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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9572534" data-attributes="member: 7737">A fair complaint. However, not one that is unique to Wizards. In fact, perennial mismanagement of digital projects affects every business way, way, WAY outside the elfgaming niche.Source: ... just read any book about software development written in the last 30 years, and probably for decades before that. (I mean heck, "The Mythical Man-Month" dates back to 1975! and was describing problems that were already old at that point.)The vaporware that they showed off in the infamous video was just that, smoke and mirrors. However I will note that Wizards was far from the only company to show off a smoke and mirrors software "product". Much like "subscription service", we can lament this aspect of modern business, but we cannot say Wizards/4e did the smoke and mirror vaporware VTT any worse than anyone else at the time.Point the first, almost all software projects are mismanaged and under-resourced.Point the second, in my experience and the experiences of many friends and colleagues in or adjacent to software development (so: here come anecdotes, but I'd like to submit the are representative) -- the loss of two key people is ALWAYS crippling on ANY team in ANY size company on ANY project REGARDLESS of how well managed and funded it is.We might like to think that large organizations have in place redundant backups and knowledge transfers and blah blah blah and some of that is true, but the reality is that software is still build by individuals working in small teams (or often: working solo). Thus when you lose that one guy or gal it is a BIG PROBLEM.I will give you an example from my current employer, which is a huge multi-BILLION dollar company you almost certainly have heard of. We have a process that sends some key product information to our suppliers (trying to be vague); that process and much of the code was written by one woman. She is still, thankfully, with the company and not dead like the tragedy that befell the Wizards team -- but she is off in another area and this is, frankly, no longer her problem. It has been a COMPLETE DISASTER since she changed teams, as the new developers try to figure out what she did (I dunno, maybe it's junk? it worked, though), the new non-development manager tries to answer questions from the supplier that he can't answer, and everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else.This kind of thing happens ROUTINELY at major, very well capitalized companies doing work far more serious than elfgaming.Thus, how could Wizards be immune to it?So when someone says "part of 4e's failure was their crappy software development!" that complaint applies to LITERALLY EVERY BUSINESS IN AMERICA.Yes. It is easy to forget just how mind-blowing it was: for YEARS, a character builder had been the holy grail of D&D, and 4e delivered. We may complain about Silverlight or this and that, but the fact is the character builder WORKED (and still works, wink), and that had NEVER BEEN DONE in the past with the launch of a new D&D version.(Sure sure, PCGen for 3e; but was not available at launch, and had all KINDS of problems.)Exactly. It's not that these were two random consultant programmers doing some niche to optimize performance of database calls. They were the key people on the team.It would be like if, God forbid, Wyatt and Collins died in a car accident early in 4e's design. Not just two random guys who wrote some monster statblocks. Two incredibly key guys.</blockquote>

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