I’m not a gamer, but I imagine most are smart enough to see through this cringe-y PR disaster. Late Friday night dump of nonsense corporate speak is painfully predictable. This will do more harm than good. Yikes.
Or even a hamfisted attempt at an apology like you get out of many PR departments. The only thing that remotely resembles an apology in the whole release is:
> In hindsight, our process wasn’t adequate, and we reacted too quickly.
No explanation of how that happened. No discussion about what they are doing to make sure it doesn't happen again. It's not even saying, "We made a snap decision and it was wrong." It seems to be saying, "We made all the right decisions, but we're going to tune the degree a little."
Had they not done that they might be believable, but because of the way the kowtow to china, definitely hard to find any honesty/truth in their statement.
>> In hindsight, our process wasn’t adequate, and we reacted too quickly.
I'm not even sure here what "reacted too quickly" means. If the player did clearly violate an unobjectionable Blizzard policy, one would hope that the sanction would be swift -- it shouldn't take a week to (for example) ban a player for blatant cheating.
Anecdotally, most those I know, while unhappy about it, are continuing to play. While I don’t think people are going to defend this, I doubt this will meaningfully affect them in the long-term.
It’s easy for companies, after some backlash by a loud yet small crowd on social media, to blacklist a certain high profile individual out of risk. It’s hard for that same group to make a difference against an organization as large as Blizzard. Most people still want their product.
I've been unable to play this week. I haven't outright deleted my account, but it made me sick to the stomach to think about opening the Blizzard launcher.
I've seen others in StarCraft related subreddits share similar feelings. I agree the majority seem to still want the game and community to continue on as is.
Gamers aren't very loyal. And Blizzard has certainly not been defended by its gamers here - it's been heavily condemned by the whole gaming community, which is why we're hearing so much about it and blizzard is issuing a PR statement. Just look at reddit's r/blizzard right now, it's a shitshow. Pages upon pages of posts protesting against blizzard's handling of the events.
I don't think this is totally inaccurate, though there are probably more puppet accounts than sincere Blizzard apologists.
I'd be more worried about the influence that propaganda machines can have, and what's freaking me out is that you actually have to look to spot those sorts of posts. Most people don't look.
