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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nemesis Destiny" data-source="post: 5431292" data-attributes="member: 98255">I catch your drift now. It did sound like an overreaction at first. I see what you meant now though.A fair assessment, I think. It is far easier for them to compete  with Paizo, Whitewolf, Steve Jackson, Mongoose, etc, etc, than it would  be for them to go up against Blizzard or Bioware. I agree with you about Essentials. I think we both see it the same way. That said, the saddest part of this is that even though Essentials was a totally optional add-on to the 4e line, that could be integrated, played separately, or ignored entirely, it still split the community. It somehow annoyed the people who liked what had already been done with 4e, and likely as an extension of the 3e way of doing things. Somehow a lot of these folks felt insulted or betrayed (and somewhat confused) by the Essentials line. I don't entirely understand it, but that was the reaction we witnessed.I think these were the folks that liked the 4e ruleset, as an extension of the Book of Nine Swords school of thought, but who wanted to continue with the 3e business model of zillions of classes and splatbooks. To them Essentials was a step backward. As I said, I don't necessarily agree, and I think that the type of things that lead to schisms within the community are often silly and trivial. That doesn't stop them from occurring.If even the olive branch that was Essentials caused a schism, then what can WotC possibly do that won't?I can understand the frustration. I feel it too. I was going to buy those books, in all probablility. I liked Essentials, and I wanted to know how to better integrate those classes with the old ones, or how the designers intend for powers to be swapped within a class. I have ideas on how I think it works, and if those books never see the light of day in any form, I will houserule it for my games, but I still want official rules too.If I have to subscribe to get access, I think that sucks. Don't misunderstand: I have no problems with paying for the material, but putting it all behind the paywall, which amounts to renting access to D&D... that just sucks. I like the game though, and the price isn't terrible, so I will do it anyway.I agree with you. I'd at least like the option of getting this material from Amazon, or Chapters, or my FLGS. Not being able to do that, I think they're shooting themselves in the foot even further. Now instead of DDI, Hardcopy, or piracy, the only options are now DDI or piracy. I think that they'll find a lot of folks that would have bought the books because of some issue or another with DDI, will now just pirate the material that they otherwise would have paid for. They're chopping off their own nose to spite their face. Again.Worse for them still if the DDI content remains in PDF article format. Even if the issues remain non-compiled, they're still trivially easy to pirate and distribute to non-paying players. That is why I mourn either the loss of Dragon and Dungeon, or the material from the axed books.If Dragon and Dungeon articles are to become the vehicle for the distribution of that material, as has been hinted, then they certainly can't continue just pumping it out in bite-sized PDFs. That doesn't solve their problem with digital distribution in PDF format.If Dragon and Dungeon continue to be a part of the D&D landscape in its current form, then that almost certainly means that we won't see the material in those books presented there. It will likely mean that Dragon and Dungeon continue to be vehicles for fluff pieces, editorials, and advertising that we are paying to look at.All this, to me, points to a something else. What that is, what form it will take, I can only guess.</blockquote>

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