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The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community senti

The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. They chose to do so anyway and are backtracking out of an interest of self-preservation rather than a customer-first mindset. I find this shameful enough behavior to warrant a legitimate, heartfelt apology. Instead, they present themselves as benevolent caretakers listening to their communities' response. This comes across as tone-deaf because they've already lost the trust of the community and don't seem to have learned how to take ownership of that fact. Still, this is a better result than if they'd stayed their advertised course. So, for that, I am thankful.

tonfreed 4y ago
I think they've completely misunderstood their product. The execs in charge of running the show come from video games, and watching what they're trying to do with DnD beyond makes it pretty obvious they're trying to introduce micro transaction hell and loot boxes into the product. Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  Yes, that is a critical part. They want to make DnD Beyond the core of the product. The main channel, where "ideally" both, DMs and players, have to buy each little piece of content and an expensive subscription to create their own scenarios instead of books, which are expensive to produce, ship etc. and then are shared in a group (or kept for DM's eyes only) And they "have to" extract as much revenue from third parties like Paizo and get consumers of their platform. If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)
  - secabeen 4y ago
    They either want microtransactions and loot boxes, or 30% of the overall revenue like Apple and Google do in their app stores.
    - wincy 4y ago
      Ah yes, and then if you try to tell even the slightest bit controversial story about say, adventuring in an ancient Egyptian city with slaves, that will be flagged as hateful content and you’ll be banned from D&D forever.
voakbasda 4y ago
Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents such from happening.
- crayboff 4y ago
  I mean, they did a huge thing that can't be backed out of, they released SRD 5.1 under creative commons. Yeah they did some not great stuff, but let's celebrate the successes when we get them!
  - deadbunny 4y ago
    Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
    - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
      Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
      - cma 4y ago
        Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
        Karrot_Kream 4y ago
pubby 4y ago
> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think. I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.
- tonfreed 4y ago
  The least they could do is sit down once a month with the game designers for a session of dungeon crawling. The main two in charge have both said they don't play
  - hinkley 4y ago
    The only thing worse than obstaining is half-assing it. Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      Meeting once a month would be within the normal range for a group playing for fun. On the low side, I think, but it's not "so little attention that it's worse than nothing".
      - hinkley 4y ago
        People who are uni vested let things go as they are. People who are a little invested screw them up.
- TillE 4y ago
  Given the extremely fast and extremely comprehensive U-turn, it seems like a lot of people near the top did understand the community very well. Somehow, one person or one small faction made a different decision, and the overwhelming feedback proved it was the wrong decision.
roenxi 4y ago
I disagree because the fundamental core of this argument is "everyone in a community should think alike". That isn't realistic, and using that as a principle leads to bad results - we have to be used to having robust communities with questionable leadership. The natural state of leadership is to be a bit shabby and not quite up to the task. We have the internet now, we have great visibility on what leaders actually do and they can't meet impossible standards. Although that is why decentralisation is so powerful - WOTC doesn't run your games night and doesn't send out a goon squad to police that people aren't using house rules. WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough. They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.
victorvosk 4y ago
Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.
- ninth_ant 4y ago
  I understand what you’re saying, but attempting to revoke a widely-used open source license is not just something completely within their rights. Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights. Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test. WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights. Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior. Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it. Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.
- jbm 4y ago
  A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap. I have never seen "no" registers open though.
  - Macha 4y ago
    Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    Walmart seems to agree that they like them as well. Renovated stores are entirely designed to streamline the self-checkout experience.
  - michaelcampbell 4y ago
    I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right. Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too. Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.
freshhawk 4y ago
It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this. They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest. So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?
- hellcow 4y ago
  That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work. The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase. DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_. And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    When I was a player the story was way more important than the mechanism. Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh
    - kcartlidge 4y ago
      Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.
    - alisonatwork 4y ago
      This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.
Karrot_Kream 4y ago
If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.
LegitShady 4y ago
agreed. a substantial amount of the playerbase and 3rd party creators are looking for non-DnD games moving forward, and Hasbro finally realized they handed the opportunity to take all those players and creators to their competition. I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?
cleak 4y ago
I’d bet they anticipated the backlash, but thought it could be managed - some short term anger followed by long term profits. It so far hasn’t worked out that way, but these are still recent events; they may just wait to roll out changes more quietly.
- hinkley 4y ago
  They might be right long term, but that's 1) pretty cynical and 2) I think they might have just created the origin story for their competitors. So good news, they're making $1 billion, bad news they are now making $1 billion of a $1.7 billion market instead of $800 million of a $1 billion market.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

tonfreed 4y ago

I think they've completely misunderstood their product. The execs in charge of running the show come from video games, and watching what they're trying to do with DnD beyond makes it pretty obvious they're trying to introduce micro transaction hell and loot boxes into the product. Matt Colville whacked the nail on the head when he said D&D isn't really a game, it's a folk tradition and storytelling. Those are two very difficult things to monetize.

johannes1234321 4y ago
Yes, that is a critical part. They want to make DnD Beyond the core of the product. The main channel, where "ideally" both, DMs and players, have to buy each little piece of content and an expensive subscription to create their own scenarios instead of books, which are expensive to produce, ship etc. and then are shared in a group (or kept for DM's eyes only) And they "have to" extract as much revenue from third parties like Paizo and get consumers of their platform. If they get rid of story telling etc. they even can look at AI DMs leading a Dungeon Crawl to increase time of their consumers on their platform, even without fixed groups etc. Extract as much value as possible (and destroy the game)
- secabeen 4y ago
  They either want microtransactions and loot boxes, or 30% of the overall revenue like Apple and Google do in their app stores.
  - wincy 4y ago
    Ah yes, and then if you try to tell even the slightest bit controversial story about say, adventuring in an ancient Egyptian city with slaves, that will be flagged as hateful content and you’ll be banned from D&D forever.

voakbasda 4y ago

Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents such from happening.

crayboff 4y ago
I mean, they did a huge thing that can't be backed out of, they released SRD 5.1 under creative commons. Yeah they did some not great stuff, but let's celebrate the successes when we get them!
- deadbunny 4y ago
  Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.
  - Karrot_Kream 4y ago
    Sure, but the outrage from this change came about revoking the license for past works. By putting SRD 5.1 under CC, the situation for many indie creators of working with the SRD becomes clean and clear. Hasbro can do whatever they want going forward with D&D.
    - cma 4y ago
      Game rules/mechanics usually can't be copyrighted other than just the literal text of descriptions of them. Does this give anything you couldn't have by cloning the rules with different wording flair?
      - Karrot_Kream 4y ago

pubby 4y ago

> how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? IMO it's common for people at the top of a hierarchy to be out of touch with those on the bottom. It takes dedication to stay in touch, but even with effort a bigwig can't experience the community exactly as a peon does. Usually, they have to do market research (like this poll) to find out what people really think. I'm not saying this as a defense or anything, but I find it helpful to think about.

tonfreed 4y ago
The least they could do is sit down once a month with the game designers for a session of dungeon crawling. The main two in charge have both said they don't play
- hinkley 4y ago
  The only thing worse than obstaining is half-assing it. Do you really want a bunch of detached people paying just enough attention to something you like that they feel like they can 'contribute' by changing it?
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    Meeting once a month would be within the normal range for a group playing for fun. On the low side, I think, but it's not "so little attention that it's worse than nothing".
    - hinkley 4y ago
      People who are uni vested let things go as they are. People who are a little invested screw them up.
TillE 4y ago
Given the extremely fast and extremely comprehensive U-turn, it seems like a lot of people near the top did understand the community very well. Somehow, one person or one small faction made a different decision, and the overwhelming feedback proved it was the wrong decision.

roenxi 4y ago

I disagree because the fundamental core of this argument is "everyone in a community should think alike". That isn't realistic, and using that as a principle leads to bad results - we have to be used to having robust communities with questionable leadership. The natural state of leadership is to be a bit shabby and not quite up to the task. We have the internet now, we have great visibility on what leaders actually do and they can't meet impossible standards. Although that is why decentralisation is so powerful - WOTC doesn't run your games night and doesn't send out a goon squad to police that people aren't using house rules. WOTC don't have the same incentives as their community. A company producing a game almost never has the same incentives as their community. As long as their incentives align with folding in the face of solid negative feedback, that is enough. They made a mistake, they appear to have recognised the mistake and course corrected. Asking for more than that is going to get less - it encourages lies and bad, blandness.

victorvosk 4y ago

Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.

ninth_ant 4y ago
I understand what you’re saying, but attempting to revoke a widely-used open source license is not just something completely within their rights. Their sudden claim to have ability to “deauthorize” the 20+ year old OGL and destroy the partners and competitors who built businesses on the promises of a perpetual license - this was an egregious move that was almost certainly not within their rights. Legal analysts were quite consistent in that it’s impossible to be certain but this process wouldn’t have withstood a solid legal test. WotC, in trying to pull this, was attempting to leverage their expensive legal team to bully people into giving away their legal rights under the open license. That’s shady and deeply unethical, and shouldn’t be considered to be within their rights. Now for the future content they make, they can release that under a closed license if they want and that is within their rights even if I don’t like that license.
bluefirebrand 4y ago
Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior. Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.
Aeolun 4y ago
Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it. Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home Depot, and the like? Who is for having products be a little bit more expensive, but reducing the quanity 10%-20% (eg: shrinkflation)? Plenty more examples.

jbm 4y ago
A minor point, but I am grateful for the self checkout lanes — they have greatly speeded up my checkout, and w/ covid spiking I just want to leave asap. I have never seen "no" registers open though.
- Macha 4y ago
  Not the US, but no manned registers happens often enough across various store chains here in Dublin at least. To the point where you might have to wave down a staff member restocking a shelf because the self-service needs someone to authorise your alchohol purchase or whatever.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  Walmart seems to agree that they like them as well. Renovated stores are entirely designed to streamline the self-checkout experience.
- michaelcampbell 4y ago
  I don't mind the OPTION of self checkout, but not having the choice is a big fuck-you to the customers purely to make more millions of profit. At our local Wal Mart, they have registers for humans, but no humans are ever there. 100% do it yourself, with someone wanting to check your receipt. I never stop, if they want to see it's done right, hire someone to do it right. Home Depot is getting to be that way, though you can go to the "professionals" checkout if you need human interaction, and they don't seem to mind us plebs doing so if there aren't contractors waiting. And they have the cust. svc. desk too. Recently, our local grocery store has started a "no humans" checkout after some arbitrary time of day; I think ~17:00. This is 10x worse since there we tend to buy things that require human input; notably produce that isn't pre-wrapped and pre-priced and goes by the # for cost.

freshhawk 4y ago

It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this. They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest. So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?

hellcow 4y ago
That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work. The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase. DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_. And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  When I was a player the story was way more important than the mechanism. Many times we just reduced to a few D6 tbh
  - kcartlidge 4y ago
    Us too. Though in the end we settled on the Fighting Fantasy RPG rules as they were simple enough to play in the school playground whilst also providing just a little bit of authority to decisions.
  - alisonatwork 4y ago
    This is the thing that makes me realize the small amount of roleplaying I did growing up wasn't really indicative of "the community", such as it is. For my family and friends group who played, the sourcebooks served as inspiration, something to read to get the ball rolling. Dice were just an arbitrary mechanic to fall back on as a way to add gambling-style tension to encounters or prompt players to come up with a more creative solution. Nobody ever wants to "lose" an interactive storytelling session so getting caught up in rules feels against the spirit of the thing. And yet, here we are. I guess a lot of players take the rules and the lore a lot more seriously than we ever did.

Karrot_Kream 4y ago

If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.

LegitShady 4y ago

agreed. a substantial amount of the playerbase and 3rd party creators are looking for non-DnD games moving forward, and Hasbro finally realized they handed the opportunity to take all those players and creators to their competition. I think people should still switch. Hasbro has shown who they are. Is there a DnD transformers crossover yet, like in MtG?

cleak 4y ago

I’d bet they anticipated the backlash, but thought it could be managed - some short term anger followed by long term profits. It so far hasn’t worked out that way, but these are still recent events; they may just wait to roll out changes more quietly.

hinkley 4y ago
They might be right long term, but that's 1) pretty cynical and 2) I think they might have just created the origin story for their competitors. So good news, they're making $1 billion, bad news they are now making $1 billion of a $1.7 billion market instead of $800 million of a $1 billion market.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]