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Author Topic: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...  (Read 10088 times)

Mistwell

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #90 on: January 14, 2023, 11:34:14 AM »

Forbes is a leftist rag and a joke of a magazine in the investment industry.

LOL anyone can write for Forbes. YOU can write for Forbes if you really want to. It's not an "anything" rag. It shifted to a submission format years ago.

Bro, I thought you were a high-powered, cocaine off hookers’ asses, attorney!  :P  ;D  Nothing you said invalidated what I said. Are you suggesting nobody is filtering or selecting what is published?

I will take the compliment that I could write for a magazine, tho. My mother always told me I had an elegant nature to my prose.

They don't appear to filter for partisanship. Plenty of right-leaning articles get published there. It's one of the more open sources for people to publish to. Not quite as open as Medium I imagine, but it's pretty darn open compared to mainstream press.

And just to be clear, I don't practice law a lot these days, and was never "high powered" nor have I ever worked for a large or even medium sized law firm. That life is kinda repulsive to me.
« Last Edit: January 14, 2023, 11:35:49 AM by Mistwell »

THE_Leopold

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #91 on: January 14, 2023, 11:59:35 AM »

Forbes is a leftist rag and a joke of a magazine in the investment industry.

LOL anyone can write for Forbes. YOU can write for Forbes if you really want to. It's not an "anything" rag. It shifted to a submission format years ago.

Bro, I thought you were a high-powered, cocaine off hookers’ asses, attorney!  :P  ;D  Nothing you said invalidated what I said. Are you suggesting nobody is filtering or selecting what is published?

I will take the compliment that I could write for a magazine, tho. My mother always told me I had an elegant nature to my prose.


Yes even you can write for Forbes. There is minimal curation
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Kerstmanneke82

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #92 on: January 14, 2023, 01:41:31 PM »
Quote
First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products.

So they're going to ban WOTC from making any more D&D product? That's gonna be awkward.
Well they did hire a whore to promote D&D.
Who then?

Satine Phoenix.  Look her and her hubby Jamison stone up for wonderful scammery on KS RPGs.

They are overjoyed they can push their delayed KS’ back another year and blame it on the OGL.
I was thinking about somebody else, but now you mention it, Satine Phoenix. WOTC seemed cool with her a long time and suddenly they had a falling out or somesuch... I think it would take us too far astray from the topic.


Effete

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #94 on: January 14, 2023, 03:30:23 PM »
1. Censor D&D content: Yeah, they definitely want to do that, probably for a number of reasons. I would guess that ESG scores, PR, and pure ideology of the publisher are all factors there.
2. Restrict the OGL to paper and pdf rpg products: They don't actually offer a reason for this, but as I posted elsewhere, I think this reveals a desire to monopolize on digital content in order to protect the microtransaction economy they're intending for OneD&D. Personally I think this was a major motivation behind all of the OGL 1.1.
3. Prevent other companies from using the OGL to make competing games. There's an obvious market motivation there, especially with the likely shitshow that the OneD&D rollout was going to be even without this scandal. However, this also folds back into the ESG and ideological motivations of point one. Censoring D&D is going to be meaningless if the consumers can just move on to less woke games. For the record, I think they've misunderstood the RPG hobby here, and no matter what they do with the OGL, this is a goal they're going to fail on.

#2 and 3 make perfect sense from a business perspective, but are completely antithetical to the OGL. #1 is just virtue signaling nonsense, and also completely wrong. The SRD is Open Content, which by definition means it's not truly "their content" anymore. Anybody can use it for whatever purpose they want, provided they do so through the OGL (meaning proper attribution through clause 15). WotC trying to stomp out how stuff is used would be like Coke Cola trying to sue someone for doing the Mentos experiment because they "used the product wrong."
It's the thought patterns of authoritarians.

I've said it before but it bears repeating: whoever is behind this either fundamentally does not understand the principles of the OGL, or they think their leverage as "the gayest roleplaying game ever" would allow them to brute-force these unlawful changes through. I think it's a mix of both.

GeekyBugle

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #95 on: January 14, 2023, 03:34:58 PM »
Lots more info today at https://gizmodo.com/dungeons-dragons-wizards-hasbro-ogl-open-game-license-1849981136

I'm expecting and hoping they will triple down on stupid. It's fine by me, lots of sheeple will continue to play D&D and will become paypigs in their walled garden.

But this will create a revolution on the hobby that will be good for it.

"Monte Cook Games released their own open, perpetual license for their acclaimed Cypher System last year." Which is just a license agreement to become a 3PP for Monte Cook and has a morality clause.
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Effete

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #96 on: January 14, 2023, 03:36:04 PM »

Bro, I thought you were a high-powered, cocaine off hookers’ asses, attorney!  :P  ;D  Nothing you said invalidated what I said. Are you suggesting nobody is filtering or selecting what is published?

I will take the compliment that I could write for a magazine, tho. My mother always told me I had an elegant nature to my prose.

They don't appear to filter for partisanship. Plenty of right-leaning articles get published there. It's one of the more open sources for people to publish to. Not quite as open as Medium I imagine, but it's pretty darn open compared to mainstream press.

And just to be clear, I don't practice law a lot these days, and was never "high powered" nor have I ever worked for a large or even medium sized law firm. That life is kinda repulsive to me.

I noticed you didn't deny snorting blow off a hooker's ass.
My man!!

Omega

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #97 on: January 14, 2023, 06:19:12 PM »
The Sparkle Troll Brigade is already saying that they are perfectly fine with "kicking out the bigots" but they want their OGL 1.0a to be modified to include such language.
Are they? Source?

Yeah I can confirm its on Reddit, BGG, and even saw it on a video review of the new OGL and they were gloating in the video about how that would make the Right wing upset. Because apparently all the Right are wacists or god knows what.

Omega

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #98 on: January 14, 2023, 06:23:04 PM »
I am sure they can provide 10 or 15 examples of hateful material created using the OGL. Right?

On one fora they were using Star Frontiers as an example when someone challeneged it and comments like "all the Gygax's are racist!"
Someone else trotted out Spelljammer and the Hadozee and then they got distracted patting eachother on the back about what a good thing WotC did in changing this because Ape is WACIST!

Jaeger

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #99 on: January 14, 2023, 09:59:37 PM »
I think Brad Walker on his blog wrote an interesting alternate take on the situation:

https://bradfordcwalker.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-business-wankers-leadership-got.html
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The Business: Wankers' Leadership Got What They Wanted

As I said yesterday, the drama over the Open Game License is--for all intents and purposes--already over.

What will come over the following weeks and months are what, in real terms, is a series of finalization manuevers to attempt to achieve secondary and teritiary objectives.

What will shock a lot of people thinking that Wankers By The Beach has taken a loss is that Wankers' leadership just won their biggest fight: the internal one, the one against the insiders leaking material out in the first place.

The new Wankers head is a non-gamer MBA from Microsoft, and she's a microtransaction expert. She's trying to pivot WOTC's D&D away from its current form into something far more profitable, which means switching to a different customer demographic - and given who this woman is, that means turning D&D into a gatcha-style business with aggressive microtransactions focused around a Walled Garden with in-app purchases.

This entire drama is WOTC signaling that they're dissolving the legacy group and pivoting to someone more profitable. They don't care about the existing players getting mad; they care about the sub losses, but that is--as the leaks showed--considered a short-term hassle.

They want to get atomized friendless losers with money to buy into the Garden, which they can do on mobile, and play exclusively via VTT. The players will be gimped if they don't pay, encouraging transactions, and using the VTT exclusively means that DM autonomy is gutted- and, once a DM bot is good enough, replaced.

Wankers DELIBERATELY antagonized the existing D&D customers with their response.

They want all of you--us--to GO AWAY.

By provoking this reponse, and being confident that someone like Paizo would step up, said MBA Boss Lady can turn to the naysayers sandbagging her and say "See? I AM RIGHT! Fall in line or get fired."

They will. Expect to see some people leave the company--be yeeted from it, really--soon and the rest to quietly get in line behind the bossy bitch.

Expect Wankers to proceed with turning Current Game into a proprietary digital service.

Expect Wankers to expound on the new edition "liberating the player from the need to maintain a regular group" by ensuring that the new service has a matchmaking system that works, which means that all of the problems of Organized Play will be normalized for the new edition and then solved in the most technocratic manner possible.

Expect the gameplay experience to drop from a standard play session length measured in hours to one measured in minutes, likely 10 minutes or less--the length of a single encounter--so that those Gatcha players can get in a game or two as they commute to and from work in their Bugmen hives.

Expect Wankers to proclaim that the service is Free To Play, but in practice you will be gimped without paying real money; due to the amount of SJW Death Cult convergence going on--and the failed attempt at making this a Culture War issue--expect all of the overpowered character options to also demonstrate Death Cult morality while Cult enemies are left at the Free (Shit) Tier, meaning that paying those microtransactions to not be gimped is also a subconscious buy into the Death Cult narrative frame of morality.

Expect Wankers to gut the autonomy of the Dungeon Master by making him little more than a bot to handle interactions that cannot yet be scripted, and then be eliminated as soon as all interactions that fit into the business model's paradigm of play are scripted.

Expect Wankers to then expand this service internationally, looking to break into heretofore hard marketplaces via a new angle that renders them soft: phone-based applications.

Expect Wankers to not only claim that this edition of Current Game met expectations, but that independent audits thereafter to confirm it as fact. Wankers wants what Blizzard got with Diablo: Immortal AND THEY WILL GET IT.

Expect Wankers hereafter to refocus the rest of their business into completing the pivot away from being a tabletop RPG publisher to being a Lifestyle Brand company that extracts value from the brand alone and cares about what its attached to only insofar as it aids or hinders that brand's ability to magic-up massive profits out of nothing.

Expect Wankers to begin explicit disavowal of the tabletop RPG hobby within a year or so, especially if they can pin the failure of the upcoming movie on them.

Where one Williams failed, another is now set up to succeed.

Yes, tabletop RPGs will persist after this. All of you will still be able to make, publish, and play elfgames just fine. However, you can expect any popular sentiment to once more turn against you over time as Wankers now has incentive to smear you--us--as low-status and perfidious villains who should not be accepted in polite company. Old timers remember those days; get used to it, youngin's.

I'm not sure I agree on all points, but the general drift by WotC to eventually move D&D almost 100% digital does make a lot of wotc suits current actions make sense...
« Last Edit: January 14, 2023, 10:05:10 PM by Jaeger »
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Shrieking Banshee

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #100 on: January 14, 2023, 10:44:50 PM »
I'm not sure I agree on all points, but the general drift by WotC to eventually move D&D almost 100% digital does make a lot of wotc suits current actions make sense...
I disagree on the idea that this will work. Hasbro has to jump into the hypercompetitive micro-transaction game market with something much more unproven with less internal experience with that.

Just because they had a big wig that hired a bunch of people to do all the work for her, doesn't mean she magically carried all those people from Microsoft into Hasbro. MTG arena plays a far second Banana to Hearthstone. And I would say the crossover between the sort of people that would pay for D&D microtransactions and MTG arena is...80% at least. You're competing with yourself.

I absolutely believe that D&DONE wants the mobile game audience. I just don't think they can expect to garner a good audience with that. Or an audience any bigger then any other mobile game with a D&D skin attached.

Ratman_tf

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #101 on: January 14, 2023, 11:23:09 PM »
If the goal is to make more money, step 1 is to get out of the TTRPG business. [/joke]

We all wants to get paid, but golden geese and all that.
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Semaj Khan

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #102 on: January 14, 2023, 11:56:47 PM »
So they basically want to make money while producing nothing tangible.

Sounds like a bunch of fucking bankers.
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Rod's Duo Narcotics

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #103 on: January 15, 2023, 07:48:23 AM »
At least the current obese, non-gamer woman with the surname "Williams" isn't trying to shove Buck fucking Rogers down everyone's throat this time around!
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GeekyBugle

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Re: So WOTC reacted to the backlash...
« Reply #104 on: January 15, 2023, 12:09:18 PM »
I think Brad Walker on his blog wrote an interesting alternate take on the situation:

https://bradfordcwalker.blogspot.com/2023/01/the-business-wankers-leadership-got.html

I'm not sure I agree on all points, but the general drift by WotC to eventually move D&D almost 100% digital does make a lot of wotc suits current actions make sense...

If Brad is correct (And I think he is in regards to Wankers on the Beach {Love the nickname} wanting to turn D&D into a phone videogame with microtransactions up the wazoo, then I wish them the best of lucks, the sooner they get out of the ACTUAL TTRPG market the better for the hoby.
Quote from: Rhedyn

Here is why this forum tends to be so stupid. Many people here think Joe Biden is "The Left", when he is actually Far Right and every US republican is just an idiot.

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

― George Orwell