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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 3195381" data-attributes="member: 9053">Ah, I leave the boards for a couple days, and this is finally announced.Sigh.I worked as a manager for one of the major national ISPs for about five years, and they branded a number of "pay sites" for their members, giving them free access. The idea was to create online content for their users, much like AOL does, without actually having to host it themselves. As a result, I got to see a lot of data on these sites: how many hits, how much new content, and so on. In a nutshell, the idea stunk. Most of the companies were initially updating things like gangbusters, and advertised how many subscriptions they had (including all of our members in those totals, which really inflated things). After a few years, the only web site that was still in existance was ESPN, which became a hollow shell of what it once was.Pay for content does not work. In fact, today, most of what WotC is providing is simply expected as part of the high prices for gaming products. Having a decent website with previews, errata and expanded content is par for the course for all of the tier one and tier two companies out there. Should it be? Is that a reasonable expectation? Well, if games had better quality control, I would say that it would not be. The problem is that so many games, including WotC products, have absolutely attrocious editing and proof reading. They also don't have a usable index. The net result is that many products need on line support to be fully usable to me, much like patches for PC games are a requirement.So no, no subscription for me. Should WotC decide to eliminate errata and web enhancements from their free service, it will mean significantly fewer purchases from me in a year. Maybe none. Good job, guys!--Steve</blockquote>

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