D&D 4E Why is this board so down on 4E critics?

[king_ghidorah]

Think of the stereotypical player of WoW. That is why it is used as an insult.

When someone uses "They are making it like WoW" as an insult, it is generally used to mean that they are marketing it (4E) towards teenagers who are only interested in killing things and getting "phat loot!!" and have no interest at all in roleplaying. They need to be spoon-fed quests and can only work on a railroad.

Of course, in my snotty "I'm too good to play D&D" days, I and other RPers like me used to characterize D&D that way ourselves. Of course it wasn't a true representation of D&D players, though we all had plenty of anecdotal evidence of D&D play that was just like that and reasons to argue that the game rules as structured supported that sort of play.

Geek culture has a lot of interesting hierarchical prejudices (tabletop vs. larp, my system vs. your system, my genre of interest vs. yours, everyone vs. furries...) and this sort of hierarchical system is as arbitrary, biased, and based on stereotypes as any other....

 

[Piratecat]

FIFY.

I'm sorry too, but just because you consider it to be rude doesn't make it so. It's a pretty common practice.

No, it can be pretty rude. It's also a fairly common practice on the net, but it's not one that we really encourage here.

 

[Rel]

No, it can be pretty rude. It's also a fairly common practice on the net, but it's not one that we really encourage here.

HOBO GOT PWND!!

Wait, do we discourage sayin stuff like that too?

 

[king_ghidorah]

By the way, while I don't 100% believe that such an email was sent (in WotC's case, I'd rather expect formal documents about something leak-critical as this), shouldn't playtesters report their negative feedback/review to WotC, meaning it would get fixed and would hence be pointless anyway?

Additionally, if you're playtester, your job is finding faults and reporting them (and allowing change, as above), not trumpeting them into the internet.

If playtesters find negative things and don't report them, "saving" them as criticism, then that's pretty underhanded, yeah?

Cheers, LT.

I think of work places where employees have complained publicly about issues that were not brought up in the work place (this procedure sucks, and the office is screwing up). Those employees were generally reprimanded, and our staff was reminded that complaints had to go to supervisors before dirty laundry was aired publicly. Those who reprimanded complained that this was sweeping things under the rug. The truth was, the complaint was that this sort of reporting undermined the group and didn't give supervisors the chance to address the problem. This seems pretty fair to me.

Likewise, with play testers, I could understand an instruction that any problems you had needed to come back to Wizards to get fixed, not aired in public, to give the designers a chance to address issues. I could also see where someone who had a problem with the system would consider this a silencing move rather than an attempt to direct playtesters to do their job, which is not to review the system, but to find problems and report them to the company, not air dirty laundry about an in-progress system. This seems pretty fair to me, too.

 

[king_ghidorah]

FIFY.

I'm sorry too, but just because you consider it to be rude doesn't make it so. It's a pretty common practice.

Yeah, but most FIFY comments come across as smug, sarcastic, and passive-aggressive IME. Common practice, perhaps not overtly rude, but not necessarily polite, either.

 

[king_ghidorah]

Oops. double post.

 

[Desdichado]

Just because something is common practice doesn't make it right.

And just because a handful of people complain about something doesn't make it wrong.

If it's clearly labelled as such, so that nobody could interpret it as deliberately misattributing what someone said, then I don't see any way this can be considered rude behavior.

 

[Tewligan]

Wait, do we discourage sayin stuff like that too?Egg McMuffins

FIFY

 

[Desdichado]

HOBO GOT PWND!!

Wait, do we discourage sayin stuff like that too?

I think only if you post that as an image macro, like such:

 

[Psion]

FIFY is fine... in places where it is accepted practice.

I don't think ENWorld is one of those places, and can certainly see how it would be considered rude and "putting words in people's mouths" in places where it has not achieved joke status.