My love letter to WotC

[Nemesis Destiny]

I don't read it that way. Sounds to me like supporters want WOTC to produce for ALL previous editions (I know I do), not just the one the poster loved.

That may be what they're saying, but it's pretty clear that most of those voices are firmly in the 3.x/PF camp.

I don't personally care one way or another. I think if it were about pleasing the fans / supporters of the game, they should probably release all the old stuff as PDFs, along with the new, but I know they probably won't do the former, and they almost certainly won't do the latter. It's not ideal, but it is realistic.

As for producing new material for older editions... that's just not going to happen. They would have to retain such a large number of staff, even if they mostly got freelancers to write it, they still have to edit it, put it through QA, market it, etc, that it almost certainly would not be profitable enough (if at all) for them to bother with it.

I love all my old books, don't get me wrong, and I'd like a legal option to have PDFs of them, but I don't really expect WotC to come through here.

 

[Sunderstone]

Were there ANY of those shared experiences for 3E? Maybe The Age of Worms and Shackled City. You might be able to add in Rise of the Runelords or Red Hand of Doom, but otherwise?

Alot more.
More Paizo classics like Savage Tide, Mad God's Key, etc.
Necro stuff like Crucible of Freya, Tomb of Abysthor, Lost City of Barakus, Grey Citadel, Vault of Larrin Kar.
Goodman DCC Stuff like Castle Whiterock.
Green Ronin's Freeport.
WotC's RHoD, and Expeditions to Greyhawk and Ravenloft.

All new memories made during the 3E/3.5 era that rivaled some of my favorite moments from the old AD&D days (though some of the above I didnt run but read about others experiences and how much they enjoyed it). For awhile I thought I was in RPG heaven again.

Honestly, I agree that Hasbro and even WotC at this point should leave tabletop RPGs alone. I knew eventually D&D would get dragged through the mud by a company known largely for their CCG games (no offense to CCG gamer folks of course). D&D needs to be in the hands of a company that specializes in RPGs, not CCGs, boardgames, etc.
Again, IMHO only.

 

[Bacris]

That may be what they're saying, but it's pretty clear that most of those voices are firmly in the 3.x/PF camp.

I don't personally care one way or another. I think if it were about pleasing the fans / supporters of the game, they should probably release all the old stuff as PDFs, along with the new, but I know they probably won't do the former, and they almost certainly won't do the latter. It's not ideal, but it is realistic.

As for producing new material for older editions... that's just not going to happen. They would have to retain such a large number of staff, even if they mostly got freelancers to write it, they still have to edit it, put it through QA, market it, etc, that it almost certainly would not be profitable enough (if at all) for them to bother with it.

I love all my old books, don't get me wrong, and I'd like a legal option to have PDFs of them, but I don't really expect WotC to come through here.

It never made financial sense to me for them to pull all the PDFs of their old books. RPGNow / DriveThruRPG was handling all the hosting costs / merchant fees. The PDFs were already there - so no additional work was needed from their part, aside from receiving the royalties... And cracking down on legitimate PDFs doesn't discourage pirating, it instead encourages it, because now your good customers who were willing to pay can't.

While it was either a knee-jerk reaction or an attempt to push people to 4E, I personally view it as short sighted and hurting the bottom line. Most people who still want to play AD&D, 3.x, or older editions aren't going to suddenly spring for 4E because the legal PDFs are gone.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

It never made financial sense to me for them to pull all the PDFs of their old books. RPGNow / DriveThruRPG was handling all the hosting costs / merchant fees. The PDFs were already there - so no additional work was needed from their part, aside from receiving the royalties... And cracking down on legitimate PDFs doesn't discourage pirating, it instead encourages it, because now your good customers who were willing to pay can't.

While it was either a knee-jerk reaction or an attempt to push people to 4E, I personally view it as short sighted and hurting the bottom line. Most people who still want to play AD&D, 3.x, or older editions aren't going to suddenly spring for 4E because the legal PDFs are gone.

For the PDFs of the old books, I agree 100%. It was dumb to pull them. Pirates aren't usually customers, and fans of older editions don't buy new books. This has always been the case.

I don't think it was about "pushing" 4e though, as the 4th edition books that were in print at that time were also available in PDF. If it were actually about pushing 4e, they would only have pulled the older material.

Their officially cited reason was, in fact, piracy. The PH2 had just been released and they claimed massive piracy of that book was what caused them to drop PDF support. Their claim was actually posted in an exclusive interview on ENWorld, but the important bit is here:

The piracy became a substantial concern when we saw thousands of copies of our recently released Player’s Handbook 2 being downloaded illegally within hours of its release. We cannot share sales figures, but I can tell you that we conservatively estimate the ratio of illicit downloads to legally purchased copies was 10:1.

(Subsequent clarification: The 10:1 ratio that Greg references is for PDFs only – it has nothing to do with the physical books. For every one PDF purchased legally, there were at least 10 downloaded illegally. And yes, we can track it.)

I'd like to see these sales figures that he can't quote. I find their claim of being able to track just how many illegally pirated copies are floating around out there to be dubious at best, however, that is beside the point.

I've said it before and I will say it again, that keeping the older stuff in pdf format at places like DriveThruRPG was pretty painless for them, so it was foolish to pull it. It was presumably making some money then, as opposed to the zero it is making now.

I'm sure that piracy does result in some lost sales of current product, but that's a pretty amusing reason for a company to use, especially after they had already intentionally leaked copies of the 4th edition core books a month or so before release. That was a strategic move, and one which I think, to an extent, worked to get gamers talking about the new edition instead of why/how WotC is going to hell for "abandoning" 3.x.

It seems pretty clear now that the rest of his statements in that interview about looking at ways to distribute "even older material" digitally was nothing more than lip service. Too bad; they blew a good opportunity.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

Alot more.
More Paizo classics like Savage Tide, Mad God's Key, etc.
Necro stuff like Crucible of Freya, Tomb of Abysthor, Lost City of Barakus, Grey Citadel, Vault of Larrin Kar.
Goodman DCC Stuff like Castle Whiterock.
Green Ronin's Freeport.
WotC's RHoD, and Expeditions to Greyhawk and Ravenloft.

All new memories made during the 3E/3.5 era that rivaled some of my favorite moments from the old AD&D days (though some of the above I didnt run but read about others experiences and how much they enjoyed it). For awhile I thought I was in RPG heaven again.

Honestly, I agree that Hasbro and even WotC at this point should leave tabletop RPGs alone. I knew eventually D&D would get dragged through the mud by a company known largely for their CCG games (no offense to CCG gamer folks of course). D&D needs to be in the hands of a company that specializes in RPGs, not CCGs, boardgames, etc.
Again, IMHO only.

Wow I'd forgotten about Crucible of Freya and Tomb of Abysthor. Necromancer games really did have some great product out there for a while. I have the first two Rappan Athuk mods and missed the second somehow, but have the Rappan Athuk box that they came out with years later. Now THAT'S how you do a limited edition product!

Savage Tide is also pretty fricking Epic. I dont know how I forgot about that one. The goodman DCC stuff was good but no one mod springs to mind from off the top of my head.

 

[scruffygrognard]

I'm sure that piracy does result in some lost sales of current product, but that's a pretty amusing reason for a company to use, especially after they had already intentionally leaked copies of the 4th edition core books a month or so before release. That was a strategic move, and one which I think, to an extent, worked to get gamers talking about the new edition instead of why/how WotC is going to hell for "abandoning" 3.x.

Is that true that WotC intentionally leaked the 4th edition PHB? If so it backfired for the many who saw the illegal pdf, didn't like what they saw and never bought into 4th edition.

 

[Bacris]

Their officially cited reason was, in fact, piracy. The PH2 had just been released and they claimed massive piracy of that book was what caused them to drop PDF support. Their claim was actually posted in an exclusive interview on ENWorld, but the important bit is here:

Yeah, I know that was the official reason... But that's very much a knee-jerk overreaction.

Piracy of your new PDFs a problem? Don't release them immediately in PDF... That's fine. Not everyone is going to like it in the Digital Age, but the overreaction in pulling EVERYTHING definitely alienated customers (especially those who had already legally bought and could no longer download).

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

Is that true that WotC intentionally leaked the 4th edition PHB? If so it backfired for the many who saw the illegal pdf, didn't like what they saw and never bought into 4th edition.

I don't know if it's true or not, but that was the rumour.

I disagree that it backfired though. There was so much negativity over the decision to push out a new edition that they felt that they had to do something to get gamers talking about the game again, rather than how much WotC sucked for ruining D&D (sound familiar?).

The folks that didn't like what they saw in leaked PDFs were probably not going to like 4th edition anyway; it's pretty similar to the piracy argument. There's no point in trying to please gamers that were never going to be your customers in the first place, either because they'd decided this before reading it (as I initially did), or because the game mechanics are genuinely not to their liking, or because they're happy with what they already have. This has been the case through EVERY edition change.

As I pointed out, I was initially in the "I hate you, WotC" camp because I'd grown tired of the many glaring problems with 3e (just as I had with 2e, back in the day) and felt that 4e was going to be more of the same, and releasing after only 8 years, just felt like a cash grab to me, so I was all set to boycott 4e in protest, and head straight on over to Pathfinder, or E6.

One of my group convinced us to give 4e a try, saying that we would just do a one shot, and if we didn't like it, then we would drop it and look at other options. I'm glad he did, but I don't think I would have done that if not for the pirated PDFs. As I read them, the more I realised that even though I didn't agree with a lot of their business decisions, 4e wasn't so bad after all.

You may agree, or as many in this thread clearly do, disagree with my assessment, but that is beside the point ENTIRELY. That point being that in at least my case, and likely thousands more, leaking the printer's proofs in PDF actually won them back some customers. And in more cases than that, I'm sure, it changed the mood of the conversations on boards like this from "I hate WotC" to "look what is in this book."

Even if they hated the book content, at least they were back to talking about the game.

I think more than anything, that's the kind of thing they need right now. There has been a huge shift in conversation to their recent business decisions and flip-flopping and a whole lot less talking about the game.

If you've ever been over on the 4e section of the boards here, you would have noticed this. There is always at least one foolish "sky is falling/sky is not falling" type thread, but when those books got pulled from Amazon, the doo-doo hit the Fan of Speculation.

The mods have (wisely, I feel) mitigated this problem somewhat by moving most of the threads like that to the industry forum. It has restored a modicum of sanity in the 4e section, but the flipside is that there are a lot of 4e haters in the industry forum, so a lot of the 4e supporters are reticent to comment for fear of being slammed publicly, or starting an edition flamewar. I feel that this is a legitimate concern. This thread has been fairly civil, however.

 

[Nagol]

Is that true that WotC intentionally leaked the 4th edition PHB? If so it backfired for the many who saw the illegal pdf, didn't like what they saw and never bought into 4th edition.

It's very unlikely the leaks were intentional.

The original 4e pdfs that leaked were apparently pre-production proofs. At the time Scott Rouse denied that WotC leaked them and implied the leak was causing consternation / extra work at head office. There was some damage control done to limit the leak's impact, but the genie doesn't go back into the bottle.