Just a quick entry here, I've been pretty busy with some RL stuff. I also have a new CWOW account, so I'll be collecting some more information to include in the "WoW China Interesting Facts" series. Also, someone's been tweeting details from my blog too that's making some other online news sources (Hey V.S.!) =]
Anyhow, I noticed that some of the readers were interested in knowing Blizzard wages.
Below is what they are now roughly. These are based on the submissions of Blizzard employees, so some of these approx. results may include a few years of annual pay raises (1-6% per year) but for the most part they're pretty close to starting wages. Going back 5-10 years though, these jobs paid A LOT more. They've come down quite a bit since 2000-2003 (over 30% on most jobs), so if you start at Blizzard now you'll be paid much less than if you started 10 years ago. =]
Hourly Staff (Approx. $USD):
Quality Assurance: $10.50 / hr
Game Master: $11-12.50 / hr
Tier 1 In-Game Support Rep: $11.00 / hr
Tier 2 In-Game Support Rep: $12.00 / hr
Intern: $11.50 / hr
Account and Technical Services: $12.50 / hr
Web Designer: $10.50 / hr
Salary Staff (Approx. $USD):
Sr. Web Designer: $61,500 / yr
Cinematic Producer: $39,500 / yr
Animator: $43,000 / yr
3D Artist: $74,000 / yr
Technical Artist: $75,000 / yr
Cinematic Artist: $70,000 / yr
Environmental Artist: $59,000 / yr
Graphic Artist: $57,000 / yr
Modeler: $50,000 / yr
Associate Cinematic Artist: $52,000 / yr
Senior Cinematic Artist: $110,000 / yr
Software Engineer: $80,000 / yr
Senior Software Engineer: $109,500 / yr
Game Designer: $85,000 / yr
Systems Analyst: $85,000 / yr
Associate Project Mgr: $85,500 / yr
Senior Animator: $90,000 / yr
Global Manager, Localization: $120,000 / yr
There are a bunch of other jobs listed (Activision too). You can see them for yourself at Salarylist.com, Payscale.com, and Glassdoor.com. There's also Jobvent.com if you're interested in seeing more feedback from Blizzard employees. You can see that (internally) Blizzard is just like every other corporation - everyone think's their boss is an idiot and the only way to get to the top is if you're friends or family.
However, be aware that when people are pleased, they walk away happy and say nothing. When people are unhappy, they fill out surveys and complain loudly. So, you'll mostly find complaints on these types of webpages and very few compliments. =]
It didn't take long for the "open source PSJailBreak" to make it's appearance. 12 days in fact.
The original PSJailbreak was being sold for $170, the cloned one (x3jailbreak) was selling for $30, and now you only need to pay $20 for a USB development board and copy over the software. Or if you wait a little longer you can just use your jailbroken iPhone, iPod, and even a TI-84 calculator or jailbreak your PS3. As mentioned before though, you'll see some significant drops in vendor prices (once they're allowed to start selling the original Jailbreak again.) =]
It only plays homebrew at the moment, and the "pirate feature" (ability to boot ISO files) is temporarily disabled.
Exophase has more details on the new open-source implementation called PSGroove. As mentioned though, right now a programmable USB flash chip is required (Teensy USB dev board) but other methods will be made available in the near future.
This is actually a little bit of history which I'd like to preserve on the blog.
Back in late January 2009, Blizzard's advertisements were accidentally swapped out with Gold Seller ads. (Links: wow.com, cgenetwork.com, 1up.com)
Other than this one incident, I recall that it happened a few times actually: on BNet Forums, WoW Forums, and the waiting room of Diablo 2.
But in each case, most (if not all) news instances started to "disappear" and people later forgot. It didn't help though that threads were locked, forum entries were deleted, and Blizzard told sites to remove the news either.
So it's difficult finding information on these accidents now and it's something that Blizzard would prefer that you forget. =]
Reading over the forums, you'll see that Blizzard employees and players alike will all insist that "Blizzard has NEVER been breached. They've never been hacked. They have security measures in place that make them foolproof and 100% protected."
(Note: I never understood that logic so I simply chalk it up to "Blizzard Indoctrination". It's funny because if a game developer creates games that melt video cards and are full of bugs, cheats, issues that take years to fix, exploits, and can easily be hacked and exploited.. why would anything else they create be so different?)
Although employees insist that "To this date Blizzard has never been breached", in an earlier post I listed many cases of Blizzard database breaches, how Blizzard employee accounts have been compromised (and used to spread keyloggers on official forums), and other hacking activities. When the Blizzard employee accounts were compromised, Blizzard sent notifications to websites to remove the information ("Reputation Management"). And those were just the breaches that made public headlines! Who really knows how many breaches there have been?
Some of these are just accidents and "glitches" while others are major security breaches.
This has been going on for years, but it's obvious that it has been forgotten by most. That's why preservation is so important. =]
