Because firing someone for what Price did is not the same as firing employee's without cause while being the target of a misogynistic hate campaign.
Price was the target of a misogynistic hate campaign. The @s towards here and other female devs is 99% GamerGaters and about 1% Guild Wars players. This is their standard mode of operation, they suddenly show up no matter the size of the community when they finally corner a target they've been chasing.
Anyone claiming GamerGate has no involvement here is either hopeless naive, or a GamerGater runniing the ol' "wasn't me" script. It'd be great if the administration here didn't allow the second one to be done, but for a forum founded around the concept of believing woman that have been harassed, it sure seems to have turned it's back on them already and now you have to carefully manage what you say along the lines of the ol "Republicans buy shoes too" shlock. Interesting how in women's issues threads, the women here have to fucking do everything themselves with a bunch of men telling them something isn't happening, with no help from the administration, and the result is Era is losing multiple long time women posters
every week because they are fucking tired of having to "careful" with their honesty and viewpoints so that it doesn't hurt the feelings of Era's ad clickers.
And save me the ol' "the team here has ____ on it and we care". Words don't mean fuck all. Actions do. It's been tracked for a while now that this forum cares more about throwing out warnings for console wars posts, but does weird shit like only ban misogynistic for 3 days. You can be more transparent without also allowing people to metagame you like Kasparov playing a 5 year old in Tic Tac Toe.
That people even offering the idea that her firing occuring in a vacuum not only receives oxygen here on Era, let alone results in honest call outs of that resulting in decent posters getting warned for it, speaks to how much this forum has failed those it supposedly cared about when founded. I am in the thick of this in twitter right now; male devs going hard against these people do not get a mob on us, even when we're VERY blunt, but female devs that literally just have their company in their bio are getting DMs, mail and email and voice mails sent to their employers at them, hoping to get lucky and another spineless CEO will toss them. Women like Hazel were under the radar, and GamerGate didn't lock onto her until they started keyword searching for tweets supporting Price
So, let's review:
- There is an active, prolonged campaign against women in the games industry.
- This campaign is actively managed and participated in by GamerGate, and can be confirmed by simply searching their subreddit.
- ERA has done a really, REALLY poor job of not giving GamerGate a free megaphone here, proved by facts and community feedback in the relevant community threads, because your "process" is so easily metagamed that I've almost wanted to become a troll account just to prove how broken it is because your moderators hands are so fucking tied not even Houdini could ban an obvious troll account
- Developers are not your property, are not on the clock 24/7, do not owe you a smile, and do not owe you the response you think you deserve
- The things people are claiming these devs on twitter owe them can all be obtained through the company's official support methods, you don't need to go after devs personally
- Critiquing games is okay, constructive critcism is
great. Asking for someone to be fired because your feelings got hurt is bullshit, especially when male devs do it all the time and don't get a peep, and a bunch of people actually praise or like smartass male devs (see how many people brag about being blocked by Kamiya) while female devs doing the same are "misrepresenting their company" makes you immediately suspect as to your actual reasons for supporting Price's firing. As it should.
Thanksfully, the industry is about 90% on Price's side on this matter. O'Brian has done more damage to the industry as a whole than the mob could have ever done to his company. It's so fucking ironic that people want devs to be more open and "honest", and when they are, they want them to go back to being PR-laden call center script interactions because some people can't seem to remember that gaming is a hobby, not a goddamn identity and lifestyle.