Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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I think both the community at large, AND C-Suite mindless business lackeys, misunderstand what "live service" means. You can have a free live service (if you have an alternative revenue stream). D&D Beyond has been a live service platform for a long time, because it's been improved and updated constantly.
The online gaming industry uses "live service" to differentiate between a purchased item that will never be updated, and an ongoing platform. World of Warcraft is a live service, Warcraft 3 is not. A live service platform can be a good thing. And you have a non-live service platform that requires subscriptions or a predatory purchasing model.
People need to stop using it to mean "Everything is paywalled and you subscribe through the nose", when the payment aspect has nothing to do with being a live service platform.
Well, language is mutable; if enough people use a term to mean X, it starts to actually mean X. Nowadays common usage is pretty much "Like Fortnite", which is of course why features such as announcing "seasons" and having subscriber perks cause people to get suspicious.
Of course, if you really want to complain about WotC business practices, D&D is not the place you should be looking. You should look at Magic the Gathering, aka "I was a gatcha game before gatcha games existed".
Would "Walled-garden Recurrent Spending Traps" or "WaRT" be a better term? Cause i am pretty sure that is what the C-Suites want, and what the community dislikes.
A little more precise but it isn't as intuitive.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
People love to accuse Wizards of trying to make a “walled garden.” If that is their plan, they’re really bad at it. Giving licensing deals to other platforms like Roll20. Allowing anyone to make their own content for the game and distribute it via any mechanism the content creator chooses. Literally designing the entire revised system around being able to play outside of the digital tools. Promoting their competitor’s games.
More so than any other company, Wizards understands the danger of trying to create a true walled garden - that is basically what TSR tried to do in the past (albeit in a non-digital way), and it almost killed D&D. C-suite execs at Wizards have consistently acknowledged that this approach does not work for D&D, and their actions have been very much that of a company that would love for you to use their platform, but feels comfortable taking down some of the walls and letting customers explore elsewhere.
I legitimately think lots of folks who complain about D&D with such buzzwords are angry the buzzword exists in other contexts, and railing at someone fairly small like Wizards feels much easier than railing at a bigger player. So many of these buzzword-based complaints against Wizards start to fall apart with even a cursory look at fact.
What the C-suite wants is spending, they're largely indifferent to how it's achieved, and calling D&D a walled garden is really not accurate.
Of course it is not a walled garden yet, we want to keep it from being that, which is why i said "What the community dislikes" when naming the acronym, people are fighting what they see as moves in that direction.
So did the nearly month long discussion of how people dislike Drops because they feel like a move toward a walled garden approach just not make an impression on you?
Like do you think people are trying to keep the system open and the way it is out of boredom? Do you think people are just shadow boxing?
The community criticizes bad practices because we DON'T WANT THE GAME TO GO AWAY. I call things out BECAUSE I don't want another TSR.
You are so ready to tear into anyone who speaks a thought unlike yours that you can't see that they else might have the same goal as you, D&D flourishing.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Honestly... yes? Wizards is by no means a perfect company, but the way people overreact is ridiculous. There's nothing wrong with disliking the way they implemented drops, I don't particularly like it either (though I also don't particularly care since they seem eminently skippable), nor anything wrong with voicing displeasure, but don't make them out to be more than they actually care.
Imma just straight up and admit if forget "Its the internet people argue for fun" for a minute there, so imma hand this one to ya.
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Accusing WotC of being on a slippery slope to making D&D a walled garden is pointless sensationalism. Fearmongering about the game going away just because Wizards offered extra digital freebies to subscribers doesn't contribute meaningfully to this discussion.
This is another great example of the toxicity that gets aimed at WotC. They try something new and people complain. So they listen to the fans and lay out plans to change the new thing they tried. And people keep complaining.
it is almost like some previous CEOs expressed intention to do that a few years ago. Is having a working memory toxic?
He/Him. Loooooooooong time Player.
The Dark days of the THAC0 system are behind us.
"Hope is a fire that burns in us all If only an ember, awaiting your call
To rise up in triumph should we all unite
The spark for change is yours to ignite."
Kalandra - The State of the World
Fearmongering about alleged intentions attributed to a person who isn't even at the company anymore doesn't contribute to healthy, non-toxic conversation or community building, no.
That depends- what is "this"? Because the only big "scheme" I've heard they were allegedly cooking is the standard "the player-base is under-monetized" bit. Which is a pretty reasonable observation. As has been pointed out, this is a market where 20% of the players are making 80% of the purchases. Looking for ways to diversify offerings to find something that appeals to that 80% segment of players is not inherently a sign of insidious corporate greed that will suck the soul out of the brand, it's asking "what else can we make/offer that these people will want to buy?" This is literally the paradigm the entire disposable income market segment runs on. Trying to vilify specific execs, WotC, Hasbro, etc. for asking "what else can we put on the shelves" doesn't really come across as a good faith or productive talking point.
Frankly, WotC will never not make people angry due to 2 factors:Fandom culture, & Hasbro.
A LOT of the hatred is rooted in Paizo fans echoing past Paizo feeling screwed over by WotC over the Dragon Magazine contract, & all of the bad blood between those iterations of the companies(Barely anyone, if any at all, from those days still works at WotC...)...& given Paizo's "Whatever WotC doesn't do, we'll do it" attitude, they deliberately assembled a fandom that holds grudges against WotC , DND & Hasbro for being the big bad who has never (financially) compensated their "victims" regarding their "sins" towards said fandom(s members).
A LOT of the ORC companies deliberately cultivated that kind of jilted victim audience.
Hasbro is run so poorly that they make cyclically boneheaded cashgrabs like partnering with JK Rowling because they don't care about the damage that does to their PR.
Hell, board game fans hate Hasbro w/a flaming passion, too.
Hasbro is the Disney, Oracle/Skydance, Microsoft &/or Nintendo of toys, games & TTRPGs as far as the wider communities are concerned. & Hasbro's refusal to try & not be such within toy culture is hurting WotC and other parts of the conglomerate, especially when Hasbro & all of its constituent parts are run like a Silicon Valley techbro company due to baby boomer money blob shareholders like BlackRock & The Vanguard Group mandating the asinine practices of the worst of US business culture to protect the money they draw from....money that Millennials & younger generations will never see or earn.
WotC will never be "good" because fandoms hold grudges past 1 generation now, & Hasbro is simply too big.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
A lot of it is based on the desire to identify a 'good guy' and a 'bad guy' in a situation, and root for one side or the other. The dragon magazine contract is a perfect example, because it's total nonsense as the basis for a grudge. Wizards didn't engage in any shady business to not renew the license, they just... didn't renew the license, which they were under absolutely no obligation to do, and the main reason it didn't just vanish into the dustbin of history is because 4th edition was poorly enough received that Paizo could opportunistically reinvent itself as the savior of 3.5e.
Funny thing is, WotC specifically gave Paizo a lifeline by putting Abomination Valuts on DDB at a time when Paizo was being destroyed by the Diamond Publishing bankruptcy.
Both Wizards and Paizo staff have consistently said there is no bad blood between the companies. A significant number of people on Wizards’ staff (including one of their head designers right now) are former Paizo employees who still have friends back at Paizo. After all, working for Wizards is the career advancement move in the industry. Staff at both companies have said they play one another’s game. In fact, in interviews done via Zoom with WotC staff at their homes, I’ve seen bookshelves with multiple Paizo products prominently displayed next to the D&D ones. There’s the fact Wizards has regularly talked about how their company does better when the TTRPG industry thrives - which is why they champion things like International Day of Play (something they are literally pushing right now), which often disproportionately help Piazo and others, as players are likely to try out different games during such an event. There’s Perringaiden’s point above.
You should also know better than to pretend the Dragon Magazine situation is a real issue - I explained why this was not a real situation to you on a different thread where you tried to stoke divisions that are not there.
To repeat myself, everyone knew Dragon Magazine, in the form Paizo created it, was dying. It was not selling, printing prices were going up, and the Wizards and Paizo contract was ending. Paizo certainly knew they would not have the contract renewed - they had killed off their own Pathfinder equivalent a year or so earlier. So, this was a situation where everyone knew the magazine was on life support and would be stopped once the contract ended, everyone had plenty of advance warning to prepare, and everyone fully understood the external factors resulting in the decision. It is also notable that one of the head editors for Paizo’s Dungeon Magazine publications is literally running D&D right now. A basic analysis of the situation then and now clearly shows the lack of bad faith on anyone’s part, and general lack of bad blood between the companies.
There are certainly members of the player base that try and stoke divisions between the games. And often those attempts are “supported” by mythical divisions between the companies themselves. But when the actual employees of the companies talk about the situation? It is clear tales of bad blood are significantly overblown to the point of fiction.
Notice I used the qualifier "fans".
Paizo FANS perpetuate this nonsense.
I admitted my mistakes in believing it(& even mocked the illogical nature of it all) in the very same post you quoted.
But the player poaching & sainthood sweeps are known behavior of Paizo itself.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.