NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9434869" data-attributes="member: 18">Because there's a printable PDF of those? And in many cases you can get POD of them. Also, they're not purporting to be official, which does make a difference.I mean, it is different, because those books physically existed lol.It clearly does to a great number of people or a lot of this discussion wouldn't be occurring. I think if WotC offered printable PDFs this would be a lesser issue. But they don't and appear to have no intention of doing so whilst any form of 5E is "current". They only offer the Beyond website and possibly app (I forget if the current app lets you read books), which means you're essentially locked to digital devices to use this content (you can currently print from the website but it's not great).More importantly, digital exclusives in the case of something that's both digital and physical are usually stage 1 in enshittification. I know your - quite reasonable - position is "If it gets rubbish, I'll just dump it! Corporations going to corporate!", but I think a lot of people feel like they'd like it to, y'know, not get rubbish. Obviously if it does they can and should abandon it (though some will not of course). Also, some people are interested in warning signs here, because D&D Beyond represents quite a notable financial investment, in both buying individual books and subscribing, so if it start on a "dark path", maybe it's better to stop buying stuff on Beyond at that point, rather than to keep dumping in hundreds of dollars only to realize a year or two from then that it's going somewhere you really don't like.I feel like, and this is not an attack, I respect that you achieved this, you have more financial flexibility than some people, maybe a lot of people, so you investing hundreds of dollars into Beyond and then potentially at some point going "Idiots, they've ruined it!" and just stopping using it when it does get bad (as I believe you've suggested you would happily do if it did) is less consequential than for some people. This is a hobby where some people are dropping like $100 a year on the game (or less) and others are able to spend literally thousands of dollars. There's quite a diversity there. And for people closer to the $100 end (which I am nearer, despite being on a much higher income than most people in the UK), being able to anticipate or see warning signs this may well be more significantly beneficial.I actually largely agree here, though one thing to note is a lot of digital stuff has a tendency to be suddenly snatched away, but that's a whole other can of worms.I actually disagree with [USER=7034611]@mamba[/USER] that the main problem microtransactions create is financial harm. Gambling-style ones do and should be absolutely condemned out of hand, but I think unless WotC completely lose their mind, those are unlikely. That said, if they do that with say, digital minis, and if so, obviously that'd be pretty contemptible (especially as they're almost always non-trade-able unlike physical stuff). But I think regulation/legislation/potential bans in European and Asian countries will probably keep them away from that. The real harm of microtransaction-heavy platforms is that they tend to, over time, increasingly attempt to funnel users into purchasing microtransactions, to the point of reshaping functionality and systems to encourage that. As this is a novel product it's impossible to say exactly what form this would take, but it might, for example, involve locking mechanical content behind purchasing microtransaction figurines (or force-bundling them or w/e).</blockquote>

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