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Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

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Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#81

Post by bluefirebrand »

victorvosk wrote: post #50
SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized the…

Real people have disagreements and work through them. Lets not be mad for the sake of being mad. It was completely within the rights of WOTC to do whatever they wanted. People complained and they decided not to do and guarantee they will never do it in the future. Be happy.

Corporations are not "real people" and "they were acting in their rights" is not a defense against criticism for shitty behavior.

Companies that can only be coerced into doing the right things by threatening their bottom line are terrible companies and we SHOULD continue to take action as consumers to dismantle them once we have evidence that they are going to be driven like this.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#82

Post by freshhawk »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized the…

It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this.

They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest.

So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fans who actually spend money and want to play their combined digital VTT/new D&D edition/microtransactions and lootboxes thing?

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#83

Post by jofer »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #63
vaylian wrote: post #48

A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…

>WoTC releases the 30th aniversary edition for MTG, which is 60 random cards for 1000 $ which are officially marked as non-tournament legal. The MTG community is furious and for once people from all corners of the community come together to boycott this product. The rage is great and enduring. Yet somehow the product completely sold out in under an hour. I really don't understand the outrage on that decision, would y…

It's honestly not so much that set. It's the sheer amount of new supplemental sets that they're throwing out, many of which are cards that you basically _have_ to but to remain competitive.

Formats like legacy and vintage are no longer things you can buy into and play a similar deck for a long period of time. Instead, they're things where you have to buy new cards once every two to four weeks to remain competitive. That's a big change from a few years back when those formats tended to be relative stable for 1-2 year periods.

That's the real thing that folks are frustrated with. The 30th anniversary packs are just something that's easy to point at and go "this is a money grab". If it were just those, it would really be a "to each their own".

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#84

Post by michaelt »

gspetr wrote: post #69
michaelcampbell wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has enough self-awareness to have realized they were encroaching significantly on their core demographic. At least where I am in the US, the behavior of many corporations seems to indicate they... just don't give a shit. People will take what they can get, by and large, and as long as it makes the corporation money, they're willing to risk it. Who actually _likes_ not having a single register open at Wal Mart, Home…

>At least where I am in the US I am somewhat perplexed by that statement. Are you implying that there are major jurisdictions in the US where WotC wouldn't have been able to fully enforce compliance with their (originally) overly restrictive license?

Presumably michaelcampbell means "There might be ethical corporations elsewhere, US equivalents of Mondragon Corporation for example, I don't claim to have proven the complete nonexistence of corporations that give a shit"

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#85

Post by hellcow »

freshhawk wrote: post #82
SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized the…

It might be that they are out of touch but there is another very sensible reason for all this. They view D&D as extremely under-monetized (pretty reasonable, they don't make much off each player on average) and they have a huge influx of new fans and interest. So why does everyone assume they care about the existing fans, who don't give them money, so much? Maybe they just decided they don't care, they'll get new fan…

That was certainly their gamble... and it clearly didn't work.

The problem for WotC is that Dungeon Masters (DMs) are the decision-makers for the playerbase.

DMs are higher information consumers than players. They are the ones looking up obscure 3rd party homebrew fixes for issues inherent in 5e's design. They are the ones memorizing hundreds of pages of rules _for fun_.

And if your DM says, "I'm going to switch us over to run Pathfinder 2e because Paizo is supporting the community," then you as the player probably just go along with it.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#86

Post by roblabla »

dragonwriter wrote: post #44
roblabla wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. So the situation now is somewhat better, they can't simply revoke the license anymore for that document.

> At least the SRD5 is now irrevocably in the creative commons. They changed the underlying law of licenses that makes gratuitous licenses revocable at will independent of the content of the license? How?

IANAL, but from TFA:

> By simply publishing it, we place it under an irrevocable Creative Commons license.

I'd be very surprised if they still had their rights to revoke the license after explicitly saying otherwise.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#87

Post by Karrot_Kream »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #6

The community WOTC built over decades shouldn't have to give feedback that 85%+ identify with in order to achieve results that are desirable. If community sentiment is so lopsided then what was the rationale to make the decision in the first place and how was the communities' desire not implicitly understood? There is no doubt in my mind that WOTC (let's be real, Hasbro) has enough self-awareness to have realized the…

If anything, this shows the power of a product that is driven by subscriptions. Cancelling subscriptions sent a strong signal to how the player base felt and it was felt high enough that execs pivoted directions.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#88

Post by deadbunny »

crayboff wrote: post #33
voakbasda wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, trust once broken cannot be rebuilt easily. Too many companies make these kinds of bad PR moves, backtrack temporarily, and then quietly deploy their plans after the initial furor dies down. I wager that the winds here will shift back to blow against their customers soon enough. Want us to believe otherwise? An apology would only be the start; they need to swallow a legally enforceable poison pill that prevents…

I mean, they did a huge thing that can't be backed out of, they released SRD 5.1 under creative commons. Yeah they did some not great stuff, but let's celebrate the successes when we get them!

Isn't SRD 5.1 essentially just 5e? Unless they start releasing all the 5.5e/One stuff under the same license I can see them just not releasing that under a permissive license. Of course I could be wrong.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#89

Post by hellcow »

ivanstojic wrote: post #51

My TTRPG group has been playing together for several years - on and off. We'd been mostly playing D&D 5e, even though we had members clamoring for other systems. After the WotC fiasco started blowing up, we finally bought a couple of Pathfinder 2e books, ran a few trial characters and one-shots. We are now in process of starting a new campaign entirely based on Pathfinder that we expect could take a couple of months…

My group is finishing up a multi-year 5e campaign. None of us had ever played a TTRPG before this, so we've never experienced anything outside of 5e. We were all super excited for OneDND...

But when the OGL changes hit, we canceled our DNDBeyond subscription and are switching to Starfinder as soon as our campaign is done. This announcement from WotC is too little, too late.

The fun is getting together with friends. I don't need WotC or microtransactions for that.

Re: Wizards of the Coast Releases SRD Under Creative Commons License (CC-BY-4.0)

#90

Post by chongli »

vaylian wrote: post #48

A bit more context: * Wizards of the Coast (WoTC) has been tasked by Hasbro (which owns WoTC) to drastically increase profits over a few years. * WoTC has been aggressively increasing prices on Magic the Gathering (MTG) and drastically increased the diversity of products. This overwhelmed even people who follow and produce MTG news. Wallet fatique is rampant and people are disgruntled. * WoTC releases the 30th aniver…

I’d say the real problem is that WoTC is a lifestyle business that should not be owned by Hasbro.
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