Now, a partial argument can be made that actually Dragon & Dungeon articles qualify as 'exclusive' material.
Then we had the heady days of the PHB3 playtest stuff - hybrids and the monk. Cool stuff! Sure it was rough around the edges, but you know what? At that time I actually felt like WotC was sharing.
Bill has said several times in his Ampersand columns about what cool stuff an Insider can see ahead of the curve. Over the last year, though, most of this great intent has evaporated. Bill's columns now read more like the 'monthname and beyond' marketing articles, with previews of things not more than a month or more away from purchase.
Undoubtedly something exploded in the R&D department when it came to planning beyond PHB3; they just didn't know where to go next. In one sense, 4e had been too structured and thorough. In two years we had three PHBs, covering 6(?) power sources, lots of classes, more than enough feats, paragon paths and epic destinies for most gamers. Magic items are everywhere, rituals have caught up, and we have three great and detailed settings, with a 4th (the new 'Core' world) in pretty playable detail.
What next? I imagine that at some point a DMG3, PHB4, Arcane Power 2 etc were all on the drawing board and their content discussed and planned to some extent.
No doubt the sales figures were noticed around this point and it made less and less sense. No one is suprised that beyond the core 3 books the sales volumes taper off sharply.
A relaunch attempting to bring in people who've given this and other editions of D&D a miss was a great move. It also allows for an errata cleanup, a sort of reprint and a new printing paradigm. Amongst other things, I'm fairly certain the new digest format is cheaper in overheads for WotC in many ways - from raw printing costs, to effective shipping per unit costs as well. Personally I like the digest format, and I also like my favorite rpg publisher to stay in business. So win win.
However, while all this was happening the effective 'Insider' output dried up. We had articles, and adventures - but the amount of near current preview material increased, and it started to feel more like straight marketing - well straight marketing that we were paying to receive in fact!
No doubt the need to change the direction of the entire RPG line had huge lead time implications for the R&D department. Consequently the time from playtest to publication has undoubtedly been alot shorter, making such Insider previews as the Monk far from feasible.
On the Tools side, they suffered as much as the R&D team. While I've written much about the core problem being very poor choices made early on (not purely at the time WotC brought things in house, but the failure right from the outset and speccing of the project to realise the nature of D&D is to transform within an edition by adding new rules, quirky features and alternate chargen method and advancement and therefore include that concept within the tools) the people currently in the studio still had to do the day to day work. And even with the undoubtedly shortened development cycle in the R&D department, they had a couple of months from the time a product is sent to the printers to when it officially hit the shelves.
So what am I saying? Yes we understand the sorts of things that must have been happening at WotC to get us into the state that we're in right now - where things aren't being communicated well, where the quality and quantity of magazine content is notably lower than previously, where the term Insider in absolutely no longer true, and we are as Outside as any non-subscriber.
Some of the above comes from straight postings by WotC, some of it is an amalgamation of various facts collected 'here and there', some of it is logical deduction. YMMV on your opinion of its accuracy.
Now we're told that there are 'snags' and issues in people being able to tell us what that hell is going on. A lot has been said about parent companies and so on. Very, very few parent companies give a hoot about its siblings day to day actions as long as they're profitable. Hasbro did make special mention that the initiation of Insider program reduced its profits in its games division that year, so quite possibly they are keeping a close eye on things. Other reasons that people get gagged is because of NDAs... however NDAs only exist between a company and other entities. So if an NDA is involved at WotCs end, it means they're working with a more senior partner on something. I don't buy that one at all. However, I also don't buy the fact that some senior pubah at WotC is so fried by the bad publicity of the Insider release fiasco that they decided that no news was good news and would keep schtum.
If you all recall before Randy(?) or whoever the original Insider manager was was fired/left/made redundant he was doing a weekly announcement about progress. After he went Bill took up the mantle and continued it for a short while then said he'd roll that information into his Ampersand column... Well obviously that never happened.
In fact, I'm at a loss for any official references from the R&D team about the Tools at all.
Question to WotC, in what way are we Insiders anymore?
Add me to the list of folks who would like some answers about this!
You have beautifully summed up my own concerns there. Nice one
Add me to the list of folks who would like some answers about this!
I agree that Insiders seem to have been left out of the loop with how things are going, but the main concern of mine raised from your article is on the nature of bringing more 'books' to the table. I know this is the 21st century and everything should be on laptops and PDA's and whatnot, but I hope that the evolution of RPG's like D&D 4e means that we won't be seeing more power books and more settings...
As a group we've stopped at one of each of the power books now until we see something changing on the horizon for it, personally I'm getting into the Essentials line however because I'm aiming to be teaching some more people to play D&D and it seemed a wise investment for the cost and the simplicity in which its being presented.
However, to be actually on topic about DDI rather than ramble on like a drunken bard, a clear line of communication seems to be the thing that's missing here but with the way that things are going I think that things will be sorted out for Insiders. Something, whatever it might be obviously set back their time table for getting things out, but with the latest update and then next months including possibly the next essentials book & the builds from the first one (for players) things might take on an even keel again and it could then go back to the same way it was before, in the 'PHB3' era as you say.
I would imagine that if anything, Wizards are working even harder to sort out this question of 'where is my value for money' than ever now.
It's not very insider when we don't have any developer access/attention, while other places around the net do.
I completely agree w/ the preview content. So much of what Dragon was has become useless, flowery, previews for content being released in the next 30 days. This ammounts to advertising. It is not useful for play or even analysis of the upcoming content. While I would rather have new/unique content in Dragon, the old PH3 previews were rather welcome, especially compared to the marketing we have now.
There's been alot of (justified) focus on the tools of late, I just thought the rest of the Insider package and concept had gotten forgotten in the mix and wanted to bring it to attention once more.
While the physical deliverables are easiest to **** month to month, that wasn't those weren't the only thing that the whole package was about!
And for anyone who cares, I'm a very strong supporter of WotC and D&D. I've been a D&DI subscriber since day one, and purchase all of the RPG material. Partly thats an obsessive must have compulsion (from the 3/3.5 days when I wasn't as affluent) and partly the philosophy I have that if I can find one useful idea in a book, it makes the entire pruchase worthwhile. Hopefully every little bit helps keep WotC afloat!
OP is right on target. It takes a special kind of stupidity to get things to where they are today. And best of all, it get worse every single day.
I wouldn't say stupidity was even slightly the problem with WotC. Fear, timidness, over sensitivity to forum postings... these are things I could believe. Never stupid!
One of the inevitable consequences of providing a product is that some portion will complain. Before internet forums the biggest interaction with customers a gaming company had was at conventions, and usually they're too busy to really notice much in those circumstances. The only other options were to phone of write a letter. You had to be REALLY pissed off to bother to do that.
So the internet makes ranting and venting alot easier, so more people do it. However, while you might have been able to say, in days gone by, that for every one person who takes the effort to complain maybe (making numbers up here) 100 people share that view, that same calculation doesn't work anymore. Is it more, less? I'm not sure people really have the same kind of clean statistical idea of what a complaint actually equates to anymore. How should they react? Obviously the simplest way is to not do anything wrong, but thats impossible (of course). Going silent is almost as bad. Simple conjecture gives me the idea that they've set some internal standard that they must meet before saying something. But surely they've realised that thats not working either.
We're not just customers buying books, we're also customers paying an ongoing fee. Should that make a difference? Certainly! Subscription services are incerasingly important for many companies because it gives a revenue stream thats easier to predict, and is better suited to inertia - people get used to paying the money and can't be bothered to cancel. Its great for a company. And of the 30k+ subscirbers, less than 1% (maybe 2?) are really active in their vehemence on these boards. More probably read them. Why haven't they noted the delays on the main product pages? Well, no one puts 'our product is currently not working well, or supporting our current product line' on their main advertising. But it means people don't know about the problems. Plenty of Internet savvy people won't waste time coming to these boards to discover things. And lets face it, companies rely on that sort of blind spot.
The point BrennonSithech makes about it being easier to get an R&D writers attention on enworld than on here is unfortunatley true. Paulo has shown that he intends (if allowed) to make good excpetions for the dev studio. But as my original post (hopefully) points out, we're not only looking for new tools and info on that, but on all things D&D. We're the people who run games and rave about games we've played to our friends. We're the people who spread the great word of mouth. We're the people who pull others into the hobby by our sheer enthusiasm!
We deserve better.
The concerns that you listed here are well said.
MB, you should note this for your weekly (or is it bi-weekly?) report to the WotC Headpersons.
Bravo, satir.
The concerns that you listed here are well said.
MB, you should note this for your weekly (or is it bi-weekly?) report to the WotC Headpersons.
Weekly, and it is.
If t was fully updated on CB, it would be aweasome.
Back to topic:
I'm not a kind of poster that likes to go against wizards in any way.
But its kind of sad, that we dont receive the beta test material.
CB is the main product from D&DI. If you want to show a new class, please do so adding it do CB, like was done in the past.
The way 4ed is created, and the way to books works, makes it alot more difficult to create characters with pen and paper them it was in 3ed. (Atlast for me...)
Character Builder isnt a good tool anymore, its necessary to create characters nowdays. Yes you can do it with the books, but you will take ALOT more time, and it will not become as good as a character on CB since you can compare all powers of the same level with easy, and try many feat/powers/builds combinations with alot less time.
The content of the dugeon and dragon magazines is greatly reduced from what it was...
I was really pleased when they released assassin, and monk on CB. I had the sensation that my money had paid off, for the advantage of having something before it was even released.
Maybe so much people was angered with the bugs/exploits and changes on beta to "live" classes that they decided to not show beta tests anymore. And just show things they are sure are almost done... Who knows?
But thats just my random thoughts.
Sorry for my bad english, not my main language.
Now I agree that it would be nice to have Essentials in the builder now, especially since they told us we would. And I agree that more playtest/preview classes/builds/etc would be a great thing. I just find it an odd thing to complain about the month after they gave us a playtest class.
Even in the past the playtest classes/monsters were first released in the magazines and then incorporated into the CB when the magazine was, if I remember correctly. We are currently caught up on their usual schedule for including magazines. There was always a month delay from the end of the magazine to incorporation in the CB (the September magazine wouldn't show up until the November update, which is where the playtest assassin is/should be). Similar issue with the books, having Essentials in the CB now would probably be a little earlier than usual.
Now I agree that it would be nice to have Essentials in the builder now, especially since they told us we would. And I agree that more playtest/preview classes/builds/etc would be a great thing. I just find it an odd thing to complain about the month after they gave us a playtest class.
None of this is an explicit complaint about any single aspect of the D&DI program. There's no doubt they're trying to fix things and get things back into place, but there's little to be lost by telling them about the things I (and others) found to be the some of the most valuable aspects of the subscription.
Things have gotten over focussed on the Tools of late. Just because there are some very good reasons for that focus of peoples unhappiness doesn't mean we should be telling WotC its the only thing we care about.
I'm not entirely sure that everything they release ahead of time has to be included in the CB or AT. There's minimal value in the time spent on that - considerably fewer players will create characters that aren't complete yet, not everyone will create a character just to try it out and so on. Of course, if we had better mechanisms for certain types of custom content in CB, heck the R&D designers could produce a CB file with their playtest classes in! No need to make it even vaguely official. At your own peril and all that
(Note: I actually think that'd be a kind of cool approach, and also be potentially useful to designers to try out math in various builds quickly - although I assume they already have various spreadsheets and other tools for this kind of thing).Not all preview material has to be crunch (necessarily) either. True, its harder to show a first draft of 'War of Shadow vs Far Reaches' mini history and plot points than it is to show a 'Shadow/Abberation' hybrid monster template, but I think there's some leeway there.