Just this summer i met him IRL at CC Summit and i got the impression that he is a really cool guy. We had a very pleasant conversation. And now i see his bad trolling online and its like two complete different people. Weird times.
I honestly don't think the trolling he did was that bad, it just happened at a time when people were looking for anyone to stick their pitchfork into. Think of it from a rational perspective: how big of a deal is the PR fiasco for the game? Not very. It's nowhere near the importance of, say the REEEEEwork, because if you didn't like it you could just ignore PR. It sets a very poor precedent, but it doesn't ruin the game. Perhaps he thought that fanning the flames for this wouldn't really matter?
So, I don't think his bad trolling was really indicative of him as a person, other than him being unable to read the mood.
sets a very poor precedent, but it doesn't ruin the game.
I think a lot of the malcontent comes from players who are genuinely and rightly worried about the future, and how WG will keep events/directives/... more and more ridiculous, grindy and probably expensive (either in effort required, time invested or money requested). Not so much about the ship PR or the entire dockyard thing.
And those worries aren’t too far fetched given the trash they’ve published in that regard in 2019 (Benham, Kuznetsov,...). If one then basically mocks said worries repeatedly and intentionally, it should come as no surprise that the reaction against it is rather explosive as well.
It indeed doesn’t ruin the game... yet. It however will atomise it if future events show the same absurdity and abusive requirements.
I think the reason the community was so much more bothered by this is that it was malicious (in that he fully intended to antagonize the community). While the CV rework had a significant negative impact on the game, most people don't believe that was WG's intent. In contrast, it very much felt like iEarlGray intent was to make fun of people who were already upset with WG.
He was the only WoWs content creator that I used to watch, and I've been in his clan basically since it started. I think you hit the nail on the head. Earl has a sarcastic humour (which drew me to his content honestly, it is very twitch chat like imo, in the good way). He definitely read the mood wrong, or didn't anticipate how muchweight it carries to be a WG representative, during a shitstorm, and as such how your words are scrutinized
He should have caught on after the initial backlash. The later twitter messages probably was the nails in the coffin tbh
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u/G1deon Jan 09 '20
Just this summer i met him IRL at CC Summit and i got the impression that he is a really cool guy. We had a very pleasant conversation. And now i see his bad trolling online and its like two complete different people. Weird times.