Hello,
I have to warn you this is going to be a long read, I started writing this on Wednesday after interviewing several people (YouTubers, streamers, etc), this article will be centred in the meeting with Victor Kislyi but will also talk about my growing disappointed over the North American office, on how they lied to us and how badly the NA community contributors have been treated. I’ve kept all interviewed people’s name anonymous and/or gave fictional names so that they would feel comfortable enough to talk freely, some weren’t at the meeting, but others did.
The reason I’ve decided to write about this is that although I’m a “EU” under the company’s eyes, I’m actually a NA player as well, have over 2600 battles (and counting) and I have as much NA readers on RSR as EU, its of my concern.
Get a cup of coffee/cocoa, this is how it starts…
Last night -As I know some of you prefer reading instead of watching things and also to help the Russian blogs, to pass the data over to the Russian community and who’s English is not the best- did a whole transcript of the Victor Kislyi video as you know. I spent over an hour mostly pausing, trying to understand Victor’s words and typing things down but the more time I spent examining the video, the more I started becoming like an agent Mulder.
I had paid special attention to the first meeting Victor did with the Russians and also experienced it as one of the invited people to the Cyprus office, to represent the English community and the whole thing at NA seemed… off, too orchestrated, even the hour-long uncut version did so.
There are a couple of things that raised me red flags: First of all, this is a meeting that is supposed to be for players and between players and Victor/Devs only, instead, Paul Barnett a WG employer (who was all over his boss) led the conversation/meeting. Second, who the heck were most of those people in the room? I could recognize at least 4 of them but the rest? What communities do they even have to represent the majority? Don’t take me wrong here but there are NA content producers who should have been there and were not in sight, like Zeven_NA for example, he wasn’t even invited. People like him dedicate so much time of their life for the NA (and all other EN) community and receive so little recognition its sad, it upsets me.
And Rita, why don’t they receive recognition? Let me explain, besides everything people and even I may say about the EU office, the guys at Paris actually have a really well-organized -CC(Community Contributor)- system and are very community oriented. Pretty much, one of the main tasks of the Community Managers and Coordinators is to keep content producers like myself as happy as possible.
There are no contracts or payments being done, not that type of happy of course, but they do make sure to look after their own by giving press accounts and being present at all times, even after-work hours they are always around for us and even I who for this past year have, still and will anger them as frequently as a boiling in-hormones teenager, when the old Status Report was being temporarily held by the Google police due to fraudulent reports, one of the higher guys at the office immediately reached out to me and pulled some strings with his contacts at Google to speed up my case, they also (I nearly forgot) notify/invite everyone beforehand to the events that WG is taking part on EU so we can meet and greet you.
NA is not like this, I’ve been up late for this past nights catching timezones, talking to various people from ‘Murica and they did had a system, “Club Wargaming” seems to have been called, which apparently got canned because the staff didn’t listen to their CCs’s advice. Now, don’t believe that things on EU were always all fine and dandy, oh trust me, they were not! But last year for example, during TankFest 2015, WG EU gathered in a private room with all the CCs present and we got to discuss things that had to be modified in order to improve. They listened, they changed and things been, not perfect but good enough.
The NA office has the same job positions filled in as EU does but instead, NA staff is more focused on self-promoting and creating/maintaining their persona, leaving their content producers/community contributors hung out to dry. From all the people I’ve spoken to, there is a common complaint: WG NA is inconsistent and unreliable, if/when they bother to answer back they promise all good things but then rarely deliver.
Gathered some quotes from the people I’ve spoken to:
“However, some streamers get some tanks, and some don’t. There does not appear to be a lot of rhyme or reason to it. I remember one instance where *Bob* was told he was going to get a tank to play on his stream… and then just never did.”
“They gave me a t-22 and didn’t even tell me.
I just sat there looking at it like what the hell is this?
Then checked the new update and was like oh, I guess I’ll stream it then?”“I swear I have no idea who to talk to at this point. They (WG NA) all seriously flake or don’t respond.”
And this goes on and on and on…but I’m sure you already got the point.
This does not only apply to Streamers/YouTubers but also when it comes to general feedback gathering from the community, serious things like bugs and game balance, they will find excuses to not pass it along to Minsk or simply ignore. Recently, I’ve found this extremely nice and passionate young man over the NA forum for example, who was for months trying to get the attention of the NA staff on how a certain tech tree which is extremely undermined could be improved, NA staff’s answer to him was “Minsk is not interested”. We had a talk and he explained in detail and with historical backgrounds of how things could be balanced and I immediately realized that his ideas are the exact type of thing that Minsk would get a hard-on for. I sent the info to one of my contacts and his answer immediately was “We are very interested in this!” It took me absolutely no time or effort and it honestly irate me that they spend illogically more effort finding excuses to not do their job than actually doing something so simple which can improve the game and make players happier.
Back to the red flags -By the way, this is when things start getting interesting, all of the answers were given by a person that doesn’t want to be named and that was present at the meeting-, another thing that came to mind, Victor visited NA at the end of March 2016, now, when was the Rubicon fiasco? I went to check the exact date actually, the news that Rubicon had been cancelled were in 30 of October, 2015, that’s… over 5 months ago. Why is he still talking about it? And why only after 5 months he visited NA to talk about it?
Well, what happened is that people were warned and asked to fly and be in California only a week previous, WG NA completely disregarded the fact that these people have jobs, school and families, still they complied. The only reason there was a meeting at all is because the GDC (Game Developer Conference) was taking place during that time and Wargaming is busy promoting their baby, Master of Orion, that was the sole reason for Kislyi to fly there.
Also, have you noticed how formal and concise all questions made to Kislyi were in comparison with EU meeting?
Basically NA asked people what questions they wanted to make (which by the way were very good ones) but the staff didn’t like them and kept things silent, sent the tickets and once people arrived to the office they were presented with a bag of questions that they were allowed to make on record, there was absolutely no freedom of speech.
“Once we got there, they basically had a bag, and Victor already had answers to all of this questions, he goes “Hey! Here is the bag with all these questions, he has already thought about these before and these are the question you have to ask on-screen” and I asked, “Is this for a TV show or we are actually going to ask this guy questions?” and he said: “Yeah this is for a show” and I was instantly disappointed.”
“I was rushed! I mean really rushed! It was literally ” Hey guys! This is what we are doing! Here are some questions! We found these, they are questions from the forums yada yada!” I mean, even the questions we sent them didn’t even get asked!”
“It was basically: Who wants this question? Who wants that question? Just like an auction! And I was like “I guess I will ask this question…” They had a guy asking about CW, he is not even in a clan! He doesn’t care about clans! “So, why are we asking this questions?” and they say, “Well someone has to do it, if you don’t want we will give it to someone else”, so I took it, I mean I flew all the way here, let me ask a question.
We had to read it and remember it, all script style and they made us saying over and over again for the camera(cut)”
“It didn’t go as planned, I didn’t got to ask any questions on the record, it doesn’t matter that we could make question off the record because the whole point was making him answer to questions that the community been asking for the last 5 years!”
“I felt used, I felt really used. I am grateful that they flew out there, to go to San Francisco to meet this guy (Victor) and visit a WG office and try stuff out but we weren’t really given any information, they didn’t tell us anything and I felt lied to and it wasn’t something that it was worth my time.”
You know, not even EU tried to pull this kind of shit… it’s clear that the whole thing at NA was nothing but a cheap half-arsed PR stunt but although the EU and RU meetings also had a PR aspect to it, things were completely different. I was the first person that got invited and knew over a month beforehand that was supposed to catch a plane to Cyprus, I did had a casual conversation with a staff member from Cyprus of how things would take place and didn’t even had to ask anything, he immediately told me to “not be polite with words aka no bullshit”, they ASKED US to be as open as possible and actually discuss game and community matters with them, part of it was recorded, I did a transcript for you and Jingles even uploaded the whole conversation with Slava and Victor for you but there was more of it that went off-record, we talked until there was nothing more to speak, it was a full extenuating day. We did had a WG EU person with us, but he was there just representing and leading us around the place, he never ever tried to censure or control freak us.
NA didn’t even sent the meeting’s data to people, instead they kept it to themselves while Cyprus/EU gave us the raw data to do whatever we wanted with it. And how I know this was all NA’s decision and not Victor’s? Because besides the whole trying to look cool and all the philosopher talk he gives, Victor is actually a really good guy and he trusts us. There were things at Cyprus that he talked about and knew that he was being recorded, relaxed funny off-topic subjects which he kindly asked us to cut to keep it professional and we complied. In the video even Victor looks a bit forced to play these guys game…
And talking about the video, I asked if WG allowed them to record the meeting:
-“No.They told us no because it was under NDA, we couldn’t do anything with it. Everything we did that day was under NDA, couldn’t mention it and they basically said that if we wanted to write, say, do anything cellphone or recording-wise we literally had to run it trough MeatHead Militia and basically nothing was allowed trough.”
RG: -“Did you signed a NDA? If not there’s none.”
-“The thing is, we had to sign in the whole Wargaming office and that was our NDA. Basically the minute we checked in under the area under MeatHead’s information we were no longer allowed to say anything, we were not allowed in our phones specially in the computer rooms, we could pictures only of the actual office away from computers. They were on us like a hawk, this time… last time we were able to wander around and check stuff out and they didn’t care but this time they were on us and we literally couldt do anything.
-“If we wondered away for a split second they would be like “HEY WHERE YOU GOING, HEY! COME HERE! Nah Nah! No! Nah Nah! “
Also, do you want to know one of the reasons the video looked so weird? This is so bad I started laughing…
-“We talked for two and half hours and actually believe or not when we were there, that whole first part we did, if you notice is cut showing us and then showing him its because they f*cked up the audio. So they recorded nothing. We had to do it a second time hence why if you watch some of the other video you notice there is no sound coming out from us whatsoever.
-“So people started leaving to the airport and they needed to redo it again.”
RG: -“So, you already leaving for the airport and they were like “Wait… hold on! Let’s do this all again?”
-“Yeah, they were like “omg omg omg we didn’t get any of the audio at all!” so Victor was like “ok… I’m going to take a break” and he walks away.”
-They were like: “People that have to leave go now, people who can stay please group together and make it look like you are still here”. We had to shoot everything in 30minutes, and as we were doing this people were leaving because they had to catch flights, it was hilarious!
RG: “I also found strange that Victor sometimes sounded surprised to things that he already had heard before in my meeting”
-“Its because there was no audio, so he had to redo those answers for the camera after we left” (He pretty much had to “act”/repeat his answers hence his emotions and facial expressions were weird/different than usual at the time)
NA server used to be my favourite, I know great people who work/worked there like Major_Rampage, Justin (Who left recently, really nice person), The_Chieftain, hum, he is okay too and I’ve been hearing decent things from MeatHead Militia (many of the interviewed said that MeatHead is pretty much the only one they have been able to reach) but honestly I don’t like at all the direction the North American office is taking, after the whole Rubicon thing Wargaming promised that would be more open with us and instead these guys managed to cross so many “no no” lines recently that they started looking as bad as the Gaijin/Warthunder totalitarian Gulag staff.
It saddens me to see so much Youtuber/streamers potential being overlooked by some big egos who prefer directing the cameras and resources at themselves and that they treat the community this way, NA were to be the nice cool guys in my eyes,but I’ve lost my complete trust in them.
WG NA: Useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
Rita Sobral
First, congrats on getting Junkers, one of the saltiest, whiny streamers to be a source. Second, the vocal minority in the CC players on NA all think they should be treated like royalty when they can barely get 100 people to watch them. The quality difference between the EU and NA CC’s is ridiculous. If they had a bigger reach and were overall better at their streams maybe people would be more willing to help them.
Boy you really know your stuff. Junkers was the only streamer there, I wonder why Rita didn’t pick a different streamer? Honestly…
Not strictly true, only 1 streamer known as a streamer was there, I know EarWaxian streams a fair chunk.
Did they not even attempt to contact you Blue?
Nolan was also there. I am pretty sure it was Junkers was the one that contacted Rita.
Actually Nolan1243 was there as well.
Actually Nolan1243 was there as well but those were the only 2 there that I recognized.
LemmingRush was there, too. I bet almost everybody there has a twitch account, seeing all the ‘pro’ players, if you catch my drift.
@TheHubGames no, they did not. Not that I would have gone under an NDA, anyway.
The Club Wargaming streamers were Nolan and Junkers. Rita talked to me for a brief time, but it was to compare answers it seems to the salty answers.. salty answers ruled. My experience was great knowing this was NOT a Dev Ops meeting. I watched Jingles and Rita Cyprus and Tankfest videos with Victor to gauge questions asked before. Knowing it would not be detailed like their Cyprus trip, this was a meet and greet with a short period of time to talk. After arriving in SanFran and finding out how many of us got invited, we were sad a bit knowing we ALL could not ask the number of questions we could, but at least ask a few during the main interview on camera.. and more after. We did send in a list of questions knowing Victor .. along with probable WG lawyers to make sure things not leaked early enough would check over the questions. When Paul had the list of questions, it was opportunity for those who had specific question to ask it on camera.. or let someone else ask it.. it was not required for everyone to be on camera. Anyways.. before Victor we got to play some experimental tanks and only then they mentioned we could take pictures, but not share them until 1) got approval from MeatheadMiltia or 2) once info was released publicly about them.
Anywho.. yes it was sad we didnt get as many questions. It did become a blunder when they had to reshoot with some failed audio, but overall I got to ask many questions even after the first shoot to Victor and he was open to discuss them. Again, as CEO he may know more the overall atmosphere of the games and plays himself, but the Devs would be better for detailed game mechanics. Though Victor still shared what he thought and would bring back to Minsk with.
I enjoyed it and WG hospitality to fly us out there in short accord and be there to ask questions.
I understand the part with the failed audio, being travelled to the place can be all fancy and that but you were there to represent the community, not to be used as actors/bodies for the camera. What kinda of Q&A is that when the Qs are being controlled? That is wrong in so many levels.
Without a larger base of players (active especially) how do you expect CC streamers to pull large numbers? Just logistics. And maybe this article goes beyond the CC players and shows the overall reasons that NA servers have such small numbers that continue to slow. And you have 2 servers spanning 3-4 hour difference, so while I may be watching Junkers stream at 10PM, it’s 1AM on the east coast, where there are 3x the active players as the West server. Again, it’s logistics.
I hate to mention this, but it sounds like you have a problem with JunkersHiryu, whether it’s personal, or as a player, or both. It doesn’t matter who the source was – the facts don’t change about the situation. And, you can’t blame the CC players who went to the headquarters for the meeting as if they should be simply honored to be invited and should be quiet that they were used as props for advertising. I’m sure anyone would welcome the opportunity to talk directly to Victor, even new players, but especially veterans of the game who have invested time, money and effort (even if they are making a little now from streaming).
Here’s the clue that they are not good at their job at WGNA – they should have KNOWN that this would be the response. Did they think that they all would be quiet about it and just go back to what they were doing, while WGNA uses their likeness for advertising? I ask this because i’m in the advertising field and the first thing you don’t do is piss of your social media connections.
But alas, this is only my personal opinion based on what I’ve seen in my short time in the community here in NA and also EU. SO I could be way off base
Keep on making guesses… Like I said, multiple people were interviewed, that were and weren’t in the meeting.
This is also how corporate America works. Truthfully its no different in any other sector. Lies and manipulation.
That is how they want corporations to work here in the EU as well, but luckily the lobbyists failed to change the consumer rights in that way AND false advertising is illegal.
But Americans and Europeans are very different, especially those blokes from Texas. But what should I say… You are gonna vote for Trump anyway and he will make you pay for it. I guess something like that was his slogan.
That’s a rather fatuous argument. Sure, there are some cultural differences between Europe and America, yet when I examined the story and compared it to what I’ve seen in the game, it underlines a rather significant problem with how this (NA) WG office handles the community. If you think that the US is some sort of homogeneous bloc that cannot think for itself or have differences of opinion, you have not been paying attention at all.
Bringing politics into it was not only a low blow, its inaccurate and reveals your general ignorance regarding what the social and cultural realities are in the United States. How Texas enters into any of this is beyond me to comprehend, unless of course, you’re meaning to be condescending and imply there aren’t decent people from Texas. That’s akin to saying that there aren’t decent people from Romania because Nicolae Ceaușescu was a dickbag. I’d be just as wrong as you are for trying to make some sort of correlation based on a frivolous observation. Similarly, the same could be applied to any nation, if one had a particularly bigoted and narrow perspective.
Thankfully, I do not share your condescension for other nations and cultures, but my goodness do you make it tempting to sink to such an unwarranted level of arrogance.
I wouldn’t say every sector, but it is still spreading like a plague. (We were supposed to be the land of the free. What happened?). For example 343i started off Halo 5 development by calling in some of the biggest names in the community, having them play with the new Forge mapmaker system and see what they like, what they don’t and what they need. However though if you’ve paid any attention to the game’s news it’s been a mixed bag of reactions all around as (by my calculations) some up in corporate said, Nope, can’t be that experimental after the MMC failure. Throttle it back and play it safe this round (thus the bait and switch). Maybe they’ll get the hint by Halo 6
You exiled the soicalists
I don’t know if I follow. Care to expand?
Disconcerting but not unexpected. Yesss men
Considering that Paul Barnett works there, I’m not surprised by disaster that NA is experiencing. Paul Barnett is one of the people responsible for the neck breaking disaster, that was Warhammer Online: The Age of Reckoning. The single Dev Log video where he basically told the one faction to “learn to play” after severely nerfing most the classes and started the avalanche that inevitably resulted in the death of that game.
Please do share more.
wait. so you’re telling me WG NA hired a gook that fucked up a Warhammer game
that can’t be right…..sounds like a short spell of insanity to me
Thanks Rita for sharing this. I can ‘hear’ how Viktor is leaving WG NA with the internal statement “This should buy us some more time to milk these idiots before they all leave…”
Hi Rita,
this is strangely exactly what I expected WG to do. I know you have more experience with them than I do, because I only co-worked on the bothunter mod and on the riggingate stuff. But to be fair to WG they are good at announcing stuff and PR in general and average at actually doing what they announce. They manage to make a few great pictures and a nice looking video of a feature that obviously sucks. And these flaws are quite often so obvious that it takes a decent person 5 minutes to find out.
That is why I do not understand why these people join the WG PR campaign, they could have said ‘screw you’. It is just a question of integrity – yes, it does not pay your bills.
That is in the end why former members of these projects and me changed our tactics. When there is a new exploitable feature we do the following AFTER we made sure that we are definitely right.
1. take stick
2. poke WG
Making shitty PR and getting to game magazines is the only way to change stuff and it is a shame that you rejected for instance the riggingate article. But you are dependent on WG’s preview tanks to boost your clicks…
Media whore 😉
PS:
No offense intended.
Lol, I’m Club Wargaming in NA wot blitz…. It seems like other servers are listened to more in the blitz world, I guess it’s just because most of the players are Russian… Our staff, (CC_Sly and Senator_Ratbat and NikoPower) always are there for us to answer questions and get us involved in the community. It’s very organized and professionally handled by them for the 12 or so of us in the system. Sound like the PC community has it MUCH worse than NA wot blitz. Forums are so much more friendly for blitz, it’s crazy.
Generally speaking, newer games and games with less pop usually go through a phase in which the community is relatively open, inviting, and self policing. As time progresses, this usually changes for the worse. Hopefully for Blitz, it stays rather tame and well organized. But as for PC WoT, I’m subscribed to 5 youtubers and watch 3 streamers, all of them are EU (except Zeven, glad to see Rita pointing him out, though he “ums” a lot), though I live in NA and play solely NA. I watch the EU CC’s so much because they seem a lot more organized, a lot more professional, and seem to actually be given information; where as the NA CC’s tend to veer towards the opposite.
I have included my thoughts on this article in this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/4e0k6j/my_side_of_the_wargaming_america_visit_with_victor/
Interesting read. But in all honesty Rita, community contributors and streamers are not the best choice for inviting to these sort of meetings. I agree they put a lot of time into producing content, but these meetings are not about content, it’s about problems and solutions in the game. WG already know the problems in their game, they need to invite people to these meetings that can bring them *solutions*, not only list the problems that WG is already aware of. For instance, in the meeting in Cyprus, how many mentioned any *solutions* to fixing arty, balancing, RNG etc? From what I heard in that video the majority of people in that meeting agreed that arty was completely fine… I mean WTF? Also, how many community contributors take part in end game content such as clan wars? I don’t know one yet. The title community contributor is something you gain as a thanks for the time you put into contributing with content, and not something that should give you automatic privileges to meetings like this. WG should invite a wide variety of different people that enjoy different parts of the game, and most important; players that have shown that they can not only list problems, but also provide good *solutions* to them.
NewMultiShow is an EU (PL exsactly) CC, a WGL player in PENTA team and a FAME member who regularly plays CW. That is the one guy I can think off
Did he get invited to the Cyprus meeting?
Sure, invite few fame cunts to learn all about rigging and using illegal mods.
Isn’t it an indicator of how detached WG NA is, if they can’t find community contributors that can provide something meaningful to the discussion?
Yes, but why specifically community contributors? They got their title because they stream or produce youtube material, that is quite disconnected from designing parts of a game. In all honesty I very rarely see community contributors sharing suggestions on the forum. IMHO WG should invite players to these meetings that they see have been active in the forum about good ideas/solutions that has got good feedback from the rest of the community. For instance, WG EU didn’t make much better invitations to Cyprus either, what was discussed there? 5 mins into the video the majority agreed that arty is fine (!) and then 50% of the meeting seemed to only bring up overpriced bundles…
What’s your server? EU I assume?
Yes, EU.
I can see your point of view but the reason why I find streamers/youtubers (and in my case, which appears to have been the exception, blogger) to appear in this meetings is that we have bigger communities behind us, we listen to the voice of many, not just ours.
Yes, but WG should, atleast IMO already be aware of the issues, as it’s basicly the same issues that players have been complaining about for the last 1-2 years if not even more. What WG actually needs is solutions to these problems. How many detailed suggestions where brought up during the Cyprus meeting? Now I’m not saying that community contributors can’t come up with suggestions, but there’re already some awsome design suggestions to some of the most important problems in WoT, why not invite these players and let them present their own suggestions on the meeting so that WG can get some inspiration to how to solve these issues?
Uff.. I have no idea actually how many (on and off record), like I said, we spent an entire day speaking of problems and giving suggestions and giving feedback to WG because they also gave us ideas that the devs were discussing and what we though about them. I personally read hundreds of comments made in RSR and not just that, did some searching on the forums and Reddit for people’s opinion and tried to give them to Cyprus… one of the reasons also that Cyprus asked to not bullshit is because how little info EU/NA sends them (blogs like RSR are the only way that they often find out about the shit the otther offices are doing, Cyprus incentives me to speak of this things actually), for multiple time I had to send info in because some of the staff is too lazy or puts their personal preferences above the players happiness.
It was a while ago I watched the uncut video and I didn’t watch the entire video as it was a lot of talk about the premium shop bundles, so I might have forgot some of the details, in that case it’s my fault. I just remember that it was said early in the video that arty was not consided such a big of a deal, which made me go “WTF :O” haha… Do you have any good contacts that you can send suggestions to and do you get any response from them of what they think about the suggestion?
Is this supposed to surprise us after years of literal silence on anything NA says? I may as well learn Russian and move to Europe if I want to actually be heard.
Basically everyone should just give up on the official forums, since it’s obvious no one is listening there.
Read the other side of the story before you jump on the hate wagon. Rita is becoming more and more of a tabloid writer who misinforms casual players who don’t know about the details than a writer who was supposed to provide constructive unbiased content regarding the game itself. Extremely disappointing that you had to stoop this low to get attention.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/4e0k6j/my_side_of_the_wargaming_america_visit_with_victor/
Who the fuck that whiny attention whores, who call themselves “community content managers” or whatever, think they are?! For wargaming, they are as important as pimple on the ass, especially in this time, when wargaming is sinking to the bottom…
And here you are whining and seeking attention.
You must be real dickhead, argumenting like this… I am not representing any company nor promoting any product.
WORLD OF WARPLANES.
I must admit, I can’t but scratch my head at this.
Not the article per se, but the people who would perpetuate such a senseless disregard for the community. It’s an awful business practice, the community is the game, they’re the ones that can spread the word, good or bad, to other consumers about their experiences with WG NA. It should be a proactive, positive effort from them to make these people happy, because it means that they’ll spread the good word to the rest of gaming community and bring in new players and new ideas that might make the whole game better for everyone.
One cannot rest on their laurels and expect everything to go well, yet that seems to be precisely what WG NA intends to do.
Well said Rita, really well said. Thanks for making this post
https://www.reddit.com/r/WorldofTanks/comments/4e0k6j/my_side_of_the_wargaming_america_visit_with_victor/ I’ll just leave this here for anyone wanting another side to what happened in the meeting.
Rita = https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/Don_Quijote_Illustration_by_Gustave_Dore_VII.jpg
Great post Rita.
Given the fates of some previous NA Community Support members, I wouldn’t dare do more than toe the line either.
Game is not made in NA. who cares…
I agree with you Rita WGNA is useless, we always receive everything late (We still have not received the 2nd let alone 3rd set of Arpeggio missions in WoWs). I also honestly believe that they don’t even bother looking into the complaints and suggestions that people make, and honestly I think you people in Europe should tell this to WGEU and make North America like your own. Either way keep this blog up and keep making some great articles.
Also forgot to mention this but “Ashtray on a Motorbike?” are you sure that Jingles isn’t rubbing of on you a bit? Not that it’s a bad thing, just noting the title sounds like a quote that Jingles would use.
‘murica
I was hoping WG would get better but so much for that. Just finished uninstalling.
I read Paul Barnett and understand so much better why WGNA is the way it is. He was the lead at WarHammer online under Mark Jacobs that screwed that game up so bad.EA poured 4 million into WH and it was absolutely terrible for the first year, was decent for a year or so and then they completely ruined it and end up closing 4 years after launch. Now Paul is here……
wait Rita. you’re telling me that these NA guys are more incompetent than EU guys in terms of community management?
and here i thought they’re just a buncha idiots. guess this is terminal. almost feels like….Trump.
all hail glorious SEA server
Pretty much.
scary o_o T_T
So basically some Youtubers felt that their butts were not sufficiently kissed by WG? OK. I suspect many of these Youtubers have an inflated sense of actual worth.
No, the butts work themselves really hard to get content out for you and WG NA promises them things which doesnt deliver and then uses some of them on a PR stunt.
“…and WG NA promises them things…”
I get it, so they only make videos because they are getting free stuff from Wargaming? Then when they don’t get their free stuff they come whining to you.
“Inflated sense of actual worth” is right.
no, they make videos because they enjoy making videos and enjoy contributing to the community. People like to see new tanks, WG has the power to give press accounts (example), they say that will give and then never do… and then when they do they dont warn people that they actually gave the vehicles to people have to figure it out… imagine someone with 200 plus tanks in the garage, it can be easily mislooked
Oh Joy another wave of forum bans on NA /face palm
WGNA: a bucket of piss being passed on as Granny’s peach tea
I saw that this morning. Not surprised
Paul Barnett. He could wreck Zork. *pfffft*
First off, while this whole WGNAleaks is rather interesting…
For the love of god, Rita, PLEASE ask Jingles to proof-read your articles!
Why? You must read the article in the sexy Rita accent 😉
That sounds like EU PR
Interesting article. On my channel, which is mostly built around WoT, ive been fairly critical of the game even though I like it a lot and want to see it improve. I dont troll the forums and haveno idea who any of WG staff are. Ive built a subscriber base to 15k subs and i am not a CC and was only once contacted by an external group representing them to get access to a press account. They promised me a Scorpion which I never received and that was it.
So Lemmingrush goes with 1.5k subs? . I may not be the biggest channel representing NA youtube, I dont stream, but Im not aware of anybody other than Sidestrafe who covers wot in Na that has more than 3-4 k, like Psionic Arrow, zeven, anfield….etc.
Ive seen CC in the cw community and been in clans with them. But have no idea what they actually contribute. It doesnt surprise me that something like this would happen. Ive been treated much better by Aw staff in general and had a good relationship with their community personel.
Good job btw with your blog Rita. It helps all us youtubers who follow the game.
Interesting article. On my channel, which is mostly built around WoT, ive been fairly critical of the game even though I like it a lot and want to see it improve. I dont troll the forums and haveno idea who any of WG staff are. Ive built a subscriber base to 15k subs and i am not a CC and was only once contacted by an external group representing them to get access to a press account. They promised me a Scorpion which I never received and that was it.
So Lemmingrush goes with 1.5k subs? . I may not be the biggest channel representing NA youtube, I dont stream, but Im not aware of anybody other than Sidestrafe who covers wot in Na that has more than 3-4 k, like Psionic Arrow, zeven, anfield….etc.
Ive seen CC in the cw community and been in clans with them. But have no idea what they actually contribute. It doesnt surprise me that something like this would happen. Ive been treated much better by Aw staff in general and had a good relationship with their community personel.
Good job btw with your blog Rita. It helps all us youtubers who follow the game.
Shame that good contributors like Zeven are getting ignored over in NA. Personally I’ve thought the content produced by MeatheadMatilda and co. on WGNA youtube channel has been really decent of late (‘free garage slot’ etc), way better and more in touch with players than the weirdly voiced (I assume Russian translated?) vehicle and map guides and shizz you get from WGEU.
Interesting article, Rita, as usual a good read 🙂 I do have a comment about the broad strokes painted by the title of your article. I am part of Club Wargaming in NA as a CC for WoT BLITZ, live streaming my Platoon Sunday events weekly. My experience with WG NA staff on the BLITZ side has been very supportive and positive, even helping me with information for the videos I make for WG Asia as a CC while Asia slept peacefully (time zones, they screw stuff up haha). They even line you up with their own staff creatives for tips/tricks/advice. WG Asia same thing, super supportive and helpful (you go Ozan!) by the way.
So, would it be fair to say that this particular experience with WG NA, for WoTPC, wasn’t excellent, as opposed to painting all of WG NA with the toilet brush?
Again, thanks for the great blog, always something interesting to see here! 🙂
Hughbert Jass
You nailed it right on the head with this one. I used to be far more active over in NA than lately because of issues like this. Rather than putting my face on camera constantly, I’d do things like write entire developmental series on their forums, and go to their live events and mingle with the staff there rather than run around begging for swag. I’ve let it be known to the moderators, and even to SerB and Nick (The Chieftain) face-to-face in the same room that I’d be interested in being a community manager to some degree. Even way back then it fell on deaf ears – and you could tell that NA’s staff were on a really short leash. I can’t recall seeing even some of their original streamer staff these days. I stuck by them almost since inception because I had believed in the branding, but the branding does not believe in the community so my participation had dropped off almost right in line with the veteran playerbase and server population as of the past 12-18 months. Damn shame… they had the perfect recipe for a Shepherd’s pie, and they decided to make it with dog meat.
well if NA isnt a strong revenue resource then WGNA will represent that effectively a P.O box
I had left WGNA for awhile I had no idea things had reached this point. I don’t see any reason to come back.