WotC New D&D survey from WotC as part of the 50th anniversary year.

Mistwell said:

But for D&D they're so far not squeezing it for every last cent.

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Cutting jobs from a successful department is squeezing.

Parmandur said:

I say good morning to a Pinkerton every day at work, as do lots of other people.

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So? That doesn't mean they're not an organisation trading on their name having horrible historical connotations. Also, I thought you were like a university/college or school guy, is that wrong? If it's not wrong what the heck is a Pinkerton doing at a place of learning?

Hiring the Pinkertons for any kind of investigative or similar work is always a bad call unless your goal is intimidation. Period. The reason you hire them is their name and the intimidatory and predatory aspect that name gives them. It's the same reason you hire them for close protection or the like - it gives the people they're protecting a sense that these guys are "dangerous badasses", even though they're just the same ol same ol rentacops you could get from a dozen different agencies (indeed they're owned by Securitas, the most generic of rentacops), and for some people that vibe matters.

WotC made a mistake by doing it - it's easy to guess the chain of events - some exec thought it was cool/badass to hire the Pinkertons, didn't even consider this might be "bad optics", because his head was too far up his own bum, and whoops, what should have been a quietly-handled, unsensational "Don't do that" to the leaker turns into sensational negative press. Even just turning up at someone's door identifying yourself as a Pinkerton is de facto intimidatory. No amount of lying to yourself about the Pinkertons being "normal" will change their reputation or how the public views them, and again, they maintain that name for that very reason - it benefits them because certain clients find it darkly glamorous.

Parmandur said:

I don't really expect better of publicly traded companies: nature of the beast.

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I don't expect Hasbro to not do layoffs when it's making a loss (even though I know it's mostly a performance rather than a practical measure - it's something publicly traded companies are expected to do, a hair shirt for the company only the only people it hurts are actual workers, the real execs are left alone). I do expect them to make more reasoned and targeted layoffs - and that's flatly not unreasonable, because plenty of other publicly traded companies do manage it. It's also fascinating that they ditched so many people from D&D when they still seemingly have over 250 people working on the 3D VTT, which is basically just an app for D&D (indeed new hiring messages went up during the layoffs and after them for the 3D VTT).

Henadic Theologian said:

Like they will kill the wrong popular God

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Yup. TSR made that mistake. Earlier WotC made that mistake. You've got to be real careful when killing off gods because if you get a popular one, people will be pissed, despite being entirely fictional and irrelevant to most campaigns, and they'll remember for decades.

Rated D&D highly. I'm a fan of the brand, and of 5E. They didn't ask specifically but I typically assume when they discuss D&D they mean the current selling edition.

I went ahead and chose the "Hate" option for WoTC. I'm perhaps more biased than others, being an MTG player as well as a D&D player, and a lot more of my vitriol comes from MTG than D&D.

Asking if I've recommended a WoTC product is weird. I already said yes on D&D, and isn't that the same thing?

Charlaquin said:

I don’t think so. I sad dislike the company, getting worse on perception, and dislike the current direction and didn’t get any more questions either. The survey does describe itself as brief. It definitely gives the impression that someone is trying to prove something, rather than hunting for the reasons behind that thing.

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Yeah same.

If they'd done this survey say, 3 years ago, they'd have got such wildly different results.

I can only assume the survey expects a negative result - there's no attempt made whatsoever to get a positive response out of the responder (which you do often see in surveys), and the ordering/structure of the questions makes it very easy to be negative, as does it being brief. My presumption is, and this entirely a presumption, without a firm basis, that as you say, someone is attempting to prove something, and that is probably "People don't have a good opinion of D&D/WotC right now". I suspect there's some internal denial about that going on, some irrational belief that despite all their bad press, despite the lack of success of some recent products, that some people at WotC think they're doing great.

As to not asking for more detail, they either think they know why these perceptions might be, or are waiting on results to do a follow-up survey.

Reynard said:

Cutting jobs from a successful department is squeezing.

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That's not what's meant by the term squeezing every dime out of D&D generally. You said squeeze it until it dies but D&D isn't going to die because some mid level employees were laid off. It would die because of overexposure, which is what that phrase usually means.

Mistwell said:

That's not what's meant by the term squeezing every dime out of D&D generally. You said squeeze it until it dies but D&D isn't going to die because some mid level employees were laid off. It would die because of overexposure, which is what that phrase usually means.

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Per Corey Doctorow: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

I have no doubt in my mind that the people in charge of D&D are going to enshittify it in order to get bonuses and reward stock holders.

Ruin Explorer said:

So? That doesn't mean they're not an organisation trading on their name having horrible historical connotations. Also, I thought you were like a university/college or school guy, is that wrong? If it's not wrong what the heck is a Pinkerton doing at a place of learning?

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Nope, I have a fancy education, but I'm a corporate drone.

Ruin Explorer said:

Hiring the Pinkertons for any kind of investigative or similar work is always a bad call unless your goal is intimidation. Period.

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Sure? The non-intimidation route didn't work, they tried reaching out to the guy several times and he blew them off until the Pinkerton came by and asked him to speak to the WotC rep who traded his illicit stuff for free replacements. Intimidation isn't illegal, they weren't threatening to break his kneecaps or anything.

Scribe said:

Hey Wizards!

Want to improve your reputation easily?

Release the SRD for the new version (wink wink, we all know what's up) day 1 of release into the CC!

Thanks!

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That's a great start, but they also fix the mess they made of settings.

Ruin Explorer said:

Yup. TSR made that mistake. Earlier WotC made that mistake. You've got to be real careful when killing off gods because if you get a popular one, people will be pissed, despite being entirely fictional and irrelevant to most campaigns, and they'll remember for decades.

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The problem is almost all of them are popular, which is why they keep having to bring them back. Its why if they are killing Gods they should be new ones or those deaths are reversed by the end of the story.