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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9412799" data-attributes="member: 8461">Which is a fairly ironic statement, as that perfectly sums up your own position far more accurately than mine.So you're saying you don't believe that a significant number of people will use WotC's VTT? I mean, that's certainly possible, but I'm not sure I'd take that as a given, at least for the premise of this discussion.I'll point out again that throwing around statistics in a hypothetical showcases the weakness of hypotheticals, since it presumes multiple levels of specificity without really justifying why such exacting specificity in any of the regards presented are warranted. Any of the numbers can be tweaked to (almost) any other value with equal validity under this thought-experiment (notwithstanding reaching for extreme outliers in a given value).I'd say this entire digression doesn't matter, as it's being carefully constructed out of nothing just to prove your point, but go ahead.So we're at how many underlying assumptions now, none of them making any pretense of the level of justification being provided?Or they can set up a program to review accounts at random and flag things they want it to look for, or allow for users to report on other users, or literally any other way of monitoring accounts.Honestly, the real hypothetical we should be asking is if it's plausible that WotC will decide (as you're suggesting) that curating their walled garden will be too difficult, and so will simply allow people to effectively hop the wall as they please (presumably because they're just good-natured like that?).Cool, at least now you're sticking to a number with some basis in fact instead of making stuff up out of nowhere.Not really. As I pointed out, you're assuming that there's only one way to do what you're talking about, that the limits you've outlined cannot be overcome, and that the result is that WotC will take a laissez-faire attitude to the whole thing. That's a far greater number of assumptions than anything I've put forward.Can it really be called an "attack" when all I'm doing is pointing out all of the unfounded assumptions?You keep mentioning AI, when in fact a simple program would be able to get this done.Yeah, no kidding. I mean, I'm sure there'll be some level of human element to the process, but the idea of that being all there is comes entirely from you.And the flaws of which I pointed out originally.So your entire idea here is that WotC can't write a program which looks at the text of rules which are part of the VTT/DDB and compares that to the "custom content"-tagged portion of user accounts to see if there's anything that's similar to said content on there? In other words, what programs have been doing for some time to detect plagiarism, AI-generated content, etc. Don't get me wrong, they very well might not be able to (I've said before that I'm not impressed with their technical prowess to date), but it won't be because such technology isn't feasible; you don't need AI to do what I've pointed out here.Of course, the problem with your entire line of thinking here is that it's entirely predicated on the idea that custom content is a panacea to the issue of the VTT's disincentivizing things which it doesn't do very well. This despite my repeatedly saying that's not the point. The point is that custom content is more work to generate, both in terms of technical application and game engine integration, for less payoff under the VTT system (and you can't even claim that the former is too small to bother with, when you yourself have found it too onerous to format links into text or properly paste an emoji in this very thread). That's not going to be much of a draw, and so works to act as a subtle "gravitational" pull away from said content...especially if it goes beyond an easy "substitute X for Y" change in things like spell damage types (which doesn't exactly push the boundaries of imaginative play anyway; it barely scratches the surface of custom spell creation).See above for why you're overstating the technical limitations (though it's worth reiterating that if this becomes too much of a challenge for them, it's not implausible that WotC will simply clamp down on custom content altogether).False positives are part of any search system, so that's not exactly a fatal issue as you're putting it. Likewise, you've ignored that simply telling people such a system is in place can have a chilling effect, like a sign that says "this property is monitored by video camera."Which isn't exactly some sort of massive burden; there's a reason why companies outsource entire tech departments to low wage countries, i.e. because they want to have crowds of IT people who do non-critical jobs.Which is all the more reason why WotC would just throw their hands in the air and scrap the entire custom content aspect altogether.Hey, maybe WotC would just give away their books for free since it's completely impossible to stop people from using their contents at no cost by slipping them in under "custom" content which WotC is powerless to police?No, that's not what I'm insisting. I'm insisting that WotC wants to make money, and does not see quality as the primary path to that. Which means that, even if something is bad for customers, there's still a reasonable chance they'll undertake it.They really don't. Remember, this is the same company that sent the Pinkertons to retrieve a single deck of cards that had been legally acquired (since an embargo isn't a matter of criminal law, and would apply to the store owner rather than the customer). Cost-benefit analysis has a habit of not being part of the equation in certain circumstances, and even then their definition of "benefit" isn't the one you're using.Appealing to groupthink is a fairly ugly thing. Is that really the side of this that you want to come down on?Four or five lay-users who keep misrepresenting/misinterpreting/misunderstanding my point does not a compelling argument make.And their absolute surety in something that is by definition uncertain is how you know they're wrong. When someone can say that they know how a situation (in terms of human endeavor) is going to develop with 100% confidence, that means they're deliberately overlooking the self-evident lack of certainty inherent to such situations, and so aren't engaging with the discussion so much as being argumentative.I'm not sure why you think I'd take the word of four or five random people on the Internet as being any sort of authorities, especially after what I noted above. I've never said "I am correct and you're wrong," because I've noted from the beginning that this is an issue of what could happen. You're the one(s) insisting that it absolutely can't, no way no how, despite your lack of prophetic powers or even basic technical knowledge, which necessarily makes your position less credible.It's neither infantilizing nor parody to point out that the focus on what the VTT does well necessarily carries the potential for a not-inconsiderable number of players to focus more on that than on what it doesn't do well, inculcating a shift away from the broader areas of imaginative play. I understand that you think such a thing is impossible, but unfortunately for your sense of certitude in this area, nothing is impossible.Notice again the absolute certainty, despite any rational basis for speaking in declaratives.Ironically, you're wrong about my being wrong, because I'm not insisting that I must be right the way you are.And yet I've managed to point out the fundamental flaws in your reasoning with regard to each of these things, making this claim not only baseless but self-evidently false.</blockquote>

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