Andy Collin's comments re censoring playtester reviews

[Mighty Veil]

I would not call it censoring.

Playtesters don't have the right to speak out about the game till a given date. They signed an agreement. A select few are being given a green light to give a positive review to the public.

 

[Kraydak]

...
2. Those playtesters that ASKED for and were GRANTED permission were allowed to relay their positive feelings, which is what they WANTED to do, and to not go into negatives since those should go to WotC. That's what playtesting is FOR.
...

The release date is soon. There is (if they intend to hit the release date) a *lot* of stuff that can't get changed. Therefore a lot of the negative feelings that exist are about things that will hit the shelves. Fundamental disagreements about design philosophy, for example, are negative feedback issues that I am interested in and which, by now, are unchangeable.

We aren't in alpha any more. Feedback is of little use to WotC (no time to change anything major), and for the same reason of lots of use to us (with no time to change anything major, feedback can be thought of as fairly accurate reviews).

Accordingly, by selecting what information goes out, they are turning the people who get to leak stuff into (unpaid) partisan reviewers. Which annoys my "fair play" sensors.

 

[WhatGravitas]

The ethical problem is not disclosing, up front, that the reviews have been filtered.

That's the problem with your analysis. These are not reviews. These are not review copies. These are impressions from a tested beta.

More correct example, based on yours:

Company develops drugs.

Company gives drugs to ten test companies, five have positive results, two are negative, three are inconclusive.

Some of the test companies ask the drug company if it's allowed to give a first impression.

Drug company says "yes" and also says criticism should be directed at them first to allow them to fix it. And this is where we are.

Drug company develops the drug further and releases it, now as fully functional version, allowing all company to publicize all reviews of the final product, whether it be good or bad.

See the difference?

Furthermore, the drug example is very bad, because of two factors: First, drugs can kill people, if they are ill-developed, 4E cannot do that. Second, drugs have the problem of being non-fixable, i.e. you cannot fix all flaws of a drug, as it interacts with a not completely understood system, the human body. 4E is a purely "designed" product, it is better controllable than a drug. Your example may imply that there are uncontrollable aspects, but 4E has less such aspects as a drug. Finally, 4E is not a novelty, like the drug example may imply as well.

Cheers, LT.

 

[Delta]

But under these criteria, 3e and 3.5e core rules also weren't Open Games, either, no matter what Dancey evangelized in 2000. Development and play-testing was not communal, but in-house or closed -- just like 4e, despite the option to use OGC.

Yes, I agree. The promise of the OGL, as Dancey wrote, was that after the publication of 3E, future products would be developed with the leverage of Open Gaming. By the time 3.5 was published, Dancey was already gone, and I said at the time that WOTC had apparently reversed course on the OGL ( http://www.superdan.net/down3-5.html ).

 

[tomBitonti]

No, your example involved entirely shutting down everyone who was providing negative feedback -- that's not at all the same thing. What I said stands -- your analogy is fatally flawed.

Edit: additionally, your analogy tries to link a situation where negative feedback would be purely factual (bad drug interactions, fatalities, other dangerous side effects) with a situation where much (not all) of the bad feedback would be either opinion or stylistic differences. Again, the flaws in the analogy are too great for it to have any use at all.

At issue is what role the playtesters are filling. Are they acting as reporters, or as WotC representatives? If they are acting as reporters, they have an obligation to avoid conflicts, and to report biases. As WotC representatives, they are can be expected to provide positive information, but then they are acting more as WotC salespeople.

 

[Umbran]

We agree that 4E is not an Open Game. It could have been if the new rules were developed in a community-oriented fashion, which is what Dancey evangelized back in 2000.

I think you are confusing open licensing with open development practices. The OGL is about license terms, not development. I don't recall Dancey ever evangelizing open development practices, and I have to ask you to find a quote to support this assertion.

 

[Kraydak]

That's the problem with your analysis. These are not reviews. These are not review copies. These are impressions from a tested beta.
...

Cheers, LT.

Whether WotC (or you) considers them to be reviews or not, *that is* what many (if not most) of the player-base that read them considered them to be. Incomplete reviews, yes, but still *reviews*. There was no hint in the posts that they were "censored". Legally, was WotC in the clear? I assume so. I cannot see how they wouldn't be. However, it was blatantly obvious that people would treat the posts as partial reviews, WHETHER that was the intent or not. Which means that they treat the "censorship" as just that, and respond as if WotC wasn't playing fair.

In short, given that people *would* treat the posts as reviews (and they did, shocker!), censoring them was *stupid*.

 

[catsclaw227]

I've commented previously about how WOTC has turned its back on the Open Gaming movement ( http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2008/01/part-iii-promise-of-ogl.html ). There's been debate in the OGL forum about why WOTC is even bothering to call its new license "OGL" ( http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=215975 ).

So we went from a philosophy of "work on problems in public" in 2000, to a clear-cut "work on problems in secret" that we have here in 2008. I find that to be a rather remarkable about-face.

Finally, you've got what Andy thinks is his coup-de-grace:


You do if it's Open Source. ( https://sourceforge.net/ )

Well, this is where we disagree.

I have been involved in Open Source development and closed development. Comparing the development of a new core system, and the Open Source software development platform is like comparing apples and oranges.

When talking about for-profit businesses (like WOTC, Microsoft, Google, etc) Open source is good for systems that either have ALREADY been released and therefore tools are provided to extend and enhance the systems through APIs or other means. Google may provide access to great tools to use for free, via APIs, but they would never give out their proprietary search algorithms. Microsoft (or do you prefer to pronounce it Micro$oft??) opens up their .NET framework for developers to build and enhance tools of their own. For all the bashing they get, they are notoriously helpful to developers.

For non-profit businesses, small businesses or dudes in a garage, Open Source is great, they can share ideas, utilize other source code to improve their own product, and get free feedback on systems they are developing.

Sourceforge is a great environment for putting together Open Source software, designed with the intention of providing tools for people. It doesn't cater well to for-profit companies with IP to protect. I have had two projects on sourceforge and two that I wouldn't use it for. The ones appropriate for Sourceforge were to help flesh out ideas and get some free programming advice/help, the others were for making money.

WOTC hasn't even released the 4e OGL publicly, so no one knows what it says. WOTC hasn't even finished v1.0 of their 4e product, so why would they open it up before getting their own bugs out. Not many companies release ALPHA, and many companies only perform closed beta testing (which WOTC is doing). Are they all evil empires that have tossed out Open Source on it's ear? No, they are doing business in the way that they see fit to find profit.

People say how much they love 1e, but it wasn't open source.

I suggest that people don't comment on how WOTC is walking away from the open gaming movement until they look at the 4e OGL. Only then will they have an informed opinion. Otherwise it is just fire-fanning and rumor-mongering.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I think you are confusing open licensing with open development practices. The OGL is about license terms, not development. I don't recall Dancey ever evangelizing open development practices, and I have to ask you to find a quote to support this assertion.

I remember Ryan saying something of the sort, though I don't know (and can't really imagine) that he was thinking in terms of a new edition of D&D. He said at the time that he hoped that the community's refinements to the system would get absorbed back into the rules system. I'll try and find a link.

It would seem to me a dangerous thing to do from WoTC's POV, for exactly the reasons catsclaw227 points out. It would endanger their ownership of D&D as a rules system.

I'd be interested in hearing Ryan Dancey's thoughts on where he would have hoped the SRD and D&D would have gone from the 3E launch.

 

[Mistwell]

So ... there is an ethical issue here.

Let's say that a drug company hires a number of companies to test out a new drug.

There are 10 companies. Five have overall positive results, two are negative, and three are inconclusive.

The drug company discontinues the testing at the two companies with negative results.

The remaining results are published. They are an inaccurate reflection of the testing results.

I have no sympathy for Wotc in regards to this issue. They know exactly what they are doing.

I have a little sympathy for the two playtesters. My thanks for the information that they have provided. But they have put themselves in the middle of a marketing process, and need to have an understanding of how that works, and how that reflects on their integrity.

Now, there is a big difference between drugs and RPG testing. A drug company that does what I outlined is probably breaking the law. For RPG playtesting, I'm OK with we realize that the information is a part of a marketing campaign, and include that in our awareness.

You win the most flawed analogy of the month award!

Mind you, it's OF THE MONTH, not hour day or week. This is a big deal. You should bask in the glow of knowing that, despite all the horrid analogies we've seen since the beginning of 2008, yours was the worst.

Congratulations. You deserve this award. You earned it. Take it home with pride.