World of Warcraft lead quits over ‘toxic’ ranking

A lead developer on World of Warcraft has dramatically quit Blizzard to protest an “unethical” and “unjust” employee ranking system.

World of Warcraft co-lead developer Brian Birmingham has quit Blizzard after he refused to give employees “unjust” evaluations.

Birmingham revealed that World of Warcraft developer Blizzard implemented a system called stack ranking in 2020, which is a system of rating employees’ performances against each other.

Birmingham says that he and other managers were told to give 5% of employees a “developing” ranking, even if they thought their performance was adequate. According to Bloomberg, Birmingham was told he had to move employees’ ratings from “successful” down to the lower rank, despite their actual performance.

Mental strain from being given a poor rating aside, workers classed as developing may also miss out on bonuses, could be overlooked for promotion, and may even miss out on some of Blizzard’s profit-sharing scheme.

A spokesperson for Blizzard told Bloomberg that the purpose of stack ranking was to “ensure employees who don’t meet performance expectations receive more honest feedback, differentiated compensation, and a plan on how to best improve their own performance”.

The system of ranking employees became popular in the ‘80s as a way to improve performance, but experts have said that it often has the opposite effect, punishing employees at the bottom of the ranks even if their work is sufficient. Many companies that previously implemented the policy have since abandoned it, such as Microsoft, which did away with the system in 2013.

World of Warcraft latest expansion, Dragonflight, was well-received by fans despite reportedly being rushed. Picture: Blizzard Entertainment

“This sort of policy encourages competition between employees, sabotage of one another’s work, a desire for people to find low-performing teams that they can be the best-performing worker on, and ultimately erodes trust and destroys creativity”, Birmingham said in an email to staff.

In tweets following his departure, Birmingham clarified that the policy was instituted by parent company Activision Blizzard King (ABK), rather than Blizzard Entertainment. ABK is currently in the midst of a lawsuit, after being accused of creating a “toxic workplace culture”.

Birmingham also claimed in his email to staff that he’d been asked to keep the policy secret, but that he refused to do so.

“We were asked to keep it confidential because it was an ongoing discussion, and we don’t want Activision executives to make things even worse,” Birmingham wrote, “That threat of retaliation cannot be allowed to motivate our actions. Even if that’s legal, it’s certainly not ethical, and I cannot support it”.

Birmingham resigned from the company, although he says he would consider rejoining Blizzard if the policy was reversed. In a series of tweets following the publishing of Bloomberg’s article, he said that ABK was problematic, but that the development team currently at Blizzard was worthy of praise.

“ABK is a problematic parent company,” Birmingham tweeted, “They put us under pressure to deliver both [World of Warcraft] expansions early. It is deeply unjust to follow that by depriving employees who worked on them their fair share of profit. The ABK team should be ashamed of themselves”.

World of Warcraft has been running continuously for almost 20 years. Picture: Blizzard Entertainment

The departure comes as regulators around the world investigate an attempted $100b acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Xbox maker Microsoft. It was recently reported that the EU Commission might object to the deal, with the regulatory body reportedly set to issue a statement of objections soon.

It was recently reported that Nvidia and Google have joined the lawsuit the United States FTC filed against Microsoft attempting to block the deal. The two companies reportedly provided statements informing the regulator of the concerns around Microsoft’s domination in the cloud gaming space.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.