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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9129587" data-attributes="member: 18">So this is actually an interesting question.There is a pretty clear answer, historically, if you look at similarly incredible screw-ups. One thing to realize is, even the with somewhat unfortunate sneering attitudes here about plebs who can't even spell OGL, this seriously damaged WotC's reputation among a far larger base of people than just "D&D players" (a reputation already at least mildly dented by MtG stuff). A significant proportion of English-speaking videogamers, who probably outnumber English-speaking TT RPG players 100:1 have heard of it, for example.Unity's recent screw up attracted a lot of comparisons directly to the OGL, for example. And it'll be decades before it really fades from being a go-to example of business managing absolutely to say it was going to do the dumbest possible thing (again, it's immaterial that you may personally not see it as so dumb - that's the common opinion, and it's not going to change).But your question is how long, and the answer, from history, is two-fold:1) For as long as the "current management" of WotC/Hasbro exist, this will be brought up, and to be fair, that's reasonable, because they are the people who did it, they were the people the buck stops with, and people who can let their company do something that dumb and drawn-out once, can do it twice. As long the crew of ex-MS vets like Chris Cocks, Dan Rawson, Cynthia Williams and so on remain in charge of WotC and Hasbro, this will continue to hang around. (I'm not suggesting any of these named people are dim or incompetent, but they are capable of supporting other decision-makers who made incredibly bad decisions, even if they didn't make them themselves, rather than countermanding those decisions.)That likely means at least a decade. I would suggest coming to terms with this now, and not becoming embittered about it. These people made a very bad decision, drew that decision out for nearly two full months of bad (and indeed worsening) word-of-mouth and then press, when they could have solved it nigh-instantly.Actions have consequences, and this will quite rightly hang on their necks for as long as they or other ex-Microsoft people continue to run Hasbro/WotC.My guess is really either:A) WotC continues to do well with D&D for at least a decade or more, and these people all stay at WotC and Hasbro and indeed more MS alumni join them, and thus this will continue to be brought up.orB) WotC/Hasbro has kind of shakeup, and decides to sell off either D&D, or all of WotC. In those cases, this might very suddenly become irrelevant and stop being worth bringing up.2) This will exist as a go-to example, as mentioned earlier, even WotC sold D&D tomorrow, for decades. Multiple decades.As an aside, the drawn-out nature of this is the big problem. If WotC had quickly pivoted away from the bad ideas, rather than drawing them out for weeks on weeks, we wouldn't be still talking about this. It'd be seen as some sort of "aberration" or temporary insanity. But they didn't. It took so long for the bad press to build up. They had so long to fix it. But the perception - and I think it's a correct perception - will now forever be that they only pivoted away because of the bad press impacting the decision-making of the company.Of course another way it could become somewhat forgotten is WotC could do something even worse, but, uh, let's hope not.</blockquote>

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