news scoop: insider account of how the statement was drafted, and the fear-based culture in Wizards offices

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

DM: "OK, there are two guards flanking the door. One always tells lies, one always tells the truth."

Player: "That's easy. Whichever one says things that disagree with my opinion on the OGL is the one who always lies."

 

[Yaarel]

DM: "OK, there are two guards flanking the door. One always tells lies, one always tells the truth."

Player: "That's easy. Whichever one says things that disagree with my opinion on the OGL is the one who always lies."

Heh, thats easy!

Between the two, the one that is carefully omitting the important part, is the one that is always telling the truth but only about the unimportant stuff.

Half-truths.

 

[Charlaquin]

It was secret unless someone in the party had the requisite language proficiency. Most DM advice will tell you that gating content behind proficiency requrements is bad design, but sometimes it happens anyway

Psh, I disagree with that advice. Missable content is a good thing!

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Psh, I disagree with that advice. Missable content is a good thing!

Missable content = good

Content necessary to continue the adventure hinging on a skill roll = bad

 

[Charlaquin]

Missable content = good

Content necessary to continue the adventure hinging on a skill roll = bad

True, although personally I think if that can happen there’s a bigger adventure design flaw behind it. Namely, the adventure is far too linear, at least for my tastes.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

That seems to square with DnD Short's source info:


So the feedback is seen, but only the bubbles. The commentary is still not being taken into account. I'm not entirely sure how you'd fix that with the volume of info coming in, though.

And multiple people are saying that's not true.

 

[clearstream]

Ultimately, the goal is "democratic capitalism", in the sense of democratic control of financial capital.

Historically, democractic capitalism has inevitably transitioned to plutocracy.

 

[clearstream]

Here is Will Earl (D&D Shorts?) conferring with the source of the leak.

In sum, they did read the survey comments for 2014. But they arent reading the survey comments for 2024. More specifically, the presentations to the employees about the survey results only summarize the approval ratings − the numbers. These presentations dont summarize any of the comments. Because the staff is small, it is impracticable to sift thru the comments.

My note − but the designers can still go thru the comments themselves when wanting to resolve a low approval item.

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I have read several comments making the appeal to reason that game designers don't have time to read the comments (and so it is reasonable to imagine that they ignore them.) I think it is important to keep in mind the personnel and machine-learning tools that any sizeable company has available to parse and present responses for designers to use. Outputs of common machine-learning, natural language processing and data visualisation tools include topic and sentiment analysis, word clouds and graphs of themes. Larger companies - like Hasbro - typically have data and customer insights teams, who provide analysis to their design teams... making the number of game designers doubly moot.

Lines of reasoning like "thousands of people complete those surveys" and "the design team consists of a small number of individuals" might have once been true, but today seem naive.

 

[dave2008]

heads up to @Morrus:

more slated to be revealed on Wednesday

Well this is another confirmation to stay off Twitter!

 

[The Stray]

Historically, democractic capitalism has inevitably transitioned to plutocracy.

Historically ALL capitalism has inevitably transitioned to plutocracy, so I don't see what your point is.