Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8666036" data-attributes="member: 18">This is beyond a stretch and into "2+2 = 143.7" territory.The real change is a much more straightforward and direct one - the PR departments of companies have become massively more professional over the period 1990 through 2022. WotC actually trailed far, far, far behind other companies on this - to its chagrin!Back in 1990, most companies, including a lot of very large multinationals, had extremely poorly run PR departments, and numerous ways that executives or even just mid-level people could talk to the press or individuals and circumvent both PR and legal. Executives would mouth off or say dumb things, but the lack of the internet meant such statements rarely went far, though heads often rolled if they did make it to the mainstream news (rather than just, say, Private Eye or an industry specialist publication).As the internet came into being, and it became easier and easier to transmit information, like, say footage of a executive saying something awful, or email or screenshot of an email, or whatever, PR departments and legal departments had to up their game, and companies had to increase professionalism and training to stop people from circumventing them to mouth off (often in ways damaging to the company and/or its products). This in turn lead to consumers expecting better-quality and less slapdash responses.WotC did an appallingly bad job here. It failed to teach professional behaviour to people like Mike Mearls, but put them in leadership positions regardless, and it failed to set up a situation where the communications of the guy who was essentially "the face of D&D" were adequately monitored by PR and legal. This lead to the Zak S fiasco we've been discussing in various threads. Mearls, being extremely unprofessional (like, dude makes me look a senior civil servant in terms of professionalism! Me! A random idiot! Mearls is seemingly the sort of guy who flat-out fail the easy multiple-choice training quiz on "What is the correct thing to do in this business situation"), and having, frankly, outstandingly poor judgement of the kind it takes a lot of entitlement to acquire, decided to take it upon himself to be both judge and jury on the Zak S matter, and to demand evidence from the women involved, despite having declared himself a friend of Zak S not long before and despite the fact that he had absolutely no business whatsoever being involved with this. Somehow, WotC's presumably either inept or powerless PR and legal weren't able to stop Mearls, even though this went on for days, until suddenly BOOM Mearls suffered the fate of the mediocre man promoted beyond his level of competence - he got promoted again, but this time to a position out of sight from the public, and told to shut his yap (a terrible fate to be sure!).Anyway, TLDR, point is, the real change is professionalism in PR/legal in response to the speed of information distribution, which changes expectations/standards re communication. It's nothing to do with "participation prizes" or other bizarre fantasies. You might as well connect it to the price of Freddos! (look it up lol)</blockquote>

Verification