WotC WotC blacklist. Discussion

[Gradine]

this make it SOOOO very complex and case by case

 

[Charlaquin]

Not necessarily. Not speaking for the person to whom you are addressing, but I haven't had live TV in twenty years, only visit gaming and religious sites on the web for pleasure (everything else is work-related), and have spent the last twenty years working on my career and raising my children. Now that they are teenagers and are engaging in popular culture, what all has changed has left me a little shocked, as I was oblivious to changes as they occurred. It's almost like I left the country for 20 years and came back to find that it had an entirely different governmental system and language was significantly different. Not making a judgment call, there, but if you don't engage with culture due to other priorities, changes can seem rather stark from when you last engaged.

It’s absolutely true that the culture has changed significantly in those 20 years, the weird thing is singling out participation trophies as the cause of that change. There’s a contingent of people who get bafflingly worked up over participation trophies and seem to think they’re everything that’s wrong with society, and… nobody else really cares about them at all.

Heck, at this point, the anti-participation trophy sentiment itself feels pretty outdated. Like, come on, haven’t you moved on to griping about CRT yet?

 

[Dausuul]

I agree there are valid reasons to decline to associate with a business, I am just saying I don't have that experience with mine. At least not so far. The thing I was responding to was that everyone would have such a list if you were around long enough.

A blacklist doesn't have to be about moral disapproval, though.

Surely you've dealt with companies that delivered unacceptably poor work, or were such a hassle to deal with that it wasn't worth the time you spent on it? Likewise, if you have more than a few employees, I'm sure you can think of at least one ex-employee whom you'd never, ever agree to hire back.

 

[Charlaquin]

I largely agree with your assessment. Except Mearls was/is a very good game designer. BUT game design, management and PR are completely different skill sets. Expecting someone to be good at 2 of the three skills is unlikely expecting someone to be good at all three unrealistic bordering on incredible.

At a small company, there's nothing you can do about, people have to double/triple up. But with WoTC as it became big? Totally unrealistic to expect someone to fill more than one role well.

WotC is big, but I understand that the D&D team was tiny during the D&D Next playtest and for at least the first few years of 5e.

 

[Ancalagon]

Whoops. You are correct. That's what i get trying to do this from memory on the fly.

might be worth editing your initial post then.... we all make mistakes but fixing them matters

 

[Parmandur]

This is beyond a stretch and into "2+2 = 143.7" territory.

The real change is a much more straightforward and direct one - the PR departments of companies have become massively more professional over the period 1990 through 2022. WotC actually trailed far, far, far behind other companies on this - to its chagrin!

Back in 1990, most companies, including a lot of very large multinationals, had extremely poorly run PR departments, and numerous ways that executives or even just mid-level people could talk to the press or individuals and circumvent both PR and legal. Executives would mouth off or say dumb things, but the lack of the internet meant such statements rarely went far, though heads often rolled if they did make it to the mainstream news (rather than just, say, Private Eye or an industry specialist publication).

As the internet came into being, and it became easier and easier to transmit information, like, say footage of a executive saying something awful, or email or screenshot of an email, or whatever, PR departments and legal departments had to up their game, and companies had to increase professionalism and training to stop people from circumventing them to mouth off (often in ways damaging to the company and/or its products). This in turn lead to consumers expecting better-quality and less slapdash responses.

WotC did an appallingly bad job here. It failed to teach professional behaviour to people like Mike Mearls, but put them in leadership positions regardless, and it failed to set up a situation where the communications of the guy who was essentially "the face of D&D" were adequately monitored by PR and legal. This lead to the Zak S fiasco we've been discussing in various threads. Mearls, being extremely unprofessional (like, dude makes me look a senior civil servant in terms of professionalism! Me! A random idiot! Mearls is seemingly the sort of guy who flat-out fail the easy multiple-choice training quiz on "What is the correct thing to do in this business situation"), and having, frankly, outstandingly poor judgement of the kind it takes a lot of entitlement to acquire, decided to take it upon himself to be both judge and jury on the Zak S matter, and to demand evidence from the women involved, despite having declared himself a friend of Zak S not long before and despite the fact that he had absolutely no business whatsoever being involved with this. Somehow, WotC's presumably either inept or powerless PR and legal weren't able to stop Mearls, even though this went on for days, until suddenly BOOM Mearls suffered the fate of the mediocre man promoted beyond his level of competence - he got promoted again, but this time to a position out of sight from the public, and told to shut his yap (a terrible fate to be sure!).

Anyway, TLDR, point is, the real change is professionalism in PR/legal in response to the speed of information distribution, which changes expectations/standards re communication. It's nothing to do with "participation prizes" or other bizarre fantasies. You might as well connect it to the price of Freddos! (look it up lol)

I wish my employer had a more professional PR department often.

 

[The Glen]

might be worth editing your initial post then.... we all make mistakes but fixing them matters

Already did

 

[Cadence]

I guess you should have played soccer, I played and coached soccer and we only got trophies for winning.

I want to say AYSO in the midwest in the early 80s had trophies for everyone. Pretty sure tee-ball did in the late 70s.

 

[Jer]

I want to say AYSO in the midwest in the early 80s had trophies for everyone. Pretty sure tee-ball did in the late 70s.

We definitely got participation medals for youth soccer back when I played in the mid 80s. I can say this with certainty because my mom just handed me a box of things she had saved from when I was a kid and they were in there.

Now that I'm old and have my own kid who is almost grown up, I've come to believe that participation "trophies" are mostly for the parents rather than the kids. The kids don't care - they know who wins and who loses and what a "thanks for participating" ribbon really means. In fact the kids are some of the ones who might be the most openly hostile about the whole thing - at the end of a tournament nobody is deluded into thinking that their "participation medal" is the equivalent of the medals the winning teams get. It's the parents who want to have some kind of artifact to hang onto and put into a scrapbook or display case or even just a shoebox to have as a memento of when their kid did something. A reminder of when their kid was 8 and played teeball or 6 and played soccer and how proud you were to see them out there just running their heart out giving it their all even if their team didn't win.

I don't think my kid has looked at any of the "thanks for participating" tchotchkes they got for playing youth sports when they were in elementary school. In fact I remember them being one of the kids who was openly hostile about the whole idea after one particular losing event. Conversely, my wife has every single one of them saved in her memento box, and as the kid is now a surly teenager instead of a surly elementary school student I can kind of see the appeal of saving those memories like that.

 

[Mistwell]

A blacklist doesn't have to be about moral disapproval, though.

Surely you've dealt with companies that delivered unacceptably poor work, or were such a hassle to deal with that it wasn't worth the time you spent on it? Likewise, if you have more than a few employees, I'm sure you can think of at least one ex-employee whom you'd never, ever agree to hire back.

I have not dealt with a vendor whose work was so poor that we couldn't work something out to get it corrected, or that were such a hassle to deal with that we couldn't work with them again. But then the nature of my business is old and slowly fading, and the vendors I deal with are almost entirely seasoned professionals who lasted this long because the problematic ones likely faded away over the years.

Yes, I can think of some employees I wouldn't hire back. Though it would be rare for an ex-employee to want to come back so that seems like it would generally be a moot point. I can think of one employee who left and asked to return after having left and returned twice before, and we finally said no. So I suppose that's along the lines you're talking about. However that ex-employee started his own business in our field, and we would sometimes refer people to him if we couldn't help them but we thought he might be able to. So even in those circumstances it would be difficult to assign the name or any part of the concept of a blacklist to the situation.

Just a brief note: I am not questioning this topic to be negative or a gadfly. I'm finding the topic interesting, and not disputing that others have experienced these issues. If that helps any.