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Why do they even keep him around? Is he somehow essential?
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Jan 18, 2022 21:42
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Why do they even keep him around? Is he somehow essential? he knows where the bodies are buried? Who knows, probably just real cool with the people at Hasbro, and has helped* make them a ton of loving money. *was in charge when their property blew up in popularity due to things not really in his control
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Jan 18, 2022 21:46
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Why do they even keep him around? Is he somehow essential? It seems that you can often find people working for some time in a company fall into a kind of "us versus outside"-sentiment with teamwork events and corporate culture doing the rest. Thus critical outside voices "feel" less believable or just like something which clashes with the internal "but I've known him for x years and he was always okay?!" people have, and leads to a very different perspective. Usually one where they go "eh, just put him somewhere they don't scream at us on twitter for". Corporate Virtue Shuffling?
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Jan 18, 2022 21:57
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Letting him go now would confirm that the company hosed up by letting him stay.
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Jan 18, 2022 22:07
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Covermeinsunshine posted:Why do they even keep him around? Is he somehow essential? His name is on a list next to D&D Essentials somewhere and the managers who make the retain/fire decisions don't realise that's the name of a product line he was in charge of pre-5E.
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Jan 18, 2022 22:12
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moths posted:Letting him go now would confirm that the company hosed up by letting him stay. I feel like he's been in the background long enough that they could get away with it with very few people noticing, but yeah. Internally it would be admitting they were wrong, and I don't see Hasbro doing that.
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Jan 18, 2022 22:18
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He saved Johnny Hasbro's life in The War. But seriously, I think there's probably also some degree of HR complication in addition to what has already been mentioned: He's probably been with the company long enough that it would be a major hassle to actually fire the guy without financial repercussions.
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Jan 18, 2022 23:45
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KingKalamari posted:He saved Johnny Hasbro's life in The War. If Mearls managed to get Hasbro or WotC to sign up for anything beyond at-will that’s more than token severance, he’s a lot more clever than I gave him credit for.
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Jan 19, 2022 00:51
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Warthur posted:His name is on a list next to D&D Essentials somewhere and the managers who make the retain/fire decisions don't realise that's the name of a product line he was in charge of pre-5E.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:01
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I assume that Mearls is around for roughly the same reason most lovely middle managers are kept around: he's got the tepid backing of some untouchable higher-up that no-one feels like crossing.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:05
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I just assume that firing meals means admitting fault, which is anathema to big corporations, or mignt upen them up to something.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:08
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I think it's weird the degree to which some are acting like Mearls is barely capable of composing an email and there must be an insidious plot to protect him (by some sugar daddy or, paradoxically, by his own base villainy). Everything that's happened so far is pretty standard white male immunity to consequences. By RPG standards he is a wildly accomplished project manager, even if the projects he's best known for are regressive crap. Hitting deadlines can get you a lot of slack for later gently caress-ups. Even with the whole Zak thing getting bad enough that Wizards felt compelled to put out a statement and alter future book printings, most of the game-buying public doesn't know or care about any of this poo poo. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that Mearls is, within the bounds of what his supervisors think, largely pretty great at his job(s). They likely think all this internet poo poo is pointless garbage that occasionally boils over and requires them to slap a rainbow sticker on some products, then everything goes back to normal so who cares no real change necessary. That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 02:27
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In my experience being a successful project manager isn't about being good at managing projects. You can be good at managing projects but that's kind of a side gig. It's more about things like being good at taking credit and diverting blame (or earning the loyalty of people who will do that for you), creative accounting to come in under budget, and gaslighting the higher ups into thinking the end product is what they wanted all along. Being in a department with high turnover helps because there's no-one left around afterwards wiling or able to contradict you.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:42
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That Old Tree posted:I think it's weird the degree to which some are acting like Mearls is barely capable of composing an email and there must be an insidious plot to protect him (by some sugar daddy or, paradoxically, by his own base villainy). Everything that's happened so far is pretty standard white male immunity to consequences. Yeah, I have no reason to believe anyone at Hasbro thinks Mearls is such a toxic fuckup that the only reason he's kept around is out of obligation or blackmail or something. The time when they might have done that calculus was right when the whole thing with Zak broke wide open and people were being very vocal about it but instead they told him to keep his head down which he did and has continued to do, and so he remains with the company because they simply don't care about this thing he did which is now ancient history ago. He probably hits the various checklists for what they consider to be doing a good job, he's been with WotC for a long time now which makes him an old hand, he was the figurehead of a very successful game, so it's not surprising that he hasn't been fired. Mearls also did the one actual smart thing you can do when one of your fuckups gets publicly outed but you can't bring yourself to actually apologize which is he stopped posting. If he'd done the thing where he tried posting his way through it maybe he'd have dug himself into a hole so deep it might have tipped the scales against him, I dunno, but instead he posted a solemn jpeg and then stopped using twitter (at least under his real name) altogether which is more than most people manage when their lovely past catches up with them in some way.
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Jan 19, 2022 04:30
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Splicer posted:In my experience being a successful project manager isn't about being good at managing projects. You can be good at managing projects but that's kind of a side gig. It's more about things like being good at taking credit and diverting blame (or earning the loyalty of people who will do that for you), creative accounting to come in under budget, and gaslighting the higher ups into thinking the end product is what they wanted all along.  To the Complex.
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Jan 19, 2022 09:25
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I think the reason why people suspect there's more going on than Mearls retaining his job out of bog-standard institutional momentum + white male privilege is that he keeps getting shuffled around. Because yes, in a lot of corporate settings you can keep your job just by being not-actively-harmful-to-the-company despite putting out mediocre work, and we should all be so lucky to have that kind of standard apply to to all of us, but the frequent role-shifting suggests that someone at WOTC/Hasbro is aware of Mearls's reputation at least among some of community and is playing a shell game in response.
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Jan 19, 2022 09:39
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I'm mostly surprised that they are willing to keep him around when mediocre d&d designers are dime o dozen. Also, they don't have to straight up fire him, just not prolong his contract. Comparatively, he is no Mark Rosewater.
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Jan 19, 2022 09:45
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Covermeinsunshine posted:I'm mostly surprised that they are willing to keep him around when mediocre d&d designers are dime o dozen. Also, they don't have to straight up fire him, just not prolong his contract. Comparatively, he is no Mark Rosewater. This post is a lot funnier when you realize he got shuffled from D&D to the Magic team a year ago.
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Jan 19, 2022 13:44
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gradenko_2000 posted:I think the reason why people suspect there's more going on than Mearls retaining his job out of bog-standard institutional momentum + white male privilege is that he keeps getting shuffled around. Shuffling people around the guys you know and are friends with, while quietly driving out the "troublemakers", is a major pillar of traditional American corporate culture. And apparently Wizards of the Coast is a pretty insular collective, where that sort of thing is still normal. It's not a good-normal, but it's more of a disappointingly regressive sort.
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Jan 19, 2022 15:35
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Nessus posted:Somehow, it always comes back... Glad to know I'm not there only one whose brain immediately went there after reading that post.
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Jan 19, 2022 16:47
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Toshimo posted:This post is a lot funnier when you realize he got shuffled from D&D to the Magic team a year ago. He's still in charge of the D&D franchise: 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Jan 19, 2022 |
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Jan 19, 2022 19:04
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I work in Big Corporate America and I have worked indirectly for countless upper-middle-management people who move from one job title/role to another every 2 years or so forever. It's incredibly normal, and nerds read far far far too much into shifting titles on credit sheets with zero additional insider knowledge. It's completely possible that Mearls' job literally has not changed at all in years, but he's had different teams (themselves subject to routine re-orgs) assigned to him on an org chart that leads to different "<x> Director of <y>" type titles on his business cards. There is no indication that either Wizards or Hasbro is unhappy with him in any way. The product line he's worked on has been wildly successful and profitable for years. I doubt any of his bosses have even heard of Zak S, and if there's one who has, they've forgotten it by now. These people are too busy with important poo poo like "how can we get more money from our languishing Transformers franchise" and "what is the brand strategy for My Little Pony next year" to bother with what they'd consider to be just a small crowd of angry impotent non-customers on Twitter have to say about one of their employees. I'd be interested in actual information from an insider at Wizards, if we had one here; otherwise, the idea Mearls was ever in trouble at work, or is being shuffled around to avoid firing him, etc. is all unfounded conjecture.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:17
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"Unfounded" seems harsh here, given that he cosplayed as WotC HR and doxxed some goons directly to Zak. He probably never faced consequences for that. But knowing that would get you fired almost anywhere else is probably why the sentiment survives.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:35
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moths posted:"Unfounded" seems harsh here, given that he cosplayed as WotC HR and doxxed some goons directly to Zak. "Unfounded" is correct. There is no actual information on which to base that assumption, just conjecture based on what might happen in other companies and in other industries.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:43
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With the radical success of D&D 5E Mearles is obviously untouchable. Like, none of his bosses care anything at all about any rumors surrounding him. He brings in money, period.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:50
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moths posted:"Unfounded" seems harsh here, given that he cosplayed as WotC HR and doxxed some goons directly to Zak. I may have been unclear: The "unfounded" conjecture I'm referring to is the idea that Mearls is or has been in some kind of trouble at his company, now or ever. We've never actually had evidence of that, and evidence would be the foundation. People keep trying to read something into the changes in title he's had over the last ten years, trying to interpret that as him having some upper management supporter preserving his symbolic job while he actually doesn't do anything real, or similar. But that's all conjecture and "has changing titles" is not actually evidence of anything other than "is a manager at a big company". Our issues with him are of course founded on actual lovely poo poo he did, so the anger of the tiny mostly invisible minority of gamers who know all the details about what he did are well-founded.
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Jan 19, 2022 19:51
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One less-scandalous reason job titles change is for internal accounting reasons ("from now on, all people in X salary range must have Y title"). Another is changes to the internal org chart or reporting structure ("Joe has too many direct reports, so let's move Mike to Z"). A third is that the position is created, and an internal candidate applies for it/agrees to take on the responsibilities.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:45
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He's been promoted up into a position where he gets to direct the vision of what D&D looks like to outside agents brought in by WotC/Hasbro to reproduce Dungeons and Dragons as an IP in other mediums. That's what we know based on things that have actually been disclosed in interviews and promotional materials and such around developing Baldur's Gate 3 and the Forgotten Realms MTG set. Maybe he was told to stop tweeting when Zak finally became a liability to D&D's image, maybe he decided it just wasn't worth it or necessary when he was no longer the most immediate public face who needed to promote D&D 5e for it to be deemed a success? There's certainly a million reasons not to engage with twitter at all ever in any case. And he's probably in a dream job now anyway, not having to do any of the heavy lifting of developing the game anymore, and getting to shape how the public actually sees it for years to come.
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Jan 19, 2022 20:51
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Also, a lot of big corporations move their managers around on a regular basis (a process called "rotation"). This is mostly done for young managers who are being groomed for possible senior roles, so they can get hands on knowledge of all the company's different functions, so it probably doesn't apply to Mearls. But yeah, the point is that in very big companies managers get their job titles and positions shuffled around for all kinds of reasons.
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Jan 19, 2022 21:01
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https://twitter.com/jdragsky/status/1484175859175116800?t=Ahv2kJsKNLuLGaqubLM6PQ&s=19 TLDR Possum Creek (Wanderhome, Sleepaway) is not just moving to Indiegogo for crowdfunding, they were actively courted by IGG. They still expect a hit due to KS's popular dominance, but that kind of outreach and active support from a platform seems like it could really put a dent in Kickstarter's captive audience if enough creators are willing to make the leap.
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Jan 20, 2022 18:52
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I hope Indiegogo follows through on making itself a good home to cut into KS' business and provide actual competition to them, plus a place for folks made about the crypto thing.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:07
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That Old Tree posted:https://twitter.com/jdragsky/status/1484175859175116800?t=Ahv2kJsKNLuLGaqubLM6PQ&s=19 *looks at the new Zombicide kickstarter* Hmm...maybe but I don't see it.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:07
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A high-profile, high-earning creator jumping ship could pave the way for others to follow, especially if their project makes the same sort of fat stacks as it would on KS. It's a smart move from IGG.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:08
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That Old Tree posted:https://twitter.com/jdragsky/status/1484175859175116800?t=Ahv2kJsKNLuLGaqubLM6PQ&s=19 I don't feel like I have a lot of clout to help here, but on the other hand,  Nice.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:37
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I confess to being somewhat torn on IGG because they let the likes of Ethan Van Sciver and company run hog wild with ComicsGate projects, but I also don't know of a better option and I really get wanting one.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:12
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I mean, it’s not like Kickstarter removes chud projects, either.
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Jan 20, 2022 20:17
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I'm planning out my next project, and right now my plan is to use Kickstarter and open up Backerkit ASAP. It's not ideal, but it's probably the best middle ground I can find given my size as an indie publisher. I'd love to jump ship entirely, but it's a terrifying thing when rent and noodles are on the line.
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Jan 20, 2022 21:04
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Did IGG ever make its policies more backer friendly? I still only know them as "the place scummy creators went to after KS said 'you have to actually attempt to fufill your project, and can't just take the money and run,'" IGG specifically sprung up because they let projects keep all pledges even if the threshold to fully fund the project wasn't met. That's all they are in my mind, and I have to imagine there's some other consumers who have the same impression. Maybe since that was now almost a decade ago people have forgotten about it?
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Jan 20, 2022 21:27
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Coolness Averted posted:Did IGG ever make its policies more backer friendly? I still only know them as "the place scummy creators went to after KS said 'you have to actually attempt to fufill your project, and can't just take the money and run,'" IGG specifically sprung up because they let projects keep all pledges even if the threshold to fully fund the project wasn't met. That's all they are in my mind, and I have to imagine there's some other consumers who have the same impression. Maybe since that was now almost a decade ago people have forgotten about it? It’s an option, but you can also do the regular “this project needs to completely meet its funding” thing as well. Monsterhearts 1st edition had its fundraising there, although anything else doesn’t come to mind right away.
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Jan 20, 2022 22:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm planning out my next project, and right now my plan is to use Kickstarter and open up Backerkit ASAP. It's not ideal, but it's probably the best middle ground I can find given my size as an indie publisher. Same here. This is a side project for me so I could financially risk moving to a smaller platform, but fully 87% of my backers came from native KS discovery tools and that's a hard number to ignore. The in-built audience is literally the only thing KS offers to me, but that's arguably the most important element as a small creator.
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Jan 21, 2022 00:13
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