NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Buzzardo" data-source="post: 2566795" data-attributes="member: 18120">Ahh but it's not.  As the long running team advancement tournaments such as the D&D Open and the NASCRAG at gencon have shown, you can turn the game into a big competitive tournament.    But there are soooooo many problems with the way the OPEN especially is being run.   Here is a portion of a rant about the OPEN that I think is relevent to the current discussion, which I posted over on an OPEN thread at the Gencon forums:********My Rant: The open has completely lost it's soul. For years and years and years the open was the main reason I went to GenCon. Always been great. But now the Hasbro Marketing department writes the rounds, and their idiot lawyers oversee the administration. It used to be by gamers for gamers, now it's by corporate types for profit. It's all about tie-ins. It has to be set in Ebberon so as to hawk that, and this year to hawk the flagging sales of the psionics stuff, it was a heavily psionics module. And of course they have to showcase the daylights out of the miniatures.The last two years I have felt like ralphie from Christmas Story: A CRUMMY COMMERICAL!!!???Now that being said, I am ALL about WOTC/Hasbro marketing the crap out of the game we all love... but for cryin' out loud: Am I the only one who sees that they are going about it all wrong?1- turning the D&D open from a game into a commercial is effectively PREACHING TO THE CHOIR. Everyone playing the open at GenCon is by definition the hardest of the hard core and already owns all the WOTC books and 6 to 50 of every single miniature in the Minis line! Commercializing the open serves to do nothing but alianate the loyal base. I have the books. It is already bad enough that I have to haul the Triple-Combo of core rule books all the way across the country, but now I have to bring the eberron and psionics handbook too?? Then rather than play an enoyable game, I get to star in a commercial. No thanks.2- I have been an avid gamer since 1979 at age 11. (Started with Top Secret and never looked back) I atended my first Gencon in 1986 (drove from Utah to Miluakee! (My buddies and I actually won the open in 1987, Woo Hoo!) But over the years, I have noticed something I am sure you all did. I was a kid when I started playing, and most players at gencon in the mid 1980s were also teenagers. Here we are 20 years later, and most of the people at GenCon are 30 somethings, just like me! The gamer population is aging. What on earth is WOTC/Hasbro doing to market this most wonderful of games to the next generations? Nothing!!!!!! Instead they WASTE THEIR TIME, RESOURCES and EFFORT selling to the converted at GenCon? In the 80's, every single comic book from Uncle Scrooge to the X-Men had a D&D advertisement on the inside back cover. Today? Nothing. Then we had a saturday morning cartoon for crying out loud! Today? JACK.**********Back to the point at hand:  Wouldn't it be cool if WOTC made regional tournament qualifiers and ran them all over the place all year long?  Winners receive cash prises, and get invited to further qualifiers and then the big national championships at Gencon?  For serious cash awards.  Not just about a hundred bucks worth of swag.   I think it would pull in alot of new kids into the game if advertized properly.  I have a vision of geeky kids all over the country standing up from their Xboxes and computer games, rubbing their bleary eyes and stepping out to their FLGS to check out how they can actually MAKE SOME MONEY at geeking out!I could be wrong.</blockquote>

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