Sure is mad in here; maybe we can address some of these points without getting emotional about it. Some people may have already covered a few of these.
You know WotC is owned by another company, right? Hasbro vetoed the digital distribution because they were afraid it would wind up costing them too much money given what they'd already seen on what few books they did release. Piracy is a tricky problem and simply ignoring it and bringing convenience to the masses anyway doesn't help the company protect their work. I'm not saying the choice to abandon digital distribution was the right one, but it's not without its reasons.
(I'm not going to touch on piracy further, as this answer pretty much covers all of them. Let's not demonize the wrong group of people, particularly for a decision that wasn't theirs.)
Now I start my session last weekend and get excited when a dragon is about to stomp on the party and one of my players (who stays up on new errata like no-one else) tells me ALL of the dragons have been changed.
So that renders my plan to pick up the Draconomicon books kinda uncertain. Then when I think about it, every book that gets released has me hesitating. It's insane. And the only reliable and working piece of software that included all of the updates perfectly... has been scrapped. They're trying to make us pay MMO prices without there being an MMO product.
For starters, who cares what your player says or what the errata is? Who's the DM at the table? Address the errata later. The dragon they're fighting is the one you have NOW. If you have another dragon later on, well then you can use updated stats if you're so inclined.
Not sure what you're referencing on the working piece of software getting scrapped, as the data used in the oCB/oMB is all in the Compendium, which still works fine.
Start using your brand to sell other products. Invest in a movie or tv series without it being a razzie contender. Share the profits with known writers and directors. Look at how Marvel has marketed their brand. Merchandising. Sell D&D merchandise. Lucas did it with Star Wars. Hasbro... come on guys. Someone there is out to lunch.
You mean like Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon board games? Or how about the comic book series? Oh wait:
Children's books and board games? Interesting. Actually sorry no, no interest in those unfortunately. How about merchandising something the players who know the brand already (ie the only people who would probably care) could appreciate?
...huh. Well what exactly do you want then? Lunchboxes? More books? There's not a lot of room here.
(Also, you know that they have to think about bringing new business in as well as provide retention, right? Just merchandising to the people who've already "bought in" is the worst way to do business.)
Create a suite for DM's to use with a laptop at the table. Digitize EVERYTHING so that a DM needs only his laptop to play. Why is this so incredibly difficult?
You mean like the character builder, compendium, adventure tools, and VT that are
currently in development? Sure, they're not feature rich yet, but digital development is a process, not an end product. I rather like the fact that we get at least a portion of the tools to work with as they continue to make them into what they'd like them to be, rather than having nothing and them continuing to say "We're working on it guys, promise! You'll have tools eventually!" and waiting for a single, perfected result.
As for it being difficult, there's no question that what development staff they have is probably very overworked, understaffed, and underbudgeted. If Trevor Kidd is to be believed, this again is a Hasbro suit problem more than a WotC problem; they're caught between a rock and a hard place, as they don't have a solid enough product to justify more manpower and don't have the manpower to produce a more solid product.
I guess you didn't get the memo.
DDI subscribers have a thread. It's long. It contains all of the arguments on why they *cancelled* their subscription after the old CB was killed.
The new CB is slick? Are you just trolling or... really??
Right, a thread that was created as a knee-jerk reaction to the first iteration of the wCB, from which we've already come pretty far. Clearly a compelling argument.
It's also slightly ironic -- most of your "Account" idea is exactly what DDI is now. The only serious differences are that it's not offline, which goes back to the piracy matter which I covered earlier, and that you're paying for a suite of information instead of cherry picking -- but cherry picking almost always comes at a premium, and for a game like this where no single element exists in a vacuum it's counterproductive. Even if you don't play a barbarian, having some knowledge about them is useful so you can more effectively play alongside one, or DM for one.
D&D is the sum of its parts, not a collection of individual entities that exist independently and separately from each other, and can't be effectively treated as such.
