I went back to where I first read this, Eurogamer’s coverage, and re-read the part about Fries’ role in this:
The discussion spread wider and people waded in from all sides. Peter Fries - the other writer fired by ArenaNet - jumped in at this point. His tweet has since been removed but a cached version was saved.
Fries, in response to someone complaining Price was “playing the gender card”, said: “Here’s a bit of insight that I legitimately hope he reflects on: she never asked for his feedback. These are our private social media accounts - imagine you’re an astronomer and you start sharing some things you’ve learned in the last few months since you began a research project observing Saturn, only to have observation techniques explained to you by a layman.”
Later, he added: “Today is a national holiday. It is our day off, after working hard for months on our most recent content release. If I’m being embarrassing and unprofessional, it’s because I’m enjoying a beverage in the sun in my backyard and this nonsense is being directed at someone I respect. Jessica is great at her job and deserves to be treated with respect, was the gist of what I was reacting to.”
Emphasis mine. Everyone’s focusing on his coming to her defense, but there’s certainly enough here that I understand why ArenaNet might have a problem with what he’s saying. His twitter account isn’t private. It’s personal, but he used it to engage with a discussion about his work and his coworkers and his customers, and basically admits that he may be behaving unprofessionally.
Now I still can’t tell you whether ArenaNet’s response was too severe, because as far as I know he hasn’t given any info on how his termination went down. Maybe they said “lol you’re fired, peace out”, or maybe they said “Look, your heart was in the right place defending Price, but your responses were unprofessional, we’d like you to remove them or apologize” and he stuck to his guns. Who knows?
I just think it’s a little more reasonable that ArenaNet would’ve had problems with his tweets than some of the narrative makes it sound.