As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
I’ve made some comments critical of how relentlessly PirateSoftware is being harassed and how annoying it is and how distracting from the actual movement it is.
Nothing wrong with the petition itself, and I haven’t noticed any negative astroturfing about it.
PirateSoftware is being harassed for a whole lot more than just his SKG misinformation campaign.
Perhaps, but the most I’ve seen are some tenuous “evidence” about him being a little selfish in WoW, not finishing games, or using his dad’s influence to land a job at Blizzard. Neither of those are particularly bad, and certainly don’t warrant the negative attention he got. It really seems like people are looking for dirt just because they don’t like his position on SKG.
Then again, I didn’t hear about him until he came out against it, and I saw he defended Godot, which is pretty rad. That’s the extent of my knowledge about him, other than the handful of hit pieces against him people posted here once he got negative attention.
I support SKG and don’t think PirateSoftware is a bad dude. I say just let him be, and don’t watch his content if you don’t like it.
The SKG thing was just the latest L in the series he’s been collecting for a while now. Similar to his wow raid there was another MMO when his party wiped due to someone accidentally aggro’ing a mob. He did the usually “that was moronic, whoever did that is kicked from the raid, etc”. Then he reviews the footage showing it was him that aggro’d and completely 180s, saying the wipe wasn’t on him. As evidenced in his SKG video, guy is super happy saying nasty shit about people but cries toxicity when it’s reciprocated. Guy just can’t help himself. Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.
Even the wow roaching thing, it isn’t so much the raid but the demanding everyone listen to his side before talking over others when it’s their turn and then leaving before they can have there say and tripling down. I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.
That sounds like a lot of people here on Lemmy honestly, and I think that’s pretty common.
I think this is the issue. He had a lot of fans and they were let down. I think the real issue is people looking up to random streamers/influencers. It’s not unique to YT/Twitch, but politicians and celebrities aa well.
I don’t like it. If you don’t like someone’s content, don’t watch it, and don’t burn the place down on your way out.
The WoW thing wasn’t about being selfish, it’s just one of a dozen or more incidents of him being a narcissistic bully who screws other people over and can’t take accountability for anything.
And nobody is giving him too much shit for simply being a nepo baby. The Blizzard thing is about him being a fraud who’s been caught repeatedly lying and misleading people about his credentials and work experience in order to appear like an expert. He uses his time at Blizzard like a magic wand to expel criticism, going so far as to misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority when people criticize him.
The backlash against him has been well earned by bad behavior over a long period of time, most of which involves him treating other people poorly for his own benefit.
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though? I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
After some very quick research about him, it seems his dad helped him get a job as a QA at Blizzard, and then he worked his way up to doing something cybersecurity related. That doesn’t scream “nepo baby” to me, that’s just a dad being awesome helping their kid get their foot in the door, and my dad would do the same for me if I expressed any interest in his career. If he was given a project lead role or something right out of school, then I’d agree w/ your assessment, but a QA a not a very glamorous job, he’s probably testing some boring component of their stack. Likewise, cybersecurity also isn’t very glamorous, he probably ran pen-tests or something on their servers (maybe not even game servers), it’s a decent job, but not something that would give him any authority since he’s not making important gaming-related decisions.
That said, having worked with important people probably gives him some valuable insight, and I’d like to see him expound on why he thinks things are problematic. All I saw in the videos I watched is some hand-waving and inaccurate statements (i.e. studios would need to release code or some nonsense), which tells me he didn’t actually read the petition. I didn’t watch the full thing, but apparently he read the FAQ where Ross explains what the petition is not about, and he probably just skimmed that. I think that’s unfortunate, since he actually has industry experience and might have something valuable to add to the conversation.
Again, I haven’t watched much of his content, but I did watch what I think was a relevant part of the original VOD. Here’s how I saw the WoW thing (I have never played WoW, so I’m probably missing something):
That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he could’ve said it better (seemed to be playing the “cool and collected streamer” role), but I think his actual actions were reasonable.
But maybe there’s something he could have done. I don’t know WoW well enough to know what options he would have had, but from my perspective, returning to help would’ve just meant he’d die too. And my understanding is that in this game mode, that represents a lot of investment, since the character would be deleted upon death, so it makes sense to be careful. I hear they worked it out after the stream, so his team apparently didn’t think his behavior was all that bad.
And then I look at the reaction. I see several articles slamming him for his behavior in that VOD, and a lot of the backlash citing that as justification for hating him. That seems way over the top, so I think the only rational takeaway is that other streamers are making a big deal out of very little, and people are latching onto it w/o actually looking at the facts and taking what they read for granted.
That’s why I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that. Each time someone has provided some evidence, I looked at it and didn’t see anything damning, just normal streamer behavior. I think people are making a big deal about it because they strongly disagree w/ his take on something else (say, SKG) and are digging for dirt.
So yeah, that’s my take.
No.
That would in fact make those people indie game devs. Thats not a high bar to meet. Pirate likes to word it as if he was a game dev in the industry, and often leaves the context of him just working in QA out. As for the cybersecurity role, his role dealt mostly with the human aspect of the business. Compliance, awareness training, etc. the most active things he did were social engineering phone calls. Yet he has explicitly calls himself “a hacker”.
You’re missing a step here. 3.5. He chooses not to use the items he has that would have restored his mana. Which changes number 5 a bit as a consequence.
Well you have done a pretty good job of focusing on just two of the things he’s been in hot water over, and avoiding all the other evidence that’s out there you haven’t seen. So yeah I wouldn’t want you to jump on a bandwagon without any evidence, but at the same time you’ve explained that you haven’t seen most of the evidence. So I’m not sure what the point of you weighing in here against the people who have seen all the evidence, from a perspective that hasn’t seen the evidence is.
There are hours and hours of video, photo, and written accounts of other events so I’m not just going to recap it all here for you, but it’s all out there for you to find. One of my favorites is when he’s playing another MMO on stream and a dungeon run his party does is ruined by someone accidentally pulling an extra mob. Pirate proceeds to be a huge dick about it. He doesn’t give the person who pulled it the benefit of the doubt like you have to Pirate. At the end of his rant it’s pointed out to him by his own chat that he himself was the one who pulled the mob lol. After which instead of apologizing, he then says he’s not sorry about what he did. He’s so unabashed about his view that only other people make mistakes.
That does change things a bit.
I’ve never played WoW and generally avoid MMOs, so I don’t know how everything works. I just assumed mana items are a time effect thing, so he would’ve needed to plan ahead. If they were already bailing, there’s no reason to use them on the way out.
Well yeah, I can’t know what I don’t know.
Those were the best examples provided to me, and they didn’t seem as bad as people made them out to be. I just have to assume the rest is more of the same.
I’m happy to look at more though. But honestly, I don’t know what you’d gain from that, I already don’t watch his content and support SKG. I guess I might repost some links for others to check out if they’re also confused by the backlash.
Someone else mentioned that here (today?), and that’s certainly enough for me to not want to watch his streams. I already avoid a lot of the popular streamers for being disrespectful to random opponents, and doing that to someone on your team is absolutely unacceptable.
I still don’t think that warrants the response he got, from calls for resignation to swatting.
I don’t think he’s been swatted. In fact, a lot of the “backlash” that Pirate has complained about has also been debunked.He said he had to step away from his role at a game publisher because people were “Reviewing bombing all of the company’s games”. Somehow he didn’t realize that game reviews are public and in the case of Steam reviews very detailed. People went right to the Steam reviews and found that literally none of the games had been review-bombed.
On the contrary, since the backlash started he’s been calling for his fans to brigade and mass report anyone who criticizes him, live on stream. He filed a lawsuit against a guy who made a game and put a cameo of Pirate in his game as a cockroach wearing Pirates signature wizards hat. (A cockroach is the wow term for people who do what Pirate did)
As for the resignation, generally companies don’t like to have people who are ongoing, unapologetic public menaces to be the faces of their company. Any consequences Pirate faces are all of his own doing. If you’re going to be a public figure, you have to understand that you’re going to be held accountable for your behavior by somebody.
I saw some “review bombing” on his game Heartbound. Long term reviews are 62% (mixed, 3000 reviews), and recent reviews are 8% (600+). When I checked a couple weeks ago when the whole thing was fresh, I swear the overall was positive.
To me, that’s review bombing. The game had been out for ~7 years, and nearly 25% of the total reviews are “recent” (many since the end of June).
So my take here is that he was worried that reaction would spread to the other studio, which I guess never materialized.
That’s really lame. Games should be allowed to use free expression, barring blatant slander.
I disagree, but I don’t know much about him. I don’t think anyone deserves to be publicly lambasted unless they truly are a public menace like Trump. Tell people to avoid his content, sure, but his work at a game studio should absolutely be unrelated, provided he’s not given a platform for his unpopular views.
The WoW things is the most well known, be he had a similar behavior in another game, Ashes of Creation i think. Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.
There’s also stuff coming out here cheated on his former wife. And then was a massive manipulative dick towards the person that he was cheating on with.
Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated. Like he doesn’t like giving details what he’s actually done in previous jobs. He’ll just state that he works somewhere and then let you fill in the blank. Or passing off what someone else did at the job as his own.
In his own channel he purposely misrepresent the recent things about him. And coding Jesus actually put out a video showing that, when he tries to reach out immediately gets filtered and banned. But meanwhile Thor is telling people that all he had to do was try to reach out…
Have you seen a popular streamer that does? If they do, it’s more like “sorry you feel that way.” To get a decent sized following, you need other people to see you as some kind of authority, and most authorities don’t apologize, they do some amount of damage control and move on.
That’s a big part of why I generally avoid popular streamers/youtubers. Most of my favorite YT channels have like 100-500k subs (and several well below 100k), and I only sub to a few w/ over 1M, and most of those are on the more humble end of the spectrum (e.g. Gamers Nexus). I don’t jive well with wannabe authority figures, so I’m not surprised PirateSoftware didn’t appeal to me. In fact, most of those talking head channels aren’t interesting, I want facts, not opinions, and I do validate the more important facts.
Why would he? From what I gather (from a random wiki), his dad helped him get a QA job at Blizzard, and then he moved up the ranks to cybersecurity. I don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs, but they are solid jobs. So my level in trust in what he says takes that into account, whatever he learned about the AAA gaming industry he learned by being present, not by being in any impactful role.
That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0). I’ve gotten through maybe 2 min of one of his videos.
Yes. I think a lot of people would reference the MatPat apology.
That’s your personal bias. He lets people believe what they want. He used it for clout, and while you might not care about game development or cybersecurity, there are many who do. When he did security, he did social engineering. Which is just as valid, but if people are more impressed because they think he’s looking at source code and whatnot… he doesn’t correct them and leans into those stories. Since you kinda hipster-esque view of YouTubers… here’s a guy with less than 1000 subs talking about it, https://youtu.be/oKadi1zy8fQ and he didn’t really do that much at Blizzard either, not in game development either, but again, he doesn’t say what he actually did and has a lot of stories that don’t connect. That’s like if I said, “Yeah, I worked at the White House for 7 years” and just left it at that. But then it comes to light, I was the one mowing the grass, and that’s it. If I don’t specify what I did, nor correct people, and telling stories that I overhear that belong to someone else (and I don’t specify that) or talk about things that happen that I wasn’t involved with… then I’m lying by omission.
Not even close. https://www.youtube.com/@CodingJesus He’s a C++ developer who got his name because in some older photos of him people said he looked like Jesus. That’s the whole “lore”.
Hmm, never watched him. Looks like he has tens of millions of subs, which is probably why I’ve avoided him (I generally like smaller channels).
Maybe I just have more industry insight, because when I think of cyber security, I think of people auditing computers (do you have the corporate spyware installed?), running automated pen test suites, etc. Most of it isn’t particularly technical, and most security audits I’ve been a part of (and we do them every year) are black box testing, meaning they don’t have the code. Even in the one or two audits we did that involved the code (needed a higher tier audit for government contracts), most of what they checked was just dependency versions, they didn’t look too closely at the actual code.
Outside of high profile security researchers, I see most cyber security jobs as the security guards of software dev, they make sure you keep the doors locked, but they don’t force you to use reinforced doors or whatever, they’re just there to tell you what the obvious weak points are.
Which pretty much everyone does. If someone doesn’t go into detail, it’s pretty safe to assume there’s nothing to brag about.
That said, even if you only mowed the grass at the White House, you’d pick up on a lot of stuff about politics. You’d notice who the regulars are, important peoples’ routines, etc, not to mention what you pick up on through random small talk with people there. There’s a reason spys target people like janitors and landscapers, they don’t realize how much they know so their guard is down. That’s social engineering 101.
The janitors at Blizzard know more about AAA software development than the average gamer. A QA would know even more since they have more direct access to the devs and designers.
Whether you’re telling the whole truth or not about your credentials is irrelevant if you can prove what you claim. That’s why I’d like to see PS and Ross talk, so it would be easier to tell what’s accurate from what’s BS.
Ah, ok. I assumed the other guy because was pretty public with his criticism of PS and has long hair.
I haven’t heard of that guy either, probably because I’m more into Rust than C++, and actually avoid C++ like the plague (I much prefer C).
Pirate has done a lot to earn hate over the years from stealing and manipulating a child back in second life to make a quick buck. Screwing over and generally being a major asshole in eve online that screwed a lot of people out of very real money.
Being a general twat, gaslighting and trying to get his community to harass people irl over the wow debacle.
Lying and giving objectively bad information over development and grifting on twitch.
He’s done everything a twat really can do online short of actual physical harm.
People have grudges with him going back like 15 years. This is not his first rodeo.
Ok but… That’s the correct way to play EVE online.
Really? From the 5-10 min of his videos that I watched over the last 2 weeks when trying to figure out why people dislike him, I didn’t see any of that nonsense. That’s really too bad if true, because he seemed like a pretty level-headed guy who was a pretty laid-back gamer (no yelling or other form of aggression, which is unfortunately common among streamers). I watched some clips of:
That’s about it. He didn’t seem like a toxic person who routinely trolls and screws people in games, just kind of your average, run-of-the-mill streamer who’s a little low-key but still out there to create content to get people to watch.
Then again, he could totally be the jerk you make him out to be. It’s really hard to tell what’s a legitimate explanation of things and what’s people looking for a reason to slander him because they don’t like his take on SKG. The couple of articles I read seemed to mostly be the latter, but they also didn’t mention most of what you did here. So idk, I guess I haven’t made up my mind about him, but honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth digging into because I’m not into his content anyway.
There’s the problem: you won’t get evidence of a murder if you ask the murderer for it.
He streams a lot, so the things he says or does are spread out, especially if you’re only looking for noticeably damning stuff like the rim job related rant against SKG.
His confidence and speechcraft makes him very good at steering conversations by lying or deflecting, as long as you trust what he says.
Good places to start looking may be his conversation with Dr. K or Ross’ “The end of Stop Killing Games” on Youtube, both are hosted by level headed people;
I can only assume you haven’t seen the latter, because at the very least it makes it very apparent why people dislike him.
This one? He sounds like an awesome dude according to his bio, but I’ve never seen anything by him, I’ll check him out.
And I haven’t seen any conversations between him and Ross. I did see snippets of his original reaction, where he seemed to completely misunderstand the petition, and his follow-up, unhinged rant, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the latter because he had apparently gotten a lot of negative attention (swatting attempts, calls for him to leave the publisher he was at, and random negative remarks on his own games), so I think it’s quite possible his attack on Ross was an emotional reaction to that negative attention, and not level-headed attack on Ross (I’ve seen nothing to suggest Ross is anything other than an awesome guy).
So my opinion on PirateSoftware is relatively neutral. He seems to be on the better end of the streamer range, which isn’t saying much (lots of popular streamers are pretty toxic). I don’t think he’s anyone to look up to, and I wish he’d either have Ross on to discuss the petition or thoroughly read and understand it so he can elucidate his opposition to it, both of which I think would be helpful for his audience to form an actual opinion instead of borrowing his. But maybe he’s on the worse end of that spectrum, I don’t know, since again, I’ve only watched a few minutes of his content and he seemed like your average streamer who exaggerates their credentials and leans into “content,” and I’m not surprised clowning on people is part of that.
I literally had not heard of him a month ago, so I’m missing a ton of context. However, nothing I’ve seen makes me want to watch more of his content (he’s definitely not my style), but nothing makes me think he should be “cancelled” or whatever. Aside from some offensive remarks, I don’t think he’s really hurting anyone.
The (alleged) swatting didn’t happen before “The End Of SKG”.
I also don’t think he deserves cancellation, but he has lied so many times, so confidently and so unrepentantly that he deservers very little credibility.
I understand that some people would feel sympathy for the somewhat excessive negative attention he got (not from me, he lost my sympathy the first time I saw him blatantly lying and lobbing insults) but with the way he ALWAYS behaved, he absolutely had some of it coming.
Yeah, that’s basically what I’m pushing back on. The internet community loves to jump on people and dig up random dirt when they do something unpopular, and a lot of that dirt is exaggerated if not completely fabricated. Look at the response to the Godot tweet about being “woke” for an example of that (which PS rightly defended Godot for).
He may be a POS, but I don’t think he deserves what he got. He deserves to be less popular, sure, but not much more than that.
he’s repeatedly refused to talk to ross;
after the first video pirate software uploaded about SKG, ross left a comment offering clarifications and a chance to talk about the petition and surrounding misconceptions.
ross was refused an answer.
then PS uploaded more videos, and streams, with even more misinformation.
ross ignored it at that point and just continued doing his thing, advocating for the petition, giving updates, etc.
then it looked like the petition would fail, so ross decided there’s nothing left to lose by talking about the drama with PS, and lo and behold, suddenly all youtubers and streamers were suuuper onboard, helped spread the drama, and as a consequence SKG reached its goal… because of the drama.
so a net positive overall, but sad that it’s only because drama sells ads on streaming and video sites…really just a dumb state of affairs…
and to be clear: ross wasn’t at all vindictive in his video. frustrated by the situation, yes, but ultimately it was a very fair and sober response.
highly recommend checking it out; from what you said so far, i think you’ll enjoy the level-headed approach ross took!
here’s a link to the vid
Yeah, and that’s what disappoints me the most. I think suck a conversation could be productive and really suss out where PirateSoftware is coming from. Maybe there’s more to it, but w/o that conversation, it just seems like he misread it and is doubling down relying on whatever meager credentials he has. That’s sad, because I’m sure he absorbed something useful in his years working w/ game devs.
And honestly, that makes me want to watch those other streamers less. I used to watch SomeOrdinaryGamers, but him repeatedly getting into YT drama (and claiming he didn’t like it) turned me off, and now he’s apparently back on that same trend. I’m sure those other YTers have decent takes, but I just really don’t like all that drama.
Ross’ petition should succeed because it’s a good petition, and that’s obvious from the text of the petition. It doesn’t need YTers to create a bunch of drama about it.
Yeah, Ross is a stand-up dude. He made a big deal about not wanting to get into drama, but that he’d do whatever was necessary, and the result was a very reasonable rebuttal. I’d like to buy him a beverage of his choice, he seems awesome.
You watched 5 minutes of his own verbal diarrhea and formed a full opinion on him?
No, I explicitly said I don’t have a strong opinion on him. I’m not going to knee-jerk follow the hate train just because of a bad take on SKG and a couple of emotional videos where he said some moderately offensive things. Maybe he’s really a bad dude, idk, but I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon.
Fair enough, by the way, valid point. But it does seems like you jumped on a bandwagon, my friend.
And which bandwagon would that be?