WotC Anyone Else Tired of the Wizards Bashing?

[Raiztt]

Lmao you type.

One of us believes in empathy, one of us uses the law to hide their complete lack of empathy. I'm not the one playing at sleight of hand here.

If I have 10x the empathy you did, what good would it have done this gentlemen? None. Please, spare me the self-righteousness. What you think and what qualities you do or do not have don't actually effect the world even if you're very proud of them.

 

[Shardstone]

If I have 10x the empathy you did, what good would it have done this gentlemen? None. Please, spare me the self-righteousness. What you think and what qualities you do or do not have don't actually effect the world even if you're very proud of them.

If only more people cared about their effect on the world, we might not have toy companies threatening women and children over legal card leaks!

 

[Raiztt]

If only more people cared about their effect on the world, we might not have toy companies threatening women and children over legal card leaks!

Alas, you have no control over that either. Tragic. If only we were all as holy as thou, truly we would live in a utopia.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

he wasn’t a random joe public he was supposedly a friend of the person who ‘accidentally’ sold him this product.

Then that is the person to pursue legal remedies against -- criminal or civil.

This guy isn’t a journalist. There’s no public interest here.

We don't have accredited journalists in the US, for better or worse, so it's hard to say who is one or who isn't. (Half of the idiots on Twitter put "independent journalist" in their bio, which seems to mean all sorts of things.)

But in any case, we agree. The Pentagon Papers, this ain't.

Second he wasn’t a bona fide customer because in truth he didn’t buy those cards.

If he thought he was buying a released deck and got the wrong one -- as he has claimed -- then yes, he did buy the cards.

But right now, there are two wildly different versions of this story going around, one of which should have the cops involved (stolen cards being sold to someone who knew they were stolen vs. someone in the WotC warehouse put the wrong box of cards into a crate and then sold them to a distributor, and now they're out in the wild).

He just profited from them. It’s hard to be sympathetic to someone so brazen.

In his version of events, where he accidentally bought the cards, he was showing off some neat stuff he had gotten and was getting some nerd points. We can probably find hundreds of threads of people showing off WotC books when they went on sale early. I don't think it's ever been suggested they were doing something wrong.

If he intentionally bought stolen good, then the cops should be involved. But it doesn't appear that WotC believes that to be the case.

They were wronged, a contract for sale of goods was broken. The fact that this person (supposed friend of the person breaking the contract) is not legally responsible doesn’t mean he doesn’t hold some part of ethical responsibility.

I love ethics. Ethics is a friend of mine. I hope ethics marries my daughter some day.

But what this comes down to is what people were getting mad at me for saying before: WotC didn't like it, doesn't have any actual legal grounds for their response, but tried to bully a customer -- whom they already know has eyes on his YouTube page, because that's how they know who to send the Pinkertons to visit -- anyway.

As I said on the original thread (on page one, in fact), is that if I were WotC and a senior marketing official was throwing coffee cups around the conference room because they were not in charge of the marketing campaign any more, some random dude was, I would have approached this guy with a totally different "we're all MTG fans in this conversation here, aren't we?" approach and sweet-talked him into what they wanted, rather than pressured him.

Because not only did it predictably blow up in their faces, as everyone except the guy throwing coffee cups must have surely known, but this guy doesn't have any actual responsibility to give back anything. No judge would have sided with WotC on this in a million years.

WotC can’t gain redress against the person responsibly because they can’t know who that was.

If this is a repeated problem for WotC, as it appears to be, they need to be doing a whole lot of work in-house on inventory control, which would actually prevent this happening in the future. Worrying about the cards being out in the wild is pointless, because even if he took down the video, their images are already all out there. The horse is already out of the barn.

 

[mamba]

What's the rule that he's breaking? Other than "made guys in marketing sad."

at a minimum he does not own the product, because he never bought it

 

[mamba]

Are you telling me that the USPS will send armed men to intimidate me if I have the wrong mail delivered to my address?

no, not sure where you got that from. But depending on what was delivered and whether they even know it was delivered to, someone else might, esp. if you refuse prior attempts to contact you / get the product back

 

[mamba]

Why do you need to hire people to threaten others? Why not just send them a cease & desist and then a stern letter in the mail before moving to legal action?

the amount of time this takes

 

[Zubatcarteira]

I'm surely not tired of these threads, I'll tell you that.

 

[Vaalingrade]

at a minimum he does not own the product, because he never bought it

So everyone who gets the wrong Doordash and just eats it rater than deal with the horrendous chat support is a thief?

 

[Morrus]

Unless of course you're saying I can't express my lukewarm watered-down kind-of support of WOTC.

Those are your words, not mine.

I'm here to argue against people saying that WotC was out of line legally for what they did.


It absolutely will blow over in a couple of weeks. The super vast majority of D&D consumers aren't on forums and probably don't care about how ethical or unethical the company is as long as they get the product they want.

This really just is forum dweller pearl clutching.

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.

Morally? That’s open to debate. Legally? Not even slightly.