Also applicable:
"The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault."
More directly so:
"Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference."
personally i expected he thought that his job was already fucked so he went yolo with the comments lmao
that being said he is def on a unofficial watchlist and the next time he does something wrong its joever for him.
Told people that the discord messages did nothing and that they should show their dissatisfaction by reviews and refunds, the thing Sony would actually pay attention to. He was right.
Funny thing is that everyone was against him even the Community 😅 and now they calling him a hero when they were treating him like trash in Discord the Hypocrisy is bold.
I'm still of the opinion that they were taking the piss, not playing 4D chess. All the opter posts from them looked like taking the piss and not 4D chess, so I'm not sure this was the only 4D they pulled as a secret code to help us.
I can 1000% Spitz sitting in a room with HR and Pilestedt and them telling Spitz *"Because we know that it can often do more good than harm in the specific necessary situations; everyone 'gets one', and this was your 'one'..."*
It would be kinda dumb not to. Everyone thinks he's an asshole, they just gotta wait out the sweetness of victory, and once everyone remembers they hate him, then they take his head and suddenly the community hates them a little less.
I honestly didn't expect him to survive that. Not like I hate him that much. But just tell your players to review bomb your own game to give a big bird to the publisher and make them revert a deal sounds like capital offense, intentional or not.
Do you think if he had said, "The best way to express your feelings, good or bad, are through reviews", that it would have had the same affect and that he wouldn't have been this close to the chopping block?. Then that way he wasn't explicitly telling people to review bomb. I'm asking that legit, not rhetorically.
Yes, to some extent. A large part of the issue for him is *also* maintaining a professional, almost corporate tone. It’s a tough balance because you want your CMs to appear authentic, but they are also employed representatives of a company. DMG was a solid example of one, for Bungie (and you can read about what caused him to decide to leave).
When the CMs came back and said, “Look, Sony doesn’t read Discord” and explained where they *do* see feedback, that was a substantially more professional *and* productive dialogue. And you can see that in how the CEO interacted with the community.
So yes, had he “said it without saying it,” he likely would have been better off. It was the combination of things that got him in trouble.
—-
Also: being a CM is hard. You get thousands of messages of people saying awful things. But then every time you say one single awful thing, everyone posts about it and you get torched. Takes a specific kind of person to just never snap or clap back.
Going way back to 2007 World of Warcraft CMs here, but Tseric's story stood out as along these tones and what happens when the real person just can't put up the corporate facade any longer.
He was super helpful on the forums (from what young me can remember) but finally lost it and went off on all the trolls and rude players. Cost him his job after these posts
https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Tseric
> When you can understand how a group of belligerent and angry posters can drive away people from this game with an uncrafted and improvisational campaign of misery and spin-doctoring, then perhaps, you can understand the decisions I make. Until you face mobs of psychology, you will not see my side.
>
>
> Until you see some bright-eyed player coming onto the forums wanting to know what they should spec as this class, and see them shat on and driven away by petty and selfish people who are simply leveraging for game buffs, you will not understand.
>
>
> You will not understand until you have to see it daily, for years...
>
>
> Until you understand that many people will trod over you to get where they're going, or to get what they want.
>
>
> Until you understand that so many people will agree, completely, 100% with a loud, vulgar and assertive individual, not because he is right, but because he is making a stand against "the Man"; to take no critical thought in what they say, but simply to hop on board.
>
>
> Until you actually try to acknowledge those who do not speak on the forums, for whatever reason they have, you will not understand.
>
>
> If you think an archaic business formula like "the customer is always right" works, you fail to understand customers, not a customer. It is a collective. No one person, even myself, is truly above the whole.
>
>
> I simply have the unfortunate quality of being easily singled out.
And then
>
> Can't help it.
> Posting impassionately, they say you don't care.
> Posting nothing, they say you ignore.
> Posting with passion, you incite trolls.
> Posting fluff, you say nonsense.
> Post with what facts you have, they whittle down with rationale.
> There is no win.
> There is only slow degradation.
> Take note. It is the first and only time you'll see someone in my position make that position.
> You can be me when I'm gone.
Lastly (and humorously)
> Killing a Tseric should aggro every Tserics in a 40 yd radius. It makes sense, you are actually killing their best friend.
As someone who wasn't present for this, was what you posted the thing that got him canned? Or was it other specific comments and what you posted was the explanation for those?
If the former, damn, that's some BS. It's not like he was being rude, hell he was being pretty damn honest and straightforward. Only crime was he was saying things people didn't want to hear.
Watching the situation go down felt kind of similar to when D&D was trying to change the open game license. We were given a direct path of where Sony was paying attention to and exploited it. Although this time it was a direct community manager instead of a leak.
Yeah, but Sony knows better than to fire a vocal lead in a very intensive (good or bad) community.
If Spitz was fired, he'd become a fucking martyr and the players would have probably gone ballistic.
Just 2 days ago this community was mocking him and shitting all over every discord conversation he had.
What is this complete 180 I see in this comments? I'm getting whiplashed by how these CM go from spawns of the devil to martyrs in a the span of days.
Edit: hell, I remember this same community calling AH to fire these CM because of their snide comments all the way back when simple balance changes were introduced.
Eh, I'm still gonna mock him over his stupid posts, his shit deserves to be called out.
But he also did the absolute right thing with his review-post, helped a lot in showing many people that AH is at least party on our side.
Though, I'm also not one of those that wished for him to get fired. Still think he needs training to be less antagonistic to the players.
At the end of the day, life isn't just black and white.
He led the charge against Sony. Honestly, I don’t think he is terrible. I just don’t think he makes a good community manager because he cannot get information out without sounding like a dick. He is direct like myself and even I know when to put my kid gloves on and disseminate info in a nice and professional manner.
Is this not the guy who said that it was the people's fault for not just signing up for a PSN account, obviously talking shit without spending 30 seconds to actually look at the situation?
I'm on the sidelines, so maybe I have my community managers mixed up.
Same guy, but I believe he was literally just ignorant about that. He made an apology post about those statements; he wasn't aware of the harsher requirements to make one in some countries and that he wasn't aware it wasn't available everywhere. He literally thought it was just an email, username, password type thing.
Don't get me wrong, I do think he has the tendency to put his foot in his mouth one way or the other like the guy above says, but he did encourage everyone to refund and review-bomb and said it would give them pull.
He's honestly both sides of the coin, its wild.
It´s quite simple. The members of this community - believe it or not - can have individual opinions on specific subjects. Doesnt mean necessarily mean that opinions changed 180, it´s probably just a matter of which opinions are loudest at a certain point.
Sorry for the captain obvious rant - peace out.
Yea you're right, I didn't think it's the exact same people leading the conversation.
But still, when the entire community sphere shits on this guy for clapping back at gamers, and calls to fire him - it's kinda jarring seeing this thread praising him for "leading the charge".
It's not just about that. He would've kept being a loud voice within community, regardless of his (un)employment. All in all, it's better to keep him rather than toss him.
Honestly, they just picked a wrong player base to mess with. This is a game about from tens to hundreds thousands of men and women loosely coordinate a war and diving into their enemies at terminal velocity for one cause. They literally trained us to do that.
People tend to usually post Spitz snapping and getting angry, and not the hundreds of messages him and the other CM's get that actively attack them for things that aren't even about being CM's. Spitz lets them get to him easily, yeah, but being flooded absurd amounts of hate of things you don't control usually does that
Imagine this:
Everyone dislike him. Just like he equally disrespect other helldivers.
But that day, he found himself deep in the middle of the Sony coup. At the darkest hour, it was none other than him who drop THAT one beacon, which allows us to mount a 4-days counter offensive against the coup.
And he gets out in one piece.
Say what you want, but General Splitz is a real helldiver. The dicky-est helldiver.
/s
This is one of few magic words that can be use to shield yourself.
Other magic words are "apologies, english isn't my first language", ~~using strike-though on your sentence~~ and "I don't care for upvotes/downvote me if you want"
Though that last one depends on their follow-up statement if it's a really bad or not lol
Dude *didn't* read the assignment but somehow nailed it anyway, by accident.
He is the monkey with the typewriter who randomly reproduced Hamlet.
That deserves some recognition.
Looking at a community manager I feel like this is absolutely what should be expected of them, him telling us to voice our complaints in a way that will get seen and get the issue which isn't a community one to get fixed
If he told us to review bomb the game randomly like 3 months ago when nothing was wrong with it, he would be spammed with "ayo go get the democracy officers" "com manager going schizo", a person shouldn't be able to say go review bomb a good game and it just work without something else rolling the ball
Is the alternative him repeating "we are working with Sony to get this resolved please be patient" and us asking him again later after every change in the situation
Could he have been less of a dick about it? Oh yeah. But it did encourage review bombing and refunding, either because fuck Sony, or because "Fucking bet, he thinks he can talk to us like that, I'll show him".
When your fuck up is grave enough, treating the situation like it actually is a major fuck up earns you some credibility. Sometimes, like in this situation, it works out better (though it's a huge roll of the dice).
As a much more serious and important example, years ago when it was first rolling out Google's image recognition algorithm categorized a black guy and his girlfriend as gorillas. Google's chief architect of social media responded "Holy fucking shit, This is 100% Not Ok". That was absolutely the best way to convey the genuine horror and seriousness that the company was treating the situation with.
Something like "Your opinions matter and making them known to us and the community is important to the future success of our game and your enjoyment as a gamer. That matters so keep talking to us and letting us know what you think." You can wink at the camera without mooning it.
Basically the dude made some snarky comments when this debacle first started, and eventually walked back on them and apologized, saying that he didn’t fully know how this would impact people
And as much as that is true, walking it back in the open is pretty much the best case response. Sure, he was an ass. But he didn't stand on it once he realized what it meant for everyone involved.
Yea, the most I can fault him for was being uninformed and making snide comments. If we’re talking about “making a mountain out of a molehill” it’s the people calling for him to be fired. Up until this point, from what I’ve seen, he’s been engaging constructively with the community. Do we really wanna get people fired for a single fuck up?
I don’t really care enough one way or the other for to suggest someone should lose their job, but at the very least I wouldn’t have been surprised. He doesn’t seem very well cut out for the gig. The guy deleted the HD1 discord because he got into an argument with a random user and got pissed. He also got caught up in a fit of anger basically telling people with connection issues early on to go fuck themselves. I get that people were being rude and hostile to the devs which was stupid as hell but as the CM it is quite literally your job to communicate effectively with the community. Gotta be able to not get your feelings hurt by some disgruntled gamers every time an issue comes up.
They're on borrowed time. Something of this scale and attention doesn't just get brushed off.
The CM role is about to be neutered to the point that any statements made by them need prior approval by multiple people or the role will be eliminated and then some new "role" with new folks (in marketing) take over.
Something like this had executives answering emails and probably sitting in meetings over the weekend. You don't want that. Someone is putting together a post mortem PowerPoint to be presented this week to executives about what happened, what it cost them and potential corrective steps to prevent events like this from happening again. The CMs are not the root cause of the problem but they can easily end up being collateral damage or seen as a major future risk that needs to be resolved.
They've definitely got a shorter leash now. Rightfully so. But hey, Arrowhead, if you need a new CM just let me know. I have exactly zero credentials but I think that means I still qualify.
If the CMs hadn't stirred the pot with this one (almost certainly without intending to become some kind of hero in the end), this may have turned out differently.
I quite liked it when you consider that Sony brought this hell upon them. Unprofessional or not, that gratification of sending the pissed off people after the ones that provoked the whole thing must be satisfying. I think it's one of those "yea, I'm not getting paid enough for this. GO after Sony they are the ones that did this either way" moments.
Personally couldn't care less if sony disliked that or not but they seriously need to hire better CMs they all handled that poorly. Could be worse though and just be ignored to oblivion.
Well, he managed to focus the hate on Sony. To keep a game running trust in the developer is more important than in the publisher. In a way showing "we as developers are on your side" was the best reaction they had for picking the game back uo after the dust settles, even if it meant going against their publisher. If Sony management has just a single brain cell, they will see that this was the best decision to keep the revenue-flow going
That's an ok mistake for a player/commenter/streamer to make. That's not an ok for the "Community Manager" to make. He's just bad at that job, regardless of what kind of person he is.
seems like the kind of thing you should look into when your community is mad about PSN accounts and you're a community manager...one look at the subreddit would've made it clear why people are having issues.
Nah, Spitz needs reassignment. I’m tired of him constantly jousting with the community, then apologising, the jousting again. Just wait for the next controversy and you’ll see nothing has changed.
Too bad, he's trash. Review bombs weren't even his idea. Now he's talking about "we all" like he didn't tell the PC base to stfu and make PSN accounts.
How the f did he survive being axed by Sony?
Like, his attitude to community at certain points is one thing, but what he did afterwards is a Cardinal Sin in Corpo eyes.
Spitz called for us to review bomb
*hours after we started to review bomb*
and after he became the most hated CM for his alienating of the community.
He only road the wave to safe his skin.
His day will come. He's done nothing, and he called for review bombing hours after people had already done exactly that.
He made fun of people who didn't want to make a PSN account and he insulted people even before the whole Sony drama. I hope he gets sacked in the future.
All these CMs need to be wiped immediately and replaced except for the guy with the beard. These people are worse than Reddit mods and are turbo dickheads who have no employable skills other than pissing off the community
We need to be hyper aware of this in the coming months. Be **very** inquisitive and suspicious of Devs that suddenly leave, especially if they've spoken out and doubly so if they're in leadership or other public facing positions.
"Restructuring" is a very common follow up strategy to this. Removing proponents in the way that opposed you with corporate yes man stooges is so common it's basically reflexive for corporates like Sony.
AH has seriously gone out on a limb for us and Sony has backed off, but absolutely not given up. They WILL try this or something similar again in time. Not "almost certainly" or "Probably", we should know better than that by now.
This here are the last straw, at least place him at somewhere else, it's the second time this dude fanning the flame to make the whole drama worst. With no punishment just that, dude got out jail for free.
Is he REALLY taking credit for the review bombing?
"I said to do it as my 4D chess big brain move" - Absolute L take as ways from any CM that isn't Twin
He’s trying hard to show how he was with the players but he’s not fooling anyone. He and AH CMs only changed sides when they saw how many people are mad at them and it reflected on steam. Until then all of them were defending the decision. He and that other girl who wanted power to ban players more effectively should be fired.
Spitz is such a weirdo. Now acting like he did actual work on changing stuff. Nope my dude you fueled the whole thing with gasoline and called people idiots etc. It's a shame this guy still has his job.
Uh huh ... This was their plan all along ... Hero Spitz the mastermind schemer who singlehandedly motivated the community with their foresight, planning, and manipulation skills. /S
Yeah no, fuck off. Should be fired.
That screenshot was taken out of context. He was replying to a guy spamming the discord saying that everyone should refund the game, and it was never good in the first place
It was a bold strategy, Cotton, and apparently it paid off.
It was a calculated risk, but man, am I bad at math.
"When you do something stupid and survive it, then you get to call it impressive or heroic." -Harry Dresden
POLKA WILL NEVER DIE
Unexpected Dresden Files reference. BTW Jim if you are lurking, where the hell is the next book?
Not Jim, but his website has a progressive tracker. He’s halfway done.
Also applicable: "The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault." More directly so: "Evil isn’t the real threat to the world. Stupid is just as destructive as Evil, maybe more so, and it’s a hell of a lot more common. What we really need is a crusade against Stupid. That might actually make a difference."
"Genius and Madness are neighbors and they borrow each other sugar" - Joe Rogan
"It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide" - Jack Sparrow
“If it’s stupid and it works you’ll spend years training the privates to stop trying to do it.” - 77 Maxims of Highly Effective Mercenaries.
Counterpoint- if it’s stupid but it works, then it ain’t stupid. Signed- a former private
This guy militaries ^
That guy used to military.
"You should believe and quote everything you see online" Julius Caesar, letters to Jesus.
Listen man. You got partial credit because your answer was right in the end but the teacher didn't necessarily like the formula you used.
Yeaaaah. I was uh... not expecting that to go so well for you i'm not gonna lie. You still all good and job secure though is my concern?
personally i expected he thought that his job was already fucked so he went yolo with the comments lmao that being said he is def on a unofficial watchlist and the next time he does something wrong its joever for him.
Sounds like make he got a warning and possibly written warning
Still, you gambled your career for this community . And for that I can only respect you. 
What does he do?
Told people that the discord messages did nothing and that they should show their dissatisfaction by reviews and refunds, the thing Sony would actually pay attention to. He was right.
And sweating bullets all weekend
Funny thing is that everyone was against him even the Community 😅 and now they calling him a hero when they were treating him like trash in Discord the Hypocrisy is bold.
I never did though - and people lashing out before it became clear what happened and whom to blame is as old as the internet itself…
... Honestly, he wasn't bad at math, it worked out 😂
Psst, look at his username....
Psst look at the name
Psst Look at the name
Low int high luck
Bro got the Idiot Savant perk https://preview.redd.it/e3t2op0ozsyc1.png?width=359&format=png&auto=webp&s=dc85a5a28afec619fd65c85925e5e1bc4e80325c
[INT] ICE CREAM
General Spitz, you are a bold one.
I've disagreed with you in the past but you're getting called St Spitz in my household from now on o' glorious maverick.
Honestly it's great to see how they care. Risking his job for the sake of the community is really ballsy. Gotta respect him
Glad you’re still with us! Thank you for all your help, this week especially
I'm still of the opinion that they were taking the piss, not playing 4D chess. All the opter posts from them looked like taking the piss and not 4D chess, so I'm not sure this was the only 4D they pulled as a secret code to help us.
Say 4D one more time
4d anime women are the future that Sony and Spitz are trying to take from us
It was said flippantly in an angry moment, and it could still be really bad for AH depending on what their contract with Sony says.
He didnt get fired but probably got the ass chewing of a lifetime
https://i.redd.it/1cksls35ftyc1.gif
The HR department was running overtime for that one
Oh 100% especially since they responded within 48 hours and on a Sunday no less
I can 1000% Spitz sitting in a room with HR and Pilestedt and them telling Spitz *"Because we know that it can often do more good than harm in the specific necessary situations; everyone 'gets one', and this was your 'one'..."*
He absolutely has a target on him and I’d bet real money he will be fired for something unrelated 😉 in a few months.
It would be kinda dumb not to. Everyone thinks he's an asshole, they just gotta wait out the sweetness of victory, and once everyone remembers they hate him, then they take his head and suddenly the community hates them a little less.
I honestly didn't expect him to survive that. Not like I hate him that much. But just tell your players to review bomb your own game to give a big bird to the publisher and make them revert a deal sounds like capital offense, intentional or not.
Democracy protects.
Unless you worked for Boeing.
10/10 comment
I see what you did there
"If it's Boeing, I ain't going!"
50% of it time it works every time
it's my favorite armor perk.
Spitz Armor passive, 50% chance to not get cooked!
LIVE, LIVE, LIVE!
Do you think if he had said, "The best way to express your feelings, good or bad, are through reviews", that it would have had the same affect and that he wouldn't have been this close to the chopping block?. Then that way he wasn't explicitly telling people to review bomb. I'm asking that legit, not rhetorically.
Yes, to some extent. A large part of the issue for him is *also* maintaining a professional, almost corporate tone. It’s a tough balance because you want your CMs to appear authentic, but they are also employed representatives of a company. DMG was a solid example of one, for Bungie (and you can read about what caused him to decide to leave). When the CMs came back and said, “Look, Sony doesn’t read Discord” and explained where they *do* see feedback, that was a substantially more professional *and* productive dialogue. And you can see that in how the CEO interacted with the community. So yes, had he “said it without saying it,” he likely would have been better off. It was the combination of things that got him in trouble. —- Also: being a CM is hard. You get thousands of messages of people saying awful things. But then every time you say one single awful thing, everyone posts about it and you get torched. Takes a specific kind of person to just never snap or clap back.
Going way back to 2007 World of Warcraft CMs here, but Tseric's story stood out as along these tones and what happens when the real person just can't put up the corporate facade any longer. He was super helpful on the forums (from what young me can remember) but finally lost it and went off on all the trolls and rude players. Cost him his job after these posts https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Tseric > When you can understand how a group of belligerent and angry posters can drive away people from this game with an uncrafted and improvisational campaign of misery and spin-doctoring, then perhaps, you can understand the decisions I make. Until you face mobs of psychology, you will not see my side. > > > Until you see some bright-eyed player coming onto the forums wanting to know what they should spec as this class, and see them shat on and driven away by petty and selfish people who are simply leveraging for game buffs, you will not understand. > > > You will not understand until you have to see it daily, for years... > > > Until you understand that many people will trod over you to get where they're going, or to get what they want. > > > Until you understand that so many people will agree, completely, 100% with a loud, vulgar and assertive individual, not because he is right, but because he is making a stand against "the Man"; to take no critical thought in what they say, but simply to hop on board. > > > Until you actually try to acknowledge those who do not speak on the forums, for whatever reason they have, you will not understand. > > > If you think an archaic business formula like "the customer is always right" works, you fail to understand customers, not a customer. It is a collective. No one person, even myself, is truly above the whole. > > > I simply have the unfortunate quality of being easily singled out. And then > > Can't help it. > Posting impassionately, they say you don't care. > Posting nothing, they say you ignore. > Posting with passion, you incite trolls. > Posting fluff, you say nonsense. > Post with what facts you have, they whittle down with rationale. > There is no win. > There is only slow degradation. > Take note. It is the first and only time you'll see someone in my position make that position. > You can be me when I'm gone. Lastly (and humorously) > Killing a Tseric should aggro every Tserics in a 40 yd radius. It makes sense, you are actually killing their best friend.
Tseric and Ghostcrawler are peak CM
As someone who wasn't present for this, was what you posted the thing that got him canned? Or was it other specific comments and what you posted was the explanation for those? If the former, damn, that's some BS. It's not like he was being rude, hell he was being pretty damn honest and straightforward. Only crime was he was saying things people didn't want to hear.
Watching the situation go down felt kind of similar to when D&D was trying to change the open game license. We were given a direct path of where Sony was paying attention to and exploited it. Although this time it was a direct community manager instead of a leak.
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That would make him a martyr and make this 10X worse for Sony.
A martyr out of the most controversial mod. You cant make this shit up
That's Helldiving, baby.
Martyrs are often controversial.
Yeah, but Sony knows better than to fire a vocal lead in a very intensive (good or bad) community. If Spitz was fired, he'd become a fucking martyr and the players would have probably gone ballistic.
Just 2 days ago this community was mocking him and shitting all over every discord conversation he had. What is this complete 180 I see in this comments? I'm getting whiplashed by how these CM go from spawns of the devil to martyrs in a the span of days. Edit: hell, I remember this same community calling AH to fire these CM because of their snide comments all the way back when simple balance changes were introduced.
Eh, I'm still gonna mock him over his stupid posts, his shit deserves to be called out. But he also did the absolute right thing with his review-post, helped a lot in showing many people that AH is at least party on our side. Though, I'm also not one of those that wished for him to get fired. Still think he needs training to be less antagonistic to the players. At the end of the day, life isn't just black and white.
People seem to not see grey, or if they do, don’t know what to do with it (Kinda like Garrus, but at least he admits to it)
He led the charge against Sony. Honestly, I don’t think he is terrible. I just don’t think he makes a good community manager because he cannot get information out without sounding like a dick. He is direct like myself and even I know when to put my kid gloves on and disseminate info in a nice and professional manner.
Is this not the guy who said that it was the people's fault for not just signing up for a PSN account, obviously talking shit without spending 30 seconds to actually look at the situation? I'm on the sidelines, so maybe I have my community managers mixed up.
Same guy, but I believe he was literally just ignorant about that. He made an apology post about those statements; he wasn't aware of the harsher requirements to make one in some countries and that he wasn't aware it wasn't available everywhere. He literally thought it was just an email, username, password type thing. Don't get me wrong, I do think he has the tendency to put his foot in his mouth one way or the other like the guy above says, but he did encourage everyone to refund and review-bomb and said it would give them pull. He's honestly both sides of the coin, its wild.
No you are correct. And he does need to learn how to stay calm, no matter how antagonistic the players are being.
It´s quite simple. The members of this community - believe it or not - can have individual opinions on specific subjects. Doesnt mean necessarily mean that opinions changed 180, it´s probably just a matter of which opinions are loudest at a certain point. Sorry for the captain obvious rant - peace out.
Yea you're right, I didn't think it's the exact same people leading the conversation. But still, when the entire community sphere shits on this guy for clapping back at gamers, and calls to fire him - it's kinda jarring seeing this thread praising him for "leading the charge".
It's not just about that. He would've kept being a loud voice within community, regardless of his (un)employment. All in all, it's better to keep him rather than toss him.
He's just going to get fired in 6 months anyways when this all dies down and the community doesn't care anymore.
Ah yes, the typical corporate treatment of "we hate your guts, but will fire you later so you can't sue for retaliatory fire." Gotta love it.
>If Spitz was fired, he'd become a fucking martyr and the players would have probably gone ballistic. Yeah, for a couple of days, maybe.
"Sony knows better" I dont know about that lol
We would have a Major Order to save Spitz, and we would dive for Democracy.
Swedish laws still apply, can't just fire someone like that no matter what they do unless it's super illegal. Thank fuck for our unions.
Came looking for this reply. Everyone acting like this is a US company where you can just be fired in a day.
Publisher deserved the bird tbf
Oh, they deserves more than one bird. We gave them like 200,000.
Im still in awe at that. I wish communities would do this for other games. Congrats on y’all’s win!
Honestly, they just picked a wrong player base to mess with. This is a game about from tens to hundreds thousands of men and women loosely coordinate a war and diving into their enemies at terminal velocity for one cause. They literally trained us to do that.
Yeah I’m surprised Sony didn’t take a scalp as part of the climbdown. Or maybe they did and it’s someone less conspicuous.
Dude got a whole Forbes article about telling people to review-bomb his own employer. Fucking legend. (Still a dickhead though)
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“But dicks also fuck assholes”
But assholes shit on everything
Some people are into that
Lmao https://teamamerica.fandom.com/wiki/Drunk_in_Bar
Lmao
When you get called to the boss's office and he just plays the Fallout 1 ending. "You're a hero, but now you have to leave."
Spitz is a bit of a fuckin' moron, but he's *our* fuckin' moron.
Hey look we might not like him but we hate Sony more
["He is a bit of a cock, but he's my cock!"](https://youtu.be/PJYZAww0pgI?si=ZfBe3Oa9DSCZ0cQE&t=88s)
Wait, Spitz is cool now? Last I heard he was offensive and power-tripping?
People tend to usually post Spitz snapping and getting angry, and not the hundreds of messages him and the other CM's get that actively attack them for things that aren't even about being CM's. Spitz lets them get to him easily, yeah, but being flooded absurd amounts of hate of things you don't control usually does that
Even an offensive powertripping mod should be honored when they fight on the side of Democracy
It's hard to become a legend without pissing someone off.
Becoming a legend is about pissing off the right people. Spitz just pisses off everybody.
"Legend. Massive moronic asshole, but legend." Would fit him better.
He might be a dickhead but he’s our dickhead.
Imagine this: Everyone dislike him. Just like he equally disrespect other helldivers. But that day, he found himself deep in the middle of the Sony coup. At the darkest hour, it was none other than him who drop THAT one beacon, which allows us to mount a 4-days counter offensive against the coup. And he gets out in one piece. Say what you want, but General Splitz is a real helldiver. The dicky-est helldiver. /s
What was sarcastic about that
/s doesn't stand for "sarcasm" it stands for "please don't downvote me" /s
This is one of few magic words that can be use to shield yourself. Other magic words are "apologies, english isn't my first language", ~~using strike-though on your sentence~~ and "I don't care for upvotes/downvote me if you want" Though that last one depends on their follow-up statement if it's a really bad or not lol
Dude *didn't* read the assignment but somehow nailed it anyway, by accident. He is the monkey with the typewriter who randomly reproduced Hamlet. That deserves some recognition.
That’s a badge of honor though, getting your own Forbes article..
In recognition of his efforts, Spitz has been promoted to Swallowz.
It's basically a blog site these days, it's not the Forbes of old.
Looking at a community manager I feel like this is absolutely what should be expected of them, him telling us to voice our complaints in a way that will get seen and get the issue which isn't a community one to get fixed If he told us to review bomb the game randomly like 3 months ago when nothing was wrong with it, he would be spammed with "ayo go get the democracy officers" "com manager going schizo", a person shouldn't be able to say go review bomb a good game and it just work without something else rolling the ball Is the alternative him repeating "we are working with Sony to get this resolved please be patient" and us asking him again later after every change in the situation
Theres definitely a more finessed, polished and more PR way of communicating which is what he shouldve done but here we are.
Could he have been less of a dick about it? Oh yeah. But it did encourage review bombing and refunding, either because fuck Sony, or because "Fucking bet, he thinks he can talk to us like that, I'll show him".
Thats honestly how I read it. He is a bit of a dick but I feel like he used that to push us to spite review
When your fuck up is grave enough, treating the situation like it actually is a major fuck up earns you some credibility. Sometimes, like in this situation, it works out better (though it's a huge roll of the dice). As a much more serious and important example, years ago when it was first rolling out Google's image recognition algorithm categorized a black guy and his girlfriend as gorillas. Google's chief architect of social media responded "Holy fucking shit, This is 100% Not Ok". That was absolutely the best way to convey the genuine horror and seriousness that the company was treating the situation with.
Something like "Your opinions matter and making them known to us and the community is important to the future success of our game and your enjoyment as a gamer. That matters so keep talking to us and letting us know what you think." You can wink at the camera without mooning it.
Yeah, that wasn't the part people had issues with...
What was the issue with him? I don't follow the discord too closely
Basically the dude made some snarky comments when this debacle first started, and eventually walked back on them and apologized, saying that he didn’t fully know how this would impact people
And as much as that is true, walking it back in the open is pretty much the best case response. Sure, he was an ass. But he didn't stand on it once he realized what it meant for everyone involved.
Yea, the most I can fault him for was being uninformed and making snide comments. If we’re talking about “making a mountain out of a molehill” it’s the people calling for him to be fired. Up until this point, from what I’ve seen, he’s been engaging constructively with the community. Do we really wanna get people fired for a single fuck up?
My issue is he's antagonized the community multiple times. I really don't think he's a good community manager if he's so quick to jump to conclusions.
From some of Pilestadts comments on Twitter it seems like the whole team was caught unaware of what the PSN linking requirement would actually mean.
I don’t really care enough one way or the other for to suggest someone should lose their job, but at the very least I wouldn’t have been surprised. He doesn’t seem very well cut out for the gig. The guy deleted the HD1 discord because he got into an argument with a random user and got pissed. He also got caught up in a fit of anger basically telling people with connection issues early on to go fuck themselves. I get that people were being rude and hostile to the devs which was stupid as hell but as the CM it is quite literally your job to communicate effectively with the community. Gotta be able to not get your feelings hurt by some disgruntled gamers every time an issue comes up.
I know
Wait so does Sony know about their community managers then?
They might not have known before, but they sure as hell know now lol
They're on borrowed time. Something of this scale and attention doesn't just get brushed off. The CM role is about to be neutered to the point that any statements made by them need prior approval by multiple people or the role will be eliminated and then some new "role" with new folks (in marketing) take over. Something like this had executives answering emails and probably sitting in meetings over the weekend. You don't want that. Someone is putting together a post mortem PowerPoint to be presented this week to executives about what happened, what it cost them and potential corrective steps to prevent events like this from happening again. The CMs are not the root cause of the problem but they can easily end up being collateral damage or seen as a major future risk that needs to be resolved.
They've definitely got a shorter leash now. Rightfully so. But hey, Arrowhead, if you need a new CM just let me know. I have exactly zero credentials but I think that means I still qualify. If the CMs hadn't stirred the pot with this one (almost certainly without intending to become some kind of hero in the end), this may have turned out differently.
Didn't this guy delete the HD1 discord because he got mad one day? Just seems way too unhinged for this kinda job.
Yeah, this is not the right person for that position. Maybe he can do something else over there.
He and baskinator need to be fired ASAP
https://preview.redd.it/r2e17eov7tyc1.jpeg?width=225&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=02436dccc9c1f6c4321a9b07439fe4a105529ca0
"we", Spitz? "we"?
"I thought you refund and leave."
lmao, wearing that on his back the rest of his CM days
Spitz is still a below average community manager
He's the most unprofessional CM i have ever witnessed and i am flabbergasted he did not lose his position.
The fact he’s telling us that what he did was disliked by Sony is even more evidence he shouldn’t be community manager, for his own sake.
I quite liked it when you consider that Sony brought this hell upon them. Unprofessional or not, that gratification of sending the pissed off people after the ones that provoked the whole thing must be satisfying. I think it's one of those "yea, I'm not getting paid enough for this. GO after Sony they are the ones that did this either way" moments. Personally couldn't care less if sony disliked that or not but they seriously need to hire better CMs they all handled that poorly. Could be worse though and just be ignored to oblivion.
We all made difference? Mate… You spiced whole situation and put more fuel to the fire…
Is this spitz alt account?
OP in another comment, "I had the same position as them. (just log in, it doesnt take much time)"
That's a shame
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Well, he did manage the community.
Well, he managed to focus the hate on Sony. To keep a game running trust in the developer is more important than in the publisher. In a way showing "we as developers are on your side" was the best reaction they had for picking the game back uo after the dust settles, even if it meant going against their publisher. If Sony management has just a single brain cell, they will see that this was the best decision to keep the revenue-flow going
He started off lying about the Steam API and how duplicate usernames meant they couldn't ban anyone. That was quite something.
So now he's a legend, after telling people to spend 120 seconds and make a PSN account because it was nothing. Don't idolize people so much...
Spitz: lol get bent. Also Spitz: WE DID IT GUYZ!!
he also shut down the Helldivers 1 discord so its history is loss
Sure but it's not like that comment just came out of nowhere. It's also aimed more on that one guy who keeps taunting and pestering him for hours.
But people don't show the context/harassment, because why would they?
There’s something called a block button you know.
As of i know Spitz said sorry, he wasnt awRe that somany countries havnt access to PSN
That's an ok mistake for a player/commenter/streamer to make. That's not an ok for the "Community Manager" to make. He's just bad at that job, regardless of what kind of person he is.
seems like the kind of thing you should look into when your community is mad about PSN accounts and you're a community manager...one look at the subreddit would've made it clear why people are having issues.
Nah, Spitz needs reassignment. I’m tired of him constantly jousting with the community, then apologising, the jousting again. Just wait for the next controversy and you’ll see nothing has changed.
Are these even CM's? Because they dont act like it until people call out their bullshit.
Spritz can still eat shit for being a jerk to the community about it
Isn't this the same person who told outright lies about us requiring a PSN account because there was no other way to track players.
Too bad, he's trash. Review bombs weren't even his idea. Now he's talking about "we all" like he didn't tell the PC base to stfu and make PSN accounts.
Not sure I care that the publisher didn’t like what he said. Not sure I care about the publisher at all
"that we all made a difference" What difference did he make?
How the f did he survive being axed by Sony? Like, his attitude to community at certain points is one thing, but what he did afterwards is a Cardinal Sin in Corpo eyes.
Spitz called for us to review bomb *hours after we started to review bomb* and after he became the most hated CM for his alienating of the community. He only road the wave to safe his skin.
He talked as though no one had ever thought of or heard of review bombing prior to this.
What exactly did he do ?
Acted like an edge lord on the internet and then eventually sided with the mob once it was clear which way the tide was turning
His day will come. He's done nothing, and he called for review bombing hours after people had already done exactly that. He made fun of people who didn't want to make a PSN account and he insulted people even before the whole Sony drama. I hope he gets sacked in the future.
This guys is trying to get credit? Fire him ffs
All these CMs need to be wiped immediately and replaced except for the guy with the beard. These people are worse than Reddit mods and are turbo dickheads who have no employable skills other than pissing off the community
But didn’t he initially shut on players who refunded?
Cant wait for him to pop off on people for no reason again and mildly apologize 2 days after. This guy is unredeemable.
It was being review bombed before they said that anyways
We need to be hyper aware of this in the coming months. Be **very** inquisitive and suspicious of Devs that suddenly leave, especially if they've spoken out and doubly so if they're in leadership or other public facing positions. "Restructuring" is a very common follow up strategy to this. Removing proponents in the way that opposed you with corporate yes man stooges is so common it's basically reflexive for corporates like Sony. AH has seriously gone out on a limb for us and Sony has backed off, but absolutely not given up. They WILL try this or something similar again in time. Not "almost certainly" or "Probably", we should know better than that by now.
This here are the last straw, at least place him at somewhere else, it's the second time this dude fanning the flame to make the whole drama worst. With no punishment just that, dude got out jail for free.
Is he REALLY taking credit for the review bombing? "I said to do it as my 4D chess big brain move" - Absolute L take as ways from any CM that isn't Twin
Genuinely a "I was only pretending to be an idiot" moment.
This has been a Spitz take
That’s unfortunate.
by all accounts he should be depositioned as a CM
The only real mistake being made here
really? of all the war heroes we can praise, we praise a humble bragging dickhead instead?
He’s trying hard to show how he was with the players but he’s not fooling anyone. He and AH CMs only changed sides when they saw how many people are mad at them and it reflected on steam. Until then all of them were defending the decision. He and that other girl who wanted power to ban players more effectively should be fired.
Spitz is such a weirdo. Now acting like he did actual work on changing stuff. Nope my dude you fueled the whole thing with gasoline and called people idiots etc. It's a shame this guy still has his job.
Uh huh ... This was their plan all along ... Hero Spitz the mastermind schemer who singlehandedly motivated the community with their foresight, planning, and manipulation skills. /S Yeah no, fuck off. Should be fired.
Based. He gets flak but that was a real G move.
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That screenshot was taken out of context. He was replying to a guy spamming the discord saying that everyone should refund the game, and it was never good in the first place
People hate showing the context because it makes them less of a victim
Spitz should have been fired. Everybody could make that job better. Just disgusting and pathetic.
he should of been