard comes a long earlier than normal. Diablo 3 Season 24 started on July 23rd and we had been making plans to do our normal grind… right up until the point that the news broke last week.
Do you know what I didn’t do Friday? I didn’t play Diablo 3 because I just cannot bring myself to participate in anything Blizzard-related right now. This is not me telling you that you should boycott Blizzard, because for starters gamer boycotts never actually work. Gamers will talk a big game, but when it comes to actually miss out on something that they enjoy… those words never really translate into actions. Even then a potential boycott feels super bad for other reasons, namely that I still have a large number of friends who are currently stuck dealing with this situation from within the walls of the company. My not supporting the games that they create is actively harming people that I care about deeply. When I say I am not playing, it is very much a personal decision that I cannot separate the game that I love from thinking about the scope of the harm that was caused.
What I did instead was screw around in Final Fantasy XIV and eventually had my friends Grace and Byx join me for some nonsense low level content. I think we all realized that the ritual of playing Diablo 3 was more a ritual of hanging out together and shooting the shit for several hours rather than the game that we were actually playing. Byx had only a level 30 character on Cactuar, so we did a lot of lower pressure content in order to have a thing that we were all participating in together. The truth is I had a delightful evening and I am super glad that we still did something. Even if none of us were really in the position mentally to be doing the thing we had originally planned on doing. Friday evening did serve as the gateway to what was an excellent weekend of group activities in Final Fantasy XIV.
At the close of the evening, Grace and I ran a few extreme primals as she needed two more ponies in order to get Kirin. We killed two primals, got two ponies… and this intense luck streak gave me an artificial feeling of how difficult it is to get a specific pony to drop. So much so that I volunteered that we get my friend Sparkz her mount as well. For a specific chunk of Saturday afternoon, I was throwing myself at primal encounters and when I left we managed to get Ramuh and Garuda to drop. This bolstered Sparkz confidence and she managed to get Leviathan and Titan on her own, and then struggled a bit with Ifrit. It was around this point that the rest of the FC stepped in as I was busy and managed to get her the Ifrit whistle on their first kill. So that is two Kirin mounts achieved in a single weekend, which seems pretty solid to me.
This lead to Rae, Thalen, Waffles and me to have several impromptu groups over the weekend. The next set of mounts are the lanner whistles, that we more or less collectively refer to as “birbs”. To the best of my knowledge the only one that actually dropped last week was off Nidhogg and Rae managed to win the roll. We also made a number of attempts on Sophia, which was its own battle just to learn the fight… or more so re-learn the fight. Throughout the course of late Heavensward and Stormblood there are a good number of encounters that I unlocked but never actually completed. Sophia Extreme was absolutely one of these and I think we only actually downed the boss twice before needing to take a break. The vast majority of that time was spent learning the mechanics of the fight, because raid wipe mechanics are still raid wipes even though we overgeared the content.
Lastly we closed the weekend of fun with a planned night of treasure maps. Right now we are pulling together maps somewhere around 7pm CDT on Cactuar in the Aether data center. We start filling the group with the Free Company and then reach out to other folks who might be available until we hit 8 slots. It took a little while to get the group rolling, but were able to include Sparkz who had never seen any of this content. It is complete luck that we managed to get a portal on our very first map, but that is when tragedy struck. I am guessing the server was deluged at the very moment that portal open because we started encountering an error anytime Rae attempted to transfer us into the dungeon. The portal eventually timed out, and we ran another map as a test to see if it was endemic of larger server problems or just a glitch.
Something we did not realize is that when it timed out the portal… the map itself was returned to Rae’s inventory. Opening clicking on the map again… it just straight up reopened the portal allowing us access to our first dungeon of the night. I think in total we did something around six or seven different dungeons, including one that we managed to get all the way through without being ejected. That was the first time we had actually managed to do that as a group. I love maps night largely because it is just good silly fun, with content that is just challenging enough to be interesting, but not so challenging as to feel like we are grinding our faces against anything. What I was not prepared for really is just how lucrative these maps end up being. There was one chest we opened that dropped 100,000 gil by itself and all told I probably cleared around 500k gil for the evening.
The weekend had a bit of a rough start, in not knowing exactly what we would do in place of the Diablo 3 seasonal start. However it ended up phenomenal as I got to spend a lot of time doing things with my friends and I am extremely happy I chose to come back to this game. Sure it was nostalgia that got me to return, but I somehow managed to break what had been a three or so year long mental block against doing group content with strangers. Now I queue for dungeons every single night and enjoy my time spent greatly. It feels like I have repaired some rift in my psyche that now allows me to appreciate just how good it feels to do group content again. I am really wanting to figure out a time and a place to at least start dipping my toes into doing raid content again. I am not yet sure what night would work for me, but I will probably be reaching out to some of the usual players to determine what might even work as a schedule.
I did D3 Season 23 and saw the alert for 24 as well. Like you, I wondered if I should play it. Since I did S23 while I wasn’t blogging, I was going to include that in a catch-up post at some point, but then this whole scandal happened. I had to try and think what I thought of it. I’ve been harassed, too, while at a previous company and also at the place I work now. The previous one I never talked about. The current one I did mention to my supervisor, but he didn’t take it seriously. The thing is, EVERY tech company has these issues. I GUARANTEE they happen at Apple and Microsoft. Facebook is a certainty. I’m sure of all the rest of them, too, because it is PERVASIVE. I support those who chose to take a stand against Blizzard, but I have to add, well, what about all the other companies? Or is it only important when it makes the news?
I have no answers. You’re being an ally on your blog, which is amazingly fantastic. I think the people who most need to read your words, or these words, never will. It’s the megacorps that have to be active in rooting these people out and seeing they don’t harm anyone else. Furor was quietly let go and is probably causing terror wherever he is now, because until this went public, nobody knew. Thousands of other people in authority never had their scandal go public and are still doing it.
For years I fought becoming a manager. I had a bad taste in my mouth early on when right out of college I was thrust into the role of being over a bunch of people without any real training to do so. I was not qualified but that didn’t seem to matter, and I worked hard to try and make sure I was running an equitable team with an open door policy. What killed me through when I was asked to discipline an employee for reasons that I did not agree with. I avoided even the hint of management for years. That was until I saw the fallout of what bad management looked like. I was essentially left with the decision of either stepping up or taking the chance on more bad management.
One of the main reasons why I finally agreed to apply for the position I am in now or any of the leadership roles I held before then is that I thought maybe just maybe I could start to shape things from within. I know harassment is pervasive, but I am trying to build an environment that is safe for folks to thrive. I am sure it isn’t enough, but it is what I can actually do that makes a difference. The problems are endemic to the system. For example, over the years I noticed that I did not get many women applying for development positions. I started to research this and found out that there were plenty of women who applied, but ultimately were excluded by Human Resources before I ever had a chance to see the resumes. This has lead us to change the way that we write job descriptions in order to feature more equivalent skillsets. Essentially Human Resources was just doing a word search and looking for resumes that matched exactly the terms that we were using… so we needed to update the terms that we were using.
Sexual harassment and abuse will continue to persist so long as IT, in general, remains a “boys club” and I am trying my best to start to chip away at that. Again it isn’t perfect but we have processes in place to try and minimize bias in our interviewing process. It ends up creating a fairly cold and clinical interview environment, but it also is based on a grading rubric and a third-party assessment test and gets rolled up into a cumulative score. Even with all of this effort, the numbers are not great. I have eleven male employees and four female employees, which is not a great representation. That would have been ten and five but one of the former employees that I mentored has moved up into management. The thing is… I know this is going to be a slow process but it is going to require attention and mindfulness to turn the course of technology.
I am sorry you went through what you went through, and I am so sorry that this cycle keeps repeating itself over and over again. I feel like I need to do something, so I am doing the things that are in my power.