Cancelling accounts also creates a support ticket. (As does filing a complaint.) You're reading what you want to read.
Admittedly it is unclear in that article and it does include those details in the same paragraph making it seem like they were talking about deletions.
Especially as outright deleting accounts would be a stupid thing to do. You'd lose all your books you've paid for. And since you can't come back, there's no reason for WotC to make any changes. If you cancel, there's a way for them to get you to return...
I'm sorry, no. I've got the text of the article on my side. You can try to switch it up for any number of reasons
not named in the article, but from the article itself it is pretty clear what they are talking about.
However, the support team is also understaffed AND was just returning for the two week holiday break. So a not insignificant number of those tickets were likely unrelated.
That really wouldn't matter when it comes to the breadth of deletions going on. It takes a lot more effort and dedication to delete rather than simply cancel. I'm waiting to do it, if only to give Wizards a slight chance. But it's tossing away hundreds of dollars worth of purchases. I think you are severely underestimating how much this means.
People don't just go to court for no reason.
Lawyers are expensive. Someone like Paizo isn't going to just sue on a whim to get brownie points with the community. They're not going to blow most of their profits for the year on lawyers unless they think it's absolutely necessary. If they weren't going to be able to sell their books, then absolutely. It's sue or go out of business. But since they'll likely have a goodly amount of time to update their unpublished books to ORC and still be able to publish existing books, then they have no reason to sue. It's not losing them any revenue, so there's no benefit to the lawsuit: even if the win, they're still out millions.
They don't need to sue.
Wizards needs to make the move to enforce their copyright. Paizo and others just need to defend, and have plenty of defense in that regard. It's going to be on Wizards to actively defend themselves, and I'm not sure they were expecting a whole bunch of games to come out against them. They definitely didn't
WotC could destroy most 3PP for a variety of reasons without even trying. Kobold Press once released a book that heavily plagiarized the Dungeon Master's Guide. WotC could have destroyed them. But they didn't. Because the D&D team was friends with the head Kobold and knew it was an accident, and Kobold Press corrected the error.
This is just baseless fear mongering.
I mean, it's not. Wizards has been going about its business trying to consolidate the brand completely inside the company. Just look at the stupidity of what it did with Gale Force Nine, who they had a contract that GF9 was faithfully adhering to. Why would you trust a company that attempted to bully a bunch of 3PPs into a bad contract via NDAs and a ticking clock?
The idea that they want to control the industry is pretty clear given what they are doing with the old OGL and their new VTT policy. It's pretty clear that they want to be the only game in the business, and this move really solidifies it. That it didn't work initially doesn't really change that it's clearly still their objective. At this point, there's no point to take any Wizards action as being in good-faith until they make a serious concession, such as regarding OGL 1.0a. Actions speak louder than words, and no amount of casting "Friends" is going to get around the fact that they failed their Deception check.
Quite the opposite. Feedback is not meaningless.
Okay, feedback that is just "QQ don't remove the OGL 1.0a QQ" is meaningless. But feedback on the OGL 1.2 and it's final form is very meaningful, and good feedback can have real impact. There's lots of ways it can be improved, but no one is discussing them because they're rather whine about the 1.0a going away.
Ah, so feedback on things that matter are meaningless, but we get to decide the wallpaper in our cell. Great!
This kind of proves my point: OGL 1.2 is a non-starter. They don't want to change anything that needs changing, and why forgive and forget when they aren't correcting the thing I got angry at them for? If you come into house and wreck up the place, saying you're sorry doesn't suddenly absolve you of your actions, especially when your apology is "I'll help you move in any new stuff you buy to replace the old stuff I broke".
WotC isn't stopping people from making Pathfinder 3PP. No one is "stifling" them.
The simple reason is that no one is making PF2 3PP because they can make ten times as much money with a mediocre selling 5e 3PP.
I mean, they kind of are. When you have one big dog in the industry, it
is a stifling thing because people are generally attracted to the standard, the status quo option. When everyone plays D&D, people want to put money into something that everyone plays. Not having that top dog means people might invest in other things because there is not one automatic choice anymore.
Also there is plenty of PF2 3PP. The difference is that Paizo has a pretty quick, robust schedule when it comes to making content. They don't need 3PPs to fill in the obvious niches because they are already doing that themselves. But there are absolutely 3PPs that are doing well there.
Dethroning the God-King of RPGs won't change how much money you can make for a Pathfinder 3PP. It will just mean that's all you can make, so you'll settle for the scraps instead of the feast.
What? The idea that people will just leave RPGs just because it's not D&D is utterly
inane in ways I cannot even begin to describe. If D&D falters, that means people can go elsewhere. If it's just casual fans, then they are people who were never going to help 3PPs in the first place. What happens is that Wizards gets a bit smaller and other companies can get a bit bigger as those players look for alternatives.
You talk about how there will only be table scraps left, but Wizbro's plan basically means that you'll still be scraps with the threat that you could become the next course at any given moment.
It doesn't help 3PP. It actually seriously hurts them, especially if it drives players to the many, many game systems that aren't released under an open license and don't support 3PP.
Yeah, that might be bad if there weren't a whole bunch of people signing up and looking to create like their own OGLs. Free League is a good example of one that didn't have one before, but will in the future.
Looking at the chart of top RPGs for the past few years (Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, G.I. Joe, Power Rangers, Fallout, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk, Alien, Fate, Starfinder, Shadowrun, Vampire, Star Wars, Legend of the Five Rings, Star Trek) only four of those have an open gaming license.
Okay, and? The decision you are defending literally allows Wizards to kill off the 3PP market at their whim. The companies themselves have said as such, and there is no reason to believe they won't try to exert that power given how they have been acting regarding their business relationships recently and their attempt to strong-arm companies into OGL 1.1. If you were worried about 3PPs, you'd be listening to them instead of trying to coax people into accepting a system that would give them no agency and put them at the complete mercy of Wizards.
