Hello,
here’s a message I waited all day for from Markus Schill, the General Manager of Europe, there’s a public statement given to the player base but I will share with you the one sent to the Community Contributors:
It was pointed out to me that this message did reach as far as Viktor Kislyi even although he didnt sign it which was, to my beliefs, the right course of action given that the last time he stepped in the promises weren’t really met.
I need to point out that on my previous article “To be Blatantly Honest?” I wasn’t doing a “NA VS EU”, in fact, I wrote things in a way in an attempt and hopes of having these and other servers being more communicative with one another which is something that is seriously lacking in the company so far. Such lack of communication can only result in fuckups that could have been easily avoided with a 5min voice call and even if it’s not the case, players will perceive them as two kids not speaking to each other because they are throwing a tantrum. I honestly hope that these different channels in the company realise that are giving themselves and of course the whole company a bad image by acting in such way.
And to give you more context will be quoting an answer I gave to one of your comments earlier about what made me change my views:
“While I understand your opinion we may be separated because we are seeing this from different perspectives, an inside and an outside one that is. WG EU has handled the aftermath situation well, both sides acknowledged what they did and Foch got his sorry, WG NA in the other hand spoke about something to the media they had no idea of what was truly about without checking with WG EU first but what really got on my t!ts was the fact that they stood their ground not once but twice on believing that is okay to abuse the copyright system and the fact that they tried to put SirFoch under the bus. You can make a mistake once but do it multiple times and it becomes a decision. I don’t separate offices to go on a witch hunt, I couldn’t give a damn which office gave the false accusations, I said earlier in this comment section that it could be “WG Saturn for all I care” I do it to prove that is a clear lack of communication between the different company channels and to have changes you need to enlight them in this manner sometimes. I can assure you the company will work on ways to fix this, they told me a few hours ago (when I went on a sort of an angry rant in close doors with them about this).”
I have to admit I nearly flipped the table and walked away earlier today because I wasn’t seeing guarantees that some other office, whatever office it may be, wouldn’t put me or one of my colleagues under the bus like it happened to SirFoch in statements given to the media (to Kotaku and Jim Fucking Sterling). Because for all the trust I have in Florian, the Head of PR in EU, he is powerless if another server tries to intervene like it happened in this situation. He did let me know that a statement was coming today from Markus so I waited but If I didn’t get guarantees that such would never happen rest assured I would be giving “Toodalo” to the CC program.
I am satisfied with what Markus and the other lads had to say, in particular:
“It is very important for me to make this absolutely clear: Wargaming will not take copyright action against opinions based on our publicly released content. Before writing this letter I have clarified Wargaming’s global position on this topic with the Product Director for World of Tanks – Thaine Lyman, North American’s General Manager Jay Cohen, the Head of Global Publishing – Evangelos Georgiou and our Chief Executive Officer – Victor Kislyi. Lastly I also want to apologize for the statement which was given to some media outlets over the weekend – this statement contained unsubstantiated allegations towards the content of videos from our previous Community Contributor SirFoch – this statement was ill-advised, false and while it cannot be undone, we do want to apologise for it.”
Those are the words I wanted to hear and made me decide to remain a Community Contributor.
Also, before I wrap this up, I spent quite a lot of time answering questions and clarifying things with the community, in particular on Reddit. As for I am quite happy that managed to clear some ancient misunderstandings with people like Milkyman (if you don’t know is content -but you like tank skins- do check him out) as example, I still noticed that the majority had missed/did not understand the true intentions of my words and I want you to know, Redditors, forumites and every other SR reader that you are more than welcome to reach me out for conversations. I will be more than happy to speak with you because you would be surprised how more often than not we are on the same page.
- You can always email me at ritastatusreport@gmail.com
- I’m also quite active on Discord nowadays, RSR has its own discord with well over 600 members: https://discord.gg/mu9rXc5
- If on Reddit just use the nickname tagging so that it appears on my notifications to summon me.
- Or just the comment section here on Status Report
With the help of the other RSR authors, I am currently quite focused on having a closer relationship with you, the community.
Thank you,
Rita Sobral
This is good but I still think they need to do do a lot of restructuring. To prove that we can have confidence in this statement.
Thank you for keeping me in the loop. I love the game and the content that some of you contributors do and I don’t want to lose that.
I especially like status report for the weird and incredible tanks that may never be a part of wot
I’m so relieved that things got this ending and WG got their feces together at last. I was acctually quite ready for even more blood, sweat and tears for this matter since in my last work I got to deal with the so sweet and so humble Russians and eastern-block countriers and it’s just so damn hard for them to take their heads out of their arses and say “We are sorry, we F’ed up” (and with network software they F’ed up extremely often, that’s why I quit and now happily work in game industry just in Finland).
Let’s just hope WG learned their lessons and improve. I also hope this opened WGs ears for the community at least a little more, but that probably will be seen later as the Q&A happens during GF.
Surely Ph3lan should be forced to step into a lesser role, it’s all very well them promising they won’t copyright people but this man issued one without any reason or warning when it was already assumed they would not do such a thing.
General manager of Europe. Well that is a high position indeed……..
Markus is a good guy too just like Florian I trust these 2.
I seem to remember several prominent CCs praising Ph3lan as a “good guy” in the past. Just sayin’.
Origami its a matter of having known the guy IRL, he’s pretty chill, never swears and somewhat nice to have around. People sometimes pass trough hard times and that’s usually when they create crap of monumental proportions. We’ve known him for over 2 years now, not a single time I had a reason to complain about him.
+ Being a C. and CC Manager is not easy, I saw it on Ectar and I saw it on Ash who are both out of the company now and I see the same on the “not so new guys”.
He acknowledged and apologised.
& he’s a human at the end of the day.
I suppose you can say that he punished himself. I can’t begin to imagine how hard it will be for him to continue working as a community manager when a large portion of the community no longer trusts him.
LAck of communication between depts has always been WG’s main problem. If they would ever fix that 90% of their screwups would disappear. But they’ve been told this for years and it still keeps happening.
I can’t remeber my discord information 🙁
We still got your emoticons here when you are back! 😀
He Rita, ever considered a job as a senior PR manager at wargaming NA. I heard they got a vacancy :p
I wouldnt mind being the Dominatrix of the WG dungeon.
this game is almost unplayable for me now with all those OP tier 8 premiums in every battle.. getting in a team with Löwes and IS-6 as top heavys against Chrysler platoons and Defenders every single game.. so much powercreep
CAN WE GET RID OF THE WHITE WHITE WHITE EVERYWHERE IM GOING SNOW BLIND – APOLS FOR CAPS NOT!
It’s all just BS in the end.
Of course it is BS. This is pure PR, they are trying to soft things up as much as they can. If they would mean what they say, they would have made things right with SirFoch and others in the first place, then address the community.
The truth is that they can’t have an open mind (a straight out person) in the CC community, it would mean a disaster waiting to happen. Their main concern is that they have said too much, things with legal consequences and now they are trying to avoid they mess that could follow.
Days will pass, people will forget (it is in the human nature and they know it) and they will bring out something new to feed the players with (the Romans had a say: the masses/people need only bread and Circus/show to be happy/content). People don’t realize that in order for one to succeed, all must succeed.
The main problem of this game is that the business plan doesn’t go well with the free to play idea.
Regardless of whether you opt to stick with the wargaming CC program or not, I think diversifying your content base would still be a wise course of action. As you yourself mentioned you’ve seen broken promises on their end before. And as I’ve mentioned to you before, on twitch, twitter, etc. the majority of your fans are primarily there to watch the personality, not the game itself (please dear god don’t do a LOL though). Heck I’d love to gain your and Jingle’s insight in Star Trek Online as just 1 example. I’ve never been good about designing a character or ship and with how they’re changing things up I’m less confident in youtube tutorials for that game than ever before.
Regardless of whether you opt to stick with the wargaming CC program or not, I think diversifying your content base would still be a wise course of action. As you yourself mentioned you’ve seen broken promises on their end before. And as I’ve mentioned to you before, on twitch, twitter, etc. the majority of your fans are primarily there to watch the personality, not the game itself (please dear god don’t do a LOL though). Heck I’d love to gain your and Jingle’s insight in Star Trek Online as just 1 example. I’ve never been good about designing a character or ship and with how they’re changing things up I’m less confident in youtube tutorials for that game than ever before.
Regardless of whether you opt to stick with the wargaming CC program or not, I think diversifying your content base would still be a wise course of action. As you yourself mentioned you’ve seen broken promises on their end before. And as I’ve mentioned to you before, on twitch, twitter, etc. the majority of your fans are primarily there to watch the personality, not the game itself (please dear god don’t do a LOL though). Heck I’d love to gain your and Jingle’s insight in Star Trek Online as just 1 example. I’ve never been good about designing a character or ship and with how they’re changing things up I’m less confident in youtube tutorials for that game than ever before.
If they’re this sorry, why don’t they give Foch his CC status back? Yes, yes… he’s an extremely salty guy but that’s his way of being himself. Would a Foch tank review be fun anymore if Foch wasn’t himself?
Besides that, he’s done quite a lot for this community. Simply taking his CC status isn’t fair.
For the record, his review did go overboard with the expletives, harsh statements, and what have you; leaving out any objectivity for the matter.
And still WG haven’t said a single word about the issue that tilted SirFoch in the first place: the deluge of ridiculously OP Premium tanks that is doing a great deal of harm to the game. If that deluge continues (which looks to be 100% certain), more and more YouTubers are going to lose their cool with WG. And because WG has an extremely thin and fragile ego, WG will lose their cool in response. This current shitstorm is merely the first. I’m sure there are bigger storms on the way. WG’s greed, ego, and stupidity is rapidly angering the game’s userbase. I can foresee this game coming to an end through loss of players in only a year or two at the current rate of fuckups.
BS after BS…Apologies and promises from WG’s employees mean nothing.
Viktor Kislyi needs to come forward or they can go home…
This is a very welcome statement from Markus Schill, but I can’t help noticing that despite the reassurances of this being WG’s global position, there is no mention of the Asia server or Asia WG team being included in this. So there is still a question there – does this statement genuinely cover WG policy in ALL regions in the world?
They spoke Globally so yes that includes SEA. If SEA does any shenanigans after that statement do feel free to let me know. 😉
OK, thanks Rita.
I appreciate all the bandages flying around to patch things up but sadly this still doesn’t solve anything with wargaming’s marketing policy that all of this stemmed from. the entire reason why I joined was because I believed those that paid more money wouldn’t have a serious in game advantage. I just can’t aford to play anymore and the grind is way too stressful unless you pay money to skip things. I’m just burnt out.
One point of concern: There’s still the Southeast Asia cluster out there and they didn’t sign it. Which means that WG SEA could indeed still hit someone with a copyright strike.
They also didn’t name who was responsible for the frankly bizarre WGNA post accusing SirFoch of using hate speech and homophobic slurs. (And also potentially proving that WGNA themselves were homophobic.) That person and Ph3lan need to be visibly and publicly punished for their clearly excessive reactions. Demotion to head janitor for a while, perhaps.
Also, given how WG has broken promise after promise after promise in the past… how much credence can we reasonably give the promises WG made in the above statements? Same thing happened with Gaijin – they did the same thing, made the same kind of apology. I haven’t seen Jingles do much WT content since, even with the apology. I haven’t played WT since either.
Once a dev goes there, there’s no way to unring that bell. They’ve stated that they are willing to LIE and abuse copyright strikes to screw up someone’s YouTube channel for non-copyright reasons. Now we’re supposed to believe them when they promise not to do that? With all their prior broken promises?
I raised the same concern above, and Rita replies that she believes the Markus Schill statement is intended to be truly global, covering the Asia server.
Hmm who ever thought wg had “normal” standards.
I questioned a shills pedophile behaviour +was banned.
While the pedophile keptup his wg shill posts
I’m happy to see that they were able to get together a unified response that carries the acknowledgement of Victor and the US office, as this means that this statement can be taken as being authoritative. I still think that Ph3lan at the very least needs to be reassigned to another department, but overall I’m satisfied. Hopefully this is enough to make Jingles and Jedi comfortable enough to return as CCs.
“It is very important for me to make this absolutely clear: Wargaming will not take copyright action against opinions based on our publicly released content.”
Yeah, sure. Until next time ;P
Community fucktards vs. Wargaming cunts. I am laughing at this battle of pathetic cripples. Great PR stunt to get attention to this miserable game. I would not be surprised if this was carefully orchestrated,
Why are you so easy on this? As a CC, you should stand for the community. They are completely missing the point. It’s fine that WG and Foch are cool with eachother, but WG hasn’t commented on that OP premium thing that is going on for the last year.
I don’t care if they fuck up communications, but I would like to see a WG statement on the pay2win direction this game is going.
If they don’t change that, they aren’t sorry for shit…
Yeah everyone apologized each other but what’s the point?
OP/Unbalanced premiums will still continue to flood the game.
Hah!
I’ve been playing this game for years. I don’t believe or trust a single th8ng that any WG employee is told tonsaybinna system. Utter bullshit. That’s what this is. PR and damage control.
Make some fucking changes. Fix the game.
Corridor maps, gold ammo, OP prem….etc etc etc.
The community has been giving feedback for years upon years. You never listen. Until you do snowstorms like this will continue to happen. Simple as.
Stupid phone autocorrect 😛
There is no doubting WG have been travelling in a certain (well armoured, gold & premium encouraging) direction recently and I think the SirFoch video ‘hit a nerve’ they were all too aware of. The best way for players to express their discontent with WG would be to abstain from buying the Chrysler but sadly this does not seem to be the case. In fact judging by numbers I have been seeing in random games, all the negative/OP commentary seems to have encouraged players to buy the tank and adopt the WG pay2win strategy.
In terms of the recent message and apparent apology, well actions speak louder than words. Once this saga has died down, I suspect WG will continue to put profits before the fundamentals of the game and players will indirectly continue to support this strategy by buying new tanks and using gold ammo! (It is only fair to mention I am absolutely guilty of the former).
Thank you for sharing that Rita. An apology is an apology. Where does that leave CC’s who decided not to risk their channel and leave? I do believe Sir Foch should loose his CC status because of his foul rant. Its not appropriate for a Company to be associated with this kind of language and profanity its extremely immature. He needs to grow up and put his criticism in a more professional way.
It’s an apology to please the media that got wind of the situation and a way to placate them. WG know very well that a brand is as good as its brand name, and when that brand name it starts to get tarnished in media then it’s time to rethink and try to put the fire out.
But what’s completely forgotten (or ignored/hidden away) is the very basis of SirFoch’s video, namely the progression of a free to play game to a more P2W game by funneling players into using prem ammunition to name one issue. Foch have released a new video which details what’s currently wrong with WoT in a sensible and rational way. Until WoT’s current basic, core problems are vented by themselves and dealt with by themselves, their apology is just hollow, more like an apology to themselves that the whole issue was released to the masses for public scrutiny.
They’ve had CC’s for a long time which I thought would be a bilateral spokesperson, however with their apology and that it’s first now that they’re talking about listening to the community more than before (which mainly was non-existant), I now understand that the CC’s are nothing but a free, unilateral PR stunt.
I really hope WG prove me wrong and start to deal with the fundamental problems that haunts WoT because I enjoy the game so much. But to jump around excitedly just because an apology and because “but he’s such a nice guy!” I won’t do. Not before they start taking action instead of just telling people what they want to hear.
if a comment/statement hits too close to home,and the reaction is a strong or a hard comeback, it is a high chance its true.
WG knows their bullshait is true, and snaps back at foch.
if it wasnt for foch, and the uproar of the community, they would go on with the same old shait.
PS. communication issues might be different timezones
Wish to see these ‘apologies’ backed by some real action on the ground; starting with firing the entire balance team and getting back the old gang.
Rebalance/up-tiering of OP premium tanks.
Since they can’t change the tanks much (money tanks) they should simply get up tiered.
https://youtu.be/GDL2HUtytV8
Wot Blitz testing new premium ammo. Cost and damage reduced. Making it a high pen low damage ammo. This could be the initial testing of something great.
Still nothing on the german page…..
That should smooth over the internet feels. Now get back to the GAME….
Ph3lan is a bastard
If something like the CC statement had been the first statement made then that would probably have enough for me but it was in fact the fourth or fifth attempt from a desperate PR dept after all the slurs and threats preceding it. The WGNA release in particular, after several days of consideration, means I will not play another WG product
And then, after all is said and done, WG NA releases this pile of excrement.