Arcane Power: How long before the pirated copy appears

[ppaladin123]

That would be disrespectful to ddi subscribers. After all, they're paying to be advertised to see previews first.

If I can use that advertisement in my game immediately then it has ceased to simply be an advertisement. Anyway a lot of preview material is free and a lot of the subscriber-only content is full of crunch.

 

[nnms]

I checked out the first 4 chapters. Very high quality scan, but it is a scan. Not searchable.

The guy in my group who pirates everything reports the first 5 chapters are now on torrents in a searchable format. I expressed that this is quite a delay compared to what some people were predicting on the internet. I was informed that before WotC sold PDFs, it would take about 3 months for someone to get around to scanning the latest book and uploading it for some titles.

So chapter by chapter seems pretty fast to me.

All this talk about how easy OCR is and how well it works finally got me around to trying it. I have some documents I made for my business a few years back and had lost the word documents for. I have a cheap all-in-one printer so I fired it up. I scanned directly to acrobat pro and ran the OCR option. It worked 100% perfectly and was done in the background while I did other things with the computer. Time taken was about 4 minutes a page.

I can imagine that a pirate who gets the binding cut off the book and feeds it through an automatic scanner could get a whole book done very quickly. Then when the job is done they could get their book rebound with coil binding to lie flat.

I might start doing it myself to make my own PDFs as I feel naked without a computer as my DM screen.

 

[CapnZapp]

Guess they save the best for last (meaning chapter 6)...

 

[renau1g]

What's chapter 6. My copy hasn't arrived yet

 

[baphomet68]

Well, WOTC has certainly slowed down the pirating, I think that much is clear. But will it be slowed to 3.5 levels, or even slower? I think to 3.5 levels, where people do the crude image pdfs, so WOTC's plan has had at least some success.

But did it equate to success in the pocketbook? That I do not know.

The state of the art tech has changed - the cruddy scans of earlier years are pretty much gone. A kid with no scanning experience can scan pretty well by following directions. I think that of course WOTC will try to spin it like they somehow accomplished something positive, but it is clear that they didnt. As of yesterday, Pirates have chapters 1-5 in a pretty good package, and honest joes get no PDF's. Which is fine, if U R A Pirate!

 

[baphomet68]

What's chapter 6. My copy hasn't arrived yet

6: ARCANE OPTIONS 122
New Feats Heroic Tier Feats 124
Paragon Tier Feats 130
Epic Tier Feats 133
Multiclass Feats 135
Familiars 137
Familiar Feats 139
Familiar Descriptions 139
Epic Destinies 142
Arcane Sword 142
Archlich 143
Archspell 144
Feyliege 145
Immanence 146
Lord of Fate 147
Magister. 148
Parable 149
Sage of Ages 150
Magic Items: Tome 151
New Rituals 153
Arcane Backgrounds 159

Cut and paste, anyone?

 

[Mistwell]

So it looks likely that those who guessed a week were correct.

I checked, and I do see chapters 1-5, but still no complete book. I am betting by tomorrow it will be there.

 

[HardcoreDandDGirl]

So it looks likely that those who guessed a week were correct.

I checked, and I do see chapters 1-5, but still no complete book. I am betting by tomorrow it will be there.

So does this mean that Wotc was right? Not selling PDFs did slow the pirateing...

 

[Kask]

so does this mean that wotc was right? Not selling pdfs did slow the pirateing...

rolf!

 

[Mistwell]

So does this mean that Wotc was right? Not selling PDFs did slow the pirateing...

Well, yes in that it did slow the pirating. But does that one week delay translate into materially better sales? I don't know.