"A couple of last thoughts. First, we won’t be able to release the new OGL today, because we need to make sure we get it right, but it is coming. Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we"
That is so funny. My BBEG said the same thing to the PC after they stopped all of their dastardly plans to take over the world...
To all the other PCs, cancel your subscriptions. Paizo and all the other companies are offering discounts to allow you to walk away from this greedy company.
No I’m not going to threaten to cancel my D&D Beyond subscription. Especially considering how much I’ve spent into it. Why should that worry you more, because I am willing to spend money on products I like. Lately I have been questioning myself if I truly want the product being produced. Why’s that you ask, it’s because recent products have been quite lackluster in appeal.
You can cancel the sub without losing access to all of your digital books that you've purchased so there is no harm in canceling the sub.
It takes a WEEK to say "woops we rolled a 1"? It's dripping with dishonesty. Why did OneDnD get opened for public review/playtesting, but this dumb OGL NOT get released in the same way? This letter claims it was "released for feedback", but it was leaked. The response took a week because they're lying about their real thoughts about the community. They don't respect their customers. They don't like their customers.
They "leaked" an extreme version for us to reject emphatically so they can now come back and write their Actually intended OGL which will still screw over creators.
Not coming back. I'll wait for someone to buy WOTC that cares once they go bankrupt. TSR all over again. Remember how they really feel. To the higher up we are just "obstacles" to our money.
Because I'm running several games, I was going to hold out a little longer (at least until an official release or update), but the obvious gaslighting and lies led me to immediately cancel my subscription.
Must’ve rolled a 3 on their CHA if they think we’re going to fall for this Deception.
Must believe we all rolled a 3 on our INT if they think the community won’t see right through this gaslighting Mental Prison.
I was looking for "We're going to leave 1.0a untouched and won't deauthorize it," and would accept that regardless of whatever new license they wanted to make. Obviously they didn't do that, and are continuing to be Lawful Evil.
In order to actually earn my respect and subscription back now, I want them to sign on to Paizo's new ORC license.
This entire statement seems like they were trying to accomplish a few things...
1. Mitigate the losses and slow the mass exit from their most direct revenue stream(DNDB subs) by passifying the immediate outrage from the community.
2. Make small concessions that will temper the outrage from influencers and creators in an attempt to reduce the amount of negative media that surrounds this issue.
3. Put third party publishers at ease and try to encourage them to keep an open mind when the new OGL 2.0 is released to them so they are able to sign it.
4. Attempt to virtue signal as a way to try and pull over some of the community onto their side and be more willing to accept some limitations in the OGL moving forward.
I think this entire release is totally transparent and nothing but a veiled attempt to salvage this mess. Here's the issue, we now know the true intentions of this executive board. We know what the end goal will be. The were stupid and got too greedy and tried to force it all at once. But they forgot that their entire platform is built on the entire community be comfortable with reading copious amounts of rules and making sure they're not being abused.
As long as the executive board of WotC remains the same and Hasbro still owns them, I will refuse to trust them ever again. Any products that I purchase from now on will be from third party publishers or for other game systems outside of the Hasbro SOI. I hope their shareholders meeting for q1 shows how much of a disaster this whole situation has been and I hope the shareholders call for resignations. Anything short of that will be suicide for this company.
The response is hollow, and obviously filled with lies and falsehoods meant to calm us while they continue to destroy the hobby we love, and have put our time and effort into.
They are also going around making sure that people can't talk about this topic in other areas, and slapping people with small bans when they do so.
I have pics for proof, cuz I was scared they were about to just get rid of people. Seems crazy but it totally is happening. They don't want us talking, and they don't want us organizing. Cuz it loses them money, the money that WE work for, not them.
Agreed, I've cancelled my subscription and I've been a customer from the beginning i have 3 campaigns about to start up, but guess what? Its a TTRPG, it uses paper, and pencils, we never needed dnd beyond. I'll be sharing my books without paying Hasbro a dime, and loving it. To be frank they still haven't supported all the PHB in this site, and its pathetic. I'm specifically referring to custom warlock invocations, and nonmagical custom equipment sections.
So they've been soaking up our money, and creating less and less for us as time went on, while saying "Its on the roadmap".
Remember that this clown show is the best they could do, even after giving themselves extra time. They put their best people to work spinning this, and after all the spin, it still reads like Strahd explaining how much he cares for his livestock -- I mean citizens.
It felt condescending and not a bit toxic, just like the OGL 1.1. Felt a lot like "We're sorry you got mad at us", making it at least partially our fault that we had a problem, instead of "we're sorry we wrote the bad thing". I don't doubt that the designers and even most of the DDB Beyond staff actually feel a lot of the "we'd never do that to you" feelings expressed in the response, and I appreciate that. But it's so clear that c-suite numbnuts forced these changes, and they're the ones that need to respond. And, it's so offensive to have to say this, they need to be honest. We all read that part that said "The OGL was never meant to create competitors", so don't give us this "the OGL changes were actually intended to be the opposite of that". That document portrayed creators, especially successful ones, as unrestrained parasites that "at long last" were going to be "rightfully" regulated and exploited. Period. So the next response needs to include a healthy dose of honest "How dare we do this to you?", instead of this infantilizing "We rolled a nat 1 on community outreach" stuff.
If they're gonna gaslight us, they should at least try and be better at it.
A draft wouldn’t be sent directly to the people involved, to be signed and to go into effect the day that it went into effect. The FIRST moment they cared about our feedback was when they realized their stream was going to flop hard yesterday - so they canceled it because the headlines would’ve been how badly it was received, with literally nothing positive to say about it.
I cancelled my subscription and have already started reading through the Core Rulebooj for Starfinder. This thing is 500 freaking pages. I’m excited.
It's a step in the right direction, but it does feel forced, given how it all went down (as previous comments have highlighted).
Two things still irk me with this response:
...and (2) the OGL exists for the benefit of the fans...
I'm bothered/worried that WotC doesn't seem to acknowledge or realize how important the OGL has been to their own business growth. Very many people (including myself) were brought into the brand as a paying customer because of OGL empowered content creators. We bring our friends in, and the brand grows. The truth here is that the OGL exists for the benefit of all: fans, players, WotC, and the D&D brand. Until WotC understands this, I worry they will always view the community in the wrong light, and act accordingly.
...our drafts included royalty language designed to apply to large corporations attempting to use OGL content...
The largest entity I know of using the D&D ruleset to create content is Critical Role. Critical Role Productions has some 40 employees (including the 8 founding members, the actors)? Are we supposed to view this as a large corporation? What is WotC? Or Apple? Or Amazon? This would be interpreted as a small business by any standard I've heard of, but it doesn't have the same ring when targeting small businesses, does it? And in a big way, I refer back to the previous point: Critical Role as a content creator, is hugely responsible for the growth of D&D over the last decade. Like it or not, CR is why I'm now a paying customer of D&D products, along with many others. If WotC actually understood this, the real importance of OGL and content creators, they would realize how delicate this all is, and I expect would be doing everything they can to empower groups like Critical Role to grow their brand for them.
Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we.
This statement is half right, and terribly disingenuous. Nobody won. There is no winning in the situation. Even if nothing changes, which is looking like the best outcome, trust between the community and WotC has been lost. A not insignificant amount of trust, to be clear.
As has already been pointed out, OGL 1.1 wasn't a draft. Contracts were pushed upon publishers to sign. Kickstarter signed a contract. And if 1.1 was written with the intent of bolstering the stated principles and goals, quite frankly, it was a baffling poor execution.
The truth is, in certain terms that at least the community will understand, WotC acted in a very LE manner with regards to this attempt to change the OGL. Nor did it happen in a moment of weakness, but was a long and premeditated series of actions. Even if WotC's most recent update were honest about RAW and RAI being very different, I don't know of a DM in the world who would let a character swing from LE to LG or any other *G alignment based solely upon their word and practically overnight. And material evidence tells us that such words cannot be trusted.
WotC, you have a lot of actions to go before you've earned back the faith you so carelessly discarded in pursuit of riches.
Don't forget that this all comes from the same company that has been butchering Magic: The Gathering for years now. In the last 10 years we have seen a lot of cross platform with first MtG in D&D with Thoros and Ravnica books. They were cheeky and fun, not harm and easy fix. GM could just say no MtG content. Then in the last year or two MtG started getting really wierd. We've had Warhammer 40k and Transformers in MtG. We've had releases so fast in MtG that nobody could keep up and product getting worse and worse. WotC D&D content has been getting worse and worse as well. Lacking originality and keep people interested through power creep (I'm looking at you silvery barbs and lunar sorcerer). This isn't going to get better until WotC or really Hasbro is really hurting. It in fact will probably get much worse from them first. Thankfully there are new options thanks to Kobold Press, Paizo and the ORC.
The problem with betraying a trust is that once you've done it, it's much harder to earn back what you lost. WotC betrayed the promise made 20 years ago. Sure it was a "draft" but it was dated and ready to go and only an employee leaking this dreck and our response to it caused them to walk it back a little.
It sounds like they'll be making minor changes to get us to come back, while still fully implementing their efforts to become a gaming monopoly and force other publishers out of the market.
What I really hear is "Our failing parent company has demanded we bring in much more money to save the overall enterprise, so stop losing subscriptions and get them to come back with a few platitudes".
The very idea they would de-authorize a license promised to be good for perpetuity says everything we need to know. Wizards broke a trust that they themselves authored. I hope people don't trust their promise to behave before they've proven they will and bound it to an acceptable IRREVOCABLE contract with content creators.
Can any of you cancel your subscriptions right now? I keep getting redirected to the subscribe page when I try to go to management, and the option is not available on the app at the moment.
Yes, go to your account settings, then Manage Subscription, then hit the hyperlink at the bottom that says Cancel My Subscription or somesuch.
Huh, when I did it on desktop I clicked on Subscribe.
This took me to the Subscription Management screen, but I was no longer logged in so I had to log in again.
Then I didn't see the option, so had to scroll down to the FAQ and choose the option for managing the account.
Then it took me to a screen with the option to Unsubscribe.
So additional login step, option is hidden through a link in the FAQ. Not very user friendly.
As for the announcement, it was insulting and petty and was a bunch of lies about intent while only slightly reducing the horrible parts without getting rid of them altogether. They should be ashamed.
"A couple of last thoughts. First, we won’t be able to release the new OGL today, because we need to make sure we get it right, but it is coming. Second, you’re going to hear people say that they won, and we lost because making your voices heard forced us to change our plans. Those people will only be half right. They won—and so did we"
That is so funny. My BBEG said the same thing to the PC after they stopped all of their dastardly plans to take over the world...
To all the other PCs, cancel your subscriptions.
Paizo and all the other companies are offering discounts to allow you to walk away from this greedy company.
The only way I trust them now is if they join the licensing agreement being worked out by Pazio and Kobold press.
You can cancel the sub without losing access to all of your digital books that you've purchased so there is no harm in canceling the sub.
It takes a WEEK to say "woops we rolled a 1"? It's dripping with dishonesty. Why did OneDnD get opened for public review/playtesting, but this dumb OGL NOT get released in the same way? This letter claims it was "released for feedback", but it was leaked. The response took a week because they're lying about their real thoughts about the community. They don't respect their customers. They don't like their customers.
They "leaked" an extreme version for us to reject emphatically so they can now come back and write their Actually intended OGL which will still screw over creators.
Not coming back. I'll wait for someone to buy WOTC that cares once they go bankrupt. TSR all over again. Remember how they really feel. To the higher up we are just "obstacles" to our money.
Because I'm running several games, I was going to hold out a little longer (at least until an official release or update), but the obvious gaslighting and lies led me to immediately cancel my subscription.
Must’ve rolled a 3 on their CHA if they think we’re going to fall for this Deception.
Must believe we all rolled a 3 on our INT if they think the community won’t see right through this gaslighting Mental Prison.
I was looking for "We're going to leave 1.0a untouched and won't deauthorize it," and would accept that regardless of whatever new license they wanted to make. Obviously they didn't do that, and are continuing to be Lawful Evil.
In order to actually earn my respect and subscription back now, I want them to sign on to Paizo's new ORC license.
This entire statement seems like they were trying to accomplish a few things...
1. Mitigate the losses and slow the mass exit from their most direct revenue stream(DNDB subs) by passifying the immediate outrage from the community.
2. Make small concessions that will temper the outrage from influencers and creators in an attempt to reduce the amount of negative media that surrounds this issue.
3. Put third party publishers at ease and try to encourage them to keep an open mind when the new OGL 2.0 is released to them so they are able to sign it.
4. Attempt to virtue signal as a way to try and pull over some of the community onto their side and be more willing to accept some limitations in the OGL moving forward.
I think this entire release is totally transparent and nothing but a veiled attempt to salvage this mess. Here's the issue, we now know the true intentions of this executive board. We know what the end goal will be. The were stupid and got too greedy and tried to force it all at once. But they forgot that their entire platform is built on the entire community be comfortable with reading copious amounts of rules and making sure they're not being abused.
As long as the executive board of WotC remains the same and Hasbro still owns them, I will refuse to trust them ever again. Any products that I purchase from now on will be from third party publishers or for other game systems outside of the Hasbro SOI. I hope their shareholders meeting for q1 shows how much of a disaster this whole situation has been and I hope the shareholders call for resignations. Anything short of that will be suicide for this company.
the blockchain statement is a deflection of guilt. they absolutely are aiming to make you pay for avatars. it's been a cool ride, WotC
The response is hollow, and obviously filled with lies and falsehoods meant to calm us while they continue to destroy the hobby we love, and have put our time and effort into.
They are also going around making sure that people can't talk about this topic in other areas, and slapping people with small bans when they do so.
I have pics for proof, cuz I was scared they were about to just get rid of people. Seems crazy but it totally is happening. They don't want us talking, and they don't want us organizing. Cuz it loses them money, the money that WE work for, not them.
Communication is the key.
Absolutely, correct.
Communication is the key.
Agreed, I've cancelled my subscription and I've been a customer from the beginning i have 3 campaigns about to start up, but guess what? Its a TTRPG, it uses paper, and pencils, we never needed dnd beyond. I'll be sharing my books without paying Hasbro a dime, and loving it. To be frank they still haven't supported all the PHB in this site, and its pathetic. I'm specifically referring to custom warlock invocations, and nonmagical custom equipment sections.
So they've been soaking up our money, and creating less and less for us as time went on, while saying "Its on the roadmap".
Communication is the key.
Remember that this clown show is the best they could do, even after giving themselves extra time. They put their best people to work spinning this, and after all the spin, it still reads like Strahd explaining how much he cares for his livestock -- I mean citizens.
It felt condescending and not a bit toxic, just like the OGL 1.1. Felt a lot like "We're sorry you got mad at us", making it at least partially our fault that we had a problem, instead of "we're sorry we wrote the bad thing". I don't doubt that the designers and even most of the DDB Beyond staff actually feel a lot of the "we'd never do that to you" feelings expressed in the response, and I appreciate that. But it's so clear that c-suite numbnuts forced these changes, and they're the ones that need to respond. And, it's so offensive to have to say this, they need to be honest. We all read that part that said "The OGL was never meant to create competitors", so don't give us this "the OGL changes were actually intended to be the opposite of that". That document portrayed creators, especially successful ones, as unrestrained parasites that "at long last" were going to be "rightfully" regulated and exploited. Period. So the next response needs to include a healthy dose of honest "How dare we do this to you?", instead of this infantilizing "We rolled a nat 1 on community outreach" stuff.
If they're gonna gaslight us, they should at least try and be better at it.
A draft wouldn’t be sent directly to the people involved, to be signed and to go into effect the day that it went into effect. The FIRST moment they cared about our feedback was when they realized their stream was going to flop hard yesterday - so they canceled it because the headlines would’ve been how badly it was received, with literally nothing positive to say about it.
I cancelled my subscription and have already started reading through the Core Rulebooj for Starfinder. This thing is 500 freaking pages. I’m excited.
It's a step in the right direction, but it does feel forced, given how it all went down (as previous comments have highlighted).
Two things still irk me with this response:
I'm bothered/worried that WotC doesn't seem to acknowledge or realize how important the OGL has been to their own business growth. Very many people (including myself) were brought into the brand as a paying customer because of OGL empowered content creators. We bring our friends in, and the brand grows. The truth here is that the OGL exists for the benefit of all: fans, players, WotC, and the D&D brand. Until WotC understands this, I worry they will always view the community in the wrong light, and act accordingly.
The largest entity I know of using the D&D ruleset to create content is Critical Role. Critical Role Productions has some 40 employees (including the 8 founding members, the actors)? Are we supposed to view this as a large corporation? What is WotC? Or Apple? Or Amazon? This would be interpreted as a small business by any standard I've heard of, but it doesn't have the same ring when targeting small businesses, does it? And in a big way, I refer back to the previous point: Critical Role as a content creator, is hugely responsible for the growth of D&D over the last decade. Like it or not, CR is why I'm now a paying customer of D&D products, along with many others. If WotC actually understood this, the real importance of OGL and content creators, they would realize how delicate this all is, and I expect would be doing everything they can to empower groups like Critical Role to grow their brand for them.
This statement is half right, and terribly disingenuous. Nobody won. There is no winning in the situation. Even if nothing changes, which is looking like the best outcome, trust between the community and WotC has been lost. A not insignificant amount of trust, to be clear.
As has already been pointed out, OGL 1.1 wasn't a draft. Contracts were pushed upon publishers to sign. Kickstarter signed a contract. And if 1.1 was written with the intent of bolstering the stated principles and goals, quite frankly, it was a baffling poor execution.
The truth is, in certain terms that at least the community will understand, WotC acted in a very LE manner with regards to this attempt to change the OGL. Nor did it happen in a moment of weakness, but was a long and premeditated series of actions. Even if WotC's most recent update were honest about RAW and RAI being very different, I don't know of a DM in the world who would let a character swing from LE to LG or any other *G alignment based solely upon their word and practically overnight. And material evidence tells us that such words cannot be trusted.
WotC, you have a lot of actions to go before you've earned back the faith you so carelessly discarded in pursuit of riches.
Don't forget that this all comes from the same company that has been butchering Magic: The Gathering for years now. In the last 10 years we have seen a lot of cross platform with first MtG in D&D with Thoros and Ravnica books. They were cheeky and fun, not harm and easy fix. GM could just say no MtG content. Then in the last year or two MtG started getting really wierd. We've had Warhammer 40k and Transformers in MtG. We've had releases so fast in MtG that nobody could keep up and product getting worse and worse. WotC D&D content has been getting worse and worse as well. Lacking originality and keep people interested through power creep (I'm looking at you silvery barbs and lunar sorcerer). This isn't going to get better until WotC or really Hasbro is really hurting. It in fact will probably get much worse from them first. Thankfully there are new options thanks to Kobold Press, Paizo and the ORC.
The problem with betraying a trust is that once you've done it, it's much harder to earn back what you lost. WotC betrayed the promise made 20 years ago. Sure it was a "draft" but it was dated and ready to go and only an employee leaking this dreck and our response to it caused them to walk it back a little.
It sounds like they'll be making minor changes to get us to come back, while still fully implementing their efforts to become a gaming monopoly and force other publishers out of the market.
What I really hear is "Our failing parent company has demanded we bring in much more money to save the overall enterprise, so stop losing subscriptions and get them to come back with a few platitudes".
The very idea they would de-authorize a license promised to be good for perpetuity says everything we need to know. Wizards broke a trust that they themselves authored. I hope people don't trust their promise to behave before they've proven they will and bound it to an acceptable IRREVOCABLE contract with content creators.
Huh, when I did it on desktop I clicked on Subscribe.
This took me to the Subscription Management screen, but I was no longer logged in so I had to log in again.
Then I didn't see the option, so had to scroll down to the FAQ and choose the option for managing the account.
Then it took me to a screen with the option to Unsubscribe.
So additional login step, option is hidden through a link in the FAQ. Not very user friendly.
As for the announcement, it was insulting and petty and was a bunch of lies about intent while only slightly reducing the horrible parts without getting rid of them altogether. They should be ashamed.