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I’ve felt like I needed to talk about this point for a few days now, but honestly was uncertain exactly what I would say about the matter. If you remain blissfully unaware of the situation happening with Blizzard entertainment, I would like to have some of whatever you are smoking because apparently, it works extremely well. The short rundown is the State of California has filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for hostile working conditions, specifically targeting women and in EEO language “protected classes”. Since this point, a cavalcade of horrible stories of Blizzard employees behaving badly has been loosed upon our community. I am in no way trying to diminish these stories but there are way too many of them to ever realistically cover in a blog post. If you have remained oblivious then I highly suggest educating yourself and PC Gamer has a fairly good rundown of the timeline of events.

As part of this discussion, I feel like it is important to at least talk about the employee walkout at the Blizzard campus. The first image in this blog post is a picture of Blizzard staff walking out on July 28th to protest the situation. Corresponding to this action there were calls across social media, many of which coming from Blizzard staff to boycott all of the studio’s games on that day and to create a virtual picket line. This specific call to boycott was targeting a specific time and date and not a larger drive to boycott the games as a whole. The thing is… once this ball started rolling it was difficult to stop and now there are a number of individuals that are maintaining the boycott as a way of showing support. It is all a double-edged sword because, in order to make the “corporate overlords” take notice, the company has to be losing money. However, in order for the company to lose money, you have to take actions that will actively harm the folks that are still working there.

In fact, there are folks in the community trying to say “hold up a minute” and stop the boycott. Alanah Pearce is a trusted voice in the gaming community, and I generally speaking appreciate her opinion on things. Yesterday she released a heartfelt video talking about how a boycott might do more harm than it does good. I’ve seen this echoed in the comments on Twitter of my own friends who work at Blizzard. Now that the initial employee action is over, there seems to be a general fear that the fans won’t be coming back. I mean and honestly, that fear is warranted given that I myself cannot stomach the thought of playing any of the games right now. Diablo 3 Season 24 is happening currently and the start of a new Diablo season is generally my happy place, but I cannot bring myself to touch the game.

If you have reached this spot in the blog post, you might be wondering… “Bel why are we even talking about this right now?” On Tuesday just ahead of the investor earnings call, J. Allen Brack the president of Blizzard Studios left the company to “pursue other opportunities”. Replacing him is a team of “co-leaders” made up of Jen Oneal that came from Vicarious Visions, and Mike Ybarra previously from Microsoft and the Xbox platform. Firstly let me be clear, that I absolutely believe that JAB needed to go to begin the process of change. Secondly, I don’t necessarily see anything specifically wrong with the choices that were made other than they seem to reflect Activision more than they reflect BLizzard as a studio. They are choices that point at corporate control and stability with Jen Oneal being a pretty familiar surrogate for Activision and Mike being looked at as a rainmaker from Microsoft.

I think my ultimate fear with all of this is that these were simply performative actions in order to show the stockholders that Kotick and crew were seizing control just ahead of the earnings call. Additionally, the head of Human Resources left the company, which makes sense given that every single tale that I have heard involved either that department being apathetic or openly hostile towards those coming forward to report incidents. The timing of this all synchronizing with the earnings call, however, makes this all seem like a calculated series of steps in order to smooth out investor sentiments. I wouldn’t exactly classify the stock prices as being in freefall, but there has absolutely been a downward trend since the announcement of the lawsuit and the other information coming to light. There is even a lawsuit coming from the investor community alleging that the company misleads shareholders.

Tuesday, August 3rd was the Activision Blizzard earnings call. If you are so inclined you can check out the webcast recording of this call here or view the slide deck from which the above image is pulled. Some of the core takeaways are that Blizzard as a whole continues the downward slide of MAU’s reported, losing another 1 million players and down roughly $50 Million in revenue compared to the first quarter. Additionally, Diablo Immortal the oft-maligned mobile port of Diablo 3 has been pushed out to a 2022 release and there are still no firm dates for either Overwatch 2 or Diablo IV. Diablo II Resurrected appears to still be on track for a September launch which is largely the big positive.

In 2015, Blizzard stopped reporting subscription numbers in favor of a more ambiguous engagement figure of MAU’s or Monthly Active Users. However in the above image pulled from MassivelyOp, shows that since 2018 Blizzard has lost 32% of its Monthly Active Users. In other terms, it is now sitting at 26 Million MAUs for Q2, which means it is down 12 Million users for the company as a whole in that timeframe. I think what is scarier is the fact that this quarter doesn’t even take into account the current exodus of players from World of Warcraft. That all more or less started during the Month of July. My own World of Warcraft account was canceled and laying dormant, but still on the books until the first part of July for example. When it comes time for the investor call in Q3, it is likely going to be pretty bleak.

So I guess we wind up back at the first question of the post. Should you boycott Blizzard games? Ultimately I don’t have a clue. I don’t know what actions are going to lead to a significant change in that company. I do know that it is a more complicated issue than just seeing some performative actions taken to convince the investors that change is coming. Change actually needs to happen. The other side of the coin that we have not even begun to discuss is the fact that not only are the allegations of sexual assault horrific, but the fact that World of Warcraft has not been in great shape for the last four years. I didn’t quit World of Warcraft because of the allegations, I was already long gone when I bounced hard off the Shadowlands content. While my six-month sub timed out corresponding with the great exodus that is happening, it is not part of it. I simply input didn’t want to play this game anymore.

Going back to the changes that are happening with the company, the Employees that were protesting made a list of pretty straightforward demands. To the best of my knowledge, none of these demands have actually been met or even publicly discussed by those in power at Activision Blizzard. Until these demands are taken seriously I am hesitant to ease up on the pressure. So if you did in fact quit World of Warcraft or any other Blizzard titles over this recent situation, then it isn’t exactly time to take your eye off the ball because no tangible action has actually been taken to improve the situation other than a changing of the guard. If you were boycotting for this specific reason then it is a pretty fraught decision to determine if you should go back to playing like normal or not.

It is very easy to look at any corporate action taken as being “good enough”. The thing is gamers have very short attention spans when it comes to boycotting the things that they love. There are deep structural issues at work in the gaming industry as a whole, and that doesn’t align itself with rapid change but instead, a slow and prodding ship that takes decades to turn. I’ve been guilty of being angry with a company and then forgiving them quickly because it means that I can return to doing the things I want to do guilt-free. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and we all want to return to the places that give us those happy feelings. I would love to be able to return to playing Diablo 3 for example with a clean conscience.

The thing is… I can’t, at least not yet. I can’t tell you what you should do or the actions that you should take. Your situation is different than mine and in the eyes of one of my friends “the money is already spent”. That is a perfectly cromulent way of viewing the situation if it works for you. For me, it does not, because I know that regardless of what I happen to be doing… I am also broadcasting that action to the world. I can’t in good faith keep publicly supporting Blizzard or its games. That is not to say that this will always be the case. It is entirely possible that next week I buckle and return to the fold, but for the time being, I am holding my ground. It is not so much a boycott but instead me doing what feels right. You need to look deep inside yourself and determine what feels right to you.

Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was an unforced error on my part because I had to get up super early… then never actually got around to writing a blog post. When I got home from work I pretty much crashed on the couch and along with doing some chill maintenance gaming in Final Fantasy XIV, I decided to binge my way through Black Summer season 2 on Netflix. For those who are unaware of this show, it is another in the zombie survival genre, but it is told in a bunch of disconnected story fragments shifting perspectives between a large cast of characters. This means it is not necessarily told in chronological order which can completely screw with your perspective at times.

There are very few characters that carried over from the first season, and this time around we are introduced to a large number of new players centering around what ultimately is a handful of events told from different perspectives. The central conflict of the season is that someone is flying over the snowy expanse of land and dropping off supply crates. Some contain food and medicine and others weapons… but all of which are highly sought out by the groups of survivors inhabiting what appears to be the backwoods of Colorado or some other similar area. I enjoyed the show in spite of the fact that they seem to be really bad at dispatching zombies. However one of my friends stated that was one of the things that they actually liked about the show because no one seems to have a supernatural aim.

For those unaware, Black Summer is the higher budget and production value cousin to Z Nation. I had no clue at all that these two series were connected until I watched this video outlining how the virus in both shows worked. The Red Death as far as zombie virus strains go is one of the ones that produce near-instant zombies. That means… your highest priority when someone is dying is either to damage the brain or get the hell away from them before they wake up and start running around seeking their next meal. As far as Zombies go, these also appear to be of the stupider variety meaning that if they ever lose sight of their prey they cannot seem to reason out where they might have gone to and begins the process of open hunting again. There are times when the cast of humans literally hide around the corner of a building and the raging zombie seems to be incapable of understanding spatial reasoning enough to figure out their hiding place.

Another thing about Black Summer is that much like Walking Dead it posits that humanity will break down into tribal factions that will quite literally kill each other over a can of beans. This is where I start to wonder about how a hypothetical zombie invasion would actually play out. Firstly I somehow doubt that it would spread terribly far at least in the region I live in where a large percentage of the populace is “packing”. I think armed militias of “good ole boys” would be all too willing to roam around hunting down packs of the undead. I mean my initial instinct would be to leave the city center and then ride it out with family in a small town with plenty of ammunition. There is more than enough open land to slow down the spread and each of these small towns would likely become a safe haven as the townsfolk protect against roaming packs.

The part that starts to conflict with me on a personal level when a post-apocalyptic fiction predicts chaos erupting around us, is that I have seen chaos first hand. I live in the area of the country lovingly referred to as Tornado Alley. We’ve gone a few years without a bad one, which means we are due for a significant tragedy at any point. The above picture is the aftermath of the Tornado in Joplin Missouri that took place on May 22nd of 2011, just over ten years ago. The thing is… we were there shopping with my mother-in-law the weekend before this took place. Had we picked a different weekend we could have easily been in the path of this disaster?

In the face of a tragedy like this, I have watched as folks who have nothing are all too willing to give what little they do have to help others. Ten years ago when the Joplin Tornado happened there was a mass volunteer drive to go clean up and pretty much every organization was doing some sort of food, clothing, and essentials drive to help the victims make it through the coming weeks and months. So in the face of ravening hordes of the undead, I do wonder if our response will be inherently selfish as our fiction predicts or if we will instead band together in defense of humanity? This is actually a conversation I have had with friends before. Sure my first instinct is to leave the city core just out of a sense of preservation in that fewer zombies equates to a higher survival rate. I fully expect however that once you reach the outskirts that folks will rapidly begin grouping together to help weather the events.

What are your thoughts? Does our zombie fiction get it right and that you think it will be self-interests over the needs of the many? Do you think we will instead band together to fight back? Drop me a comment below.

Hey Friends! I did not make a post on Friday because I was more or less in “holiday mode”, but also a bit trepidations about something happening that day. Oddly enough it wasn’t actually about my Birthday and more about something that I did in honor of the day that made me deeply nervous. I turned 45 which seems like a big number all of the sudden and thank you all for your warm birthday wishes on various social platforms. Something you need to know is that spending large amounts of money on things terrifies me. On Thursday I did a thing… and wound up spending more on myself in a single sitting than I have ever done in the past… other than say an automobile. Even then the whole car buying experience stresses me the hell out.

First I think we need to get some details out of the way. My gaming desktop was getting a little bit long in the tooth as I have had most of the same set up for six years. The last major revision that I did was putting a graphics card in four years ago. While it still continued to perform admirably, I absolutely had planned on upgrading during this graphics card generation, and knew that realistically I needed to upgrade everything. In a normal climate I would have bought a bunch of parts and built my own system as I have done in the past. This is not a normal climate and pretty much all hardware is inflated to extreme numbers. Here is what my system of the last several years has looked like:

• Intel Core i7-5820k 3.6 ghz
• Asus x99-a / USB 3.1 Motherboard
• MSI GeForce GTX 1080 ti Duke 11 gb
• 24 gb ram
• SSD Storage
  • 256 gb ssd system drive
  • 1 tb ssd storage drive
• Mechanical Storage
  • 5 tb 7200 rpm storage drive

In the current situation we find ourselves in… everything is being scalped. Without extreme luck or the use of bots… you really cannot get a graphics card. As a result I could flip my current 1080 ti for about double what I ended up paying for it. However there has been a bit of a loophole if you are willing to take it. System builders seem to be getting a pretty regular supply of graphics cards though most of them have waiting lists if you are looking to buy a new system. Another thing that I learned about in this process is that effectively NewEgg is building new machines under the ABS brand and more or less sells them for the cost of parts. They arrive effectively as though you had slapped together the parts yourself and thrown an operating system on it with bare minimum of software installed.

Knowing I needed a new system… I had been periodically watching these machines to see what is in stock. On Thursday I noticed that they had a system with a 3080 in it… which is ultimately the graphics card that I really wanted. I would have settled for a 3070 had I found one of those… but I really wanted to stay with the product line equivalent of my 1080. Thursday I leaped and spent a significant amount of money… and when you are doing that… the extra $40 for next day shipping seems trivial. So around noon on my birthday I hauled into the house a truly ridiculously sized box and after some shuffling of my office I plugged the machine in and powered it up. The new system looks a little bit like this:

• Intel Core i7-10700KF 3.8 ghz
• Asus Prime Z490-P (wifi) Motherboard
• Asus TUF Gaming Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 OC Edition 10 gb
• G.Skill TridentZ RGB 16gb DDR4 3200 MHz ram
• SSD Storage
  • Intel 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD system drive
  • 1 tb ssd storage drive
• Mechanical Storage
  • 4 tb 7200 rpm storage drive

The first thing I installed and played… was Quake II RTX Edition that I have been wanting to piddle around with for ages but never could due to the lack of an RTX card. I went back and forth about whether to go Ryzen or Intel. The equivalent Ryzen system was about $200 more and I was honestly not sure if it was going to bring me $200 more in joy? I don’t use my machine as exclusively a gaming machine but do a lot of creative and development work on it, and right now… the software that does those things seems to have more optimization for the intel product line. In any case I think the difference would be felt in the margins and since I am highly unlikely to really do anything that extreme on either processor it was probably a wash out.

My ultimate goal was to get the new machine which I named the “NormandySR2” moved in enough to be able to record the podcast on Saturday and edit it Sunday. I accomplished both goals and the only upgrade that I will probably make on the short term is to add 2 more sticks of matching ram in the system to take it up to 32gb. I’ve never had ram that looked pretty, and that I would care about matching to the existing ram that I had. I am still very much in the mode of install games and see what they look like with the new card. Cyberpunk 2077 looks really nice with raytracing turned on, and while I had perfectly cromulent performance before… it looks much nicer now.

As one is obligated to do so… I have also been playing some Doom Eternal because playing a Doom game on a new gaming rig just seems like a thing one needs to do. I still can’t believe I plunked down the amount of money that I did on a new gaming rig… but I am ultimately happy with the results. One of the catches with these systems is that you don’t exactly get to pick the SKU of the graphics card you end up with. I knew it would be a 3080, but I did not know which model so I was pleasantly surprised when it ended up one of the premium SKUs. The graphics card alone could be sold for around $2000-$2500 if one is to believe ebay sold listings, which isn’t that far off from the price tag of the total system.

The overall experience of ABS systems from NewEgg was pretty great. They used quality foam and one of those inflatable bag things on the inside to keep all the parts stable in shipping. While the concept of buying a prebuilt sorta hurts my gamer pride… I would absolutely do this thing again because it just worked flawlessly. So if you have been saving your pennies for an upgrade, you seriously might look at the prebuilt computer market. In many cases you can buy an entire system for less than the graphics card alone is selling in the third party market.

Hey Friends! I feel like I am stuck in somewhat of a rut. Right now I am playing Mass Effect 1 again and it is largely because it is familiar and easy to fall back into when I get home from work. I didn’t spend a ton of time on my most recent playthrough of this game and largely took the critical path. As a result I missed a lot of fairly important things like the whole Cerberus quest chain that takes place planetside. I don’t love the Mako or Hammerhead so I tend to avoid doing those missions… but in the first game at least you end up missing quite a bit of content by taking this stance. I am wondering how it will impact the later games because I think I have always skipped most of the planetary nonsense unless absolutely required. At this point I am staring down the barrel of the Virmire mission and I am not really certain what decision I am going to make.

I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart and I really need to return to that. The problem is when I get home from work I have not wanted to be up in my office… which is where my PS5 is currently hooked up. The living room is a communal space and I don’t have any of my devices hooked to that television as a result. So if I want to hang out downstairs… I am going to be playing something on my laptop which isn’t exactly conducive to console gaming. There are times I daydream about redoing my office and putting a couch up here… but that is never going to happen because I don’t have anywhere near enough room to do so.

Another console game that I really want to return to and finish is Final Fantasy VII Remake, especially now that is has added DLC. I went through the process of downloading the new PS5 version of the game and swapping over a save file from the PS4 version so I should be able to pick up where I left off. I also installed the Yuffie DLC so it is sitting there waiting for me as well. I was enjoying the game last time I played it so I could probably easily slide back into Midgar for some chill gaming. I’m coming to the realization that I need to just simply admit that I am a single player gamer and as a result should spend more time playing single player games.

I’ve downloaded and spent a very small amount of time poking around the Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin demo. It is interesting… and I get the whole soulslike comparison. So far I like it considerably more than a traditional souls game because it has a difficulty slider. I hope to spend at least a little bit more time this weekend poking about in the game.

Lastly there is the problem of Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis. I don’t love the game… and I was really hoping that I would. I am not sure what it is about the game but I am not attaching at all. In fact I like it considerably less than I liked baseline PSO2. I am not sure if I can pinpoint why though, but the entire thing just doesn’t feel good to play right now. It might simply be that I am in the wrong state of mind to really get into it, but whatever the case it is… I’ve tried a Hunter and a Ranger and neither one really feels good to me. This is a little sad since I was hoping this would be the game to unite the tribes… at least for a little bit, but unfortunately that does not seem to be the case for me at least.

The challenge that I keep struggling with… is I am nostalgic about when I used to play games with other people. However I never can seem to be in the right frame of mind to play the game that the bulk of my social group seems to be playing. I’ve reached a point where it feels like I am too old to make vast changes in my circle of friends, and as such given that I always seem to be playing the wrong game… I am just going to always been the odd man out. I am trying to reach a point of acceptance with this and just move on with finding the joy that I can from the games that I seem to be enjoying. That realization however stings a bit.