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Message: <blockquote data-quote="cougent" data-source="post: 4390403" data-attributes="member: 48665">I gave them a 2, strongly considered a 1.That had nothing to do with my feelings for 4E, it has everything to do with products thay have produced... or not produced.  My initial frustration does go all the way back to e-Tools.  After pre-ordering the product and getting the original 1.0 CD that was almost totally useless, downloading the 1.1 patch from Fluid which fixed almost nothing, and then progressing through the various Code Monkey Publishing patches upt to 1.666 the program finally became tolerable.  So what does WotC do, they kill it entirely.  Fine, give me my $30 back then.Then to add insult to injury, WotC decides not to license out character generation to any programmers who have character creation software products, no instead they will once again pull a Microsoft and reinvent the wheel themselves, and again create a product that will have built in shortcomings, in this case a required Internet connection and a monthly "rental" fee.  You can't buy the product and just use it, you can only borrow it at WotC descretiuon (The site is temporarily down for maintenance) and as long as you keep paying for it.  Create a character today, stop paying in a month or six, bye-bye character.As a subscriber or buyer of Dragon magazine since issue 45, I was dumbstruck with the cancellation of the magazine.  Having seen other magazines convert to online only however I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt.  I didn't have high expectations for the first attempt, but now almost a year later it is just as bad as ever.  Yes it is still free, a temporary consolation prize, but as it exists now I would not pay for it if it were a subscription product. Assuring me it will get better AS a subscription product is not going to fly either... I already drank that Kool-Aid once with e-Tools and will not drink again, ever!I have not purchased the 4E books, and from what I am hearing about the production quality, I do not want to even if I do convert to 4E.  This may be the catalyst that drives me to PDF books (from WotC anyway) from here on out.  I am sure they don't mind that since they charge almost as much for a PDF file that has an extremely low production cost as they do for a printed book that has significant production costs.  More profit for them!  I don't begrudge them a profit, but when the competition recognizes these differences in production costs with discounted PDF versus print products, it further alienates me from buying WotC products.For me it is more about quality than brand name, and since I am a 3.5 supporter the brand name thing has almost no meaning now anyway.  If WotC raises the bar on its production quality then I will not rule out future purchases in spite or anything like that, but for now I am just not impressed with their offerings.</blockquote>

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