D&D 5E The Basic D&D pdf

[Patrick McGill]

Conspiracy Theory: They WANT the site to go down and suffer load problems because that makes the rules scarce and the release all the more exciting and interest all the more piqued. If people can just go download the thing easily, it won't create NEARLY as much of a conversation as if people struggle and talk about it and answer each others' questions and have to try multiple times and....

Like, by the next day, it'll all be sorted out, but despite the frustrations, there can be a lot of buzz around a system "so popular it crushed our servers" and being able to claim that they "despite doing our best to prepare, we underestimated demand."

And their marketing department cackles evillly and laughs "Aaah! The buzz! The precious buzz! Yesssssss!"

That... sounds both devious and plausible.

Have you worked in marketing before?

 

[Morlock]

This would be smart if they wanted to avoid server overload, but I think they'd prefer if no one even knew torrents existed, so I don't think they will.

The sad thing is that torrents are a superior distribution format. I never get dropped/interrupted downloads with torrents. Never have to worry if the central server is down. Always get to peek at the file info (size, name, etc.) before I download. I can take as long as I like to download a file on my crappy connection.

 

[Morlock]

I would love if Basic D&D was with B&W old-school art.

Sadly, "old school art" has just come to mean "crap art" IMO. Every product I see that uses "old school art" seems to take the bad, and leave the good. Nothing up to the standards of Roslof, Trampier, Holloway, Truman, Easley/Elmore's B&W, or even Otus (sorry, I know old-shoolers largely consider him to be the god of OS art, but I'm not really a fan).

I love good, old-style B&W interior art, but I think it's very rare, and not found in OSR products.

 

[Tush Hog]

Sadly, "old school art" has just come to mean "crap art" IMO. Every product I see that uses "old school art" seems to take the bad, and leave the good. Nothing up to the standards of Roslof, Trampier, Holloway, Truman, Easley/Elmore's B&W, or even Otus (sorry, I know old-shoolers largely consider him to be the god of OS art, but I'm not really a fan).

I love good, old-style B&W interior art, but I think it's very rare, and not found in OSR products.

DUNGEON CRAWL CLASSICS wins the day in awesome Old school art in a new product. Of course, it makes use of some of those greats you mentioned.

 

[Henry]

That... sounds both devious and plausible.

Have you worked in marketing before?

The daredevil dwarf has a point.

 

[ShadoWWW]

I meant art similar to Castles & Crusades, for instance. Not some silly art, but beautiful one.

 

[Unwise]

Conspiracy Theory:<snip>
Like, by the next day, it'll all be sorted out, but despite the frustrations, there can be a lot of buzz around a system "so popular it crushed our servers" and being able to claim that they "despite doing our best to prepare, we underestimated demand."
And their marketing department cackles evillly and laughs "Aaah! The buzz! The precious buzz! Yesssssss!"

I was about to post exactly this. This technique has become pretty much ubiquitous for some industries. Whenever we have a new gaming console come out there are warehouses full of thousands of them waiting there until the requisite number of articles about the shortage have come out. The same goes for queue times on new MMOs. People complain about them, but if they are not there, we assume the game is a failure.

Our main hope is that this technique is so overused and trite by this stage that WotC won't insult our intelligence with it. Any outage will be minimal, just enough for a well constructed humblebrag about the demand. Past that, it does not make sense to manufacture scarcity in an easily duplicated digital product.

 

[Joneleth]

I was about to post exactly this. This technique has become pretty much ubiquitous for some industries. Whenever we have a new gaming console come out there are warehouses full of thousands of them waiting there until the requisite number of articles about the shortage have come out. The same goes for queue times on new MMOs. People complain about them, but if they are not there, we assume the game is a failure.

Our main hope is that this technique is so overused and trite by this stage that WotC won't insult our intelligence with it. Any outage will be minimal, just enough for a well constructed humblebrag about the demand. Past that, it does not make sense to manufacture scarcity in an easily duplicated digital product.

This is a complete fabrication and demonstrates that no one seems to understand the economics of running a game or hosting a download, so let me lay it out for you. The reality of the matter is that no company is going to spend money unneccesarily. After you take a moment for that to sink in, read on. Take the MMO example you mention; a company is going to project a number of sales based on pre-orders/other metrics, and purchase server infrastructure based on the best case scenarios. So, if the preorders total 200k, they’re going to build to accommodate 200k people. When the game sells 500k copies, the servers will be overloaded and no one will be able to login. If they bought 500k worth of capacity, but only sold 200k copies, then that would be a huge waste of money (and companies don’t exist to waste money). And on top of all of that, there is most often just a one time spike of users logging in the first week, so why expand to 500k capacity when the average load will only be 300k? Login queues alleviate this problem by requiring less supply then demand.


Look at it this way: it’s easier for a company to expand server capacity then to remove it. There is no conspiracy about server issues, there are only the realities of business.

 

[Agamon]

I didn't respond to KM's post because it read like a joke to me, but I'm not surprised someone took it seriously.

Let's put it this way, if they really wanted to gum up the servers intentionally and not fix any problems, they would release at 12:00 AM EST and not wait until business hours begin in the Pacific time zone.

So, yeah, put the tin foil hats away.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is a complete fabrication and demonstrates that no one seems to understand the economics of running a game or hosting a download, so let me lay it out for you. The reality of the matter is that no company is going to spend money unneccesarily. After you take a moment for that to sink in, read on. Take the MMO example you mention; a company is going to project a number of sales based on pre-orders/other metrics, and purchase server infrastructure based on the best case scenarios. So, if the preorders total 200k, they’re going to build to accommodate 200k people. When the game sells 500k copies, the servers will be overloaded and no one will be able to login. If they bought 500k worth of capacity, but only sold 200k copies, then that would be a huge waste of money (and companies don’t exist to waste money). And on top of all of that, there is most often just a one time spike of users logging in the first week, so why expand to 500k capacity when the average load will only be 300k? Login queues alleviate this problem by requiring less supply then demand.

Look at it this way: it’s easier for a company to expand server capacity then to remove it. There is no conspiracy about server issues, there are only the realities of business.

Full explanation later, but no, this is completely rubbish oversimplification when it comes to MMO launches and server issues, and I will provide examples.