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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Justice and Rule" data-source="post: 8941898" data-attributes="member: 6778210">This is actually an interesting point, but I think the real reason for this is that the statement was released 4 days before Christmas and most people were checked out of this sort of news until the holiday season ended. And I'd probably say that was a bit of the calculation there.I dunno if they were worried as much as they thought they could lock them in more quickly to deals by a carrot-and-stick approach. Once you get some big companies on board, you can ratchet up the feeling of "inevitability". I also think that they wanted to get this done before the community caught on for rather obvious reasons.I would largely agree! But I think that kind of feeds into the idea I keep putting forward: that they wanted to essentially "vassalize" the 3PP market. If you are unfamiliar with the game or the politics of the community, it doesn't make sense that you have a bunch of people running around with alternatives to your version of the rules, making stuff before you can and occupying market share that could be yours. If you have to make massive profits in the coming years, best to bring this whole thing under your control, and do it before it becomes a problem for your new, upcoming edition.Yeah, that probably didn't help. That sort of dramatic thing with a ticking clock attached probably helped wake people up a bit to what was happening as well. I do think a big part of the backlash is that this whole thing came across like it was trying to be done behind the community's back (again, they made their press release days before Christmas) and that definitely helped stir up emotions.Because that's not how "trust" works. When you do something sneaky and underhanded, it colors people's view of you, and if you back out under pressure, people just think you did it because you were pressured. And let's be honest: they'd be right. Wizards doesn't get any credit for backing out because they had already caused a lot of harm to the community by even just announcing it. That they switched courses is good, but they also did that because we yelled at them. To regain the trust of the community, they have to do good stuff unprompted. Even then, it'll still take time because, again, that's just how "trust" works: it takes years to earn and seconds to break.Again, to me I think those in charge didn't want a 3PP community like we see it. I think you don't go about changing the OGL (and changing it like this) if you aren't dead-set on basically setting fire to what has been built around you. And I think that makes sense if you have a bunch of people who are looking at it from a purely profit-driven sense: you don't want alternatives to your rules supplements out there, or at least not ones you can't readily control.Sure, though in this case I think it's the simplest one to ascribe as a justification.Yes, we know that. I think Kyle Brink also knows that. I think that other people in the room don't like other people being able to play in their playground and don't have high-falutin' ideas about D&D as a community. Instead, they see it as a detriment and impediment from them completely controlling their space. They had been thinking about this for a while (Again, thank you Kyle Brink!) and the timing would indicate that they were trying to put enough of a gap between 1D&D and this that outrage would have died out and memories would have faded. to me, I thinkI definitely think that 1.2 was more subtle in how Wizards could exert control, but they still had that control. They were very firm on that being in there, and I remember many of us saw that as them showing where they were going to try and hold their line.I don't think so.I mean, okay, yeah they could, but I think they wisely saw it as being way more detrimental to a lot of big things for them coming up: they had a movie releasing in roughly 2 months and this story would absolutely get more and more play because that's exactly the sort of juicy narrative the news would want to hit. Plus I think doing this in the middle of the playtest threatened to taint 1D&D going forwards because it would just become inextricably linked to it.And I think that's part of what the design team told them: that they were basically poisoning their newest product before it was released, and that the sooner they moved on from this, the better chance they had of eventually healing the rift and forgetting about it. With the profit targets they are trying to hit, they can't be limping when 1D&D comes out. So they swallowed a difficult pill and backed down.Clearly I am a multifaceted man. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60f.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":sneaky:" title="Sneaky    :sneaky:"  data-smilie="21"data-shortname=":sneaky:" />But while I do think I'm a bit jaded and cynical, not sure I'm paranoid. But I always enjoy these discussions with you. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />It's not just the absence of altruism, but going back on a long-standing agreement with the community and destroying dozens of creators in the pursuit of a buck that anyone (and I'm sure a few did) could have told them would end up losing them money rather than gaining.Not all evils have to be great evils. There are petty ones as well. To me, this is a very petty, mundane evil.I don't think that my standards are all that unreasonable. I think your standards might be too low if you can just brush off Wizbro's actions with a "Well, that's what happens."</blockquote>

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