Ex-D3 Community Manager Grimiku

I won’t get into the details, but I am now unemployed. It won’t stop my Fallout 4 stream tonight, though. Let’s get drunk.

— Marcus Bishop (@3Stonekegs) November 12, 2015

http://www.diabloii.net/blog/comments/farewell-to-grimiku 

According to a commenter, Grimiku mentioned earlier this week on his stream that he was heading in for a performance review.

Well that sucks.  As someone commented (in the DiabloII.net post), how can one fail a performance review as a CM?  The thing is that the D3 community management team recently got a new CM (Kauza).  But not only is Kauza just a CM, he’s an actual manager for that team (probably replacing Lylirra who was moved over to Overwatch community management team).

Kauza has been pretty visible and fairly quick acting (it’s actually refreshing to see someone on top of it in this regard).  But I don’t think this is just a case of new leadership asserting themselves.  It’s probably something that has been building over time.  According to his LinkedIn profile, Andrew Kauz (Kauza) started back in September (he is completely new to Blizzard and the game industry; more of a background in managing social media having worked as a manager in that capacity at GEICO and Capital One).  And there must be some concern with regards to the Diablo branding to bring in someone from the outside rather than promoting someone from within.  No one knows for sure if Grimiku was terminated or if he decided to leave on his own knowing that they had it in for him.  The general conveyance of his tweet is kind of telling though when put in the context of “currently unemployed”.

Update: He confirmed he was fired (which is unfortunate).

This does come right after BlizzCon (he mentions in the FAQ on his Twitch channel that he was no longer a Blizzard employee as of November 11th).  I feel bad for him since I know how harsh we as a Diablo community can be at times.

Anyone who has ever worked in a corporate environment at the management level knows how a lot of companies use these “performance reviews” in a number of different ways; like how on one side of the spectrum, it can be used as a tool to performance out those who aren’t team players.  I’m not saying this is the case (since no one knows the details); my point is that performance reviews at many companies aren’t always indicative of anything because there could be other ulterior motives at play (especially when there is new leadership).

Grimiku was always sort of laid back when dealing with the community or when communicating back feedback from the actual game designers.  Sometimes, that is the kind of person you need where that stuff doesn’t personally affect you.  Anyone who has also met him in real life also knows how laid back he is.

One of his last postings was in the hot button issue of stash tabs.  There is nothing wrong with any of his posts since it finally made the developers intentions clearer.  I know I’ve posed some critical remarks to Grimiku (not directly at him but as feedback to the dev team) in the past; I did in that same topic (which I haven’t had time to make a posting about).  And I know the community managers are only a conduit between the community and the actual game designers (so I know from their perspective, it sucks having to deal with what is often times a very hostile crowd).

The thing is that in his time as a D3 community manager, he actually did a lot for the community even if it wasn’t always visible (hell, creating content for blog and social media postings can take time) while acting as a real life “meat shield” as a community manager for what has to be, a tough job having to filter through many of our communications.

It’s unfortunate that it didn’t work out for him at Blizzard because no matter the sort of issues I have with this game or the design direction of the designers, I never had issues with the D3 community management team.  I always thought that Grimiku and his Khazra avatar was one of the good guys (and also the last CM that has been with the team since D3’s launch as Vaeflare moved over to Heroes of the Storm and then took on an opportunity this past August in the Story and Franchise Development).  Seriously, Blizzard’s loss is going to be someone elses gain.

November 27th update: lol, while streaming ARK albeit slightly intoxicated, someone on the chat server he was on was playing D3 and he humorously said (most of this is paraphrased “hey, I used to be part of that before… go and punch fucking Grimiku in the face for me, but more so punch fucking Lylirra in the face… sorry, no salt, no salt….. not Nevalistis, I never had a problem talking with her”.  This is of course referring to in-game monsters who have the nicknames of Blizzard community management employees.