Wizards: Musings on the new DDi disaster

[Glyfair]

Doesn't 3.5 still have PCGen? I've never liked it's interface, but the program works. (And isn't it available for Pathfinder?)

Funny you should mention PCGen. In the early days I used it and liked it and what it could become with more work. One day they decided they needed to make it cross platform and so switched to Java. What was once a pretty quick, useful program became a sluggish mess on my computer and I pretty much abandoned it.

Turn the clock forward and we have WotC taking a very useful and working program and decided to move it forward, with cross platform compatibility being a mentioned goal, and ended up with a sluggish non-working mess (at least on my computer, which can't even create and Eberron character.)

I understand the early version of a program can be wonky (but it shouldn't be this wonky). However, you can't do that when you have a strong working program. It takes the standard and sets it back a long time. IMO, the character generator was pretty much state-of-the-art in RPG character generators and now is back to the days when the first few 3E generators started to be designed.

 

[Grabuto138]

My opinion about their financial status is just as much a bag of hot air as yours is. Only difference is... I don't actually believe I really know what's going on.

Hasbro is publically traded. There must be someone on this board who is a broker, an attorney or somehow how ready access to a database with the financial information to settle this debate.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

No US copyright case has ever been decided solely on the strength of the boilerplate in a ToS agreement. In fact, boilerplate between parties to a contract who are demonstrably of radically unequal bargaining power is generally either interpreted most strictly against the contract drafter or ignored.

I wanted to clarify this a bit:

In most cases, transferring a copyright requires the exchange of something of comparable value.

If someone were to sell you a character sheet, and you wrote your PC on it, the person who sold you the sheet would not own your PC. The only thing you got from him was something you paid for, the sheet.

CB is essentially a computerized character sheet with some frills. You pay for that service. They have given you nothing of value in addition to this to make a transfer of ownership valid. If, OTOH, the ToS had a clause that included paying a royalty or a fee that was the industry standard for freelance work for characters in the CB that were used by WotC, then you might start being concerned.

However, since you have no bargaining power in the relationship, a court might still deem that full ownership of the character had not been transferred.

 

[bbjore]

You know, I read all the various responses about how terrible DDI is, how it's a ripoff, and how people are done with 4E because of the character builder stuff, and quite frankly it baffles me. I always thought D&D was a Pen and paper game. You bought the books, and you wrote your character down on a sheet of paper. I can still do this, although now I use copy and paste from the compendium, and it goes even faster. When I'm in a bind for time, I'll use the character builder, and can have character done in 20 minutes using either the offline or online version even with the crashes. For me, it seems like they've done nothing but keep on improving on things as they were 10 years ago. Are things perfect? No. But I hardly think the fact that a gaming accessory doesn't work is a reason to dislike the system or the end of the game itself.

That might not be true for everyone, and regardless of how people feel, I truly hope they all find their own bliss in whatever system works for them. But I do wish people would spend more time enjoying a game, any game, with their friends rather than focusing on the shortfalls of a simple accessory. Wizards is a gaming company, it was probably a little unrealistic to expect them to be a top tier program design company in the space of a few years. But I for one am at least glad their trying to improve the game as best they can. I'd rather have them try and fail than not try at all. I waited 20 years for a digital implementation of D&D that made me happy, and I can wait a few more. Until then, I say the compendium alone is worth the price of DDI.

 

[Grabuto138]

I wanted to clarify this a bit:

In most cases, transferring a copyright requires the exchange of something of comparable value.

If someone were to sell you a character sheet, and you wrote your PC on it, the person who sold you the sheet would not own your PC. The only thing you got from him was something you paid for, the sheet.

CB is essentially a computerized character sheet with some frills. You pay for that service. They have given you nothing of value in addition to this to make a transfer of ownership valid. If, OTOH, the ToS had a clause that included paying a royalty or a fee that was the industry standard for freelance work for characters in the CB that were used by WotC, then you might start being concerned.

However, since you have no bargaining power in the relationship, a court might still deem that full ownership of the character had not been transferred.

Could we all agree that the debate over IP in this context is largely moot since no one, least of all WOTC, wants your character? I have no idea whether or not the picture you draw on a urinal wall with your own feces has some sort of implied copyright. But I can say for certain that, at at least in terms of entertainment value, it has more value than any character currently residing in anyone's character builder.

Dannyalcatraz: By "you" I don't mean you. I mean "us." Or at least the portion of of us that thinks our character has some sort of currency in the real world.

Edit: Since I quoted Dannyalctraz a reasonable person may assume I was refering so him. I absolutely was not.

 

[Dice4Hire]

Hasbro is publically traded. There must be someone on this board who is a broker, an attorney or somehow how ready access to a database with the financial information to settle this debate.

The problem with this is separating WOTC out form the masses of other Hasbro businesses.

 

[avin]

Well said Merric.

This new CB is pure trash, a total fiasco, an epic fail, I can't even use it on my netbook as I used the old CB.

Time to refresh wotc staff.

 

[Votan]

It's legal boilerplate. Many or most online applications that accept content from users have some such thing, to defend themselves from any number of future unforeseen circumstances.

It is a significant defense against convergent development, which is not at all unlikely in a small field: You put something in the CB. WotC independently developed something similar to your content. You cannot make claims that they used your content without permission.

There's a certain... arrogance to the idea that there is some significant risk that WotC is going to actually take your stuff and use it and make scads of money off it and leave you in the cold. I mean, really?

I suspect the actual concern was a lawsuit after the dream fantasy novel is published from WotC. I don't think that naybody is worried, per se, about WotC stealing names for human slayers with dark pasts fromn the character builder. While I agree that the risks are microscopic, it is a small reason for an aspiring novelist to care.

THat being said, defending against convergent development is fairly critical and a reason that many author types avoid forums where ideas get posted (JMS from Babylon 5 had an online presence so long as nobody posted ideas -- he already had ideas but did not want to deal with the accusation of having lifted one that happened to be similar).

 

[AllisterH]

Er, people do realize that M:TG actually gets mentioned in Hasbro stockholder reports? Indeed, in the last couple of years, M:TG has undergone something of a resurgence in popularity..Hell, the Xbox Live game Duels of the planeswalkers is listed in the top 10 of all time X-box-live games and that's incredible...

Given the size of Hasbro, M:TG must be pulling in serious moolah to get a mention and from what I remember, M:TG is NOT WOTC's most profitable property...

That would be DuelMasters which is HUGE apparently in East Asia (but was a bust in the North America) market.

M:TG has undergone in the last few years significant changes (rules changes, addition of planeswalkers, mythic rares)...but I think this is where M:TG has an edge over D&D. M:TG has ALWAYS been somewhat in-flux. Fans of the game realize/expect that the game will always be changing/being modified. With the rotation of sets and the fact that cards every 3 months change in value because of the addition of new cards means WOTC has conditioned MTG players to be more receptive to change.

So the fact that WOTC tries something different with M:TG isn't seen as "the sky is falling" (...although..even here...on MTG website, MaRo likes to joke that he is STILL working on that damn list and one day he'll actually "wreck" magic the gathering....given how many times people complain/write to him that he's wrecking magic:TG).

We think that WOTC doing nothing/not experimenting/trying something new is a good thing whereas I think most M:TG fans would start to get worried if WOTC didn't have some sort of biyearly announcement.

 

[Imaro]

Well at least now we know what happened with the assasin article.

I'm starting to wonder if the whole "digital" thing has made WotC a little too lax in the Quality department... I mean it seems like going to a more digital format (and I'm talking about everything, including eratta, software, mag articles, etc.) has made them feel that quality is less important because everything can be fixed...later. I think I will hold off until December (if things go as planned) before I check out DDI for now.

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/26276933/Dragon_393_-_Assassin:_Executioner?pg=3

"OK folks, you deserve an explanation. And that is, we messed up.

The article you're seeing and commenting on is not, in fact, the final version of the assassin executioner. Before everyone screams "shenanigans," let me explain what happened.

The magazines and the development team (and everyone else in R&D, for that matter) work on separate calendars. We have our schedule, design has its schedule, development and editing have theirs.

Normally, those things are closely coordinated. In this case, the system broke down.

Back in September, we (being Dragon magazine) promised that the updated assassin would be published in November. Under the impression that it was done, we sent the file through typesetting and posted it. The development team, however, was working toward a December deadline, and had set the assassin aside to deal with other projects. That mis-coordination went unnoticed until today, when one of the developers spotted this thread and realized that something had gone wrong.

The PDF is out there, so we're going to leave it where it is. There's no accelerating the development schedule at this time, because doing so would ripple through other projects that can't be rippled. That means the FINAL final version of the assassin will be available in December, according to Development's schedule.

That's the situation. It's embarrassing, but it's not a conspiracy. We apologize for the confusion.

Steve Winter
Editor-in-Chief, Dragon magazine