Two ArenaNet writers lost their jobs this week after a Twitter argument with a Guild Wars 2 community partner. The community has been talking about almost nothing else. We waited a few days before writing this, because some stories deserve more than a hot take.
This is an opinion piece. The reporting of events is as factual as we can make it. The analysis that follows is ours.
Key Facts
- July 3, 2018: ArenaNet narrative designer Jessica Price posted a Twitter thread about writing player-characters in MMORPGs
- Deroir - a prominent GW2 streamer and member of the official ArenaNet Partner Program - responded with a polite suggestion about branching dialogue
- Price pushed back sharply, characterizing the reply as condescending; writer Peter Fries joined in to support her
- ArenaNet CEO Mike O’Brien announced both were terminated, calling their conduct “an attack on our community”
- The exchange, and the firings, became one of the most-discussed events in the GW2 community’s history - and reached well beyond it
What We Don’t Know Yet
- Whether ArenaNet had a formal social media policy in place before this incident
- What the ArenaNet Partner Program’s code of conduct looks like from the company’s side
- How the remaining writing team is handling this - the human impact on colleagues isn’t something we have visibility into
- Whether ArenaNet will formalize any policies around developer social media as a result
What Actually Happened
Let’s run through this carefully, because the details matter and they’ve gotten muddier with every retelling.
Jessica Price posted a thoughtful Twitter thread on July 3 about a specific challenge in MMORPG narrative design: how do you make a player character feel like an individual when the player’s identity is fundamentally undefined? It was a professional musing, not a call for feedback. She shared it publicly, from an account connected to her identity as an ArenaNet developer.
Deroir - known to the GW2 community as a streamer, a collaborator, and formally recognized as an ArenaNet Partner - replied to the thread. His response disagreed with part of her framing and offered a counterpoint about branching dialogue. The tone, reading it now, is polite. It’s also unsolicited feedback on a thread where feedback wasn’t requested.
Price’s reaction was sharp. She called the reply condescending and wrote that she was tired of people attempting to explain her job to her. She later posted that she’d be blocking the “next rando asshat” who pulled the same move - a tweet that landed harder given Deroir is not, by any standard measure, a random anonymous person in the community.
Peter Fries, her colleague, entered the thread in her defense, arguing that her account was personal and that she hadn’t asked for critique.
By July 5, Mike O’Brien had posted a statement. Both Price and Fries were terminated. O’Brien wrote that their conduct failed to uphold ArenaNet’s standards for engaging with the community and constituted an “attack” on the people they serve.
That’s what happened. Everything else is interpretation.
The Case For the Decision
The argument for ArenaNet’s decision comes down to context and role.
Deroir isn’t a random player. He’s an ArenaNet Partner - formally recognized, formally engaged with the company. When Price and Fries publicly confronted a community partner, they weren’t just two private citizens having a Twitter argument. They were ArenaNet employees, identifiable as such, treating a person the company has an ongoing relationship with as an adversary.
The company’s relationship with its player community is the foundation of a live service game. Players need to feel like ArenaNet is on their side, or at minimum not actively hostile to them. When developers with their employer’s name in their bio characterize community engagement as an attack to be defended against, it damages something that’s hard to rebuild.
There’s also a straightforward professional dimension: when you represent an organization publicly, the organization has a legitimate interest in how you conduct yourself. The line between personal and professional collapses when your name is attached to your employer’s.
The Case Against
The argument on the other side is worth taking seriously, and we think it’s being underweighted in some corners of the community.
First: Peter Fries. He’d been with ArenaNet for over a decade. His involvement in this exchange was defending a colleague, not initiating a conflict. Whatever you think of Price’s response, Fries’s participation was minimal by comparison. The decision to terminate him at the same time struck many observers - including people who supported firing Price - as disproportionate. “Collateral damage” is the phrase that keeps appearing, and it’s hard to disagree with.
Second: ArenaNet had encouraged its developers to be public and engaged on social media. The company’s culture, by multiple accounts from former employees, supported developer voices having public identities. To then use that public activity as grounds for termination when the content became inconvenient looks, from the outside, like a company that builds its house on developer authenticity and then collapses it the moment that authenticity costs something.
Third: the speed of the decision. O’Brien moved within 48 hours. That pace suggests the company was responding to community pressure - specifically to the parts of the community that were loudest and most coordinated. The question of whether those voices represented the GW2 community or a subset of it applying sustained pressure is one the company apparently didn’t feel it had time to answer.
The ArenaNet Partner Program in the Middle of This
One thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention: Deroir’s position as an ArenaNet Partner puts him in a specific relationship with the company. Partners get early access, coordination opportunities, promotional support. It’s a formal, managed relationship.
When an ArenaNet employee publicly clashes with an ArenaNet Partner, the company isn’t just a bystander. It has a stake in both sides. And the decision ArenaNet made - that the employee’s conduct was the problem, not the Partner’s unsolicited feedback on a thread - reveals something about what the Partner Program means in practice.
Is a community creator’s status as a Partner a shield? Is it a weight that tips the scales when conflicts arise? We don’t know how ArenaNet thinks about this internally. But the optics of that power dynamic are worth examining.
What This Means for the Game Going Forward
Guild Wars 2 doesn’t stop working because two writers were fired. The content pipeline is bigger than any two people on the narrative team, and Season 4 is going to keep releasing episodes whether we’re processing this or not.
But the relationship between ArenaNet’s staff and the community they serve has changed this week, and it’s going to take time to understand how.
Developers who are watching this - at ArenaNet and elsewhere - are learning something about the cost of public engagement. Some of them will withdraw. When the people who build the game stop feeling like they can talk openly about what they’re building, everyone loses something, even if we can’t easily name what it is.
The GW2 community is genuinely warm. Most of it. The subset that turned this into a coordinated pressure campaign is a minority. But that minority was loud enough to contribute to two people losing their jobs.
What happens next is, in part, up to the community that remains.
Who Should Pay Attention
Players who care about the creative team: The writing staff just absorbed a significant event. Season 4 continues, but the human atmosphere in that building is not what it was a week ago. That matters for the work eventually.
Followers of the ArenaNet Partner Program: The program’s role in this conflict is underexamined. Whether the company revisits its expectations for Partners - and for how employees relate to Partners publicly - is worth tracking.
Anyone who engages with developers on social media: The line between “sharing feedback” and “inserting yourself into a conversation you weren’t invited to” is genuinely blurry. This story is a useful lens for examining where you draw that line in your own interactions.
What to Watch For
- ArenaNet’s formal social media policy - if one gets announced, that’s a direct consequence of this week. Watch the official blog.
- Developer communication going forward - will the remaining team engage less? The same? More cautiously? The change in texture will tell us something.
- Episode 4 in September - this is ultimately a game site, and the game continues. Whatever happened this week, “A Star to Guide Us” is coming. The work goes on.
We’ve covered this game since 2012. We’ve watched ArenaNet make good calls and bad ones, and we’ve tried to be honest about both. This one isn’t clean. There are real arguments on multiple sides, and anyone who tells you it’s simple is probably not looking hard enough.
What we know for certain is this: two people don’t work at ArenaNet anymore, and that has costs that aren’t visible in any press release.
Tags: ArenaNet, Community, Developer Relations, Opinion, Partner Program, Social Media, Season 4