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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Roman" data-source="post: 4744829" data-attributes="member: 1845">That is your prerogative, but do you really believe people would be this angry if this was the first action by WotC to which they objected? A few would, perhaps, but I still think for many this was merely the last straw that got them angry and not some sort of isolated incident.  I am not sure what you are getting at. Obviously, for different people there are different last straws. There are also different last straws for different levels of reaction in the same person. For example, my personal last straw for not giving WotC the benefit of the doubt came about a month or two ago with the endless GSL delays. I began to entertain the possibility that malice (deliberately butchering the 3PP market) rather than incompetence were the cause - quite possibly that is not the case, but I began to consider it as a possibility rather than auto-assuming that WotC's intentions were clean and taking their statements at face value as I have more or less done hitherto. By the same token, for many people this fiasco seems to be the last straw before becoming angry at WotC. Some might even stop buying products, and others will not despite being angry. Different last straws for different levels of reaction and for different people and all that...   Only a few people have said something to that effect and they might well follow through for all we know, but again, the numbers of people who have said something like that are not large. There is a difference between expressing anger, as many have done, and actually expressing a desire for boycott. That said, dismissing the power of the internet to organize consumers for a boycott and an anti-company campaign is not prudent. From personal experience, I was engaged in the anti-EA boycott because of draconian DRM they imposed on their games. It took about 6 months to a year (depending on when you start counting), but EA is now backing off the draconian DRM scheme, but only after the public relations fiasco has cost it 10s of millions of dollars in lost sales in its own admission. EA deserves credit for rectifying its mistake, but it has lost many sales and much goodwill by trying to last out the boycott. This was an internet-based campaign and I am not saying that WotC is about to suffer something like that - I am just using it to illustrate that internet-based customer anger can have an impact on the bottom line of a huge gaming company (EA is surely much bigger than WotC). The EA case actually bears a sad parallel to the current WotC case. In both cases, the companies argued that they are fighting piracy with their moves. In both cases, their real motivations were more suspect. In EA's case, a likely alternate motivation was destroying second-hand sales through draconian DRM mechanisms and in WotCs case it may be some sort of weirdly veiled attempt to bring all of its electronic products into a service-based model (perhaps based on the DDI). In the case of EA, the DDRM proved completely ineffectual in fighting piracy and Spore (the poster-child DDRM-infested game) became the most pirated game in history. WotC's move will prove similarly ineffectual. Let us hope WotC wisens up to the stupidity of its decision faster than EA did and reverses it as quickly as possible.</blockquote>

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