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#1 Vathelokai Nov 14, 2009 17:57:33

I've spent the day on the forums reading up on the ranting and raving and complaining.  I had been away from the forums for about 2 years and decided to come back on a whim.  At first glance, I thought all the new changes were cool.  Then I found out quickly how buggy everything is.  Meh. I'm not sure I can stay positive here, but I'll give it a shot.  The possibilities for this site are great.  If things were not so buggy, I would post here all the time (like I did pre-Gleemax). That said, I am completely shocked at how much of a mess the place is.  There was a week were I had a 50/50 chance of the formatting buttons on my posts working right.  I just gave up and started writting my posts with raw html because it was faster and came out better.  Just think about that for a second. I work for a publishing company, and we are going through redesign right now, so I can imagine what it's like at WotC.  This stuff is far from easy.   I can sympathize, but to be blunt, there are only a few ways it could have ended up like this and those ways are avoidable. However, these are symptoms I think.  I think there are a couple major problems at the administrative level.  It is events like pay-walling, un-responsiveness, and SCR (spontaneous crappy redesign) that make me think this way.  Hear me out. First, look at the world that Wizards of the Hasbro is working in:  Data 'piracy' and recession.  Next look at their products: rely on expendable income, easily reproducable, facilitate hobbies that don't technically require their products, frequently bought by groups instead of individuals, and difficult to sell to the same person twice.  Third, and I think most important, this isn't the same type/style/design of company that made these products famous.   Finally, these decisions are made by business people, whose drive to have a profitable business superceeds any drive to create a quality product (I mean that in the most literal sense; I do not mean to imply they do not want a good product, only that they will sell a less than optimal product if the profit motive is not fullfilled). The 'piracy' thing is a trendy, mislabeled, misunderstood phenomenon that businesses are rabidly attacking.  Like any media company, they are fighting it.  This comes from a (in my opinion) bizarre notion that if someone gets something that you could have made money off of, then you have lost money.  It's rather like saying that if I eat a hamburger that I cook, I have taken money away from a fast food chain.  As to real piracy, I feel bad for the people doing the creation, but I could care less about the 15 people between me and them that get to tack a dollar onto the price of a product.  But piracy discussion are all over the net, and we don't really need to rehash them.  Sufice to say, the anti-digital initiave from WotC (my guess is that it was probably a Hasbro level decision) was a bad move. Recession, in my experience, drives business executives to do insane things.  They ask more from employees in exchange for less.  They undercut business deals, hoping to get the benefit of the deal before the negative consequences of undercutting kick in.  They accept rediculous sales pitches from third parties on the hope that they can cut their own costs.  I can only assume WizBro is doing this as well, and the consequences are all over the forums.  Who wants to bet that their IT department/service is short staffed, underfunded, and getting chewed out for being behind on impossible deadlines?  Who want's to bet that in addition to being nice guys and role-players, OneSite offered more than they could deliver?  Who thinks that the Wizards executives bought it because it was shiny and cheap? It also seems clear that WizBro is out of touch with the customer base.  As referenced above, some executive thought that they could increase value in DDI by lowering value for non-payers.  Thus, no more gallary images without paying.  From an executive perspective this looks right; from a customer perspective it looks assinine.  But then again, can the executives really consider non-subscribers to be 'customers'.  It seems clear that the view has shifted, and I for one am no longer a customer; now I'm a potential market.  Being that I've been playing D&D for over 20 years, I'm slightly offended.  But again, from a pure executive look, that is irrelevant.  I provide word of mouth advertising, but I'm not putting food on their table. It appears that the company has started in a new direction with how they sell their products.  In the past a group of people would get together to buy books, maybe a magazine subscription, minatures, etc.  WizBro now wants a paid subscription service model; you pay monthly to play the game. (Imagine, if you will, Monopoly(tm) online... heh).  Those models only work for specific products, and RPG books is not one of them (although the company is currently trying to prove me wrong).  Mostly it just looks like they don't understand their product, and they see World of Warcraft doing one thing, Shadowrun doing one thing, free gamer software doing one thing, so they try to do half of all those.  They end up with a project that is bigger than 100%, that they only complete parts of, and that doesn't make anyone happy.  I think someone saw too many buzz words (web 2.0!  virtual table top!  social network!  value add!) and made decisions badly. I give up.  Time to cook dinner.