Any word on the GSL?

[Philotomy Jurament]

GSL? ZZZzzzz....

 

[Mark]

Sorry nothing to report.

Honestly, I haven't touched it since I last posted before Christmas. I have had other important priorities to focus on for the past couple of weeks.

I am getting back to it on Thursday after some time sensitive work is behind me.

Getting back to what? What is left to do but get approval on the changes previously discussed? If this cannot be done by this week I can only conclude that nothing of useful significance will ever truly come of your efforts. All of the deadlines and snow days have seemingly come and gone. I hope to see something conclusive today or tomorrow. Either way, thank you for all of your efforts on the open gaming movement and even the GSL such as it is. Please do not think that anyone blames you directly for the failure of your company to properly handle the concerns of the third party publishing community. There have been a lot of good things to come out of the last eight or nine years and I am sure that most third party publishers would have liked to move forward as partners in open gaming with WotC. Some publishers have already moved on and others have awaited concrete results from WotC who has repeatedly made it plain that the existing continuing partnership with third party publishers, and their collective concerns over the wording of certain GSL sections, simply was not going to be a priority. I am sure everyone appreciates your candor in that regard. I look forward to your response.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

Getting back to what? What is left to do but get approval on the changes previously discussed? If this cannot be done by this week I can only conclude that nothing of useful significance will ever truly come of your efforts. All of the deadlines and snow days have seemingly come and gone. I hope to see something conclusive today or tomorrow. Either way, thank you for all of your efforts on the open gaming movement and even the GSL such as it is. Please do not think that anyone blames you directly for the failure of your company to properly handle the concerns of the third party publishing community. There have been a lot of good things to come out of the last eight or nine years and I am sure that most third party publishers would have liked to move forward as partners in open gaming with WotC. Some publishers have already moved on and others have awaited concrete results from WotC who has repeatedly made it plain that the existing continuing partnership with third party publishers, and their collective concerns over the wording of certain GSL sections, simply was not going to be a priority. I am sure everyone appreciates your candor in that regard. I look forward to your response.

I can empathize with the frustration you must be feeling over this. I appreciate the support.

So you understand where I am coming from: among my other duties, since my return from the holiday break on January 5th I have been preparing for our annual meetings with all of our core hobby distributors. This is a one day event, so yesterday I spent the day presenting our 2009 brand strategies and product line to all of these very important customers. I know you can appreciate the importance of such a meeting.

With that behind me, today after going to a writing celebration at my son's school (he's in kindergarten and is just starting to read and write short stories) I went to work and had several meetings including kicking off development of the 5 year D&D Brand global strat plan, 2009 marketing campaign kickoff and review of the GSL revision with Brand, R&D, and Legal. Legal was out with a sick family but brand and R&D signed off on the changes. I'll review with legal on Monday with two outstanding questions: can we add cosmology? can we add pantheon? yes or no we'll move forward with the rest of the changes and start adding it to the SRD. We'll need to see if the person who did the first SRD has bandwidth to take this on now otherwise we'll figure something else out. I am not opposed to putting out the revised license before the revised SRD but it would be nice to get them out together.

edit: oh ya, I also spent about an hour today tracking down and logging links for pirated copies of D&D books and magazines on a sharing site with about 9,000 apparent violations

 

[Rechan]

Scott acts as if he didn't personally walk up to every third party publisher and spit in their eye. C'mon now. WotC hates everyone and wishes all non-WotC businesses would die of terminal hemroids. They also send crack commando units into houses to burn all notes of non-traditional D&D homeworlds and ruin games that aren't approved of by the Gaming Committee department of WotC. They are more evil than rainy days and tooth aches.

How dare you, Mr. Rouse, to act innocent. You have destroyed the happiness and livelihood of all gamers everywhere.



All sarcasm aside, reading some posts here, it's like people actually think this way. It's as though WotC and the GSL ran over their dog. The level of conspiracy-theories and hate pumping through the threads has eaten through a portion of my screen. It gets really difficult to actually read information on the GSL without the massive hateon some have for the sorcerers on the beach.

 

[Jack99]

Thanks Scott, we are looking forward seeing the beast.

 

[Mark]

Well, fair enough, Scott. Obviously you cannot get the support within the current corporation to get this done in a timely manner with an eye toward the obvious concerns of many third party publishers. You've done the best you can and your efforts have been appreciated.

 

[tomBitonti]

I can empathize with the frustration you must be feeling over this. I appreciate the support.

So you understand where I am coming from: among my other duties, since my return from the holiday break on January 5th I have been preparing for our annual meetings with all of our core hobby distributors. This is a one day event, so yesterday I spent the day presenting our 2009 brand strategies and product line to all of these very important customers. I know you can appreciate the importance of such a meeting.

With that behind me, today after going to a writing celebration at my son's school (he's in kindergarten and is just starting to read and write short stories) I went to work and had several meetings including kicking off development of the 5 year D&D Brand global strat plan, 2009 marketing campaign kickoff and review of the GSL revision with Brand, R&D, and Legal. Legal was out with a sick family but brand and R&D signed off on the changes. I'll review with legal on Monday with two outstanding questions: can we add cosmology? can we add pantheon? yes or no we'll move forward with the rest of the changes and start adding it to the SRD. We'll need to see if the person who did the first SRD has bandwidth to take this on now otherwise we'll figure something else out. I am not opposed to putting out the revised license before the revised SRD but it would be nice to get them out together.

edit: oh ya, I also spent about an hour today tracking down and logging links for pirated copies of D&D books and magazines on a sharing site with about 9,000 apparent violations

Hmm, all interesting, and I empathize (I'm in a similar spot at times, I think), but largely irrelevant. As a professional, you have an understanding of your own workload, and you should not have gotten as far as you have without being able to come up with good estimates of when work can get done.

Also, the bit about adding new content doesn't work. You will have new content arriving at a near continuous pace, for the next two years, at least, as books for new power sources come out, and other material as provided through the DDI. If you don't have a system for releasing updates to the SRD in pace with the new content, then you basically have a broken delivery mechanism.

Now, I understand about workload (I really really do), and at times there is work that one really doesn't know when it will get done, and folks are asking for dates and estimates all of the time. At the same time, eventually, you'll have to tell folks who ask for those estimates that you don't have one, and the product will be ready when it's ready. That may mean breaking a commitment -- but the commitment has already been made and broken -- and all that is left is to either clear the air and work to re-establishing your word. Or turtle, which is basically giving up.

 

[johnnype]

"WotC offices being closed between December 25th and January 4th"

Am I the only one who has a problem with this? Is this in addition to regular PTO? Because if it is that is incredibly generous and if it isn't its ridiculously draconian to force employees into a fixed vacation schedule. Either way someone is being screwed (shareholders or employees). I find it a bit strange for a public company to shut down simply because "it's the holidays".

Regardless it's obvious the GSL is low priority for WotC. Then again they lost me months ago.

 

[Pramas]

"WotC offices being closed between December 25th and January 4th"

Am I the only one who has a problem with this? Is this in addition to regular PTO? Because if it is that is incredibly generous and if it isn't its ridiculously draconian to force employees into a fixed vacation schedule. Either way someone is being screwed (shareholders or employees). I find it a bit strange for a public company to shut down simply because "it's the holidays".

It's actually one of the coolest things about working at WotC. I wish all my employers had done that. It does not count as your regular vacation time. It's a nice thank you to the staff for working hard all year and a recognition that not a lot of work really gets done between Xmas in New Year's anyway.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

"WotC offices being closed between December 25th and January 4th"

Am I the only one who has a problem with this? Is this in addition to regular PTO? Because if it is that is incredibly generous and if it isn't its ridiculously draconian to force employees into a fixed vacation schedule. Either way someone is being screwed (shareholders or employees). I find it a bit strange for a public company to shut down simply because "it's the holidays".

That's actually fairly common in Germany in small companies that don't provide some services that must be run uninterrupted.

Of course, even if this isn't the case, most people around here will spend some vacation time to get the entire period off. I mean, what the heck - most of us get around 30 paid vacation days, so it's not that much of a drain on our vacation budget (especially considering the many public holidays in that period). As a result, nobody tries to push any serious project through in this period since hardly anyone works during that time anyway...