D&D General Bob World Builder Recreates WOTC's "Do You Like Me?" Survey!

[TiQuinn]

I don't condone it. It's just not really costing the company much of anything. The people who would engage such poor quality stuff are also not generally the type who are going to buy anyway. And many people who do go for the better quality PDFs do so to see if they want to buy the print product or to get a PDF version of the print product they already bought.

Generating ill will(albeit minor) in order to stop not much of anything isn't a great look for a company who has destroyed trust in a major way not to long ago.

As well as this, which is more likely to have an impact?

Someone stitching together a fuzzy PDF version of the Player's Handbook from screenshots provided by YouTubers?

OR

A clean PDF version of the Player's Handbook created by someone who buys the GenCon version provided by WotC themselves off of EBay?

 

[Maxperson]

You don't contribute your money when you buy something. You contribute time or money to a charity.
When you buy something you give them money and they give you a product.

If you're going to argue that my money doesn't contribute to their profits, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I'm never going to change that viewpoint.

I just don't understand why how they run the company means so much to so many people.
Do i trust WOTC? There is no trust involved in our relationship. They make a book and if i like it i buy it.
I'm obviously on the outside of this topic and that's ok.

When a company actively tries to hurt a significant portion of the the community that has been built around their product, that matters to a lot of people. People don't like being betrayed.

 

[KYRON45]

I'll use an analogy.

If I'm shopping at a local store that I love and have shopped at for a long time and then one day the store owner just walks up to me and punches me in the face, I'm not going to shop at that store anymore. To get me to come back is going to take a lot of work on the part of the store owner to restore my trust. Much more than just trying to sell me more stuff as if nothing has changed.

Now the store owner doesn't have to do anything to earn back that trust, and I don't have the right to expect it to happen, but absent that effort I'm never shopping there again. And whenever I hear of minor transgressions like the store owner yelling at another customer, it's just going to reinforce my feelings not to shop there.

WotC is the store owner. D&D is the store. The OGL debacle is the punch in the face. And I'm never buying another WotC product absent significant efforts from WotC to restore the trust.

What would that entail?
How do you feel they could earn your trust?

 

[mamba]

You don't contribute your money when you buy something. You contribute time or money to a charity.
When you buy something you give them money and they give you a product.

semantics, they create the product because they want to make money from it, me buying it is rewarding them for their efforts (overall, not just in creating the product) in exchange for that product

I just don't understand why how they run the company means so much to so many people.

and I do not understand how it cannot, it seems deeply selfish to not care about how the company is treating not just you but also others

 

[Maxperson]

What would that entail?
How do you feel they could earn your trust?

In part, not doing more things to earn distrust and/or cause the company to look bad, like what they just did with the Youtubers. In part doing things that go above and beyond, that they don't have to do and aren't designed to just earn them money like the free D&D products to kids. For example, if they had placed the older SRDs into CC in the time frame that they said they would try to put them there, rather than two years later, that would have meant something. Two years after the time frame that they were trying for, with no update until recently, doesn't inspire or repair trust.

These things don't have to be huge. I'm not asking for them to make a complete book and just hand it out for free or anything, but there are lots of little ways a company can show gratitude for their customers and repair trust.

 

[Maxperson]

As well as this, which is more likely to have an impact?

Someone stitching together a fuzzy PDF version of the Player's Handbook from screenshots provided by YouTubers?

OR

A clean PDF version of the Player's Handbook created by someone who buys the GenCon version provided by WotC themselves off of EBay?

The former is nearly worthless to just about everyone, and the latter is something very different than what was going on with the Youtubers.

If someone is trying to illegally sell the WotC products for money, WotC has every right to bring the full force of it's legal team down on that person.

 

[KYRON45]

semantics, they create the product because they want to make money from it, me buying it is rewarding them for their efforts (overall, not just in creating the product) in exchange for that product


and I do not understand how it cannot, it seems deeply selfish to not care about how the company is treating not just you but also others

It seems disingenuous to assume that any company i buy anything from cares about me at all.

 

[KYRON45]

In part, not doing more things to earn distrust and/or cause the company to look bad, like what they just did with the Youtubers. In part doing things that go above and beyond, that they don't have to do and aren't designed to just earn them money like the free D&D products to kids. For example, if they had placed the older SRDs into CC in the time frame that they said they would try to put them there, rather than two years later, that would have meant something. Two years after the time frame that they were trying for, with no update until recently, doesn't inspire or repair trust.

These things don't have to be huge. I'm not asking for them to make a complete book and just hand it out for free or anything, but there are lots of little ways a company can show gratitude for their customers and repair trust.

I guess that is the heart of my inability to understand the ire. I don't interact with the SRD in any way. They made a book and i bought it that's the extent of my relationship with Wotc. Thanks for answering though.

 

[TiQuinn]

The former is nearly worthless to just about everyone, and the latter is something very different than what was going on with the Youtubers.

If someone is trying to illegally sell the WotC products for money, WotC has every right to bring the full force of it's legal team down on that person.

Of course, but the point is - WotC cannot prevent people from doing this, and in the meantime, they're being counterproductive to their own goals to promote the product by targeting YouTubers using the possibility of a stitched together pirate copy as their rationale.

 

[Maxperson]

I guess that is the heart of my inability to understand the ire. I don't interact with the SRD in any way. They made a book and i bought it that's the extent of my relationship with Wotc. Thanks for answering though.

I don't interact with it really, either, but I know folks here and on Facebook who make 3PP and who were betrayed by the OGL thing. It was an effort by WotC to take back what they had given to this community; a community which has given much to the game for relatively little money(often for free).

When a company does something like that to people I know or even that I don't know, but make the game better, that upsets me bigtime.

As another example, drug companies. They don't just try to make profit, they gouge people for money by hyper inflating the cost of drugs, often life saving drugs. I despise drug companies for that, even though I don't use any life saving or super important drugs myself. They have earned my scorn and distrust simply by virtue of what they are doing to others who don't deserve that kind of treatment.