WotC Anyone Else Tired of the Wizards Bashing?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Lmao ignorance is bliss I guess?

Wait, the lawyer called me back. He asked me why any rational person would think "call a lawyer IF YOU DARE" is a reasonable argument to post on a message board. I didn't know what to tell him.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You can't attack the company withput attacking the game.

I strongly believe we need to have a strong central RPG in the industry to preserve the health of RPGs overall. There are benefits to having a pillar around which the industry rotates. Right now, we have several groups that see blood in the water and would rather take a shot at being the next D&D, regardless of the odds, than ride on the coat tails of D&D and WotC. At the same time, Hasbro would rather optimize profits from D&D for a short period and drive it into the ground than play the long game - as they unerstand that if D&D dies off substantially, another opportunity will take the place of it.

It sucks.

Sure you can. I love 5e. I just prefer the versions made by other companies (Mage Hand Press, Cubicle 7, and especially EN Publishing) to WotC's stuff.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

When I break a rule, which I do often in many different contexts, I don't act surprise when there are consequences - is the point.

He broke a rule by buying MTG cards and then being sent the wrong ones?

 

[Raiztt]

He broke a rule by buying MTG cards and then being sent the wrong ones?

"Oh whoa I have a thing I definitely know I am not supposed to have because I am a huge MTG fan and I know when the release date is - surely there will be no problem with me posting this to the internet!". Why do you act like this dude is a complete clueless idiot when he was certainly was trying to profit from something he knew he wasn't supposed to have?

WoTC didn't care about him HAVING them, they card about what he was doing WITH them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

"Oh whoa I have a thing I definitely know I am not supposed to have because I am a huge MTG fan and I know when the release date is - surely there will be no problem with me posting this to the internet!". Why do you act like this dude is a complete clueless idiot who certainly was trying to profit from something he knew he wasn't supposed to have?

He broke a rule by buying MTG cards and then being sent the wrong ones?

 

[mamba]

Possession of counterfeit money is a crime, which is why you give it back.

There is no legal requirement for someone to give back Magic the Gathering cards released a few weeks early.

then he can keep them, regardless of what WotC and the Pinkertons say. I don’t think this is as clear cut as you claim however

At a minimum it were not the cards he ordered, which already complicates this quite a bit for him

 

[Raiztt]

He broke a rule by buying MTG cards and then being sent the wrong ones?

And that was it, right? He totally didn't splash them online, right?

 

[Lanefan]

You can't attack the company withput attacking the game.

Sure you can; and remember WotC is more than just D&D.

Didn't they also recently - as in, within the last year or two - have some major PR issues around what they were doing with M:tG?

I strongly believe we need to have a strong central RPG in the industry to preserve the health of RPGs overall.

Agreed.

And of that strong central RPG there's two different custodians: the company that produces it, and the players and DMs who keep it going.

And when one of those custodians mess it up it's our right (and maybe even duty) as the other custodians to take them to task over it.

 

[Raiztt]

He broke a rule by buying MTG cards and then being sent the wrong ones?

Since you want to be obtuse let's just break it down:

Did he have possession of a product that he knew had not been released yet? Yes.

Did he know that WotC has a corporate interest in keeping their products as secretive as possible or at least controlling that information? Yes.

Does WotC have a legal right to control their products and pursue remedies through legal civil procedures? Yes.

If I bought a case of coke and coke-cola sent me the secret formula to their product, I didn't 'steal' it from them and yet it seems pretty obvious that if I posted it online or shared it, I would probably be doing something they could legally object to.

 

[SteveC]

I don't give a naughty word about WotC - D&D is an inferior product to my preferred system so far all i care they can go bankrupt - I'm just not clutching my pearls at the thought that a corporation would want to keep as tight of control over their unreleased product as possible.

I don't think there's any pearl-clutching going on. A company just did a very sketchy thing that makes them look horrible in many people's eyes (seriously, go look the Pinkertons up!) The situation was: a person got some cards delivered and shipped to them by accident. Once that happened, those cards were out in the world. They could simply have done something as simple as show them off to an influencer and invite the guy to talk about it on the show. No one would have been upset and they would have got some positive press.

Instead they did this, which people are upset by. There is no reasonable way that they could have expected this to end up positively for them other than for the guy who got the cards to be intimidated enough to say nothing. And in that case, I'd say the result would have been even worse, just no one would have ever heard about it.

There are ways that PR professionals handle these situations. Sometimes they go out of their way to engineer an accidental release event themselves! This just was horrible PR.

It will absolutely blow over in a week or two and just be another example of bad PR from WotC. And hopefully they will have learned from it, but there's no sign of that actually happening yet.