Kamiya has no place in this discussion. Firstly, he's his own boss and gets to run his company and project its image however he likes. Secondly, Kaniya can be a twat, but he's also quite funny a lot of the time. There's nothing about this situation that makes him a sensible comparison.
It's relevant in the fact that despite making all kinds of coarse and extremely rude comments on his Twitter account all the time, and doing this despite being in a leadership position at PlatinumGames, that it appears to have absolutely no affect whatsoever on the sales of their games one way or the other (and that's also putting aside that some people even find his comments charming and endearing, but regardless of where one falls on that, the point is it definitely does not appear to be factoring into the vast majority of people's purchasing decisions one way or the other).
Now, if some head-honcho at a company like PlatinumGames can get away with that and no one really cares one way or the other, why would someone care one way or the other about how some random writers at ArenaNet interacted on Twitter? If Kamiya can act the way he does on Twitter and the vast majority either seems to not be aware or not care, why would anyone care about infinitely more obscure stuff like this?
Hell, like forget about this type of topic completely for a moment here. Y'know all those cross-play threads that keep popping up, and how there have been like hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of pages on here and other sites discussing whether or not Sony is right or wrong to keep the PS4 from having cross-play with the Xbox One and Switch, and how that keeps popping up? I recall in the midst of one of those discussions seeing a survey that showed, that when most people were asked how they felt about the thing, that most people had no idea what cross-play even was or meant or what the deal with any of that stuff actually was. That most people outside of heavy-hobbyist sites like this simply have no clue about most of this stuff one way or the other to even begin forming any opinions on this type of thing.
And if that's on one of the big controversies-of-the-moment, like the subject of cross-play, then something like this doesn't even begin to compare. If most people have no clue about cross-play or whatever, what some random writer said on Twitter is just so much more obscure and is the type of thing that's way less likely to cross a person's radar. And going back to Kamiya and his antics, that even if people are aware, they typically don't seem to care much one way or the other and it certainly doesn't affect their purchasing decisions in most cases.
So that being the case, that this doesn't seem to be the type of thing that so much as affecting sales or anything in any way, why jump straight toward firing? It just seems so disproportionate to everything. All that seemed to happen was, well, she was human. She misinterpreted a comment and overreacted to it, assuming it was something it wasn't. But that's natural. It happens to all of us. She should have simply been given a chance to apologize and move on, recognizing that fact, and at most having to shut down that personal account entirely to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again if they were really worried about repeat offenses. But firing just appeared to be too much for what actually happened here and how things played out. Yes, it's easy to say that she overreacted. But firing her was itself an overreaction and didn't give a chance to make amends in a way that makes everyone happy and resolves everything without.
That, and it sets up an idea that I'm very comfortable with. That no matter what someone says to you (and yes, I'm aware of what was said in this particular case, but I'm speaking in general here), that the most you can do as a developer on a public account, even if it is something terribly over the line and uncalled for, is just block the person and move on. That developers aren't allowed to well, be human basically, be human beings with feelings and emotions and have emotional reactions to those type of things and also make mistakes and overreact some of the time. Having to just bottle it all up and never being able to say anything just because you're an employee to a company is just insane to me. Particularly, again, going back to people like Kamiya, that companies don't seem to particularly suffer much risk from even their figure-heads, y'know, actually being human beings and acting however they want to act, so why, if that doesn't affect things when even the people at the top react that way, should standards suddenly be different for people at the bottom, who are even less likely to affect such purchasing decisions and the like?
Of course, to be clear, I'm not saying what was said was right or necessary here. All I am saying is that developers are human beings like anyone else and as such should be allowed to make mistakes, as long as they're willing to rectify and owe up to them and apologize and the like when stuff happens and show they've grown. That is, that there are other ways this probably could have happened without jumping to firing anyone, such as such apologies. That them getting fired was the only way to handle this, and that because of that developers just have to take whatever comes their way and never be able to respond, never have so much as a single moment of weakness of make mistakes about people's intentions or anything, and be given the chance to apologize or anything when that happens, and that firing is the one and only answer instead is just something I can't be comfortable with.
