WotC WotC blacklist. Discussion

[Myrdin Potter]

Canada sounds nice.

Taxes are kind of high, there is unfortunate language politics in one province and most places are pretty damned cold. Much more opportunity in the USA, but a good place to be be from.

 

[Waller]

What i find harder to forgive is them blowing up and purging the old WotC D&D forums when Gleemax came online, and in turn, doing the same to the Gleemax forums once their usefulness to WotC had ended.

And the ending of the d20 STL and the GSL. Why anybdy releases anything on DMs Guild I don't know, because obviously at some point it will all go the same way. Four times bitten, won't get fooled again? Is that the saying?

 

[Parmandur]

I have not worked at a place for a decade (or more) that did not have strict rules about posting about work. Most even have warnings that you can be terminated for being a chump in public. I long ago purged my job from anything but LinkedIn. And this is from a person that is actually a company spokesperson …

There is no way that Hasbro should allow employees to post here. This thread alone has enough insults about WoTC employees to be a good indication of why.

I do find many threads here to be informative and the moderation is generally on mark to steer the conversation to gaming and away from personal insults and politics, so I think it is useful to monitor for WoTC.

It takes a certain age range and passion to post on a forum vs. social media, after all.

It's really astonishing and unprofessional to look back at what WotC employees were doing and saying on boards 15 years ago. I mean, they were getting into protracted arguments with trolls, that's not good for business.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

It's really astonishing and unprofessional to look back at what WotC employees were doing and saying on boards 15 years ago. I mean, they were getting into protracted arguments with trolls, that's not good for business.

Pretty much all of the “Gygax is a xxx” fodder comes from forums posts he made.

 

[Parmandur]

Pretty much all of the “Gygax is a xxx” fodder comes from forums posts he made.

Yeah, though at least he did that inhis own time, not on the clock for Hasbro.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Taxes are kind of high, there is unfortunate language politics in one province and most places are pretty damned cold. Much more opportunity in the USA, but a good place to be be from.

Mod Note:

Lets not delve any deeper into Canadian politics, thank you.

 

[Hussar]

That said I tend to forgive them Gleemax and the associated software screwups. I have been involved in software development car crashes and in developing software for managements with no experience in software development. D&D management seem to have made all the classic mistakes.

As far as the software stuff goes, let's not forget that the story there is actually pretty tragic. No one can predict a murder/suicide derailing your software development.

As much flack as WotC deserves, there was a bunch of OTHER stuff too that just dumped all sorts of gasoline on the already burning dumpster fire. @Snarf Zagyg has a really fantastic post about the timeline floating around here somewhere that I forgot to bookmark and really should because it's just spot on.

It's really rather interesting when you think about it. SF&F fandom is so different from other fandoms. We certainly don't expect the coach of the Toronto Blue Jays to post on some baseball website to argue player choices, for example. I'm pretty unaware of any websites where directors or producers of non-SF&F movies interact with the public on anything remotely close to the interactions we get here. But, F&SF fans have always had a very intimate relationship with content producers. You could pretty easily meet people like Patrick Stewart at an SF convention. You could interact with Gary Gygax at Gen Con for years and years. Or Mike Mearls, or whoever. For a very long time, I think because F&SF as a genre has been so tiny, that the fandom has really gotten used to being able to directly interact with pretty much anyone in the genre.

I mean, good grief, I emailed Neil Gaiman years and years ago to ask if I could use his story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" in my ESL class and he was tickled pink. Emailed me back with a very friendly letter letting me use it no problems. Heck, that's a story that actually got turned into a movie with Nicole Kidman. Not exactly unknown stuff, although, I think at the time it rather was. But, no problems at all. Totally nice about it. Could you imagine me emailing some non-genre writer and doing the same thing? I certainly can't.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

As far as the software stuff goes, let's not forget that the story there is actually pretty tragic. No one can predict a murder/suicide derailing your software development.

This may have affected Gleemax, which was as I recall an internal project but the VTT demoed in the run up to 4e launch was being done by a contracting company and they delivered a demo with no networking code.

That said, almost all WoTC D&D web sites prior to the current one had this magazine like layout, that does not work on the web an is usually (in my experience ) a result of a fixation on the part of senior management rather than the developers.

 

[darjr]

This may have affected Gleemax, which was as I recall an internal project but the VTT demoed in the run up to 4e launch was being done by a contracting company and they delivered a demo with no networking code.

That said, almost all WoTC D&D web sites prior to the current one had this magazine like layout, that does not work on the web an is usually (in my experience ) a result of a fixation on the part of senior management rather than the developers.

I thought that vtt was the second attempt not the first?

Also Joseph would have been in charge of that anyway. He was a video game developer/designer before WotC, and from what I remember was brought in specifically because they wanted a 3D video game like vtt. But I could be misremembering.

 

[seebs]

Some of the research on "harmful effects of screen time" is vulnerable to a correlation/causality problem. If you verify that two things seem to be correlated, that doesn't mean one causes the other. For instance, depressed people don't go out much, so many researchers concluded that "not going out" caused depression... But it's not actually obvious that this is the case! Similarly, a lot of the alleged negative effects of "screen time" appear to mostly be "if you're depressed and lonely and have no one to hang out with in person, you spend more time on your phone talking to people". Studies trying to tease out the direction of influence don't seem to show the negative effects.