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VALVE fires DOTA tourney host, Gabe Newell calls the host "an ass" publicly on Reddit
- Thread starter Abilidebob
- Start date
He's clearly been fired for his personality which is notorious amongst the Dota community and Valve would have known about this prior to the tournament. After just one day they fired him and the founder called him 'an ass' publicly without explaining why.
You can do this but don't be surprised when you come in for some criticism from the community.
EDIT: Also, one of the top posts on r/DOTA2 is a complaint that the current panel is 'scared'. So this firing has definitely marred this tournament from a punditry standpoint.
'They seem so reserved, like they don't wanna step outta line. Blitz seems legitimately depressed. He doesn't want to be on the couch at all.'
tattooed_dwarf
Member
Why did he have to go public and call him ass though? Why not contact and personally call him that? Especially after Valve themselves asked to keep things in ice?
Yknow in the midst of this I wonder how the Russian and Chinese streams are. In particular the Russian casting team has been less than..politically correct in the past.
yeah I agree, the CSGO Majors are so much better when it comes to presentation.
Dota with the money, CS:Go with the class
But seriously, it's funny how much better the CS panels and commentary are, and even those aren't always great depending on the person, but they have so many people they can rotate through that it just works well.
yeah I agree, the CSGO Majors are so much better when it comes to presentation.
Trickster
Member
Yeah I get that. But what should 2GD do when the hiring process was conducted via the people who told him to be himself, not Gabe?
From I can tell, he was never told to stop doing what he was doing fullstop and go full on boring esports commentator like everyone else is
TharpDaddy
Member
Hell, why call him an ass at all? Doesn't accomplish anything. Cut ties and move on if you don't want him on the broadcast, no need to insult the guy imo.
Valve's corporate structure doesn't designate between writer, HR, programmer, etc. Each person fills whatever role they feel like filling. It's why whenever Valve talk about their employees they never use titles, just the name of the person and the company. Gabe Newell is not the founder and chairman of the board, he is always just 'Gabe Newell, Valve' or 'an employee at Valve'. Hell, when a game dev threatened to murder Gabe Newell..Valve's verbiage was just "...he threatened to kill one of our employees".
So that person is a valve employee that, when a programmer is needed fills the role of programmer, when a PR agent is needed fills the role of PR, when a consumer relations rep is needed fills the role of CR, and when an HR head collector is needed fills the role of HR.
It's part of why their customer service is reportedly so poor: because why elect to work in customer service when you can work on Steam client updates instead? Why manually look at customer service tickets when you can develop an automated system that handles 50+% of the cases? Why manually review and approve new content for the storefront when you can develop a system that offloads that burden onto the community? Why develop HL3 when you can be credited for working on 'games as a service' games that print money instead?
All this stems from their flat corporate structure.
The dude is an ass, though.
Anuxinamoon
Shaper Divine
I knew, and the insiders at ti4 knew, but since it got fixed I don't think people really talked about it.
The most interesting thing I remember a player telling me at ti4 was how Valves Pre event player meeting was talking a bunch about how much money is in dota2. I remember him saying something like it was really different to ti3 where they cared about the players and community and that was the main talking point at the ti3 meeting.
He was pretty concerned with the shift in focus over 12 months. Maybe he was right to be worried. Maybe we just don't know all of the story.
I hope valve learns from this a lot, where dota2 and the events after will be a lot more smoother.
Monochromaticx
Member
he has not paid any of the players their winnings since secret 1.0, yet.
tattooed_dwarf
Member
Well I agree but I think is better to handle these things personally and not go online and offer insults for all to see. Of course if you want to be professional, you don't call people ass at all.
rakkadakka
Member
It just looks bad but when you're a heavenly workers commune and you have no public face..the CEO of the company has to get down in the dirt.
Honestly would have been better to have Bruno explain it.
Honestly would have been better to have Bruno explain it.
Ultimadrago
Member
"On day one I open up the show with a joke about pornography 10 minutes within the show...I"
Yeah, in no way do I feel negative towards Gabe calling this guy an ass. He probably didn't go far enough, but as CEO he has to show some restraint, I suppose.
Yeah, in no way do I feel negative towards Gabe calling this guy an ass. He probably didn't go far enough, but as CEO he has to show some restraint, I suppose.
That tardiness monologue was actually hilarious.
I'd say he's worse than an ass. He's a racist cunt.
...but Gabe Newell has no business affecting James Harding's career without properly explaining why. If the community decides you're an ass that's fine but if one of the biggest names in gaming comes out publicly and denounces you as 'an ass' for no good reason that can affect your career and that was unprofessional of GabeN.
EDIT: Also,
https://twitter.com/LDdota/status/703525197790318592
Besides, that's shouldn't be relevant to this, since you would find many more of this (many of them not as tongue-in-cheek as this) of this on the twitters of Thorin's and Richard Lewis
Especially when you consider this particular detail:
MrRudiMentary
Member
Seems like the video linked in OP was the straw that broke the camel's back. It wasn't Jeremy Clarkson getting fired for hitting a producer, it was just Valve giving this guy one last chance to redeem himself and then saying "fuck it". I don't follow these casts at all but from the videos this guy is an uncharismatic, shit-slinging twat with an awful toffee-nosed accent.
Still waiting for Valve to tell me my account details got made public on Steam all those months ago...
They strike me as the sort of company who want to automate everything, complete lack of customer services, self-moderation in most of their games and tournaments seemingly run by invisible people communicating purely via text message.
Half expecting to find out he's just hired a bunch of umpa lumpa's all this time.
They strike me as the sort of company who want to automate everything, complete lack of customer services, self-moderation in most of their games and tournaments seemingly run by invisible people communicating purely via text message.
Half expecting to find out he's just hired a bunch of umpa lumpa's all this time.
How are you certain your info was accessed? According to Valve's update thing on it, emails are only being sent out to those affected who had their information leaked, which they check by digging through what happened with the cache provider that had the issue. Everyone else is fine since there is no way information could have been leaked.
That video in the OP is not as bad as other times throughout the first day. I really like 2GD for a lot of what he, but with TI he used to be a bit more reserved which was still fantastic. With this one though he went further than he does even normally, so I am not surprised at all.
Ofcourse the current panel was rattled right after that stuff happened and it took some time to get everything back to normal, but watching the panel now no one of them seems scared or whatever people want to call it.
Haha, you either don't watch Dota 2 esports or started watching yesterday. He has been hosting major Dota 2 tournament for years and every TI since the second one.
These Valve fanboys...
BBC handled that a million times better then Valve though.
I call bull on this, as others have. Blitz is always like this. It's amazing that people are grasping at straws for this one
I think that is a certainty, although we are talking about communities such as twitch, neogaf, reddit, dota2 etc. The result would be the same no matter how you slice it, or if no statement was put out at all. It is the typical drama found in gaming and fanboyism from all sides
Yea the idea that the panel is scared is ridiculous. They're not any more or less subdued than normal.
I agree, the thing is though, Gabe is the CEO of a multi million dollar company. He needs to think about how he and valve look to subcontractors, investors etc. Firing that twat was probably the correct thing to do, however publicly calling someone an ass on social media is insanely stupid and from a business viewpoint catastrophic.
He's been at every TI (except the last one) as on official panelist but he also hasn't started the broadcast off at each one by calling all the players cunts and making an extremely stupid "joke" about porn starring disabled people. There is such a thing as context and timing and maybe, just maybe doing that at the start of a major event for a game owned and run by the people who hired you and then making an extremely insensitive joke about the place/people who hired you isn't the best way to make a case for yourself?
Yes, James has behaved poorly before but that doesn't mean that, if you hire him, you should always expect the worst behavior from him. If someone tells me to "be myself", that doesn't mean "Hey, it's OK to behave as poorly as you have in the past". Even if your shtick is behaving poorly or being a bit of an ass, there's a way to do it that is friendly and enhances banter. Paul Chaloner /ReDeYe, for example, lays out performance after performance where he demonstrates how to both keep it real and also keep it professional. Since James apparently can't handle this task, they're well within their rights to fire him and I'm glad they did.
None of this means that I'm a Valve fanboy or that I agree with all their practices. If any of what James said about the "pay structure" they tried to have for the talent at TI4 is true, then that's extremely shitty behavior on their part. However, it's completely unrelated to James inability to rein in his behavior and the well deserved firing that came about as a result.
Just because LD says he's cool with it doesn't mean what James said was fine or 'irrelevant'. I'm not Jewish but found it offensive, he is racist.
The fact that Thorin and Richard Lewis still have jobs at Valve events is a testament to Valve not taking CSGO seriously as an ESport.
I don't watch enough to argue this point but I'll take your word for it.
This is why I fucking despise 'drama' in ESports especially when it's behind the scenes. Two sides come out, the internet argues about it and in the end the truth is never fully known. I've lost respect for GabeN, Valve and 2GD because of this incident. I'm really glad I didn't get the compendium for this event and I think I'll only be buying TI compendiums from now on because that's really the only DOTA even I'm interested in.
As a private company, they do not care about investors since they have none. So from a business point of view it isn't "catastrophic" at all. Sub-contractors and partners may pay attention, but given the circumstances and the person, I seriously doubt someone would care. In fact, specifically for that audience, it makes sense to be more down to earth. 2GD has a ton of fans particularly in dota2, and any sugar coating would be called out so much more than everything that already is being discussed. In particular with Gabe and Valve in general being uncommunicative in almost everything outside of plopping out updates, and especially during the issues of this event, this is about as good as it gets. Anything later or with less of an explanation would have been an even more amusing shitstorm than this is.
I agree that esports as a "scene" has a horrible community in general. There are some good folks in there for sure, but it is just awful in so many ways as a community of people when things start to kick off. I haven't lost respect for anyone other than 2GD here though. I was really surprised that he would go so far and even call his own actions out and that he wouldn't be doing it again, knowing he was pushing things far. It's sad because in the other TIs he was great to watch. I just hope the Brit casters keep being as great as usual, undeterred by 2GD
benicillin
Banned
Valve isn't without blame for running a clearly shoddy event, but I don't blame him for calling the host an ass. He is an ass and he's the kind of host that makes esports impossible for anyone outside of his own demographic to take it even semi-seriously.
I really liked ReDeYe's performance at TI last year and I hope he's at more events from now on.
You do realize companies hire customer service off the street and train them onsite. Programmers often need 4 yr degrees or a proven track record of delivering excellent products plus they go through grueling interview process full of whiteboards, etc. So I believe what you just typed right there it's not correct at all. If you look at Valve's job board, you'd clearly see they do hire for engineers and CS separately
Link to their job board: http://www.valvesoftware.com/jobs/job_postings.html
Princess Carl
Member
Well somehow cs:go can do it better all the time and with less money and attention! Talk to them gabe.
I read the short Gaben post and the long 2GD response. It wasn't great for Gabe to call him an ass but he can do what he wants. James was immature and unprofessional which is not the direction that Valve wants these majors to go. Yes, I know they have been a production nightmare but a professional is expected to soldier on through that and put on a good show. From what 2GD wrote about the masturbation and bottom bitches it is apparent he knew he was on thin ice but continued to tread on thin ice until it broke. I did not hear the bottom bitches joke but him justifying it being fine because he is friends with the people does not make it fine. Maybe in a small group with people that know you are friends it is more appropriate but at a large tournament it is not going to fly.
A lot of people are getting sidetracked on what Reddit has to say and just need to realize that Reddit is not the market that Valve wants to target for the majors. They sure as hell are not interested in the Twitch spammers. Valve wants to provide a professional and clean look that can get others interested in Dota. They already have the attention of all the spammers and people on /r/Dota2. 2GD argues that it is better to not take a sportscaster approach to Dota but I would argue that their is a happy middle between crass jokes and super professional sports caster.
In response to the pay scale with the signed items, Valve fucked up. They have fucked up a lot and will continue to fuck up. They are charting new ground and experimenting with new ideas. Sadly the signed chest is a pretty horrible idea when you realize it is a direct copy of tipping in the United States except with the added negative of also being a popularity contest.
I watched early on the last night with the new panel and thought they did a fine job. I think KotLGuy does a pretty good job of being professional while trying to keep things a little light.
A lot of people are getting sidetracked on what Reddit has to say and just need to realize that Reddit is not the market that Valve wants to target for the majors. They sure as hell are not interested in the Twitch spammers. Valve wants to provide a professional and clean look that can get others interested in Dota. They already have the attention of all the spammers and people on /r/Dota2. 2GD argues that it is better to not take a sportscaster approach to Dota but I would argue that their is a happy middle between crass jokes and super professional sports caster.
In response to the pay scale with the signed items, Valve fucked up. They have fucked up a lot and will continue to fuck up. They are charting new ground and experimenting with new ideas. Sadly the signed chest is a pretty horrible idea when you realize it is a direct copy of tipping in the United States except with the added negative of also being a popularity contest.
I watched early on the last night with the new panel and thought they did a fine job. I think KotLGuy does a pretty good job of being professional while trying to keep things a little light.
Austriacus
Member
As a fellow peruvian i agree. I find myself as frustrated by my own people as the americans that insult them. I understand why things are as they are but americans dont know this so their obvious first reaction is to treat them as shit.
The issue comes down to Valve wanting to make things "professional" but not wanting to spend any actual effort or energy in doing so. So they try to find the cheapest way possible to do things, and in many cases, just try to profit off of being the middleman - whether it is Steam or Dota 2 signatures or etc etc. They want the Riot control without the Riot expenditures.
Shanghai being as bad as it has been was a) predicted by everyone who knew what happened the last time the same company ran a multimillion dollar prize pool tournament (Nanyang) and b) more damning than anything 2GD or Gabe could say. They knowingly hired a terrible company, and said terrible company messed up again, and they are feigning shock and surprise.
Shanghai being as bad as it has been was a) predicted by everyone who knew what happened the last time the same company ran a multimillion dollar prize pool tournament (Nanyang) and b) more damning than anything 2GD or Gabe could say. They knowingly hired a terrible company, and said terrible company messed up again, and they are feigning shock and surprise.
They were pretty clear in the statement that Valve had people who lobbied internally for 2GD to have a second chance at hosting after previous (undisclosed) issues. Gabe called that "a mistake" now.
I didn't know who this guy was, so I just searched his name, found the first video that said "2GD in a nutshell" and yeah, as a person that does not play mobas, and saw that guy commentating, I would instantly just stop watching. This video, he was making jokes about iNcontroL's mother, and at least he stayed professional cause it seemed Geoff just wanted to snap the guy in half
just read his google doc
interesting stuff..
not really sure who is to blame here. i do think some of his jokes on the panel were a little over the line, however, he has shown to do this in previous streams so valve should have known what they were getting into.
i think gabe handled it poorly as well. its not cool to publicly bash someone when youre one of the biggest CEO's of one of the biggest gaming giants in the world. that has a far more reaching impact than him just being fired. it potentially ruins his future career in casting (not sure if he even wanted one though).
interesting stuff..
not really sure who is to blame here. i do think some of his jokes on the panel were a little over the line, however, he has shown to do this in previous streams so valve should have known what they were getting into.
i think gabe handled it poorly as well. its not cool to publicly bash someone when youre one of the biggest CEO's of one of the biggest gaming giants in the world. that has a far more reaching impact than him just being fired. it potentially ruins his future career in casting (not sure if he even wanted one though).
Gabe could have put out a better statement without sugar coating by saying why they fired him, rather than a petty insult. Something like: "We made a mistake having this guy commentate. He was offensive and we decided we didn't want to represent the game that way so we are going with a different host that doesn't bring toxic commentary." Racist assholes get fired from big companies all the time and you don't see the company go out of their way to insult these people. They fire them and are done with it.
Fact is Gabe personally attacked a fired employee, for no reason other than take heat off his huge company. If the shitstorm was unavoidable as you say, then maybe he should've been an adult rather than acting like a bully himself. Especially if he wants a better community. He can set that standard rather than feeding it.
To make an example out of him. Gabe and valve had enough of his bullshit
Pureauthor
Member
And apparently they couldn't be assed to have someone give James a brief on what he could and could not say/do on air.
Pretty sure it is standard fare for not disclosing the complete reasons for dismissal of staff publicly, though it should have been made clear to the dismissed party.
Again, this is a one sided account, as is Gabe's. Not enough to have a complete picture. I would be amazed if this is true, as there are definite legal issues of dismissing someone in such a way
You abandon standard fare for dismal when you're off the cuff insulting a former employee. You can't have it both ways here, either way you slice it Gabe acted like unprofessional and petty for no good reason.
air jordans for dogs
Member
You're wrong, James is the only good part of the panels and he knows how to entertain during the endless delays. He makes jokes about his friends and none of it is taken as serious.
Is it illegal to do so? Shitty, yes, but not outside his rights I don't think.