We’ve updated this post at the end with confirmation of the Mike Z departure.

We hate to rain on the “wheee Guild Wars 2 is getting a third expansion” parade because it’s a nice parade and we’re enjoying it. But we now return to reality, where yet another top ArenaNet staffer has left the building.

Eagle-eyed Redditors point to Linkedin, where it’s now clear that Mike Silbowitz, the former VP of ArenaNet’s global marketing team and VP of marketing for NCsoft, has morphed into head of marketing for… Wargaming, working on an “exciting unannounced new game.”

The Reddit thread took a bizarre turn when a pro-ArenaNet account piped up to defend Silbowitz personally, complete with insults for Redditors and oddly explicit information (in fact, the whole account is like that, with commentary specifically on marketing and insider info on staffing). Last year, Redditors suspected that someone associated with the game was using sockpuppet accounts to post pseudo-ads for its marketing on Reddit, so it’s an… interesting situation over there indeed.

MMO readers will recall that ArenaNet suffered heavy layoffs and a reorganization in 2019, and since then we’ve seen a steady stream of multiple additional devs (including studio head Mike O’Brien) moving on from the company, most recently a pair last month.