Uff, things are still not going well behind the scenes at Blizzard. After all the scandals of the past two years, another has now come to light and one of them is the firing of a senior World of Warcraft developer.
To be clear right away, Brian Birmingham, one of the lead developers of WoW Classic, was basically not at fault. Birmingham had only protested against a personnel practice at Blizzard, which is now supported by a report Bloomberg became public.
It’s about a system of employee evaluation and the fact that there seems to be a predetermined quota of what percentage of employees have to get bad evaluations – regardless of whether they actually do a good job or not. A corresponding evaluation also has a negative impact on remuneration and opportunities for advancement. The quota should be around five percent, the order apparently did not come from Blizzard boss Ybarra, but from the parent company, which Birmingham calls ABK in a long tweet.
I wasn’t intending to make this public, but apparently its in the news already, so I’d at least like to set the record straight. I am no longer an employee of Blizzard Entertainment, though I would return if allowed to, so that I could fight the stack-ranking policy from inside.
— Brian Birmingham💙 (@BrianBirming) January 24, 2023
In an email to employees, Birmingham wrote of his frustration at being forced to downgrade an employee from the average rating of “successful” to “in development” in order to meet the company’s target quota. “When the team leaders asked why we had to do this, the World of Warcraft directors explained that while they didn’t agree with it, the reasons given by management were that it was important to see the worst players among Pushing to make sure everyone keeps growing,” Birmingham wrote in the email.
According to Birmingham, this ranking encourages competition between employees, mutual sabotage of work, the desire to find underperforming teams where one can be the best performing employee, and ultimately it erodes trust and destroys creativity. He refuses to continue working at Blizzard as long as this regulation exists. After his comments circulated internally, Blizzard fired Birmingham.
A statement from Blizzard or Activision Blizzard has not yet been made, but the matter should not be over with Birmingham’s dismissal.
A new World of Warcraft Classic trailer previews the highly anticipated Ulduar raid from the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The new raid will start on January 19th.
