Sornyth the Dark's page

My honest opinion?

A year, at most.

Look how quickly the iPhone was unlocked - although there is more widespread interest/demand for the iPhone... (And I took that into account with my estimate.)

EDIT:: Thinking on this further... I would guess two months. WotC basically challenged the pirates by stating they are going to find a format that stops them.

If that long...it's like WotC is trying to get themselves hacked. One thing I know from my compsec training is that you never ever challenge hackers to break through the security on your network...that's like a deathwish and if your boss doesn't fire you on the spot, he/she will when your network collapses under the barrage of every hacker that got wind of your "Bring it on!" bravado.

I get that.

While I didn't get into specifics, the Sony eReader proprietary file format has been cracked and a cross platform app has been written to allow you to download the files from the eReader to your computer, and read them.
The Kindle, uses files you could already store, and transport, on your computer, but had some form of DRM on it. An app has been released that removes that DRM, and since the files are just a form of HTML allows you to read them on your computer.

On the other hand, Sornyth the Dark could be requesting a WotC endorsed app that they are selling to use those file on a computer.

No definitely not...I'd prefer to give WotC as little of my money in the future as possible...I just want access to digital copies of the products I have without having to be online to view them which is what I'm guessing they are going to if they are trying to tie it to DDI.

Sorry if I jumped on your idea...and I had no idea those file types already had workable readers. If that's the case, I guess it isn't such a huge deal, but I still think they are wasting their time with this whole thing. No matter what form it takes, if it is an independent file, some pirate will find away to duplicate it and spread it all over the interwebs.

Andrew Turner wrote:

Now I might just buy some WotC novels for Kindle. That would be pretty awesome, in fact.

//open threadjack//
Edit: Just read the article--I'm happy to hear the novels are being released for Kindle, Here's a Salvatore novel.

I like these because I'd read the book in the house, and take the Kindle when I travel.//close threadjack//

VagrantWhisper wrote:

Hmm Kindle would be cool.

Oh yes, let's, once again, only focus on the US market...

Guess what, the Kindle doesn't work all over the world, but I'm sure WotC don't care about the rest of us either. I mean, obviously we're all just a bunch of pirates over here... [/end slightly sarcastic tone]

EDIT: Not to mention the very prohibitive cost of the Kindle... if it would work outside the US (and Canada?).

And why in the hades would I want to shell out another couple hundred dollars for a file reader when I have a perfectly good laptop...If they go to this reader format they damn sure better come out with a reader app for computers. I think it would be ridiculous to think that everyone would go and shell out $200 to $300 for a file reader just so they can once again use the digital copies...and thus this would just encourage more piracy...WotC are just a bunch of numskulls...bring on the Pathfinder RPG

In case anyone cares here is an interview from the WoTC president. He is not saying a lot, and there are a few obvious lies to those that are not wearing blinders.

click me

After reading that interview, I am now convinced that he is perhaps the ***EXPLETIVE DELETED*** CEO in America. I cannot believe he actually thinks that their action will reduce piracy or even slow it down. In fact, it would be my guess that their actions have actually increased piracy of their materials.

And that answer about pdfs being basically dead to WotC and they are going to work with the DDI initiative to come up with a different digital format or some such...that is all about pushing people into the DDI continuous pay format...they are using the MMORPG business model trying to establish a never-ending revenue stream.

This whole thing ends up being more about corporate greed than a minor amount of lost sales. Once again, I don't think that there is any support for the argument that those pirated copies equal lost sales, at least not on a significant scale.

But the whole interview smelled like a BS PR job...sort of like when your older brother grabs your arm and makes you slap yourself in the face while repeatedly asking you why are you hitting yourself.

That interview didn't do anything to assuage my annoyance at them and actually just the opposite. He now has confirmed that I will have to copy and paste from their crappy compendium product if I want a digital copy of anything from their upcoming releases.

Not Happy!

Scott Betts wrote:

Dragonchess Player wrote:

No matter their intentions, WotC blundered the PR aspect of this. Then again, this isn't the first time. I think Peruhain may be onto something in the Divorced from Reality thread: The current WotC CEO is a transfer from Hasbro and may not understand the differences between RPGs and more traditional games (composition of the customer base, etc.).

While I can certainly understand that, those aware of this can just take a rational view of the situation: what we're seeing is simply the result of the corporate structure inherent in Hasbro. It doesn't affect the quality of WotC's games, since they're still completely in control of their own development, and deciding to boycott WotC over this ultimately accomplishes nothing but harming the guys putting out a solid product, who are actually part of the D&D fanbase. I bet the WotC guys aren't any happier than most of you that the PDFs had to get pulled.

No, the rational view is to make clear early that corporate mishandling is threatening a good product. That way, hopefully, the problems resulting from the corporate structure get resolved before the death of the product line (or something equally drastic, like what's happening to GM and Chrysler right now).

Something tells me there aint gonna be a bailout of Hasbro or WotC, but it would ROCK if the pres could order their CEOs fired!

Wishful thinking...

That does cast a new light, but rewriting the contract or writing a new contract to replace the old one could not have been to hard.

I guess it is also possible they underestimated the number of players still using the older editions. I for one have no idea how many people still play/would play 2nd edition if they could find a group.

Ok so this begs the speculation (conspiracy theory) that access to OOP material hasn't been restored yet because they don't want to encourage anyone to play anything other than their current edition.

I'm not saying that's the case and as a rule I disbelive anything that smells like a conspiracy theory, but there is room in their behavior to suggest this is the case.

Sornyth the Dark wrote:

Hey I got an odd question...

If I have a hard cover of a product and I scan and turn it into a pdf, have I broken any laws provided I do not distribute the pdf to anyone?

This is legal, currently. It has been accepted in past case law that backups for personal use are legal. As far as I am aware, no case law has come into existence since then that alters this legal perception.

Sornyth the Dark wrote:

And if that is legal...the implication is that if I own it in one format, I am entitled to have it in any format, provided I don't distribute it.

This is a legal gray area. While you may be able to argue that you are allowed to own the product you own in any format (though I wager that particular argument will be unsuccessful, since technically the PDF and book are not the same product, which means you don't actually own it in any format), the method by which you obtained the copy was the result of illegal activity - unlawful distribution. This is illegal for the same reason that any knowing reception and possession of stolen goods is illegal; the fact that you already own a copy of a similar product does not change the fact that was you received was stolen.

So then basically, I'd be safe provided I can prove that I have the software necessary to create the scanned PDF copy of the hard cover. My problem is I am way too lazy to actually pirate anything myself...well maybe it isn't a problem...my salvation is that I am too lazy to actually pirate anything myself. Which is why I have actually purchased all the pdfs I do have.

My anger in all this is that they are releasing a product that I want and I want it in pdf format because I despise lugging around a library of books with me. So the only way I can get it, short of scanning and creating my own pdf or literally pulling it up on their compendium and cut and pasting myself silly...is to pirate it.

Now I can't be the only person who is in the situation. I want to give them my money for a pdf copy, but they won't even give me that option. How in the HADES is that a smart business move?? And how does their action not actually lead to pirating by people who would otherwise gladly have paid them for the product??

It almost seems to me, that if the argument is that the pdf and the book are separate entities and the pdf is not for sale on the market, how can you be held liable for possessing something that doesn't exist for sale?

I don't know this all seems like they've gotten themselves into wierder legal waters than they would have been in had they left the legal avenue of ownership open and simply stepped up their legal action against those who were breaking the law.

In any case, I can't see how anyone can argue that this move isn't a PR debacle for them.

Hey I got an odd question...

If I have a hard cover of a product and I scan and turn it into a pdf, have I broken any laws provided I do not distribute the pdf to anyone?

And if that is legal...the implication is that if I own it in one format, I am entitled to have it in any format, provided I don't distribute it.

So if all that is true...once I buy a hard cover of their product...doesn't it follow that I would not be committing a crime by downloading a "pirated" pdf from the interwebs?

Just putting it out there and hoping someone with copyright law info can illuminate me...us...whoever...

This won't stop Pirates... Pirates know that..*wow I wan't to put Pirate speak in that!..

A Pirate won't be upset about this at all.. or even thouse who download them illegally, because they still can..

The majority of people who are upset are going to be the ones who bought the PDFs legally.

Dragnmoon is exactly right.

This decision will only anger and alienate the non-pirate community of users who loved pdfs for how easy it made them to take their favorite game materials anywhere they could take their laptops...like work!

Let's see....Since the release of 4th ed. I have purchased over $200 in pdf files the lionshare of which probably went back to WotC...unless they open another avenue for the purchase of pdfs for their new materials, they won't get another cent from me going forward. With Arcane Power coming out in the very near future, that's $20 that they lose right there.

Now of course I know they don't care about my $20, but I don't think I'm alone in a world of 6 billion people...I know there's probably less than half-a-million gamers but I was exagerating for effect...

In any case, they only have to look back over the last few years or if they are history geeks like me...take a look at Prohibition...they won't stop the pirates and they will likely push otherwise honest folks who would have been happy to pay for their digital products to accept pirated equivalents just to have access to them.

Not smart WotC...not smart at all...

As an asside...there are some real jerks over on the WotC boards bad mouthing Paizo over this...and for the life of me, I don't have a clue where they get that Paizo has anything to do with a bad business decision by WotC marketing.

There are some serious trolls over there.

Funny thing is...I have spent tons of $$ on pdfs of the 4e stuff.

Now if I want a pdf of the upcoming titles, I'll have to wait until one falls of the back of a server...so to speak.

They didn't deter pirating...they just caused it to explode exponentially...

That's what happens when a bunch of bean-counting suits takes over a nerd oriented company....this will cost them thousands of dollars in legitimate sales.

WotC is truly stupendously dense!

Garydee wrote:

thefishcometh wrote:

houstonderek wrote:

Honestly, I think she just wants to sell books. She's WAY too over the top to be serious (at least, I hope so...)

I like to pretend that her rants are simply a satire on other pundits like Limbaugh and O'Reilly. It isn't working.

Man, I wish we had fewer pundits and more actual newscasters. Can we clone Edward R. Murrow? Please?

I'd love to see Tim Russert cloned. He was down the middle and went after both parties. I don't think we'll ever see another person like him again.

Agreed, although I think we'll get a few new good political journalists in the next couple decades. But I liked Russert too. Even when I disagreed with his assessment, I still respected the man. And for the record, even though I'm a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, I also oddly have a soft spot for William F. Buckley Jr. I'll never quite understand why I like him, because I don't agree with about 99% of what he says, but his honesty and character certainly made him respectable.

I think you probably liked WFB for the same reason all rational folks on both sides of the aisle liked him. He was old school. He didn't need to scream and debase the opposition to disagree with them. He was from the time when we could debate political issues without resorting to name-calling and pettiness. Just like Tim, who for the record was an old school democrat. Look into his bio, you'll see what I mean. But like Buckley, it wasn't about who could come up with the most outrageous insults and accusations. It was about the issues and honest debate and holding people accountable for the things they said. God Bless them both!

I hope we can all agree whether you like his politics or not, Obama is right about one thing...We all need to find a better way to disagree without being disagreeable.

Just finished running my group through Age of Worms, and mixed in with the exciting moments were some really disappointing battles. The spellweaver lich, Dragotha, Kyuss, chumps the lot of them.

Before I start running Runelords, I would appreciate a heads up on any BBEGs who end up being as dangerous as a five year old with a lollipop.

So any chumps in RotR?

Ironbriar got jumped while he was busy sermonizing. They killed him in the surprise round and the rest of the cultists were blended up like the freaky mooks that they were.

Malfeshnekor can't leave his chamber. So if the PCs back out of the room, they don't have to fight him and he's powerless, which sort of balances out the fact that it's a CR 8 Barghest in a dungeon with 4th level PCs.

Sounds like a plan. Also, if they spend enough time away from Thistletop, perhaps the remaining goblins (and their bosses) rebuild the bridge?

I don't know if we'll fight him next year, five years from now or 10 years from now, but he's going to have to be put down. With Chamberlain's ghost running American/World public opinion again, I'm afraid it'll take a mushroom cloud somewhere before history's ultimate lesson is learned again.

Just because this administration calls someone a dictator, doesn't necessarily make it the truth. I think it would be real difficult to find much truth in anything that comes out of our gov't nowadays.

As much as I disagree with the Iranian leaders views on several historical issues, there is very little he has said in his characterizations of our administration that I don't agree with. There is no need for him to lie or distort about US foreign policy. We have made such jack-arses of ourselves in the wake of 9/11, that if we weren't so militarily formidible, there would have been a coalition of the more than willing to force regime change on us.

We are mostly responsible for Ahmadinejad's rise to power. Pre-Iraq, Iran was actually moving towards a more open, liberal-minded government. But when the world's biggest bully calls your country an axis of evil and invades your next door neighbor, it only follows that your populace will move to elect an ultra-conservative, strong-arm style leader. It is the instability we created by invading Iraq that brought this guy to power.

The other thing that gets me about the whole Iran issue is our incredible arrogance and hypocrisy when it comes to the nuclear issue. Now, I don't want Iran to have nuclear weapons anymore than the next guy, but doesn't it strike anyone as hypocritical that we stand over here with the worlds largest nuclear arsenal and proceed to tell everyone else not to develope nuclear weapons. 10 years ago, when we still had any sort of credibility on the world stage, I might have been able to accept this. But with all the lies and unprovoked violence we have subjected the rest of the world to over the last decade, I just find it a little hard to swallow. I wish there was a way for us to undo the nuclear djinni, so to speak, but there isn't. And while I agree with the message of nuclear non-proliferation, we certainly are not the messanger to be delivering it, at least not until we have more credibility.

If we really want to get rid of leaders like Ahmadinejad, we need to stop threatening every country we don't agree with. Regardless of what our state department says, he was elected. It wasn't the single party elections of the Soviet era, the Iranian people chose him, just like the Palestinian people chose Hamas. His election was at least as fair as Bush's two "victories".

I have to say that I did like the multiple files for purposes of segregating player vs. GM content.

My son who runs our game said just don't read the module or the section of Thassilon, because it gives out clues about the storyline. This made it easy for me to keep from accidentally reading stuff I shouldn't know.

But if they do combine the sections into one larger file, bookmarks would be a neccessity.

Overall, I was very happy with the product..

Let's see the same sort of quality with next month's edition.

- Sorny

I have to say I liked the pdf format broken up into its sections. It's easier to find and print just the parts you want with a smaller file. I don't have to dig through the whole 96 pages if I only want to print out a couple specific pages from a specific section.

I do wish that they had left the "secret" parts of the local town out of the Sandpoint section. That stuff could have been left to the module.

But overall I have to give it a big thumbs up...

Now let's see them do it again next month!

- Sorny

A preview of things to come for the half-orc? Alternate race added as a web enhancement for SWSaga.

Devaronians

So, based upon the youtube videos that talk about the core books being augmented by digtal content, I can certainly see the core books having only a few, core races, but the number of potential additional enhancements being increased. They'd no longer be constrained by page count and printing costs.

Newbies can stick with the tried and true, you advanced players can throw in as many options as you want. And based upon their proposed digital model you can create and post your own race/class variations for others to use.

This actually makes some sense if you think about it. Newbies don't want that many options, and they probably won't be reading every inch of the online digital content options like you scary people.

Sure all that digital content is great, if you can afford a subscription. But what about all those kids out there with paper routes or mowing lawns to get money for their games. They now lose the ability to go down to their FLGS and browse through the latest issue of Dungeon or Dragon and decide for themselves if they want to invest in it. And if they don't have a regular cash flow to keep thier subscription up, they lose access not to just the current issue, but all the previous issues they have already paid subscription fees for.

Sure the tree-hugger in me likes that this means less deforestation to print magazines, but please...I still have Dragon issues from 25+ years ago. And while the gaming content itself is old and outdated, reading through the articles is great for inspiration and revisiting old ideas.

so in conclusion this is a big thumbs down from me on the whole digital initiative non-sense and what I've read of the speculation about fourth edition leads me to think I'll be avoiding that as well...

Sorny

Zohar wrote:

They stated the card would be charged when the product is processed to ship out.

My guess is that shipping on Pathfinder #1 is delayed largely because most of Paizo up 'n' went to GenCon, and because there was a flurry of activity in the time leading up to the Pathfinder release rewriting various parts of the Paizo store code to accomodate customer requests like combined shipping, etc.

My experience with ordering from Paizo is that things generally run pretty smoothly. With all of the hullabaloo over new product releases and a giant convention underway as we speak, I'm not really surprised that it's taking a little longer to get these out the door. But I'm still re-checking mail like a crazy person, waiting for that magical message to show up telling me I can download the PDF.

Waiting ... patiently ... ;)

Sooo....you're saying that one of the reasons we are waiting is that most of their staff got to travel out to GenCon.....

::: STAMPS FEET AND SCREAMS::: Not Fair! Not Fair! Not Fair!

hmm...seems to work for my sons when their mom holds out on them....

::: sigh :::

Oh well...another day staring at my inbox...

All this 4th Edition stuff is reminding me of why I despise Microsoft...

That marketer/capitalist need to force your product on people at regular intervals. Isn't it enough that we keep buying their stupid expansion books. But no, now we will have to buy a whole new edition of core books and start all over again...smells like the "Games for Windows" initiative that is driving gamers to buy bigger and better computer hardware.

I have a screaming fast PC and after running games on that box and comparing it side by side with my previous box, I'm disappointed. I hope to God that 4th Edition doesn't leave me with the same "well that was a waste of money" feeling.

I guess I just don't see what the need is for a 4th Edition.

No one can complain....I live like a 15 minute drive from PAIZO HQ and I haven't seen an email yet!

And to make it worse...I'll bet the shipping time for me is longer than it would take for me to walk to their offices and pick it up by hand.

Seriously...my guess is that the emails went out in order that people jumped on the bandwagon and subscribed, so those that took the plunge a couple of months ago will get their orders first.

Just my guess

Ok so here's my dilemma.

I have 3 issues coming by way of the transition agreement. I would like to sign up for the month-to-month subscription for issues after that. My understanding is that I will only receive those .pdf copies of the 3 issues I'm owed, if I sign up to be a subscriber now. However, based on some bad experiences in the past with getting duplicate copies during renewal times and then having my renewal date slid back as if the first one had already run out, I'm very leary of setting up the month-to-month thing before I receive those first 3 issues. I don't want to be charged for something I've already paid for.

Can someone in your accounting/subcription department guarantee that will not happen?

thanks,

Mikey