The Impasse

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I think it has to do with a belief that gaming companies should exist only to make games for us, not to make money.

I think there might be two extreme views:

1) WotC is (or at least should be) only there to make profit. They don't care about what they produce, toilet paper, rulebooks, or toilet paper concealed as rulebook, as long as it makes money. But those ignore that they are producing games, and there are more profitable things to produce.

2) WotC is (or at least should) only care about the games. It doesn't matter whether they make some money or not. But those ignore that if they don't make money, they will eventually have to stop creating games.

So yeah, I think WotC should consider their bottom line. It is important to them. But they also want to make gaming products.

But WotC is not an individual. So there are people - like the designers and developers - that look out for WotC from a game system perspective - make the best game they can. And there are other people - maybe marketing or brand or however WotC is organized - that look out that WotC still makes money in the process. And these groups have to inform each other and sometimes have to make compromises.

 

[Jack99]

Patently false, of course. No one is saying that WotC should not make money.

That's not what I said. Let me try to rephrase it.

Some people believe that gaming companies raison d'être should be making games for us, making money should be a far second (or tenth for that matter).

It's just that a lot of people are questioning the actual value of products vs their relative or perceived value.

I agree. As in this kind exists too. But these are not the people I was talking about.

 

[Rechan]

Calling someone a blind defender or blind hater is, IMO, no different than calling someone a 4E "fanboi" or a 4E "H4TER". It is an attempt to remove the legitimacy of a person's arguments or opinions by attacking the person rather than their argument or opinion.

Well, I for one will admit to being a fanboy. I love 4e. I adore it. There are some places I think could have been more polished out of the gate, I see some room for improvements, but by and large, it rocks my socks. Not my favorite system (Still waiting on the Dresden Files RPG), but I want to roll around naked on a bed of 4e DMGs and MMs.

 

[Rechan]

Calling a company greedy as an insult is like calling a duck a mammal as an insult.

But... ducks aren't mammals. They're avians.

No seriously, someone explain this argument to me. I'm not quite grasping the intent of getting upset at a company - which literally exists solely for profit gaining reasons - desiring to make a profit.

Outside of the realm of gaming, in more a general sense, the issue is companies that try to make a profit at the expense of everything else. Safety, the environment, their employees, exploiting their customers, etc. So it leads to a level of distrust - "they're trying to get money at you, at what cost?"

Here is where also you get the inclusion of someone's personal politics, so that's about as far as I'll go on this board.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

But... ducks aren't mammals. They're avians.
Outside of the realm of gaming, in more a general sense, the issue is companies that try to make a profit at the expense of everything else. Safety, the environment, their employees, exploiting their customers, etc. So it leads to a level of distrust - "they're trying to get money at you, at what cost?"

And companies aren't people. As fun as it is to pain a company or corporation as one evil looking Eastern European man in a business suit with a secret underground lair and a white fluffy cat*, that's not how the real world works. People inside of a company can be greedy. A company cannot. Literally, a company cannot be greedy. People talk about the Enron scandal, but many people who got screwed by it were either working with or for Enron.

*I do this too. It makes reading about stock trading a thousand times more interesting, which, in retrospective, isn't difficult to do.

 

[Kichwas]

Anytime something people have a lot of vested emotion in radically changes you get camps of people dedicated to defending tradition and camps dedicated to advocating for change. When it is the 'powers that be' that iniates the change it becomes even more muddled, as you get the traditionalist aligning with the revolutionaries and the liberals working for 'the man.'

And that's about the state of things here.

We've all run to our labels, found some strange bedfellows there, and tossed out the usual arguments at each other.

Nobody's happy.

In order to get around that shark without jumping it, you need to break tradition while appearing to conform, and you need to be 'the man' while appearing to be a pack of outsiders - ie: a new administration / regime change. Kind of like how WotC pulled off 3.0.

It was all about the timing, and a stream of adds proclaiming the return to the dungeon. They even carted Gygax out for a few hand waving moments. Yet they were the new kids on the block, and it definitely wasn't the same rock n' roll we grew up on. It just had the right wrapping - they got us all in the same bed for a few years.


Oh:
The other topic in this thread...

Marijuana in its natural state might not be addictive or harmful, but more and more of the newer strains of the drug are getting produced to have a more potent effect. Some of those new strains end up being lethal. And if you're buying that crap on the street - you've got no idea what its been dipped or dosed in. You can be pretty sure the guy selling it to you wants to find a way to make it addictive, and whoever's growing his supply is probably working on that.

It could be argued that prostitution reduces victims, if you look at it from the PoV of reducing the spread of STDs and lowering human trafficking. On the other hand, human trafficking has gone -UP- in many places that legalized Prostitution, such as Germany and the Netherlands. But at that point its an immigration issue. Its going up for the same reason your local farmer is using illegal workers (Slavery lost out in the 19th century when it became cheaper to pay less than a living wage to a worker - giving the 'free' world stronger economic power. But in today's global world, it has become even cheaper to simply replace a dead slave... ergo human trafficking / slavery is once again profitable). On the other hand, if you look at prostitution from a moral PoV - it has victims in spouses, Johns, and workers. But when illegal these victims lack health checks and you get things like children born with AIDS from mothers who have never been with anyone other than their husbands...

 

[The Little Raven]

Marijuana in its natural state might not be addictive or harmful, but more and more of the newer strains of the drug are getting produced to have a more potent effect. Some of those new strains end up being lethal.

There has never been a single documented case of someone dying from an overdose of marijuana. This reminds of old government propaganda about "devil weed" and nonsense like that.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Marijuana in its natural state might not be addictive or harmful, but more and more of the newer strains of the drug are getting produced to have a more potent effect. Some of those new strains end up being lethal. And if you're buying that crap on the street - you've got no idea what its been dipped or dosed in. You can be pretty sure the guy selling it to you wants to find a way to make it addictive, and whoever's growing his supply is probably working on that.[/quote[

Doesn't that only give more weight to the argument that it's better off legal?

I mean, legalizing things always works. Like with prohibition. That worked. Right?

And as was previously stated, there's yet to be a single case of someone dying from an overdose of marijuana. Not a single case. You don't have a 1 in 100 chance of dying from a pot overdose. You have a zero in infinity chance.

It could be argued that prostitution reduces victims, if you look at it from the PoV of reducing the spread of STDs and lowering human trafficking. On the other hand, human trafficking has gone -UP- in many places that legalized Prostitution, such as Germany and the Netherlands. But at that point its an immigration issue. Its going up for the same reason your local farmer is using illegal workers (Slavery lost out in the 19th century when it became cheaper to pay less than a living wage to a worker - giving the 'free' world stronger economic power. But in today's global world, it has become even cheaper to simply replace a dead slave... ergo human trafficking / slavery is once again profitable). On the other hand, if you look at prostitution from a moral PoV - it has victims in spouses, Johns, and workers. But when illegal these victims lack health checks and you get things like children born with AIDS from mothers who have never been with anyone other than their husbands...

Morally, prostitution will have the spouses, John, and workers as victims irregardless of it's legality. Prostitution - fnar fnar, much like piracy - will not go away. Ever. Period. It's here to stay. Forever. Period. You can't argue based on variables that never change.

Legalizing it removes the prostitute from the list of victims. Along with health checks, you run pimps off the street and make "working girls" actually working girls who have legal and viable protection. Suddenly you no longer have to worry about dead bodies under the hotel bed.

 

[Shazman]

Even if your description of WotC were correct (I do not believe it is), WotC is simply a game company. That's it. It doesn't produce deadly weapons, unsafe vehicles or toxic foodstuffs. I think terrorist organizations, tyrannical governments, fraudulent financial institutions, abusive religious cults and criminal groups all over the world deserve demonization far, far more than a game company that makes business decisions you disagree with. Let's get some perspective, here.

I wasn't directing my ire at WotC, but at greedy and corrupt corporations in general. Hasbro and WotC aren't "evil" to the same degree that many of the corrupt financial institutions that have helped to create the current economic crisis are. They have done some things in the past few years that are pretty disrespectful to many fans of the D&D game, and some things that seem to be just plain stupid. I wouldn't say that they are the epitome of evil, but I definitely have little enough respect for them and what they have done to one of my favorite pastimes that I no longer want to associate with them or give them any of my money.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

I wasn't directing my ire at WotC, but at greedy and corrupt corporations in general. Hasbro and WotC aren't "evil" to the same degree that many of the corrupt financial institutions that have helped to create the current economic crisis are. They have done some things in the past few years that are pretty disrespectful to many fans of the D&D game, and some things that seem to be just plain stupid. I wouldn't say that they are the epitome of evil, but I definitely have little enough respect for them and what they have done to one of my favorite pastimes that I no longer want to associate with them or give them any of my money.

Er. You're being a bit naive here, I think.

Companies exist to make a bottom line. That's the entire point of the market. Of ANY market. Of A market. Make money. Enron is no different from WotC is no different from the FLGS is no different from the guy selling roses on the corner. They all have one goal. Get money. It may not sound romantic to think that, but in most cases, it's true. That's not to say that money is 100% the most important thing at all times, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think it's on most peoples' minds.

Don't cast your blame at the company doing what they shareholders want them to. The economic crises is, quite frankly, something we've been building up for some time. I live in California and know quite a few people who work in various parts of the housing industry with a few of the giants, some of whom are still around, and THAT bubble burst was seen years ago by people in the actual industry (Which in turn is why some of them are still around). So why did more money get put in? Consumers and shareholders wanted it.

A company, at the end of the day, isn't a Shadowrun-esque megalomaniac run country. It is, at the end of the day, responsible for its actions to the consumers and to the shareholders. Ask them why the entire emphasis of business for the past decade (or two) has been increasingly put on short term profits with little to no long term plans. Ask them why they took loans they knew they couldn't afford.