DnD Shorts final video

[rules.mechanic]

One really interesting comment was the one about WotC not being able to take down the free website-that-shall-not-be-mentioned.tools. A bit odd to blame the OGL for that as neither it, nor the other-website-that-shall-not-be-mentioned, use the OGL. WotC clearly know they're on very shaky ground with claiming or pursuing copyright so seem to want people to sign up to ceding them control.

 

[Minigiant]

Watching the video now.

Wow. Damn.

This is basically everything I casually predicted months or even years ago, with a less doom-y mindset. It all makes sense, though if it's true, Chris Cao is a bit of an idiot, because he wants to go far too hard too fast. Also, given D&D Beyond was acquired against his advice, it sounds like WotC is not unified on his vision. That's not necessarily a good thing, but it's interesting. I can believe they thought $30 was viable whilst discussing it internally, not because they could get it, but because echo-chamber-type discussions often give people ridiculous ideas. I mean, I've been in discussions watching highly intelligent and educated men and women wildly overestimate how successful a legal product is going to be, and my careful attempts to burst balloons are accepted politely but basically ignored. Then unfortunately I was right lol.

The Blueprint 2.0 seems to be nigh-identical to what happened with 4E, as well. The whole thing back then was "These IPs need to make more money!" except back then it was only $50m, not hundreds of millions or more.

Fascinated to hear Dan Rawson is a good guy, and Williams is hands-off, that's kind of interesting. Unsurprised to hear Jeremy Crawford is well-regarded, he seems like he'd be a lot of fun when not trolling us all with Sage Advice. Good that he's respecting Ray's story and also unsurprising he was well-liked. Kyle Brink whilst theoretically outranking Chris Cao is allegedly basically working for him, which is interesting - it makes sense given the tens of millions being poured in to D&D - if you've twice the employees and twice the budget, even if the org chart says you're lower, that's not going to be how it works, politically.

Same. If true it's what I've been saying here for a long while.

Hasbro isn't making much money. Hasbro is leaning on WOTC's D&D and MTG to bail Hasbro out. D&D core books make money but the money slowed and cooled. Adventure books don't make enough for WOTC nor Hasbro. So this Chris Cao is aggressively attempting to pull out the gaming industry money printer. And the OGL stands in its way.

But I never bothered to look at Hasbro stock and yup it all makes sense now if true.


And my guy didn't know what Teams is. Really should have handed this info to someone else.

 

[SAVeira]

I think the issue is he literally didn't know what Teams was, so doesn't understand that by mentioning those, WotC can, potentially, depending on their Teams setup, find them. Though it may well be a needle-in-a-haystack deal.

I think it's good that he's passing people on to Linda because of stuff like that. Linda is a bit more tech-savvy and likely to double-check stuff like that.

Surprised that he does not know what Teams is. Guessing that he might not have a conversional job as the use of MS Teams has exploded throughout the corporate world as Microsoft has been pushing on every MS Office user. It is also a replacement for several older MS products such as Skype for Business. Most businesses and government agencies I deal with are using MS Teams.

As for the ability of IT to find the secret chat groups in MS Teams, it is easier than one thinks. I have people that could locate given time and I am sure Hasbro/WotC has more staff with ever more experience.

One really interesting comment was the one about WotC not being able to take down the free website-that-shall-not-be-mentioned.tools. A bit odd to blame the OGL for that as neither it, nor the other-website-that-shall-not-be-mentioned, use the OGL. WotC clearly know they're on very shaky ground with claiming or pursuing copyright so seem to want people to sign up to ceding them control.

That is not surprising. While you might hear about website being taken down in the news, there is normally a lot of work that getting it pulled down. To my current understanding the reason Hollywood and record companies are so successful is that they have years of experience dealing with this and connections. Even then there are multiple sites that are still up after years of attempting to shut them down.

Talk some book authors (non-gaming) and they will tell you that they are almost powerless to get pirate copies of their books pull from the internet even with the help of their publisher.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Surprised that he does not know what Teams is.

I'm not.

Guessing that he might not have a conversional job as the use of MS Teams has exploded throughout the corporate world as Microsoft has been pushing on every MS Office user.

By "conversional" do you mean "conventional" or "corporate"?

Because if you mean "conventional", you're totally out-of-touch. Easily 80% of jobs in the West don't involve using Teams (probably much higher). Even in environments where you're using Microsoft Office, the odds you're actually using Teams are moderate at best. The vast majority of jobs are stuff like retail, admin, factory work, transport/delivery - these are "conventional jobs". Sitting in an airconditioned office fiddling with Microsoft products may be your job and mine, but it doesn't mean we're typical.

I mean, I work in a large corporate law-firm that's tech-centric and even kind of "ahead of the curve" by law-firm standards. Do we use Teams? Yes, but we literally just started seriously using it maybe 1-2 years ago. And only in the last year that we started using it preferentially over other tools. And most people just use it for video meetings, they don't even know about the chat channel stuff.

As for the ability of IT to find the secret chat groups in MS Teams, it is easier than one thinks. I have people that could locate given time and I am sure Hasbro/WotC has more staff with ever more experience.

You're assuming competent, motivated, in-house IT and we have no idea if any of those things are the case.

 

[kenada]

Hasbro isn't making much money. Hasbro is leaning on WOTC's D&D and MTG to bail Hasbro out. D&D core books make money but the money slowed and cooled. Adventure books don't make enough for WOTC nor Hasbro. So this Chris Cao is aggressively attempting to pull out the gaming industry money printer. And the OGL stands in its way.

A $150M/year tabletop RPG is an incredible achievement. That it’s not good enough is a tragedy, and they’re aiming to screw it all up.

And my guy didn't know what Teams is. Really should have handed this info to someone else.

We don’t know what the retention policy is for their Teams. It may be that it’s short enough the comment is already gone and can’t be traced. If Hasbro is like where I work, Teams is meant for ephemeral conversations, and anything important is supposed to be communicated via a tool with a longer retention policy.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We don’t know what the retention policy is for their Teams. It may be that it’s short enough the comment is already gone and can’t be traced. If Hasbro is like where I work, Teams is meant for ephemeral conversations, and anything important is supposed to be communicated via a tool with a longer retention policy.

That's another good point. Whilst we we have a longer retention now, for a long time with Teams we had like, 2 days retention. With one of our other chat tools we have ZERO retention. Like, if everyone closed the chat, that's gone, forever. And that's the main chat tool we use.

 

[SAVeira]

I'm not.

By "conversional" do you mean "conventional" or "corporate"?

Because if you mean "conventional", you're totally out-of-touch. Easily 80% of jobs in the West don't involve using Teams (probably much higher). Even in environments where you're using Microsoft Office, the odds you're actually using Teams are moderate at best. The vast majority of jobs are stuff like retail, admin, factory work, transport/delivery - these are "conventional jobs". Sitting in an airconditioned office fiddling with Microsoft products may be your job and mine, but it doesn't mean we're typical.

I mean, I work in a large corporate law-firm that's tech-centric and even kind of "ahead of the curve" by law-firm standards. Do we use Teams? Yes, but we literally just started seriously using it maybe 1-2 years ago. And only in the last year that we started using it preferentially over other tools. And most people just use it for video meetings, they don't even know about the chat channel stuff.

I am dyslexic and I do mean conventional. Currently, we have multiple clients with workers in retail, admin, factory work, transport/delivery and other where workers are using MS Teams. Might not be what you are seeing but we gotten a lot of individuals outside of IT on MS Teams.

 

[Minigiant]

I'm not.

By "conversional" do you mean "conventional" or "corporate"?

Because if you mean "conventional", you're totally out-of-touch. Easily 80% of jobs in the West don't involve using Teams (probably much higher). Even in environments where you're using Microsoft Office, the odds you're actually using Teams are moderate at best. The vast majority of jobs are stuff like retail, admin, factory work, transport/delivery - these are "conventional jobs". Sitting in an airconditioned office fiddling with Microsoft products may be your job and mine, but it doesn't mean we're typical.

I mean, I work in a large corporate law-firm that's tech-centric and even kind of "ahead of the curve" by law-firm standards. Do we use Teams? Yes, but we literally just started seriously using it maybe 1-2 years ago. And only in the last year that we started using it preferentially over other tools. And most people just use it for video meetings, they don't even know about the chat channel stuff.

Yeah. Not everyone uses Teams. Some use Zoom, Skype, Slack, RocketChat, Brosix, Elevate... There's a billion of them (which proves WOTC's point on tech stuff). I don't use Teams at my current job.

However If you worked in corporate or tech, you would know likely what Teams is.

 

[SAVeira]

That's another good point. Whilst we we have a longer retention now, for a long time with Teams we had like, 2 days retention. With one of our other chat tools we have ZERO retention. Like, if everyone closed the chat, that's gone, forever. And that's the main chat tool we use.

Depends on the workplace. Ours is retention is years. For several businesses there can be legal needs to have items keep for the same. Worked at government agency (note I am not in the US) and a couple of hospitals and they keep chat logs for longer than a couple of months.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am dyslexic and I do mean conventional. Currently, we have multiple clients with workers in retail, admin, factory work, transport/delivery and other where workers are using MS Teams. Might not be what you are seeing but we gotten a lot of individuals outside of IT on MS Teams.

Yeah, I'm not asking to critique but to clarify, I have severe ADHD and often miss out words (usually "not" which can lead to a lot of hilarity).

Teams is just not as widespread as you think it is. It's certainly rapidly gaining in popularity and usage but most "conventional" jobs do not feature it. Microsoft says Teams has 270m users as of 2022, which is huge, but compare that to over 1bn for a still-updated version of Office. It's very easy to have a "conventional" job and not know what it is. Especially if you're the kind of person who leaves work at work.

Plus he's British (like me), and I think it's a bit less widespread here than the US.

Ours is retention is years.

That's actively dangerously long retention period, and your business should rethink that lol. There is no upside to that kind of retention policy (for the business - for employees occasionally there is). In the EU, it's risking a serious legal problem.

For several businesses there can be legal needs to have items keep for the same.

That's certainly not going to be true of a business like WotC. Nor any conventional corporation in the EU or US that I'm aware of. Perhaps in Latin America or Asia there are regulations demanding the retention of chat messages for many years, but I'm not aware of them, and we're massive international law firm. I can see cases with government and medical where Teams chats MIGHT need to be retained but I would personally question whether Teams was the appropriate method of communication in the first place if data retention is required.