I think it's a great idea to hire an actual PR team for Brink. It would help to get the word out about the game and create more awareness. Having a professional team to handle the marketing and promotion of the game could really help to increase its popularity and reach more potential players.
Exactly, thank you. I'm not saying the guy's the devil, just clearly not trained in PR management. Hell, I'm not even trained in PR, I've just done enough advertising and marketing to basically hear the professors that taught me flipping out when I see his interviews telling me all the reasons why you should never ever say something like THAT to your audience, least of all an audience you're trying to sway or convince to come to your side of things.
I'm not sure why that's such a controversial take, I honestly thought it was pretty obvious, especially what with everyone's responses to him online being pretty... middling. But I guess for some people the lack of an absolute disaster means that someone being mediocre looks... good? to them? IDK. I don't get it.
So, you’d prefer some slick as catshit PR flack to spout half-truths, dissemble and dodge hard questions? You want this instead of a guy who actually works there inelegantly telling us what he actually thinks? Is that what your saying?
I think it's a great idea to hire an actual PR team for Brink. It would help to get the word out about the game and create more awareness. Having a professional team to handle the marketing and promotion of the game could really help to increase its popularity and reach more potential players.
Please actually read the thread you are posting to.
I am really coming around to the chatbot theory.
If it's not a chatbot, it's someone trying to deliberately sound like one
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Would you rather have a fellow member of the D&D community and player addressing our concerns, or would you rather have a tight lipped and formal PR team writing legalese for us?
People already went into a frenzy about the somewhat legal use of the word draft, but there would be plenty more terms like that if we had an actual public relations official representing Wizards. Honestly, if you dislike the answers Kyle gave, then you would almost certainly like the answers of an official like this even less.
Kyle's words have meaning because he is a member of our community and creator for us. A random spokesman's words would have no weight at all.
Go to Brink's Linkedin, he has ZERO tabletop development,tabeltop program management or tabletop writing experience, zero. At least a PR rep would not be stepping into issue after issue that Kyle is adept at stepping in. If you want to turn D&D into a video game and drop paper books, he's your man. No thank you, seen that in 4E.
If you are trained to use a hammer, every problem is a nail. Good luck D&D.
Go to Brink's Linkedin, he has ZERO tabletop development,tabeltop program management or tabletop writing experience, zero.
Um... the fact that he comes from a video game background is kinda irrelevant to his appropriateness for addressing a community problem. The reason to use a manager, rather than a PR rep, is because the manager is assumed to actually have information about what they're talking about.
Go to Brink's Linkedin, he has ZERO tabletop development,tabeltop program management or tabletop writing experience, zero.
Um... the fact that he comes from a video game background is kinda irrelevant to his appropriateness for addressing a community problem. The reason to use a manager, rather than a PR rep, is because the manager is assumed to actually have information about what they're talking about.
A PR rep isn't going to be doing the gaffes annoying the community and they will know what they can and can't say. The post I replied to discussed:
Would you rather have a fellow member of the D&D community and player addressing our concerns, or would you rather have a tight lipped and formal PR team writing legalese for us?
A PR rep would has as much D&D experience as Kyle has from his resume. A PR rep would be completely fine to address the community and would probably have convinced more people to come back. A PR rep knows not to make a passive aggressive statement when trying to quench an irked community or brings up groups of people leaving the community as a good thing.
For me, he's talked my wallet permanently closed to D&D as long as he is in charge of the franchise. I frankly dislike him personally from his statements and I don't find him trustworthy. Meanwhile, if he was kept behind the curtain and a PR rep was hired to fix the mess, I would have given D&D another chance. The guy would be a nobody to me and the social media and videos on his statements further poisoning the community would never have been made and seen in the first place. With the economy going downhill, the last thing a company needs is bad public relations, but here we have it. A PR rep would have prevented all of this.
Go to Brink's Linkedin, he has ZERO tabletop development,tabeltop program management or tabletop writing experience, zero.
Um... the fact that he comes from a video game background is kinda irrelevant to his appropriateness for addressing a community problem. The reason to use a manager, rather than a PR rep, is because the manager is assumed to actually have information about what they're talking about.
A PR rep isn't going to be doing the gaffes annoying the community and they will know what they can and can't say. The post I replied to discussed:
Would you rather have a fellow member of the D&D community and player addressing our concerns, or would you rather have a tight lipped and formal PR team writing legalese for us?
A PR rep would has as much D&D experience as Kyle has from his resume. A PR rep would be completely fine to address the community and would probably have convinced more people to come back. A PR rep knows does not make passive aggressive statement when trying to quench an irked community or brings up groups of people leaving the community as a good thing.
For me, he's talked my wallet permanently closed to D&D as long as he is in charge of the franchise. I frankly dislike him personally from his statements and I don't find him trustworthy. Meanwhile, if he was kept behind the curtain and a PR rep was hired to fix the mess, I would have given D&D another chance. With the economy going downhill, the last thing a company needs is bad public relations, but here we have it.
I'd rather have someone who is professional and doing the job decently. That's it. If someone wants to say that means I'd prefer corporate lies and extrapolate that into some childish nonsense then they can do that, doesn't make it true - but it's not usually seen as absurd to want someone to do a job who is half decent at that job. Frankly it's not even usually controversial to say something like 'I think someone at a high level should be even good at their job, not just decent.' like - he's getting a huge salary for his position, and yet we're somehow not allowed to expect him to avoid very obvious pitfalls and create even more problems on top of the problems he was sent in to solve?
There's nothing about his history that we know of that tells us he's an actual D&D player - we haven't experienced him playing over ages, we don't know him and have no reason to extend the benefit of the doubt to him. Ergo, when he talks and I don't HEAR anything that actually says 'Hey guys, I GET IT, I understand the issue from your side of the table because I have sat there as a gamer myself', then I don't really feel the need to just believe him at face value when he says he's an avid D&D player and loves the community, as far as I can see this is just a dude with a job who drew the short straw to be the face man because they thought putting a 'real' face to the issue would smooth things over better.
Problem is, that face has now said some things and continues to say things that are just not helping the brand recover in the way that I could have seen them doing. These are entirely avoidable gaffes and pitfalls that they are making for no reason, again, someone with even a BIT of public relations wouldn't be doing.
I'm not asking for 'corporate legalese', I'm asking for someone who isn't going to do more damage than they already have done. You can do that in a way that is polite and professional but not lies, you know - everything Kyle has said to us there's a way he could have said it that wouldn't have bothered anyone, it's just he apparently didn't know how to do it that way. Or didn't care to.
It'd be another story if we were in, say, an Overwatch situation where this guy was the Jeff from Overwatch dude that we'd watched and trusted for ages and we KNEW he'd been helming the game and we had reason to trust his word on things because he'd been an active member of the game/community and someone we saw regularly. But that's not what we're dealing with here, there's no reason this guy is somehow doing 'better' than anyone else, he's got no credit in the community and he's not saying the best things; so why keep him on as the face of the issue? There's no pro's and only cons from what I can see.
(also sorry I realize my reply was nested to the wrong OP)
A PR rep would has as much D&D experience as Kyle has from his resume.
His resume mentions "President of the Fantasy Gamer's Guild" at Humboldt, which is unlikely to mean computer games. In any case, I would absolutely believe that someone with the type of video game experience he has would also have TTRPG experience that he just never got paid for, there's a lot of crossover (someone in my gaming group worked for one of the studios he mentions. I'll have to ask him if he knows anything).
Now, could they have found a PR rep who also played D&D? Quite possibly. Could they have done so in the couple of weeks it took for this situation to blow up? I have my doubts.
Cynthia Williams and Chris Cao need to go. They need people that actually play the games and know the culture. We as the community will not go silently into the night.
Want more money wizards? Don't be a bag of Richards.
Cynthia Williams and Chris Cao need to go. They need people that actually play the games and know the culture. We as the community will not go silently into the night.
Want more money wizards? Don't be a bag of Richards.
After reading the entire thread, I'll just say this: Your conclusions are the correct answer.
Complaining about what anyone else is saying is irrelevant. These are the two people where the corpo-speak and the bone-headed, tone-deaf decisions are coming from. So yes, they both need to go.
I have read and reread this post of yours a number of times and, I'm sorry, but I can't make any sense of it.
Forget Bob.
I agreedwith your first response to me that perhaps any outrage on social media was a distortion of any real life response to the OGL. (The same might be said of the response to the OGL here.) That's why I said if they were prepared to take the risk that it was then that would have been their prerogative.
Your going off into some tangent about how what I said about social media and forums somehow means there was never really any controversy falls outside of what I was saying or what I care about talking about here.
What I posted about studies showing social media and forums are far from a reflection of real life and why that is? That's true.
If you disagree, maybe take up any complaints you have with the authors of those studies.
If you agree, it seems odd you didn't reply to the person I responded to who is of the opinion that what people post here is a reflection of the broader community and what it thinks and feels.
Again, you're missing my point. My point is that every evidence that said there was a problem now says that it's fine (assuming they stay the course). There is no real reason to believe that people who didn't rant on social media reacted to it in substantially different manner and were less receptive to the apology than the hot heads who publically ranted about the problem in the first place.
If you developed a cure for the common cold, and you tested it everyone you saw that had a cold (we'll assume everyone gave consent) and virtually everyone was instantly cured of the common cold the moment they took it, and this sample included pretty much every public case, then the conclusion would naturally be that it was effective, right? I mean, sure, it could all be a coincidence, it could be that the vast majority of cases aren't public and if you administered the cure to them,.maybe it wouldn't work. But the evidence all points to it working and actually being a cure, with a few individual exceptions. Until we see data otherwise, that would be the working presumption.
This is not meaningfully any different. Almost everyone who was up in arms about OGL is now mollified. We were getting new multipage threads full of rants each day (to the point that those of us who were more interested in talking about D&D than contract law had to set up two threads with clear titles telling people not to rant there to do so in peace, and even then they weren't perfectly successful), I had multiple news articles each day coming into my feed about it. The instant that interview went up, everything changed. Only a couple of threads and odd posts are critical since. No critical news articles. There are multiple people who were hyper critical of WotC explicitly saying that his apology that changed their mind or at least civilised their tone and helped them reconcile. People who were critical are now defending Kyle. The evidence all says that it was successful...and very successful at that.
People who weren't or aren't posting on social media fall into certaing categories. There are the apathetic, who aren't pertinent. There are the crazies who are technophobic and refuse to use tech because people spy on them (let's be honest, they're fringe and not really in large enough numbers to discuss). There are those who don't use technology much but got the news by word of mouth from those that do and therefore will track with them. There are those who, for one reason or another, never got the news and so aren't pertinent. The only ones that might buck the trend are the lurkers - people who got upset but never say anything. Given that they're generally speaking less emotionally reactive than the active ones who were mollified despite being so vehemently against WotC, I don't see why there'd be any reason to assume that they're not tracking with the visible shift to reconcilation with WotC - if there was a need in the first place.
If you have meaningful data that shows that they might not be, then I'm open to that possibility. I'll even discuss any logic you have that might explain why they'd be differentiated in their patterns from the rather strong ones in the active posters in this specific situation. Lacking that, it's reasonable to presume that since the visible storm has abated and rather sharply correllated with Brink's interview at that, that his apology was successful.
To assert otherwise is, for the intellectually honest, a push for what is effectively solipsism, rendering the conversation pointless, and for the less intellectually honest, motivated selective reasoning.
Whether these are echo chambers or not is actually irrelevant - the people who were vocal about OGL were mollified, and that wasn't due to an echo chamber. The question is whether the non-vocal people followed suit - and there isn't really a.reason to believe they didn't.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Indestructoboy? The Rules Lawyer? Roll for Combat? Bob World Builder?
Their followers?
They and others have sustained their distrust of Brink and of Wizards. They and others are still recommending other games so that we can play D&D without Hasbro.
A fair number of them were doing that before this situation came up.
It is very telling that Brink did 3 interviews, and only one was with someone with a large following. He could have done D&D Shorts (334K) for starters.
Doing D&D shorts would be stupid -- when you're trying to put out a fire, don't go to the gasoline factory.
It is very telling that Brink did 3 interviews, and only one was with someone with a large following. He could have done D&D Shorts (334K) for starters. But no, let's do interviews with friendlies. And yes, I have watched all 3 (Ginny D's was heavily edited), and yes, they are softball questions throughout.
Ginny explicitly chose to edit the video shorter, and Wizards had no involvement in that process, as per the agreement the two parties made before the interview. Ginny hasn't actually been very pro Wizards of the Coast lately, and I don't know why your so upset that some of the interviewers were friendly and recognized that Kyle's a human who deserves to be treated with respect too.
D&D Shorts has been wrong about numerous things of late. He is not a credible interviewer, and Wizards of the Coast has no reason to give him more information to exaggerate into clickbait or misinformation. I personally am glad that Kyle is recognizing that the D&D community is made by both those who are dedicated to the game and have a large audience, as well as those who play and discuss the game as eagerly - if not more - but still haven't garnered as many clicks. Thankfully, he has talked with various types of players so far instead of only showing a commitment to the top 0000.1% (or so) of the community that gets dozens of thousands of views.
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It is very telling that Brink did 3 interviews, and only one was with someone with a large following. He could have done D&D Shorts (334K) for starters.
Doing D&D shorts would be stupid -- when you're trying to put out a fire, don't go to the gasoline factory.
I guess we found D&D Shorts' burner account
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It is very telling that Brink did 3 interviews, and only one was with someone with a large following. He could have done D&D Shorts (334K) for starters.
Doing D&D shorts would be stupid -- when you're trying to put out a fire, don't go to the gasoline factory.
I guess we found D&D Shorts' burner account
I actually thought D&D Shorts was a burner account for like Todd K or Crawford, who I sometimes thing are the same person after an interview where they tried to do the mirror thing but kinda overdid it, but that's getting way inside baseball.
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It is very telling that Brink did 3 interviews, and only one was with someone with a large following. He could have done D&D Shorts (334K) for starters.
Doing D&D shorts would be stupid -- when you're trying to put out a fire, don't go to the gasoline factory.
If Kyle went on DnD Shorts and clarified that some of the rumors were based on proposals that were not taken seriously or even just discussions about what they could do that would go a long way to earning trust. For example, if the $30 a month subscription was floated by some C Level person and then shot down it could be misconstrued as 'going to charge $30 a month' in a rumor based on a proposal that they thought was going to happen because of who suggested it.
That is of course speculation, but it would be a positive way of saying that extreme changes were proposed, but were not planned because they were shot down early. It would give some kind of hope that the other rumors, likely based on proposed ideas, could be confirmed as being shot down already and if he is consistent about that kind of information he would be trustworthy.
It is a tough road to navigate, but it would be far better than the current situation where rumors are treated as silly conjecture when they are most likely based on something that happened even if it was just an internal proposal that died in committee.
If Kyle went on DnD Shorts and clarified that some of the rumors were based on proposals that were not taken seriously or even just discussions about what they could do that would go a long way to earning trust.
No, it would just not be believed. A likely answer is "I don't even know where that comes from", because the primary sources for those rumors appear to be in the electronic gaming division -- which he isn't the manager of and wouldn't necessarily have much more information about than we do.
If Kyle went on DnD Shorts and clarified that some of the rumors were based on proposals that were not taken seriously or even just discussions about what they could do that would go a long way to earning trust.
No, it would just not be believed.
True. Because if they said that, it would be an obvious lie.
It is very telling that Brink did 3 interviews, and only one was with someone with a large following. He could have done D&D Shorts (334K) for starters.
Doing D&D shorts would be stupid -- when you're trying to put out a fire, don't go to the gasoline factory.
If Kyle went on DnD Shorts and clarified that some of the rumors were based on proposals that were not taken seriously or even just discussions about what they could do that would go a long way to earning trust. For example, if the $30 a month subscription was floated by some C Level person and then shot down it could be misconstrued as 'going to charge $30 a month' in a rumor based on a proposal that they thought was going to happen because of who suggested it.
That is of course speculation, but it would be a positive way of saying that extreme changes were proposed, but were not planned because they were shot down early. It would give some kind of hope that the other rumors, likely based on proposed ideas, could be confirmed as being shot down already and if he is consistent about that kind of information he would be trustworthy.
It is a tough road to navigate, but it would be far better than the current situation where rumors are treated as silly conjecture when they are most likely based on something that happened even if it was just an internal proposal that died in committee.
You're assuming that the rumours were based on a solid truth in the first place. It could easily have been a low level idea that got on fairly low level group excited, but never went any further - apart from one disgruntled or alarmed employee. Or it could have just been one of those office rumours that never had any founding in truth.
It could be moment where mutual understanding brought about revelation brings trust. But that assumes that there is such a truth, and that Brink knows its source - the impression I got from him was that his knowledge of the nitty gritty specifics of meetings and office politics is rather limited.
I'm not sure it is viable.
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So, you’d prefer some slick as catshit PR flack to spout half-truths, dissemble and dodge hard questions? You want this instead of a guy who actually works there inelegantly telling us what he actually thinks? Is that what your saying?
If it's not a chatbot, it's someone trying to deliberately sound like one
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Go to Brink's Linkedin, he has ZERO tabletop development,tabeltop program management or tabletop writing experience, zero. At least a PR rep would not be stepping into issue after issue that Kyle is adept at stepping in. If you want to turn D&D into a video game and drop paper books, he's your man. No thank you, seen that in 4E.
If you are trained to use a hammer, every problem is a nail. Good luck D&D.
Um... the fact that he comes from a video game background is kinda irrelevant to his appropriateness for addressing a community problem. The reason to use a manager, rather than a PR rep, is because the manager is assumed to actually have information about what they're talking about.
A PR rep isn't going to be doing the gaffes annoying the community and they will know what they can and can't say. The post I replied to discussed:
A PR rep would has as much D&D experience as Kyle has from his resume. A PR rep would be completely fine to address the community and would probably have convinced more people to come back. A PR rep knows not to make a passive aggressive statement when trying to quench an irked community or brings up groups of people leaving the community as a good thing.
For me, he's talked my wallet permanently closed to D&D as long as he is in charge of the franchise. I frankly dislike him personally from his statements and I don't find him trustworthy. Meanwhile, if he was kept behind the curtain and a PR rep was hired to fix the mess, I would have given D&D another chance. The guy would be a nobody to me and the social media and videos on his statements further poisoning the community would never have been made and seen in the first place. With the economy going downhill, the last thing a company needs is bad public relations, but here we have it. A PR rep would have prevented all of this.
I'd rather have someone who is professional and doing the job decently. That's it. If someone wants to say that means I'd prefer corporate lies and extrapolate that into some childish nonsense then they can do that, doesn't make it true - but it's not usually seen as absurd to want someone to do a job who is half decent at that job. Frankly it's not even usually controversial to say something like 'I think someone at a high level should be even good at their job, not just decent.' like - he's getting a huge salary for his position, and yet we're somehow not allowed to expect him to avoid very obvious pitfalls and create even more problems on top of the problems he was sent in to solve?
There's nothing about his history that we know of that tells us he's an actual D&D player - we haven't experienced him playing over ages, we don't know him and have no reason to extend the benefit of the doubt to him. Ergo, when he talks and I don't HEAR anything that actually says 'Hey guys, I GET IT, I understand the issue from your side of the table because I have sat there as a gamer myself', then I don't really feel the need to just believe him at face value when he says he's an avid D&D player and loves the community, as far as I can see this is just a dude with a job who drew the short straw to be the face man because they thought putting a 'real' face to the issue would smooth things over better.
Problem is, that face has now said some things and continues to say things that are just not helping the brand recover in the way that I could have seen them doing. These are entirely avoidable gaffes and pitfalls that they are making for no reason, again, someone with even a BIT of public relations wouldn't be doing.
I'm not asking for 'corporate legalese', I'm asking for someone who isn't going to do more damage than they already have done. You can do that in a way that is polite and professional but not lies, you know - everything Kyle has said to us there's a way he could have said it that wouldn't have bothered anyone, it's just he apparently didn't know how to do it that way. Or didn't care to.
It'd be another story if we were in, say, an Overwatch situation where this guy was the Jeff from Overwatch dude that we'd watched and trusted for ages and we KNEW he'd been helming the game and we had reason to trust his word on things because he'd been an active member of the game/community and someone we saw regularly. But that's not what we're dealing with here, there's no reason this guy is somehow doing 'better' than anyone else, he's got no credit in the community and he's not saying the best things; so why keep him on as the face of the issue? There's no pro's and only cons from what I can see.
(also sorry I realize my reply was nested to the wrong OP)
His resume mentions "President of the Fantasy Gamer's Guild" at Humboldt, which is unlikely to mean computer games. In any case, I would absolutely believe that someone with the type of video game experience he has would also have TTRPG experience that he just never got paid for, there's a lot of crossover (someone in my gaming group worked for one of the studios he mentions. I'll have to ask him if he knows anything).
Now, could they have found a PR rep who also played D&D? Quite possibly. Could they have done so in the couple of weeks it took for this situation to blow up? I have my doubts.
Cynthia Williams and Chris Cao need to go. They need people that actually play the games and know the culture. We as the community will not go silently into the night.
Want more money wizards? Don't be a bag of Richards.
After reading the entire thread, I'll just say this: Your conclusions are the correct answer.
Complaining about what anyone else is saying is irrelevant. These are the two people where the corpo-speak and the bone-headed, tone-deaf decisions are coming from. So yes, they both need to go.
Again, you're missing my point. My point is that every evidence that said there was a problem now says that it's fine (assuming they stay the course). There is no real reason to believe that people who didn't rant on social media reacted to it in substantially different manner and were less receptive to the apology than the hot heads who publically ranted about the problem in the first place.
If you developed a cure for the common cold, and you tested it everyone you saw that had a cold (we'll assume everyone gave consent) and virtually everyone was instantly cured of the common cold the moment they took it, and this sample included pretty much every public case, then the conclusion would naturally be that it was effective, right? I mean, sure, it could all be a coincidence, it could be that the vast majority of cases aren't public and if you administered the cure to them,.maybe it wouldn't work. But the evidence all points to it working and actually being a cure, with a few individual exceptions. Until we see data otherwise, that would be the working presumption.
This is not meaningfully any different. Almost everyone who was up in arms about OGL is now mollified. We were getting new multipage threads full of rants each day (to the point that those of us who were more interested in talking about D&D than contract law had to set up two threads with clear titles telling people not to rant there to do so in peace, and even then they weren't perfectly successful), I had multiple news articles each day coming into my feed about it. The instant that interview went up, everything changed. Only a couple of threads and odd posts are critical since. No critical news articles. There are multiple people who were hyper critical of WotC explicitly saying that his apology that changed their mind or at least civilised their tone and helped them reconcile. People who were critical are now defending Kyle. The evidence all says that it was successful...and very successful at that.
People who weren't or aren't posting on social media fall into certaing categories. There are the apathetic, who aren't pertinent. There are the crazies who are technophobic and refuse to use tech because people spy on them (let's be honest, they're fringe and not really in large enough numbers to discuss). There are those who don't use technology much but got the news by word of mouth from those that do and therefore will track with them. There are those who, for one reason or another, never got the news and so aren't pertinent. The only ones that might buck the trend are the lurkers - people who got upset but never say anything. Given that they're generally speaking less emotionally reactive than the active ones who were mollified despite being so vehemently against WotC, I don't see why there'd be any reason to assume that they're not tracking with the visible shift to reconcilation with WotC - if there was a need in the first place.
If you have meaningful data that shows that they might not be, then I'm open to that possibility. I'll even discuss any logic you have that might explain why they'd be differentiated in their patterns from the rather strong ones in the active posters in this specific situation. Lacking that, it's reasonable to presume that since the visible storm has abated and rather sharply correllated with Brink's interview at that, that his apology was successful.
To assert otherwise is, for the intellectually honest, a push for what is effectively solipsism, rendering the conversation pointless, and for the less intellectually honest, motivated selective reasoning.
Whether these are echo chambers or not is actually irrelevant - the people who were vocal about OGL were mollified, and that wasn't due to an echo chamber. The question is whether the non-vocal people followed suit - and there isn't really a.reason to believe they didn't.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
A fair number of them were doing that before this situation came up.
Doing D&D shorts would be stupid -- when you're trying to put out a fire, don't go to the gasoline factory.
Ginny explicitly chose to edit the video shorter, and Wizards had no involvement in that process, as per the agreement the two parties made before the interview. Ginny hasn't actually been very pro Wizards of the Coast lately, and I don't know why your so upset that some of the interviewers were friendly and recognized that Kyle's a human who deserves to be treated with respect too.
D&D Shorts has been wrong about numerous things of late. He is not a credible interviewer, and Wizards of the Coast has no reason to give him more information to exaggerate into clickbait or misinformation. I personally am glad that Kyle is recognizing that the D&D community is made by both those who are dedicated to the game and have a large audience, as well as those who play and discuss the game as eagerly - if not more - but still haven't garnered as many clicks. Thankfully, he has talked with various types of players so far instead of only showing a commitment to the top 0000.1% (or so) of the community that gets dozens of thousands of views.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.I guess we found D&D Shorts' burner account
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
And yet he, unlike Wizards, has freely and quickly admitted when he's been wrong.
From where I sit he's been a valuable source of perspective.
I actually thought D&D Shorts was a burner account for like Todd K or Crawford, who I sometimes thing are the same person after an interview where they tried to do the mirror thing but kinda overdid it, but that's getting way inside baseball.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If Kyle went on DnD Shorts and clarified that some of the rumors were based on proposals that were not taken seriously or even just discussions about what they could do that would go a long way to earning trust. For example, if the $30 a month subscription was floated by some C Level person and then shot down it could be misconstrued as 'going to charge $30 a month' in a rumor based on a proposal that they thought was going to happen because of who suggested it.
That is of course speculation, but it would be a positive way of saying that extreme changes were proposed, but were not planned because they were shot down early. It would give some kind of hope that the other rumors, likely based on proposed ideas, could be confirmed as being shot down already and if he is consistent about that kind of information he would be trustworthy.
It is a tough road to navigate, but it would be far better than the current situation where rumors are treated as silly conjecture when they are most likely based on something that happened even if it was just an internal proposal that died in committee.
No, it would just not be believed. A likely answer is "I don't even know where that comes from", because the primary sources for those rumors appear to be in the electronic gaming division -- which he isn't the manager of and wouldn't necessarily have much more information about than we do.
True. Because if they said that, it would be an obvious lie.
You're assuming that the rumours were based on a solid truth in the first place. It could easily have been a low level idea that got on fairly low level group excited, but never went any further - apart from one disgruntled or alarmed employee. Or it could have just been one of those office rumours that never had any founding in truth.
It could be moment where mutual understanding brought about revelation brings trust. But that assumes that there is such a truth, and that Brink knows its source - the impression I got from him was that his knowledge of the nitty gritty specifics of meetings and office politics is rather limited.
I'm not sure it is viable.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.