Another problem is the ulterior motives for the decision makers or those that influence them. Rare is the quality of ingenuous service towards your company. Usually: personal interests > company interest.
Pathfinder 1E The good man WotC and the scoundrel Paizo
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Another problem is the ulterior motives for the decision makers or those that influence them. Rare is the quality of ingenuous service towards your company. Usually: personal interests > company interest.
Fifth Element
Legend
Of course not. But anyone who claims to be correct rather than lucky should be able to show their work, so to speak. Ditto with anyone claiming that someone else was incorrect rather than unlucky.
"Hindsight is 20/20" does not mean that you cannot have been right or wrong; just that it's easy to say "they should have known" after the fact. You need rather more than the end result to say someone screwed up.
Again, it's not what you say, it's your basis for saying it.
Fifth Element
Legend
Rather the opposite, as Wicht said. If you included character creation rules (among other things), you could not use the d20 STL. That was presumably designed so that you'd always have a reason to buy a PHB from WotC.
Jeff Wilder
First Post
Yes, we are under the obligation to research back several years and prove to your satisfaction -- cough, cough -- that the reasons we believed the decisions to be bad were actually the reasons the decisions proved to be bad.
At which point you'll say, "There's no way to prove that, because only WoTC has all of the information to make that judgment. And they got unlucky."
Come on.
Nobody here -- okay, very few people here -- hates WoTC. But with the apologists for WotC claiming that it's impossible to offer valid, sound, reason-based criticisms of WotC, it's not at all a surprise that hatred of WotC and contempt for WotC's irrepressible apologists gets conflated.
Fifth Element
Legend
To clarify (hopefully):
Wizards of the Coast may have made some bad decisions regarding 4E, even using my defiition of a bad decision.
My point is that we just don't know. And as such, slagging them for making "obviously bad" decisions is unfair.
Wizards of the Coast may have made some bad decisions regarding 4E, even using my defiition of a bad decision.
My point is that we just don't know. And as such, slagging them for making "obviously bad" decisions is unfair.
WotC came up with 3rd edition - a clear improvement - but the guys who actually worked on it, like Monte Cook, are long gone from there. (In fact most of the better designers tend to be pushed out quickly from there.) So the current WotC deserves no credit for that.
Ever since late 3rd ed, WotC has been doing shoddy work a lot of the time. There are exceptions but they are in the minority. The trend was clear when 3.5 came out - they fixed some things, but messed up others, and didn't address some obvious low hanging fruit such as the problems with polymorph - in fact they explicity said that they did last minute work on 3.5 that resulted in shapechange being overpowered, as if that was not unacceptable and shameful of them. They rushed it through and created a need for Pathfinder in doing so.
Paizo consistently does careful work, which tends to be good, but in any case clearly has had effort put into it unlike WotC's. They also take into account the feelings of their customers, unlike WotC.
Ever since late 3rd ed, WotC has been doing shoddy work a lot of the time. There are exceptions but they are in the minority. The trend was clear when 3.5 came out - they fixed some things, but messed up others, and didn't address some obvious low hanging fruit such as the problems with polymorph - in fact they explicity said that they did last minute work on 3.5 that resulted in shapechange being overpowered, as if that was not unacceptable and shameful of them. They rushed it through and created a need for Pathfinder in doing so.
Paizo consistently does careful work, which tends to be good, but in any case clearly has had effort put into it unlike WotC's. They also take into account the feelings of their customers, unlike WotC.
Fifth Element
Legend
Will I? If you can provide publically-available information that proves it, clearly WotC would also have access to that information, since as you say they have vastly superior information than you or I. Why would I hold them to a different standard, since holding them to a different standard is akin to what I'm arguing against?
No. In other words, we lack the information to know if anyone was correct. Maybe BryonD was correct. Maybe WotC was correct, but something nobody could see affected outcomes. I'd more likely guess that "correct" doesn't apply - the information available at the time was not sufficient to make a reliable prediction.
More relevant in our own little space here - getting into each other's grills over speculation is kinda dumb.
Calling people "apologists" for not agreeing with you is also pretty danged rude and dismissive. You might want to rethink that particular tactic.
"Vastly superior" compared to what? Our "nearly none"? That's not saying much. I try not to second guess those with superior information, but let's not make that to mean that having more means they actually had enough.
You speak as if there's a "right" and "wrong", a clear correct and incorrect in business - like business was a deterministic, predictable machine. I think very few who look at the business world would agree with that. Business isn't about knowing exactly what will happen for sure, but about managing among uncertainties.
This doesn't mean that you cannot criticize business decisions, but it should impact how you do so. Set aside the idea that anyone is objectively right and wrong, and look at whether, given the information they had at the time, and their goals, what they did was wise or unwise.
Don't know what information they had, or their goals? Well, then criticism becomes more difficult.
I think this particular line needs addressing.
If anyone around here actually hates WotC...
The world is filled with some really bad stuff. Business decisions about a leisure activity hobby games is, as far as I can see, small potatoes. Tater tots, even - itty-bitty, and not even a real potato any more. With the no-politics, no-religion rules around here, there should be darned little on these boards that merits more than a minor annoyance to you.
Save hate and anger for things that really matter, folks.
Jeff Wilder
First Post
Except that many people did. But they were just "lucky," right?
I don't call people apologists for disagreeing with me. I call people apologists when they have demonstrated a pattern of offering excuses and defenses to the extent that they appear to be incapable of admitting anything negative about the focus of their apologist behavior. (And, yeah, "WotC, in your 20/20 hindsight (which is oh-so-easy), made a mistake, but they couldn't possibly have known it would be a mistake, so quit suggesting they be held responsible!" is pretty classic apologist behavior.)
We didn't have "nearly none." What we had was understanding of gamer desires and attitudes (both good and bad) and a better ability to reason along a path to predicting what would happen.
WotC had access to all of the information available to us -- and vastly more -- which doesn't make them less responsible for their absurd decisions. It makes them more responsible.
Except in the perception of their apologists, of course.
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