UPDATED: Controversy Ignites In Guild Wars 2 As Dev Accuses Player Of Sexism
UPDATE (7/6/2018): ArenaNet President Mike O'Brien issued a brief statement to say that "two of our employees failed to uphold our standards of communicating with players" and are "no longer with the company." Price is clearly one of the terminated employees, and the second would appear to be Peter Fries, a member of the writing team who came to Price's defense on Twitter and no longer mentions an affiliation with ArenaNet in his Twitter bio.
ORIGINAL STORY: Yesterday, Guild Wars 2 Game Producer Jessica Price posted a lengthy multi-Tweet chain describing the narrative process for writing the dialogue for the player character -- a.k.a. The Commander -- in the game. Her tweets focused on the oft-perceived bland nature of the Commander's voice lines and how that was a necessary element of an MMORPG where everyone has a different take on how "their" character should act. It seemed like a good and insightful read.
Things got messy when GW2 fan and YouTuber Deroir responded to Price to disagree with some of her points. That elicited a pointed comeback from Price -- "thanks for trying to tell me what we do internally, my dude 9_9" -- and when Deroir responded, Price insinuated that his words were typical of "being a female game dev":
Today in being a female game dev:
"Allow me--a person who does not work with you--explain to you how you do your job." https://t.co/lmK0yJWqGB
— Jessica Price (@Delafina777) July 4, 2018
Since Price's tweet, many fans have leaped to the defense of Deroir, including another noted GW2 content creator, Inks, who tried to engage Price and was told to "get out of my fucking feed." (Full disclosure: I am in a guild with Inks and have played with him on many occasions.)
The GW2 subreddit is, obviously, in an uproar over Price's conduct, with several threads on the topic, some numbering in the thousands. As of this time, there is no official response from ArenaNet.
Related Articles
About the Author
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.
More Stories by Jason WinterDiscussion (8)
Read Next
Got enough football fever yet?...
You May Enjoy
Though, no gameplay was shown.
The company has also offered to build an office in a country that recently banned the game.
The team is doing everything they can to keep players happy, but they could use a donation or two to buy time.
You may not have to roll a d20, but there are new gadgets and agent reworks to explore.
Some people do not understand tweeting and most shoudln't even tweet.
hashtags are waste of time
The best to approach tweets is just simply retweet them no message or answer with short comments like, great, nice, brilliant, unfair but a good comment, awesome, not bad, ok, keep smiling, and great work. those simple words are all you need to tweet any reply with.
She needs to be let go. And preferably anyone involved in hiring her needs to be sanctioned as well -- Her public social media demonstrates a clear pattern of overtly hostile racist & sexist behavior that should never have passed initial screening by HR.