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Good analysis. 

I don't play Battlegrounds often, but I need that Dragonspeaker Bob!

Thanks for the voice lines, had a real chuckle at some of them. That idle 2 voice line from Rag was classic 🤣

While it has nothing to do with lawsuit. It has to do with statement in this message. So...

Gotta start somewhere. I can't imagine too many people who want to work for blizzard right now. Besides, it's just 4 hours. It's not like they can easily bring in back up for that 4 hours. 4 hours of a black out, imagine one of them pulling a bunch of sh*t out of the servers before protesting. If all the technicians are protesting, that's 4 hours of random server outages. It's a small start, but even a cigarette can start a forest fire.

I played for a few hours last night, and I'm sort of blown away by how much better the meta-structure of the client is than Hearthstone. Rewards/quests/events/cosmetics/game-modes, etc. is so damn professional. I had to refresh myself on how all it worked (rounds vs. turns, being able to attack the same turn you play a unit), but gameplay was definitely fun, and a nice change of pace. I'll be playing for a few weeks minimum.

I have to say that I still like Hearthstone's collection manager more than any other game I've played, and I'm still not clear on the best way to start collecting cards from LoR expansions I've missed. It's a weird thing knowing the rewards are WAY better than Hearthstone, but still not really understanding the lack of packs. Still LoR's gameplay is really the best combination of MTG and Hearthstone I've ever seen. I think it'll take a week before my brain catches up to all the keywords, abilities, and artwork.

Compare and contrast the employees' demands to the actions announced by the CEO. Employees' demands:

• An end to mandatory arbitration clauses in all employee contracts, current and future. Arbitration clauses protect abusers and limit the ability of victims to seek restitution.
• The adoption of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion policies designed to improve representation among employees at all levels, agreed upon by employees in a company-wide Diversity, Equity & Inclusion organization. Current practices have led to women, in particular women of color and transgender women, nonbinary people, and other marginalized groups that are vulnerable to gender discrimination not being hired fairly for new roles when compared to men.
• Publication of data on relative compensation (including equity grants and profit sharing), promotion rates, and salary ranges for employees of all genders and ethnicities at the company. Current practices have led to aforementioned groups not being paid or promoted fairly.
• Empower a company-wide Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion task force to hire a third party to audit ABK's reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff. It is imperative to identify how current systems have failed to prevent employee harassment, and to propose new solutions to address these issues.

CEO's Promises:

• 1. Employee Support. We will continue to investigate each and every claim and will not hesitate to take decisive action. To strengthen our capabilities in this area we are adding additional senior staff and other resources to both the Compliance team and the Employee Relations team.
• 2. Listening Sessions. We know many of you have inspired ideas on how to improve our culture. We will be creating safe spaces, moderated by third parties, for you to speak out and share areas for improvement.
• 3. Personnel Changes. We are immediately evaluating managers and leaders across the Company. Anyone found to have impeded the integrity of our processes for evaluating claims and imposing appropriate consequences will be terminated.
• 4. Hiring Practices. Earlier this year I sent an email requiring all hiring managers to ensure they have diverse candidate slates for all open positions. We will be adding compliance resources to ensure that our hiring managers are in fact adhering to this directive.
• 5. In-game Changes. We have heard the input from employee and player communities that some of our in-game content is inappropriate. We are removing that content.

A) Removal of arbitration clauses vs. promises of more internal investigations. This should be self-explanatory. You can usually sue your employer if they grossly violate your rights, but arbitration clauses funnel everything into unaccountable internal investigations.

B) Hiring and diversity. A company-wide, participatory DEI organization vs. literally "I sent an email."

C) Accountability. The employees want a third party firm to evaluate "reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff" vs. a threat from the CEO to fire anyone who impeded with an internal investigation. Reflect deeply on the wording of that last part because it could easily be used for retaliation against staff who actually brought legitimate complaints.

D) Publication of hard data on promotions and salary vs. listening sessions.

E) Removal of in-game content vs. ??? - No way to evaluate this right now, but I have some more thoughts.

We're all familiar with the backlash (real or troll) to the real efforts of people in the gaming industry to make it genuinely a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive place. The term SJW gets thrown around a lot, and I'd say it's similar in concept to the term "virtue-signaling." The idea that "keyboard warriors" simply want to pontificate on the "politically correct" issues, get some upvotes, but don't care about the real-world. And typically the people invoking these terms have been dismissive of the civil complaint, and angry that we're still talking about it instead of the game. But I hope a close reading of these statements allows people to realize that the employees are very much making concrete, real-world demands, and corporate is the one invoking a lot of good language (I would defend large parts of Kotick's letter if I thought it was remotely sincere or in good-faith) in the service of making themselves look good.

Which brings me back to that letter E) above. There's a good argument to be made about in-game representation, hyper-sexualization, the broader culture in games etc., but... that's not the argument the employees are making. To me, including that in THIS letter, the day before the ActiBlizzWalkout over real-world working conditions, is red-meat for the cultural backlash. It's the CEO of the company hoping to provoke a reaction in the community and player-base so they get pissed at the employees for demanding, I don't know, artwork or NPC changes?, when they're actually demanding to not be bound by feudal arbitration contracts. Don't fall for it.

And what after? They'll all return and keep working for Blizzard because they don't want to lose their jobs. Even the players who are protesting will eventually return to play Blizzard's games again. You can't do anything against the corporations, they own the world unfortunately..

That card proves that Venomous Scorpid is a broken card.

Druid will take profit of this for sure. That class loves mana cheat.

The card is bad, just give a bit of tempo to the quest rogue and maybe for a memey combo deck.

OK, random guess time. It seems to be a "fiend" (demon?) that got changed, maybe to a different card? So the new cards would be Queen of Pain, Felstalker, and Xavius (are there others?). Of those, maybe Felstalker since it has a big mouth in the card art and could plausibly scream (but why would it if it is stalking?). Maybe there is some WoW lore that makes some other choice obvious, but I guess I'll go with Felstalker.

This guy is a real hero. Letting others in the company reply first and see how it goes. And then he finds it save to reply himself. Very brave.

And what is his role as CEO in all of this? He must have (shared) responsibility for this company and the people in it right?

"In-game Changes. We have heard the input from employee and player communities that some of our in-game content is inappropriate. We are removing that content."

This is probably the statement that might get some flak. For me personally, for now I am going to assume this means:  We are removing NPC's that are homages to employees who have harassing people. 

Thanks for all the feedback and positivity everyone! But to be clear, the idea of the effect is that if you trade, for example, a Frost spell, you would draw both a Fire AND Arcane spell in return (granted your deck contains at least one of each).

Similarly if your deck doesn't contain any Fire spells, trading a Frost spell would only return an Arcane spell.

And I would Imagine if you have no Fire and no Arcane spells in your deck, the Frost spells in your hand wouldn't show up as Tradeable at all (because your deck has nothing to give you for them).

I guess another copy of a card in hand will be OK. Maybe the best use in standard will be for handlock to try to  keep up on board while still maintaining hand size. I just think the random nature of it will leave a lot to be desired.

I think your definition of sabotage needs some reworking. Although, if you think you're the center of the universe, then I suppose anything that isn't exactly to your liking is tantamount to treason or something.

For me, I don't need to have 230some cards released 4 per day, which would end up taking nearly 2 months, and would actually find that pretty annoying. In fact, I wouldn't mind at all if they only showed half the pool before release, and canceled all those "theorycraft" streams that go a long way to killing off general creativity in the early days.

Call to Arms

I can understand the lack of communication by Blizzard about these twitch drops because of all the current events and such.

However.. such a short timeframe (which in Europe is also at night btw), with no previous notice, AND a requirement of 2 + 4 hours??? I mean....

I won't lose my sleep over 2 missed free packs but still I find all this quite disrespectful for the players.

Wonder if the stock taking a dive yesterday had any influence on this statement.

Hopefully they will not overdo this. I don't really care about Secret Keeper etc. but if you remove any content someone might find inappropriate this will turn nasty.

Crazy in Handlock, decent applications in other decks. Don't sleep on it.

Good in stealth rogue, bad everywhere else.

Bit too slow, but might end up being useful at some point