Blizzard President explains why Blitzchung ruling was \u201cimmature\u201d Hearthstone star, \u201cimmature\u201d and \u201cchallenging.\u201d Blitzchung was initially hit with a year-long ban, and had two seasons of prize money rescinded, for publicly declaring support for Hong Kong during the Hearthstone Grandmasters, before having it stripped back to just six months. Weeks later, Blizzard\u2019s president stepped in front of hundreds at BlizzCon 2019 and apologized for how the company handled the situation, promising to \u201cdo better moving forward\u201d and calling on fans to hold them accountable through their actions. Now, Brack has opened up on his own thoughts on the banning and Blizzard\u2019s reaction, and admitted to the Esports Observer that the company showed \u201csome immaturity\u201d in dealing with what quickly spiraled into a global issue. \u201cWe have some immaturity as an organization in terms of how to think about (this) and how to deal with it,\u201d Brack admitted. \u201cNo one had any idea this was going to blow up to be an international incident that it has become. It\u2019s been a challenging month for sure.\u201d While the ban for Blitzchung \u2014 and the casters who had attempted to duck behind their desk during the post-match interview \u2014 came down in just a matter of days, Brack admitted he would have \u201ctaken more time\u201d if he could live the moment through again. \u201cWe should have paused, we should have been more thoughtful about it, and we should have taken some time,\u201d he said of the speed of the punishment. \u201cAnd then tried to think about how do we want to move forward, and what\u2019s the five-year decision as opposed to what\u2019s this decision? What are the principles that we want to establish for the next five years? That didn\u2019t happen.\u201d \u201cWhen I think about what I\u2019m most unhappy about, it\u2019s two things,\u201d Brack said in his BlizzCon apology. \u201cThe first one is we didn\u2019t live up to the high standards that we set for ourselves. \u201cAnd second, we failed in our purpose. And for that I am sorry, and I accept accountability. We will do better going forward. But our actions are going to matter more than any of these words.\u201d Brack also clarified a number of things following his statements at BlizzCon: that the six-month ban would stand for Blitzchung, that players are still allowed to use social media to discuss politics, and that Blizzard\u2019s infamous Weibo post which suggested the ban was aimed at \u201cdefending the pride\u201d of China was not approved by the company\u2019s US offices. \u201cWe did not authorize it,\u201d he told PC Gamer. \u201cWe would not have approved it had they asked.\u201d And now, Blizzard has a long way to go to redeem themselves in the eyes of the Western audiences that turned on them following the bannings and statements. Protests across BlizzCon already showed that people aren\u2019t planning on dropping the issue. Brack said he knows this, and admitted that the whole US division understands completely that they have a long path ahead of them to if they want to make things right. \u201cThere\u2019s some work for us to do, to align rules and to think through all that and think about how we\u2019re going to handle this going forward,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this\u2026 it\u2019s the first time for us, really. And so it exposed some immaturity for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blizzard President explains why Blitzchung ruling was \u201cimmature\u201d Hearthstone star, \u201cimmature\u201d and \u201cchallenging.\u201d Blitzchung was initially hit with a year-long ban, and had two seasons of prize money rescinded, for publicly declaring support for Hong Kong during the Hearthstone Grandmasters, before having it stripped back to just six months. Weeks later, Blizzard\u2019s president stepped in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-79302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79302","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79302"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79302\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}