Wizards: Musings on the new DDi disaster

[Subtlepanic]

Good lord.

It's been what, 48 hours since release and already the dramatists are declaring the end of 4E and WotC?

Participate in the first weeks of an MMO launch - it's always like this. Yet they've got weeks of alpha testing under their belts, massive amounts of paid-for focus testing, and huge teams at their disposal. I can't shake the feeling this is just a handful of coders sat in an office trying to make something happen.

We expect too much.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Edit: DannyAlcatraz has already made my point in a more stylish way. But then as an American lawyer he gets bonus style. Only barristers get to look good in court over here.

I am jealous of their powdered wigs, though.

 

[MerricB]

Haven't tried the new CB yet but why do you think Essentials a failure? I thought it was doing well(?)

I didn't actually say Essentials is a failure; I believe that Wizards' handling of its marketing has caused a lot of confusion and has occasionally been counterproductive.

In particular, I think that the Red Box is greatly flawed due to the major discrepancies between it and Heroes of the Fallen Lands. I believe that the changes to the thief in HotFL are excellent and should have been made, but they've made the Red Box into a product that is much, much less than it should have been - and one I have trouble recommending to new players as a result. This is not how it should have been.

In addition, there has been great confusion over whether the D&D Player's Handbook will be reprinted - confusion caused (I believe) by Wizards themselves not yet knowing if they will reprint it. At one point, I believed that after Essentials was out and on shelves, we'd have both it and the core three available for purchase. However, the announcement of the [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Class-Compendium-Dungeons-Dragons-Accessory/dp/0786958588]Class Compendium: Heroes of Sword and Spells[/ame] muddies the water drastically. With that release, it leads me to believe that the Player's Handbook will not be reprinted - although I quite admit I could be wrong about that.

There's a very good reason that Wizards is having trouble with its marketing of Essentials: the spectre of D&D 3.5E hanging over their heads. As a set of products, D&D Essentials is far more compatible and excellent than 3.5E was, but the mistakes of the past are causing new mistakes in the future.

Cheers!

 

[JoeGKushner]

However, it does give me an idea of its potential..

Zero sarcasm here.

As a consumer, what potential do you see in the online CB that could not have been added/was not already there, for the downloaded CB?

 

[JoeGKushner]

Eh,potential is great and all but seriously, WotC needs to step their game up if they want people to pay for the "potential" their products have... At the end of roughly 2 + years of 4e/DDI we have exactly two tools (3 I guess if you count the Compendium)... the CB (which has been ultimately scraped) and a buggy MB... that's not impressive, and it doesn't instill faith in many as far as their ability to capitalize on potential.

Or... givei t away until the bugs are fixed... "We know that things aren't going to be perfect out of the door so we're allowing everyone to use it for xx amount of days and listening to the feedback."

 

[JoeGKushner]

Haha, agreed. WotC has always (even before Hasbro) been a two-steps-forward, one-step-back (or even, in this case 1-forward, 2-back) kind of company. This really is just par for the course with these guys, so in a way its not surprising. Unfortunately.

This mess will all get cleaned up eventually, its just a matter of cost in time, effort, and customers. Makes one wonder what they could do if they didn't royally sabotage themselves about every other year.

And the customers thing is huge. Roleplayers aren't buying in numbers that they used to. Paizo, even if it's 'just' in ICv2 was tied with WoTC for sales. Good will on WoTC part has been spent and Paizo generally, not always, but generally, gets a huge thumbs up for their handling of the line, their handling of PDF's, etc...

If WoTC is going to remain a role playing publisher, they need to make some serious decesions about how they're going to stay profitible enough that Hasbro doesn't shut them down and use the IP for other things that make real money.

 

[JoeGKushner]

But that attitute is apparently costing WoTC at some point. They are not the only fish in the pond. The biggest fish yes but they are competting not only with the other RPGs, and Paizo did tie them in sales, but they are competing with WoW and other fields of entertainment.

WoTC can't keep reaching back to the original players with nods like Essentials and Magic Missiles hitting automatic and expect that those same people who may like the game mechanics aren't going to be pissed about the way things are handled and go back to NOT playing the game.

D&D isn't as popular now as it was at its height and yeah, this is a huge concern for the company. If the RPG can't be profitible, something else will have to be.

This same exact thing was said when they announced that to start with, you could only make 20 characters on the online CB.

This same exact thing was said when the Dark Sun and Essentials updates were not done in the other CB in September.

This same exact thing was said when Essentials was announced and people thought the main game was being "discontinued".

This same exact thing was said when they discontinued development on the Gleemax suite.

This same exact thing was said when the druid, barbarian, gnome and orc were not going to appear in the first Player's Handbook.

This same exact thing was said when they announced they were releasing 4E and they would no longer support 3.5.

This same exact thing was said when they announced they were releasing 3.5 and that they would no longer support 3.0.

In other words... WotC has done years of things that were supposed to result in the downfall of their company and the downfall of the Dungeons & Dragons game.

And yet, here we are... still playing it. Still using their tools. Still buying their books. And still being hyperbolic about how the sky is falling and how THIS TIME they've gone too far.

Best of luck to all of you who are definitely, absolutely, finally, this time we mean it, giving up on D&D forever. And I'll be sure to wave 'hi' to you come January when WotC releases another product that doesn't work 100% correct right out the chute and most of you are all back here on ENWorld saying that they've really done it this time, thus proving you've still been using and playing with their products the entire time.

 

[P1NBACK]

Yeah I accepted it last night... Will probably be waiting till Christmas to get either of those... I'm behind the times I know- but I just got a Kinect, so my fun money is in rehab for a b it.

[MENTION=23977]Scribble[/MENTION] How are you liking Kinect? Looks interesting, but I think I'm more skeptical of that than DDI.

 

[The_Gneech]

Speaking as someone who went off to Pathfinder, I can only say that I don't feel I can "rely" on WotC for more than a product or two at a time ... they seem to lurch around from idea to idea without any discernible plan. And gaming, for a hardcore fan anyway, is a long-term investment. I've been in this hobby for something like thirty years and continue to use some of my earliest materials, so I'm always a lot more interested in something that I know will still be there tomorrow.

I don't know if it's a frantic desire to keep throwing out something new to up sales, just a collective neurosis, or what. But I have a lot more faith that the d20 OGL will be around tomorrow, than anything currently officially branded as "D&D."

-The Gneech

 

[mudbunny]

If you want a nice review of Kinect, listen to the Gamers With Jobs podcast.

GWJ Conference Call Episode 213 | Gamers With Jobs

This is the episode where they discuss Kinect.