Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Thank you for being the reassuring email, the pleasant post, the calming presence in the chaotic anger of the internet that spilled into this forum.
Thank you for the lunch, the office tour, the replacement map when a lamination machine when rogue (or rouge, if you prefer).
Thank you for the kindness, the understanding, the helpfulness, the patience.
Thank you for everything.
You will be missed.
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So long, and thanks for all the fish!
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Where was this news from? :(
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Where was this news from? :(
Diego made a post on a social media and Buhlman re posted it. I found out about Sara Marie here from a deleted post.
Truly hope those 2 the best in their next adventures. Going to be sorely missed around here. I said it before and I'll say it again.
Paizo's Customer Service team is top notch. Quick to resolve issues, and always makes you feel like a person and not just a consumer. I've seen it across multiple forums/communities/groups that people scream accolades about Paizo's CS team and how they are a huge factor in retaining their business. I know that's how it is for me.
It shows just how much people appreciate your team when they are wanting to speak out to voice it.
Best of luck, and good fortune to them. And anyone else who may have moved on from the team that we don't know about yet.
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Right? :(
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Oooooof, what a gut-punch. Firing Sara feels like such a colossal screw-up by Paizo management. I hope she and Diego both land on their feet! :( They've done so much for the forums and the community in general...
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That's heartbreaking. Is, um, is everything okay, Paizo?
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Crushing news. Two of the best people I have EVER worked with. Sara has done such an incredible job making Paizo a fun, welcoming, warm place to work. She was always in our corner and took the time to advocate for us even when she was dealing with her own things. It’s so very rare to come across a manager who just “gets it”, cares for their team so deeply, has such a wealth of knowledge to share, and is just a genuinely kind person. There is no one at Paizo who can even come close to how incredible Sara has been for CS. She saw us as human beings who loved, struggled, celebrated, yearned for more, had dreams and aspirations, and everything else that made us human. To her, we were never a disposable work force, and it showed especially when any of us struggled with mental health during the pandemic. Each of us was special, bright, HER team that she was always looking out for. No higher praise could I give to a manager. Goodbye Sara Marie. I know you’ll do great out there.
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Man, Paizo effed up here... for lots of us here Sara Marie WAS the CS department, she was the one I saw updating us the most. huge loss for Paizo customers, hope they can sort their s**t out...
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I'll be frank. The revelations that followed the firing from Twitter makes me think very deeply about continuing to support Paizo in the future.
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This is a major bummer. Sara Marie was a fantastic part of the Paizo team.
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Seriously this sucks. Sara Marie was so calm level headed and really a soothing balm on the forums when they got a little too hot. And on a personal note she really assisted me above and beyond when I needed to bring my autistic son to paizocon and needed to make sure we were always booked at every event together so that he would not be in anything alone. She was amazing and I really felt like she was watching out for every customer. This is making me feel very uncomfortable with how things are going on behind the scenes, if a superstar like Sara Marie is let go.
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Sorry to hear the news, and I wish the best for Sara.
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So is Paizo going to talk about the Price thread?
Just read this.... I highly doubt it will be acknowledged and more likely posts about it will be removed....
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But...whom will I praise when things go right?!?
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So is Paizo going to talk about the Price thread?
Probably not, it was more dramatic than informative.
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What the hell, Paizo? I’ve just sent a request to cancel my remaining sub.
You don’t fire a hero like Sara Marie, unless you’re so deep in red or you’re doing away with customer service, and neither is the case here. You just don’t.
For anybody who has been an Unpaid Paizo Shill as long as I was, it was quickly obvious that, like every business, Paizo is great people, OK people, so-so people and bad people. And because the way late capitalism works, the latter tend to be in management and the former tend to be closer to the customer. Over the years, Paizo has done great things, starting with printing a gay paladin and his hubby back in 2007 when your entire customer base was middle-aged working-class white American men, and that took some courage. You’ve gotten women to write Adventure Paths, you hired Crystal, you did Lost Omens: Mwangi Exapnse, the MCU Black Panther Wakanda moment for the whole industry.
You’ve also done things questionable and/or downright dumb, ranging from keeping a mindbogglingly outdated IT system that dragged everything you did down (and for the record, while I’m skeptical of Jessica Price, the story about that being a thing because one of your higher-ups gets royalties for the code sounds oddly familiar) through printing some dumb things (madness makes you Evil, what a great take to have these days), letting great people go and giving off that uncanny air that your top brass are somewhat disconnected with reality around them. But OK, everybody is living in an episode of The Office and dealing with their Michaels and Dwights. If I were to get upset about every company I interact with having stupid people in management and making bad decisions, I'd probably have to live in a jungle and scavenge on poisonous frogs.
But you don’t fire Sara Marie. You just don’t.
For years, I’ve been attacked over being unapologetically supportive of things you did. These days have certainly come to their end yesterday.
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But...whom will I praise when things go right?!?
Can things go right at Paizo with Sara Marie no longer there?
I think it is going to take some hard and thoughtful work on the part of those higher-ups still there for that to happen.
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Sara Marie is terrific. Barring some sort of undisclosed malfeasance on her part — which I find very unlikely — firing her was *astonishingly* stupid.
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I definitely wish Sara Marie luck, she's been very good about updating on the international shipping issues. But I'll admit to being surprised at people who thought Paizo has good customer service. Some of the criticism leveled at Paizo now is coming from people who have for years white knighted these message boards, pretending there weren't any issues, even in the face of a forum that has perpetually been full of problems some gone unanswered for weeks or more.
The last three months things seem to have turned around, and Sara Marie gave many good and much appreciated updates. But acknowledging that shouldn't require pretending the preceding two years of awfulness didn't happen (first blamed on 2e's launch, then blamed on a backlog, then blamed on COVID). A lot of this was due to their grotesque system, which requires customer service intervention to do even the simplest thing, but some critical voices now were more than happy to defend the system then even though the system has not changed. I don't blame Sara Marie for that, a 600 email backlog is definitely a corporate understaffing issue, but I'm seeing in various places a really rosy picture of customer service being painted that doesn't match the reality. There's even a sticky.
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Disgraceful stuff, to be honest. Sara made Paizo a better company to interact with, and the forums a better place to be on any time I saw her post.
And if the reasons for it are true, doubly disgraceful. Another hobby full of creative, hard-working people and the out of touch creeps who profit from them.
I wish all the Paizo staff who actually make the things I love about Pathfinder a very unionize.
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a really rosy picture of customer service being painted that doesn't match the reality.
I think the point here is, that the CS team staff should not have been blamed for the customer service issues. However counterintuitive this sounds. CS teams often go above and beyond their pay grade in a system which is designed to shield those actually responsible for the issues from any backlash. This is not exclusive to Paizo at all (coming from someone with a 15-year career in CS and adjacent roles).
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Yeah - customer service being exceptional while the customer experience is lousy is perhaps a subtle distinction but a meaningful one.
Nobody browsing the CS forums in the last couple of years could deny there has been a problem with the latter in that period.
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I'll be frank. The revelations that followed the firing from Twitter makes me think very deeply about continuing to support Paizo in the future.
Why are you/we thinking about this? Its been going on for years and Paizo has just been able to keep it mostly under wraps. It was inevitable that it would explode this big. Everyone should be doing their part to spread the news of how awful Paizo's management team is. Personally, I hope the entire customer service team quits. At a time when most companies are desperate for workers, I doubt they'll be unemployed for long. Paizo seems to think they are untouchable because of the love for the gaming content they produce. Well, maybe their customer base needs to demonstrate just how dependent they are on us and we don't tolerate the s*$*ty way they are treating their employees.
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Why are you/we thinking about this?
I'll admit I'm going mostly off of interwebz, but my impression is that with the coming of Jeff Alvarez into power Paizo management has gone from out-of-touch but ultimately hands-off enough that the dept leads had some freedom to run their teams, to actively trying to control everything that happens within the company and making sure everyone steps in line. Which in a creative industry cannot be a good thing.
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IMO, the issue has been fairly clear for a very long time, (1) management needs to keep their grubby little hands out of the creative part of the business, and (2) they need to stop underpaying their employees and start giving them the resources needed to get the job done.
The customer service agents bust their ass to do the right thing, but the system is set up so terribly that they have to apologize to virtually every customer they come in contact with. Mgmt allowed the system to fester such that they were nearly three months behind just to acknowledge an email, let alone do anything about it. And it took nearly two years for them to fix the problem. TWO YEARS! Perennially cr@ppy companies like Comcast are rockstars in comparison.
And when management does pop in, we get the same repeated and tired excuses they have been using for more than a decade. It would be laughable if it wasn't so sad.
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I mostly agree (looks like I misunderstood the question in your previous post), however:
management needs to keep their grubby little hands out of the creative part of the business
This has nothing to do with the issue at hand - CS is not the creative part, it is business operations. And that is personally what irritates me the most. For creative staff you can always imagine that the management didn't like their product output. But CS staff have been fighting an uphill battle on behalf of the company for years trying to make the company look better, and then get the boot over something that evidently has nothing to do with the quality of their work. I used to be in a job role similar to Sara Marie for a number of years and I know first hand how destructive this approach can be.
EDIT: there were hints that their approach to handling toxic customers was part of the problem so it is actually related to the quality of their work. Just not in the right way.| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Sun's definitely a little less bright today...
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I don't like this at all.
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Good bye, Sara Marie you were the best!! And don't let anyone tell you different!
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It breaks my heart to see both Sara Marie and Diego gone. Paizo's customer service department has been a source of strength for many, many years. There was never a time, not even during what must have been insanely busy moments such as the rollout of PF2e, that I didn't doubt that they were capable of solving a problem and that they would do so with the best effort possible.
Good luck and bright futures.
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Very very sad to see Sara and Diego go. That alone is enough to seriously shake my confidence in Paizo, but the content in the Price thread is beyond the pale.
I've been a staunch supporter since 2e launched, but I honestly don't know if I want to support this kind of business anymore. My only hope it that this will be a wakeup call to Paizo management, but...well, let's say my faith in them isn't exactly high.
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My hype for upcoming products dwindled since yesterday.
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I'm hoping this will be a wake up call for addressing the apparent issues. In light of the accusations made it would be appropriate for Jeff to step down as CEO and an independent investigation into the company polices be done. Also CS should not be under any manager who was involved in this and has allegations of printing out screenshots of private conversations and undermining employee morale. Im waiting to see what if any action Pazio takes before taking any action myself.
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Saw Sara Marie's tweet yesterday and was gutted. Always been excellent in CS and super visible and present on these forums even when she's had to deliver difficult messages.
Found out from here that Diego has gone as well which is also a blow. He has also been outstanding.
Whilst the line from Paizo will probably be that it is an internal matter that they won't discuss publicly, I would certainly like to have some clarity about what has happened here. One of the reasons I have subscribed to Paizo products for so many years is that the company has always seemed to be morally and ethically centred and an organisation that places the wellbeing and good treatment of its people at the heart of everything they do. I am now wondering whether that continues to be the case and as a result I am thinking about whether continuing my subscriptions is the right thing to do. I will not patronise companies that are not ethically sound, particularly companies that mislead as to their ethical position.
I would welcome clarification from someone senior in Paizo as to what has happened here as soon as possible.
And of course, I wish Sara Marie and Diego every success for the future. I am sure they will thrive in whatever they do.
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I still have excitement for products, I love the world that they've built, I love the work of the freelancers and devs. The problem isn't with the employees, but at the top of the structure, and it's not something that can be fixed by customers without hurting everyone else that's already impacted by the bad behaviors.
For me, it's similar to my approach to comics. Top brass at any major company is likely not great, and Marvel and DC are no exception. Until last year DC was run by actively terrible people who protected abusers and shielded racists. Currently, Marvel is run by a guy who pretended to be Asian to get around company policies on editors also writing. DC is getting better over the last year, but it took a pandemic and mass layoffs to get there. Marvel is not. But there are still books by marginalized creators that I love, there are still people I want to support, so I do, I support the things I want to continue to get pushed, and I see no difference here.
My desire to ever attend a Paizocon just plummeted, but my excitement for the work of the people that actually make these places real? That's still there.
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Yeah, I'm in the camp that making snap decisions based on twitter allegations isn't my best choice, but I'm paying attention either way.
Sara leaving Paizo, for any reason, is sad to me though. A very kind human and I always felt a very positive part of the Paizo team. Sara, if you read this thread, I wish you the best of life going forward. You've been marvelous to us.
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Farewell and sending wishes for a good future.
:(
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Yeah, I'm not making any decisions yet except to wait and hear from some other voices. I know I'm only getting one side of the story, and want to hear what Paizo has to say.