Do gamers need Wizards.com boards/Sage Advice?

[Zaruthustran]

Wizards.com is a famously unstable website. The forums are a mess. The ENWorld community giggles at the rulings of The Sage.

Today I tried to access the Wizards boards (down again), then went over the Rules forum where I read yet another ENWorlder mock The Sage's rulings. I asked myself "Geez... why does WotC bother?"

Seriously: why does WotC bother with Sage Advice and an expensive (yet inept) Web team? ENWorld's boards are much more interesting, much more stable, and ENWorld's regulars are much more knowledgable about D&D (Caliban, I'm thinking of you here).

So WotC's already laid off The Sage. They've farmed out their online store (not to Amazon, oddly enough, but to some other company). How long before they farm out their boards?

Is the online D&D community self-sufficient?

-z

PS: no offense intended to Skip Williams. I always thought that his Sage Advice was useful and (more importantly) authoritative. But I do think that WotC could save money by letting the community handle the rules questions, now that Errata and FAQ have been completed.

 

[Ranger REG]

While you can have a community of gamers to answer rules questions, which can sometimes run into various interpretations on obscure rules, there is always a need for an official ruling.

As for the Wizards.com boards, we knew last week they were undergoing a software upgrade so glitches will occur during the few days after the upgrade. It happens to almost all messageboards trying to use a new and hopefully improved version of the messageboard software to handle the loads of posting 24/7. It also happened on this board, some time ago.

 

[Umbran]

The ENWorld community giggles at the rulings of The Sage.

This is rather overstated. We occasionally find fault with the Sage. We, as human beings, tend to let those faults overweigh the fact that he is right far more often than not. Right far more often than most of us over in the Rules Forum.

You speak of "the community" as if it were a well connected whole. It isn't. The vast majority of gamers probably have no idea that EN World even exists (there are something on the order of 2 million gamers, and a measily few thousand EN World members - do the math). You cannot then expect us to handle the rules questions for everyone.

 

[Rasyr]

Bwah-hah-ha!!! The evil corporate america strikes again!

While you can have a community of gamers to answer rules questions, which can sometimes run into various interpretations on obscure rules, there is always a need for an official ruling.

Is there? With any ambiguous rule, it always, always falls to the DM to determine how he is going to handle it. About the only thing the "official rulings" are good for are to help the DM clarify how he wants to handle it. There is no absolute right or wrong way to handle a situation.

Originally posted by Ranger REG
As for the Wizards.com boards, we knew last week they were undergoing a software upgrade so glitches will occur during the few days after the upgrade. It happens to almost all messageboards trying to use a new and hopefully improved version of the messageboard software to handle the loads of posting 24/7. It also happened on this board, some time ago.

Don't be too sure of that....

When the boards first went down, right AFTER the layoff news broke, the message said that they were down for the upgrade to 6.3, yet at the bottom of that message, it gave the UBB version number, and you know what that version was? 6.3.1.1 The exact same thing it is now!

Later that day, the down message went from a dynamic page, to a static one, and guess what? The static page was completely missing that version number!

To me, this is just one example that certain people knew the layoffs were coming, and that the downing of the message boards (which was supposedly to take a single working day, but actually took two or more (never checked after Friday afternoon)) was actually to keep the flaming down to a minimum.

Another example of certain folks knowing what was coming down is the setting search. If they had a good development team, why would they need to outsource like that? In retrospect, the original timing of the search would have made the layoffs occur during the very final round of the search, instead of just after the second round people were chosen....


Look at the big picture! Hasbro had these layoffs planned well in advance. Certain people at WOTC had this information as well (although they may not have known who would be affected, at first..)

As for those who got cut, their bosses knew it in advance as well, as they were likely the ones who had to decide who stayed and who went, or at least they had to give recommendations either for or against everybody in their departments. That is how those things work.... Corporate says you have to cut xx number of people as of xx date in order to cut xx dollars from the budget. Then leaves it to the top management of WOTC to determine who gets the axe.

 

[Zaruthustran]

I don't deny that there is a need for an official ruling. But armed with errata and the FAQ, I think the community can answer its own questions.

I don't presume that "the community" is an interconnected whole. And I realize that ENWorld is not on the radar of every gamer. But I do maintain that WotC would be wise to point their "Community>Message Board" links to ENWorld.

WotC can't do that without permission and compensation to Morrus, of course. But that compensation, I think, would be less than the cost of servers+security+web team+software for the Wizards.com boards.

 

[Isida Kep'Tukari]

You also realize that WotC's boards have many thousands of more members than EN world. They also have boards for Star Wars, Magic, Pokemon, and many other games.

They're frankly much busier than EN World, which is why software problems happen more frequently.

So, there you have it.

 

[John Crichton]

Wizards.com is a famously unstable website. The forums are a mess.

This is true. However they are running an Ultimate Bulletin Board system. Actually they are running more than one. Those things are HUGE bandwidth eaters and add to that the popularity of the boards I'm surprised they get as much uptime as they do now.

EN World uses a vBulletin Board which is a completely different kind of BBS. It runs mainly off a database using mySQL & php while the UBB (WoTC's boards) uses mostly CGI and Perl. Both CGI & Perl are very old and not as efficient as php.

Forget all the techo-babble. These boards, while very popular and nowhere close to the popularity of the WoTC boards. Have you seen the amount of forums they have there? My God. Their tech staff must be going crazy right now!

Additionally, while the UBB has made progress over the years the vBulletin system is typically more stable and does a better job of keeping things in order. I suspect WoTC is using the UBB instead of the vBulletin because it is easier (in my experience) to have multiple instances of their software running on one site/server.

I have run both on a fairly popular comic book artist's site (I used to run Joe Madureira's site) and it is very hard to keep a BBS running at peak efficiency 100% of the time. There is usually the need (especially when upgrading) to shut down for a day or 2 to get things working properly so problems don't spring up when you aren't looking.

Oh my, look... I've gone and ranted too long again. Doh!

 

[Nightfall]

I personally LIKE Wizards boards. Gives me a chance to convert more and more people!

 

[Teflon Billy]

Well, I don't mean to knock the Wizards site, but when my group needs a ruling, our first thought is never "ask Skip 'The Sage' Williams"...

It's "Ask Caliban".

I don't, however, claim to represent the opinions of the world's Pokemon fan-base

 

[Crothian]

Well, I don't mean to knock the Wizards site, but when my group needs a ruling, our first thought is never "ask Skip 'The Sage' Williams"...

It's "Ask Caliban".

I agree here. Maybe not Caliban specifically, but I'll post a rules question in the Rules forum well before I'd ever think about going anywhere else. Heck, I'll post the question before consulting the books.