As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
As the title suggests, over the last couple of days there’s been an influx of doomer comments over the SKG petition. While it’s fine to disagree, I’m finding it suspicious that there weren’t comments like this posted a week or 2 ago
I’ve made some comments critical of how relentlessly PirateSoftware is being harassed and how annoying it is and how distracting from the actual movement it is.
Nothing wrong with the petition itself, and I haven’t noticed any negative astroturfing about it.
PirateSoftware is being harassed for a whole lot more than just his SKG misinformation campaign.
Perhaps, but the most I’ve seen are some tenuous “evidence” about him being a little selfish in WoW, not finishing games, or using his dad’s influence to land a job at Blizzard. Neither of those are particularly bad, and certainly don’t warrant the negative attention he got. It really seems like people are looking for dirt just because they don’t like his position on SKG.
Then again, I didn’t hear about him until he came out against it, and I saw he defended Godot, which is pretty rad. That’s the extent of my knowledge about him, other than the handful of hit pieces against him people posted here once he got negative attention.
I support SKG and don’t think PirateSoftware is a bad dude. I say just let him be, and don’t watch his content if you don’t like it.
The SKG thing was just the latest L in the series he’s been collecting for a while now. Similar to his wow raid there was another MMO when his party wiped due to someone accidentally aggro’ing a mob. He did the usually “that was moronic, whoever did that is kicked from the raid, etc”. Then he reviews the footage showing it was him that aggro’d and completely 180s, saying the wipe wasn’t on him. As evidenced in his SKG video, guy is super happy saying nasty shit about people but cries toxicity when it’s reciprocated. Guy just can’t help himself. Has to be right on everything and when it’s proven he isn’t, either doubles down or just simply denies being wrong.
Even the wow roaching thing, it isn’t so much the raid but the demanding everyone listen to his side before talking over others when it’s their turn and then leaving before they can have there say and tripling down. I used to appreciate some of his content but given his pattern of behaviour, including bullying, the negative attention he’s gotten is pretty deserved.
The WoW thing wasn’t about being selfish, it’s just one of a dozen or more incidents of him being a narcissistic bully who screws other people over and can’t take accountability for anything.
And nobody is giving him too much shit for simply being a nepo baby. The Blizzard thing is about him being a fraud who’s been caught repeatedly lying and misleading people about his credentials and work experience in order to appear like an expert. He uses his time at Blizzard like a magic wand to expel criticism, going so far as to misrepresent what he even did at Blizzard to appear like an authority when people criticize him.
The backlash against him has been well earned by bad behavior over a long period of time, most of which involves him treating other people poorly for his own benefit.
Isn’t that par for the course for streamers/youtubers though? I’ve seen people claim to be “indie game devs” when they’ve never actually released a game, or if they did, it made so few sales as to be little more than a hobby.
After some very quick research about him, it seems his dad helped him get a job as a QA at Blizzard, and then he worked his way up to doing something cybersecurity related. That doesn’t scream “nepo baby” to me, that’s just a dad being awesome helping their kid get their foot in the door, and my dad would do the same for me if I expressed any interest in his career. If he was given a project lead role or something right out of school, then I’d agree w/ your assessment, but a QA a not a very glamorous job, he’s probably testing some boring component of their stack. Likewise, cybersecurity also isn’t very glamorous, he probably ran pen-tests or something on their servers (maybe not even game servers), it’s a decent job, but not something that would give him any authority since he’s not making important gaming-related decisions.
That said, having worked with important people probably gives him some valuable insight, and I’d like to see him expound on why he thinks things are problematic. All I saw in the videos I watched is some hand-waving and inaccurate statements (i.e. studios would need to release code or some nonsense), which tells me he didn’t actually read the petition. I didn’t watch the full thing, but apparently he read the FAQ where Ross explains what the petition is not about, and he probably just skimmed that. I think that’s unfortunate, since he actually has industry experience and might have something valuable to add to the conversation.
Again, I haven’t watched much of his content, but I did watch what I think was a relevant part of the original VOD. Here’s how I saw the WoW thing (I have never played WoW, so I’m probably missing something):
That sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe he could’ve said it better (seemed to be playing the “cool and collected streamer” role), but I think his actual actions were reasonable.
But maybe there’s something he could have done. I don’t know WoW well enough to know what options he would have had, but from my perspective, returning to help would’ve just meant he’d die too. And my understanding is that in this game mode, that represents a lot of investment, since the character would be deleted upon death, so it makes sense to be careful. I hear they worked it out after the stream, so his team apparently didn’t think his behavior was all that bad.
And then I look at the reaction. I see several articles slamming him for his behavior in that VOD, and a lot of the backlash citing that as justification for hating him. That seems way over the top, so I think the only rational takeaway is that other streamers are making a big deal out of very little, and people are latching onto it w/o actually looking at the facts and taking what they read for granted.
That’s why I hesitate to jump on the bandwagon. Maybe he’s as bad as everyone says, but I haven’t seen enough actual evidence of that. Each time someone has provided some evidence, I looked at it and didn’t see anything damning, just normal streamer behavior. I think people are making a big deal about it because they strongly disagree w/ his take on something else (say, SKG) and are digging for dirt.
So yeah, that’s my take.
The WoW things is the most well known, be he had a similar behavior in another game, Ashes of Creation i think. Doesn’t take accountability for anything. Cannot say sorry.
There’s also stuff coming out here cheated on his former wife. And then was a massive manipulative dick towards the person that he was cheating on with.
Or that all his previous credentials are fabricated. Like he doesn’t like giving details what he’s actually done in previous jobs. He’ll just state that he works somewhere and then let you fill in the blank. Or passing off what someone else did at the job as his own.
In his own channel he purposely misrepresent the recent things about him. And coding Jesus actually put out a video showing that, when he tries to reach out immediately gets filtered and banned. But meanwhile Thor is telling people that all he had to do was try to reach out…
Have you seen a popular streamer that does? If they do, it’s more like “sorry you feel that way.” To get a decent sized following, you need other people to see you as some kind of authority, and most authorities don’t apologize, they do some amount of damage control and move on.
That’s a big part of why I generally avoid popular streamers/youtubers. Most of my favorite YT channels have like 100-500k subs (and several well below 100k), and I only sub to a few w/ over 1M, and most of those are on the more humble end of the spectrum (e.g. Gamers Nexus). I don’t jive well with wannabe authority figures, so I’m not surprised PirateSoftware didn’t appeal to me. In fact, most of those talking head channels aren’t interesting, I want facts, not opinions, and I do validate the more important facts.
Why would he? From what I gather (from a random wiki), his dad helped him get a QA job at Blizzard, and then he moved up the ranks to cybersecurity. I don’t think anyone would lie about that, since those aren’t “glamorous” jobs, but they are solid jobs. So my level in trust in what he says takes that into account, whatever he learned about the AAA gaming industry he learned by being present, not by being in any impactful role.
That guy rubs me the wrong way too (assuming you’re talking about Cr1TiKaL/penguinz0). I’ve gotten through maybe 2 min of one of his videos.
Pirate has done a lot to earn hate over the years from stealing and manipulating a child back in second life to make a quick buck. Screwing over and generally being a major asshole in eve online that screwed a lot of people out of very real money.
Being a general twat, gaslighting and trying to get his community to harass people irl over the wow debacle.
Lying and giving objectively bad information over development and grifting on twitch.
He’s done everything a twat really can do online short of actual physical harm.
People have grudges with him going back like 15 years. This is not his first rodeo.
Ok but… That’s the correct way to play EVE online.
Really? From the 5-10 min of his videos that I watched over the last 2 weeks when trying to figure out why people dislike him, I didn’t see any of that nonsense. That’s really too bad if true, because he seemed like a pretty level-headed guy who was a pretty laid-back gamer (no yelling or other form of aggression, which is unfortunately common among streamers). I watched some clips of:
That’s about it. He didn’t seem like a toxic person who routinely trolls and screws people in games, just kind of your average, run-of-the-mill streamer who’s a little low-key but still out there to create content to get people to watch.
Then again, he could totally be the jerk you make him out to be. It’s really hard to tell what’s a legitimate explanation of things and what’s people looking for a reason to slander him because they don’t like his take on SKG. The couple of articles I read seemed to mostly be the latter, but they also didn’t mention most of what you did here. So idk, I guess I haven’t made up my mind about him, but honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth digging into because I’m not into his content anyway.
There’s the problem: you won’t get evidence of a murder if you ask the murderer for it.
He streams a lot, so the things he says or does are spread out, especially if you’re only looking for noticeably damning stuff like the rim job related rant against SKG.
His confidence and speechcraft makes him very good at steering conversations by lying or deflecting, as long as you trust what he says.
Good places to start looking may be his conversation with Dr. K or Ross’ “The end of Stop Killing Games” on Youtube, both are hosted by level headed people;
I can only assume you haven’t seen the latter, because at the very least it makes it very apparent why people dislike him.
This one? He sounds like an awesome dude according to his bio, but I’ve never seen anything by him, I’ll check him out.
And I haven’t seen any conversations between him and Ross. I did see snippets of his original reaction, where he seemed to completely misunderstand the petition, and his follow-up, unhinged rant, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt on the latter because he had apparently gotten a lot of negative attention (swatting attempts, calls for him to leave the publisher he was at, and random negative remarks on his own games), so I think it’s quite possible his attack on Ross was an emotional reaction to that negative attention, and not level-headed attack on Ross (I’ve seen nothing to suggest Ross is anything other than an awesome guy).
So my opinion on PirateSoftware is relatively neutral. He seems to be on the better end of the streamer range, which isn’t saying much (lots of popular streamers are pretty toxic). I don’t think he’s anyone to look up to, and I wish he’d either have Ross on to discuss the petition or thoroughly read and understand it so he can elucidate his opposition to it, both of which I think would be helpful for his audience to form an actual opinion instead of borrowing his. But maybe he’s on the worse end of that spectrum, I don’t know, since again, I’ve only watched a few minutes of his content and he seemed like your average streamer who exaggerates their credentials and leans into “content,” and I’m not surprised clowning on people is part of that.
I literally had not heard of him a month ago, so I’m missing a ton of context. However, nothing I’ve seen makes me want to watch more of his content (he’s definitely not my style), but nothing makes me think he should be “cancelled” or whatever. Aside from some offensive remarks, I don’t think he’s really hurting anyone.
he’s repeatedly refused to talk to ross;
after the first video pirate software uploaded about SKG, ross left a comment offering clarifications and a chance to talk about the petition and surrounding misconceptions.
ross was refused an answer.
then PS uploaded more videos, and streams, with even more misinformation.
ross ignored it at that point and just continued doing his thing, advocating for the petition, giving updates, etc.
then it looked like the petition would fail, so ross decided there’s nothing left to lose by talking about the drama with PS, and lo and behold, suddenly all youtubers and streamers were suuuper onboard, helped spread the drama, and as a consequence SKG reached its goal… because of the drama.
so a net positive overall, but sad that it’s only because drama sells ads on streaming and video sites…really just a dumb state of affairs…
and to be clear: ross wasn’t at all vindictive in his video. frustrated by the situation, yes, but ultimately it was a very fair and sober response.
highly recommend checking it out; from what you said so far, i think you’ll enjoy the level-headed approach ross took!
here’s a link to the vid
You watched 5 minutes of his own verbal diarrhea and formed a full opinion on him?
No, I explicitly said I don’t have a strong opinion on him. I’m not going to knee-jerk follow the hate train just because of a bad take on SKG and a couple of emotional videos where he said some moderately offensive things. Maybe he’s really a bad dude, idk, but I’m not going to jump on the bandwagon.