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 remember reading that article last year. All welcome points; I especially liked the advisory committee. But not what I would consider the basis of an apology tour. It was disheartening to see some of the comments then - and the attitudes that have continued to the present - that vilified WotC anyway despite the steps they had taken to garner goodwill.
As I say, nothing short of Hasbro voiding ANYONE controlling DND, Magic, and all their other IPs would even BEGIN to "make up for" anything in the age of ANYONE or anyTHING doing content creation.
They're forever in "Damned if you do, damned if you don't" hell because NOTHING Dan Ayoub, WotC & Hasbro do can make up for OGLgate(Harmed content creators) & The Pinkertons(Unionbusters, private police, etc.) (DISCLAIMER:I DO NOT PERSONALLY BELIEVE IN THESE AS SINS)in any way that's realistically going to happen.
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.
No one with common sense would say Wizards has not more than made up for the OGL "issue". It was a pretty minor issue in the first place where the only real problem was bad communication and poorly articulated goals by Wizards. And as a direct result, Wizards vastly improved relations with major third party publishers, hired a bunch of those publishers to work for Wizards, has made those publishers a bunch of money by hosting content on D&D Beyond, has involved a number of those publishers in their community feedback program, opened up the SRD to the creative commons, committed to expanding the SRD over time to keep it relevant, and had significant leadership turnover ousting a bunch of folks who were in charge at the time of the OGL issue.
If one stills have a problem with it, the problem is not Wizards or what Wizards has done to rebuild relationships and trusts... that's a problem with the person who is choosing to be angry.
The Pinkertons thing was also a PR disaster - but it was a PR disaster not a real one. There are not many companies that do that kind of recovery of missing property, and the Pinkertons are really the biggest and most skilled game in town. They also have a bad history, are currently extra vilified by a lot of Wizards' players due to Bioshock and RDR, and have the exact same staffing issues many private investigators have. Even if we assume everything said about what the Pinkertons did was true, it is a bit excessive to hold Wizards accountable for the actions of a third-party who was one of the very few entities they could have hired in the first place. And, as far as I am aware, despite the MANY problems Magic has had with leaks recently, we have not seen a repeat of this action.
Wizards is doing great at rebuilding trust with those who actually want to engage in good faith and rebuild the trust harmed by Wizards' past actions (and mostly past failings at communication). If there are still people throwing a fit about something that Wizards more than made up for... or that wasn't even Wizards' fault in the first place... like the two examples you raised? They are not going to get won over anyway, and Wizards should not bother with the Sisyphean task of appeasing folks who do not have any intention of being appeased.
Fortunately, most folks probably fall into that first category--or into the category of people who simply do not care at all about the drama, do not pay attention to it, and just want to roll some dice.
Perfect examples. Both the OGL situation and the Pinkerton situation were blown wildly out of proportion, in large part by influencers chasing clicks, and continue to be relitigated endlessly by people who didn't see either situation with nuance and complexity and will never move on. No content creators were actually affected by the potential OGL changes, and the discussions around that event led to moving to Creative Commons, which is even more flexible for content creators than before. The Pinkerton episode came about because a customer received Magic cards before release and refused to cooperate when WotC tried to get him the card set he actually ordered and return the set that wasn't ready for release. The Pinkertons were only involved because the individual refused to engage when WotC tried in good faith to replace the set he was never supposed to have with the set he actually paid for. It's long past time to stop pretending the people at WotC are mustache-twirling villains out to steal candy from babies.
But you see, Hasbro is the Disney of Nintendos /s
If Dan Ayoub was to apologize for ANYTHING(DISCLAIMER:This is STRICTLY from the perspective of those who would want said apologies:I do not endorse such), it would be the previous management of the DND side of things doing those 2 things. There's still only so much he can personally apologize for, because Chris Cocks & the shareholders would NEVER apologize for the especially egregious stuff, & not just DND-related stuff(Hasbro killing Super Sentai because of their ownership of Power Rangers is their big sin right now in the pop culture zeitgeist).
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.
Which, on looking at what it is, appears to be yet another random bogus accusation. The proper entity to blame for the problems with Super Sentai appears to be Toei, all Hasbro did was abandon something that wasn't working for them, and not just give up their existing licensing agreements for free.
This ties into a bigger point I love to raise:You don't need to lie about Hasbro's evils:They're a megacorporation. That's enough reason to have negative feelings.
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.
And yet, you did lie about them in multiple posts. Presenting something Wizards more than made up for. Mischaracterizing non-Wizards actions as those of Wizards. For some reason talking about something Hasbro might have done in a completely different brand under a completely different corporate structuring.
“Hasbro is evil for reasons I don’t have to lie about” sure looks a lot less compelling when you have not managed to raise a single honest complaint about Wizards - the actual subject of this thread - across three posts.
The simple reality is that, to the extent Wizards messed things up in the past, a lot of those mess ups were relatively small, but compounded by the critical mistake of bad PR and communications skills muddying the issues or coming off as condescending to players. Their real flaw was always communications, and the new team has done a great job fixing that flaw. They are doing their part and have earned goodwill, and Dan has been a pretty big part of that.
I've got some posts to edit for clarity. Also, where's the 3rd one? Hasbro IS a megacorporation
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.
Wizards of the Coast is a corporation owned by Hasbro, an even bigger corporation. A corporation's primary responsibility is the fiduciary trust of its shareholders. It's not always easy for a corporation to keep their customer base happy and keep their shareholders happy at the same time, as those two groups have wildly different expectations and objectives. Some in the customer base feel that the corporation has, in the recent past, kept the trust of its shareholders at the expense of its customer base. So naturally, the corporation will utilize its executives to try to reassure the customer base that they and their expectations are still valued by the corporation.
None of that drama, however, has any effect on the game at my table. My players are still fighting the evil snake cult and still trying to save the world from being overrun by an evil snake/chaos/nightmare god. That's what matters to me. The C-Suite play their games, and my players and I play ours.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Hasbro is not a megacorporation. It is large compared to many business, but a megacorporation is defined as an entity who has overwhelming control over multiple industries with quasi-governmental levels of power. Hasbro might seem big with a $13 billion valuation, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to a true megacorporation's wealth. Further, it is still generally limited to its sphere of influence of toys and games and cannot exert domination on par with most governments. True megacorporations are things like the East India Trading Company, which at its height owned entire swaths of the globe and controlled vast military power. Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon are also candidates for megacorporation status - they have extreme wealth measured in trillions and can exert levels of influence and control on par or surpassing even the greatest government capabilities.
So, yes. It is dishonest to characterize Hasbro as a megacorporation for two reasons - the first being that it is simply wrong, the second being that it is not relevant to this thread and the limited sphere of influence Dan Ayoub has as the head of D&D. There was no reason to have brought it up, and no reason to further discuss this topic - doing so is just perpetuating wrong information and further derailing this thread by not talking about D&D under Dan's leadership.
As I have said, the real issue on this thread is what has D&D specifically has done in the past to anger players and what are they doing now to make up for it. Their primary flaw has always been communication. Whether it was failing to articulate why there was a conversation about changing the OGL (the draft changes coincided with Wizards' intellectual property being used for racism, exposing a flaw in the OGL's lack of allowing control over the IP being used in a racist manner), or their failure to state the reasons they removed piecemeal purchasing on Beyond (the aging D&D Beyond tech could not support that many independent skews), or any number of other issues, the old management at D&D had a bad habit of being silent when they should have spoken up, and often speaking up when they were already behind the story and providing incomplete or sometimes condescending information that raised temperatures rather than simmered them down.
Ayoub has been open, honest, and directly addressed a number of past concerns not only with words, but with policy changes based on player feedback. That is something to be commended, and he has certainly put in a whole lot of work to regain some of the trust previous management lost through their lack of transparency and lack of insight into player perceptions and needs.
I do not know whether he considers his role to be making an "apology tour", but he has clearly focused in on topics players disliked about the old management and has gone out of his way to try and regain trust of players in those contexts.