Quote from AaronOfBarbaria>>

[I think DDB providing advantage to book buyers and non-book buyers or not is irrelevant] Primarily because of details like that Curse is not WotC, and neither are any of the rest of the companies offering digital offerings, so treating Curse asking you to pay as the same as WotC asking you to pay again - full stop - isn't accurate, nor reasonable

So you perceive the companies as all very separated which somehow makes you feel ok about paying being treated as a newcomer? I perceive all the companies bonded to one parent company through licensing deals. Each pairing of companies is both separate, yet connected. That's not inaccurate. But even if it were, it's not about accuracy. The decision to spend the money or not is based on emotional reactions from perceived treatment.

I thought I made it clear that this was all my opinion, my perspective. Is this why you feel the need to pick apart every one of my posts? Because you want to make sure everyone knows this is my opinion? Btw you do this too. Rather than saying "We are not being treated a certain way" you should have responded with "I do not feel I am being treated this way" in order to not be a hypocrite here.

No, it's not clear that someone using phrases like "We are being thrown aside" is only meaning "I feel I am being thrown aside" rather than what the words they actually chose actually mean. And me being a hypocrite in this context is entirely a fiction of your mind - I've not made any claims phrased as everyone feeling the way I do, nor even multiple people feeling the way I do, I have only pointed out that your "we" is not accurate because it doesn't include me.

It's not fiction, it's just much harder to see it in yourself. Here's one place where you said it.

We are being thrown aside. <-Here I did it

No we are not. <- that was you.

Just the fact of you saying "isn't accurate, nor reasonable" is doing it again. Being reasonable, again, isn't logic it's subjective. Yet you claimed absolute unreasonable speaking for everyone. Pairing it right next to accurate which suggest absolute logic.

I'm getting mixed messages from you. Can't have it both ways.

In cases, like this one, where details are not mutually exclusive, yes we can have it both ways. There is no mixed message - every user of D&D Beyond is being treated equally by Curse, and part of that treatment is being assumed to have a legally acquired physical rule-book, if having a physical rule book at all, rather than have illegally acquired the information that can be found in said book in some way.

Wait, buyers don't have advantage or disadvantage compared to non-buyers (your words), yet we are not being treated as if we didn't buy the book (also your words)? I'm getting mixed messages from you. Can't have it both ways.

If what I were asking for isn't reasonable then there wouldn't be continual posts getting merged into this one where people would hope for it.

It's not a safe assumption to assume that only reasonable ideas are shared by numerous people.

Lol that's exactly what you just did. Here I'll quote it again. More hypocrisy.

isn't accurate, nor reasonable

 

If what I were asking for wasn't reasonable then it wouldn't be implemented elsewhere.

Every example of "elsewhere" involves significant differences in circumstances and resources. What is reasonable to expect in one circumstance is not inherently reasonable to expect in another circumstance.

More "reasonable" talk. I think what I'm expecting is reasonable given my experiences.

I didn't just decide the deal I made was bad. I'm like Lando, this deal is getting worse all the time.

The deal was made, you got what you paid for, and that's it. The deal you made has not changed... unless you are saying that someone took something that you paid for away from you, or you are being forced into paying an additional cost and not getting anything new in return.

If my way of expressing my displeasure is getting in your way of receiving good points then that's your problem, not mine.

It's not getting in my way. It really doesn't even matter to me - you are just some random dude on the internet to me. Why I mentioned that the way you express your points is problematic is because it's getting in your way, and I wasn't sure you realized that, so I tried to help. Because who knows, if enough people share your opinion and manage to express themselves in a way that allows they to seem reasonable, maybe you'll actually get something more like what you want?

You know, maybe its time to put this thread to bed.  We've all expressed our opinions and now lets move on to playing a game, shall we?

teak

So I already own the PH, DMG and MM in physical copy for but it is a bit annoying to have to purchase them again in DnD beyond. Is there something that already exists or plans to be able to get the books on DnD Beyond if you own the books already? Suggestion: put a code that includes a digital copy for the site in the books? 

Here we go again...

A: No, no plan exists.

B: If a plan did exist, it would NOT cover existing books, only those going forward from when the plan was implemented. 

Quote from Kreakdude >>

So you perceive the companies as all very separated which somehow makes you feel ok about paying being treated as a newcomer? I perceive all the companies bonded to one parent company through licensing deals. Each pairing of companies is both separate, yet connected. That's not inaccurate. But even if it were, it's not about accuracy. The decision to spend the money or not is based on emotional reactions from perceived treatment.

I perceive myself as not being treated as a newcomer, except in the specific case of that I am a newcomer to Curse (or they are a newcomer to me) - but they are not treating me as if I am not an existing fan of D&D.

And yes, the emotional reactions are the ones that drive the spending of money (except when a person intentionally chooses to make their decisions in a different way), but one would hope that emotional reactions are actually based on some kind of factual stimuli and be the sort of reaction expected from that sort of stimuli.

It's not fiction

It is. Your evidence of my alleged hypocrisy is you taking my statement out of context, deliberately at this point since I just clarified the context for you. When you say "We are being throw aside" and I respond "No we are not", the emphasis is on the word "we". Your use of it in your statement makes that statement apply to me as it does to you - my usage is only pointing out that I am not part of that we, and that makes your statement incorrect. I'm not creating some greater group of people that agree with me according to the implication of the word we.

Here you forgot to quote the part where I pointed out how you contradicted yourself

I didn't contradict myself. If you believe I have, you are clearly misunderstanding me, and I apologize but I cannot think of another way in which to explain it to you than I have already attempted.

Lol that's exactly what you just did.

I did not assume that only reasonable ideas are shared by numerous people. I have also made no statements that imply that assumption.

I explained this in previous posts. To me, they are connected. Sure the first deal didn't change, but the way I feel about the first deal did change.

How is it reasonable for your feelings regarding a deal to change without the deal changing? You are basically admitting that you got what you were promised at a price you felt was worth paying, but now you're demanding something more and/or feeling cheated because nobody changed the deal after the fact.

You're assuming that because it got in your way that it will be getting in other peoples' way.

Nope, no assumption... and nothing got in my way, so I don't even know what you are talking about there. My belief that your presentation of your opinions will affect how others respond to them is based on evidence, not assumption.

Also, do you care about me enough to help me or am I just some dude on the internet you don't care about? More contradiction.

There is no contradiction. I don't have to care about you more than any other random person on the internet in order to be, in general, inclined to help other people (and especially other gamers).

If I'm just some dude then why keep picking apart my posts and attacking my reasons for reacting the way I am to this situation?

It's called "discussion". That's what forums are for. I'm discussing because I have free time to spare, and like to spend some of that free time talking about D&D (because I love D&D). It's got nothing more to do with you or your opinions than that you and they are present on what I view as the last place on the internet worth visiting for the purpose of talking about D&D.

And in closing, it would be really great if you could stop with the false accusations of hypocrisy - it's offensive to keep at it when I've shown you that you're wrong.

I agree with Stormknight. This discussion is circular because it's an emotional plea vs a logical breakdown.

I tend to be more logical, hence my side of the debate.

I can try to empathize with the emotional side, as I too felt a twinge of disappointment when it was revealed that DDB would cost money (any money at all if I'm being completely honest). So I am not trying to be diminutive or "gaslighting" when I ascribe the other side of the debate to emotion.

However, once I stepped outside of my own perspective and looked at it externally, I understood how and why the system works. I understand that emotions can be a difficult thing for most people to step away from, but I'm an INTJ lol (if you take that sort of thing seriously), so I tend to have little difficulty with dissecting the particulars of a given situation as if I was not a factor. To me, even though it was an expensive product, it was proven to be priced fairly, and the fact that I could not afford the luxury that the product provides was more of my own problem than Curse's or WotC's. 

I've said this multiple times, but I'll bring it up again. The service was too expensive for me to make use of it as a single user. If it had been up to me to purchase everything on my own, I would not be using DDB today. I pitched the benefit of the service to my gaming group, and they all agreed to chip in, which made it extremely more feasible. So in that respect, I acknowledge that I am lucky and that circumstances just happened to work in my favor in a way that simply is not possible for everyone.

However, and I mean this with all due respect as (I am speaking from my perspective and not for everyone), there are still several things in life that I would like to purchase that I simply cannot. And just because those things are outside of my price range, it does not mean that they are absolutely overpriced. They are simply overpriced to me. I don't flood the forums of every one of those products saying it isn't fair. That's why, from my perspective, this debate is so frustrating. I am the type of person who is able to accept a situation for what it is, and walk away if it doesn't fit in my life.

I'm not saying that I am unwilling to fight for change when it is due, but in this particular instance, as has been articulated several times, it does not seem that this is a situation that warrants change. No one is being taken advantage of. No one is being treated unethically. You have just as much of a right to purchase as you do to spend your money elsewhere. If you own the books already, you own the full version of Dungeons and Dragons as it was written and intended to be consumed. You may feel entitled to the newer version of that same product (which would be this site and all of its functionality), but the forces of the market have decided that only those who purchase from this site are entitled to its contents. That is the situation as I understand it.

So if we wish to move this debate forward, I urge the people who feel like they have been mistreated to first take a minute and calm down (as hostility only breeds more hostility, and your concerns are far less likely to be heard under those circumstances), try to remove your feelings and what you FEEL like you deserve from the equation, and re-examine your concerns with a thorough re-reading of all of the presented points.

If after that, your concerns are still present, then please try to state your case in a way that helps us empathize with you. I have been guilty of being combative in this discussion, and I'm trying to suppress that by listening more. But the points I keep hearing are not speaking to me. And if they aren't speaking to me - a random user with nothing to gain from you purchasing content here or not - then I imagine that at least some of the people with more of a say in things are of a similar perspective to mine.

The above post made me want to post, apologies...

I am one of the folks who believe that paying for the same content twice is unfair.  I've stated my opinion 1.231 million times...When I read your post above I am getting a sense that anyone who disagrees with you is because its an emotionally based argument...that is an over-generalization and condescending.  Again, when a discussion gets to this level, don't we all think its time to chill?

teak

Quote from teak421 >>

The above post made me want to post, apologies...

I am one of the folks who believe that paying for the same content twice is unfair.  I've stated my opinion 1.231 million times...When I read your post above I am getting a sense that anyone who disagrees with you is because its an emotionally based argument...that is an over-generalization and condescending.  Again, when a discussion gets to this level, don't we all think its time to chill?

teak

From my perspective, that's how I see it. I'm not saying that I'm necessarily 100% correct, just how it comes across to me. My point was to try to explain this so that people who do see it as unfair could try to rephrase their concerns in a way that does not come across as purely emotional.

You feel that it is unfair. And you have every right to feel that way.

But is it genuinely and objectively unfair? I don't feel like it is. But my feeling is based on the facts that have been presented. My feeling is that I want the thing, but I now understand why the thing costs what it does. 

But the argument that it is unfair does not appear to have a large number of facts attached to it. A person feels that they want the thing. End stop. The arguments are very numbered and sometimes eloquent, but they never go beyond the base point of "I am unhappy. Make me happy."

So there we have an emotional disagreement. Your emotions aren't less valid than mine. But for us to get on a level of understanding to where we can have a meaningful discussion, we have to be able to move beyond how we feel. "I am unhappy. Make me happy." isn't enough, no matter how many ways you can say it. What I need to hear is why you deserve to be made happy, and verifiable facts to support that reason.

We seem to be going back to the main disconnect of buying content twice, which my main disagreement is that simply saying "buying the same content twice" is an oversimplification, as that's not exactly what you're buying. As I've asked before, if you've bought a hardcover PHB, should retailers then have to sell you additional hardcover PHBs at cost of production? You already bought the content once, so now you'd only be paying the base price for manufacturing. This is a logical discussion, and one worth having, but it always gets cut off into a "Nuh uh"/"Yeah huh" circle. This is a much larger issue than just D&D, as it relates to the value of all content and intellectual property. 

Quote from AaronOfBarbaria >> 

And in closing, it would be really great if you could stop with the false accusations of hypocrisy - it's offensive to keep at it when I've shown you that you're wrong.

Quote from mjsoctober >>

Quote from teak421 >>

The above post made me want to post, apologies...

I am one of the folks who believe that paying for the same content twice is unfair.  I've stated my opinion 1.231 million times...When I read your post above I am getting a sense that anyone who disagrees with you is because its an emotionally based argument...that is an over-generalization and condescending.  Again, when a discussion gets to this level, don't we all think its time to chill?

teak

 Many logical explanations have been made as to why it is not "unfair". continuing to complain otherwise sounds like whining. 

NO ONE IS OWED ANYTHING. Period. WotC does not owe you a digital copy of their product. Curse (DDB) does not owe you a copy of their product.

Whether or not either of these companies could offer it to you is irrelevant. It is their creation, they get to decide how to sell it. That's how a capitalist society works.

All the arguments about how WotC will "lose" customers is moot. Clearly their business model works, and the number of customers they might "lose" is a minority.

It's really very simple. If your argument is that you should be able to unlock the digital content for free because you already bought the books, then by having already bought the books WotC already has the MOST money they would get out of you, and thus your refusal to pay for DDB means that they have lost NOTHING. 

WotC only loses if you buy neither product.

Taking a step back and looking at this, I want to ask a question:

Is there any psychologist in the forums who needs a study-case? 'Cause I believe in these 24 pages there's a lot of valid material.
(I am not trying to be smartass or anything, I genuinely think there are things worth of analysis, if anything on a economy-applied level, and most probably my posts are a textbook demonstration of stubbornness in logicizing [is that even a word?] this kind of situation)

I have read some of your posts in this thread, I've been following it from the beginning. I am dealing with this...

I am one of the folks who believe that paying for the same content twice is unfair. 

 

As AdventureFlight has stated with more empathy, those of us who disagree with you (and others on that side of the debate) have yet to see a logical argument for why it's "unfair".

If WotC had offered some sort of warranty or contract with the sale of a physical book that said you would receive all future non-physical versions of that book at no (or reduced) cost, and then failed to deliver on that promise, that would be a demonstrably "unfair" thing.

Please explain to me why, logically, in a capitalist society where a company is legally entitled to sell its product however it wants, it is "unfair" to you that you must pay to a second company for something transformative from a thing you bought from a previous company?

Quote from mjsoctober >>

I have read some of your posts in this thread, I've been following it from the beginning. I am dealing with this...

I am one of the folks who believe that paying for the same content twice is unfair. 

 

As AdventureFlight has stated with more empathy, those of us who disagree with you (and others on that side of the debate) have yet to see a logical argument for why it's "unfair".

If WotC had offered some sort of warranty or contract with the sale of a physical book that said you would receive all future non-physical versions of that book at no (or reduced) cost, and then failed to deliver on that promise, that would be a demonstrably "unfair" thing.

Please explain to me why, logically, in a capitalist society where a company is legally entitled to sell its product however it wants, it is "unfair" to you that you must pay to a second company for something transformative from a thing you bought from a previous company?

Teak, I have read them. I am not convinced. Even in your reply to me you use the words "I want".

Do you understand that it doesn't matter what you, or any of us, want?

The capitalist system we live in allows for a producer to sell a product with whatever model they wish, and any producer will do just that, for as much as the market will bear.

Perhaps I should rephrase my question: Please give me a logical argument to support the claim that WotC is obligated to offer you a free digital version with the purchase of a physical copy.

Please note that citing other companies who do offer a digital copy with purchase is not a logical argument that you are owed the same from WotC, it is only an argument supporting that claim that they could.

"Just because we can do a thing, it does not necessarily follow that we must do a thing." President of Earth. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

"What you want is irrelevant. What you have chosen is at hand." Captain Spock. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

 

The toolsets do contain the same content, but I have contended from the start that the total sum of the content is not exactly the same. Saying it is exactly the same is a misrepresentation.

Let's use the Monster Manual as an example. While yes, the Monster Manual and the Monster List here on DDB have the same information, you cannot do everything with the hardcover book that you can with a sortable, searchable, digital list.

However, if I were then able to purchase just the DDB Monster List at a fraction of the price, why would I need a hardcover version of that book? I would have access to all of the information.

The DDB toolset depends on the content from the books to be functional. It does not exist in a vacuum. An independent toolset would negate the need for books for a lot of users, and would negatively effect WotC's bottom line. WotC would either refuse to sell their license to that kind of product, or would sell it at such a rate that you would be paying for an independent toolset that is just as expensive as DDB is now.

I can't speak on behalf of Roll20, as I only use the free service to project maps with Fog of War on my table.

Quote from mjsoctober >>

I have read some of your posts in this thread, I've been following it from the beginning. I am dealing with this...

I am one of the folks who believe that paying for the same content twice is unfair. 

 

As AdventureFlight has stated with more empathy, those of us who disagree with you (and others on that side of the debate) have yet to see a logical argument for why it's "unfair".

If WotC had offered some sort of warranty or contract with the sale of a physical book that said you would receive all future non-physical versions of that book at no (or reduced) cost, and then failed to deliver on that promise, that would be a demonstrably "unfair" thing.

Please explain to me why, logically, in a capitalist society where a company is legally entitled to sell its product however it wants, it is "unfair" to you that you must pay to a second company for something transformative from a thing you bought from a previous company?

when I buy a CD, I can upload it to itunes for personal use and not be required to purchase another copy to listen online