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Yes I like the ability to upload to a gallery and post in my threads, but I hate the way the web page flows east by ten percent of the page. I have doubts about the Intellectual property rights Terms of Use and the way SECTION 8-UNSOLICITED SUBMISSIONS would seem to apply beyond anything you send directly to them (as unwanted submissions) to include anything you upload to the forums as being theirs, exploitable by them, without you having intellectual property rights, or recourse.
This is precisely the ambiguity that built Dungeons and Dragons. The plunder and exploitation of the creativity of everyone who ever played the game. Ever. With real disregard of Intellectual property rights or an understanding that the Game has long since become a 'communal intellectual property'.
... an understanding that the Game has long since become a 'communal intellectual property'.
Is that an actual legal term? If it is, how would one go about proving it in court? Maybe we can free D&D of its corporate shackles... ;-)
WA HA HA HA HA!
I'm thinking that if what Wizards is trying to do is be like a typical social networking site, my decision to steer well clear of such sites was well justified.
If it wasn't for the ongoing PbP games I've been involved in there for the last few years, I'd be turning my nose up and walking away already after seeing what they've done.
Try being a SW Saga Edition player. Imagine my dismay when I found the SW forums have been threadjacked by 4e visuals, recent posts, threads etc.
I figured it out. That company is the Anti-Paizo.
Whereas Paizo think 'what would be cool and make our customers happy' that other company thinks 'let's ram more of our 4e product down the SW fans' throats'.
No the old SW message boards weren't that great. But now they just look like a subforum of something else.
Jason, fancy making an RPG of the world's most popular game set in a galaxy far, far away?
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Try being a SW Saga Edition player. Imagine my dismay when I found the SW forums have been threadjacked by 4e visuals, recent posts, threads etc.
I hear you entirely. I used to post there all the time. Its hard to look at now.
Jason, fancy making an RPG of the world's most popular game set in a galaxy far, far away?
Seconded.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Okay, this is just getting ridiculous.
Saying it's an evil version of facebook implies that facebook is not itself evil. Do I really need to explain who insane that statement is?
Sheesh people, let's get our terminology right. Maybe we could say it's a more evil version of facebook. Or a chaotic evil version of facebook.
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Okay, this is just getting ridiculous.
Saying it's an evil version of facebook implies that facebook is not itself evil. Do I really need to explain who insane that statement is?
Sheesh people, let's get our terminology right. Maybe we could say it's a more evil version of facebook. Or a chaotic evil version of facebook.
I stray away from things that involve keeping in touch with people I really don't feel like keeping in touch with.
Isn't the title redundant?
Isn't the title redundant?
Quite.
Having neither been a facebooker nor visited the Wizards' forums recently, I'm not very upto speed on the issues involved here, but I will take a stab at a general comment.
Facebook, I gather, is a wildly successful (and popular) social networking site. I can imagine an executive at another company, who is looking to expand his/her company's operations into the internet, taking a cursory glance at the facebook phenomenon and sending out an internal email: 'Wow, we need something like THIS (link to facebook) on OUR website'.
I think you forgot the bit where they say 'Who's offering the lowest bid to put it together? Pick them.'
It seems to me that if making a facebook variant for a company website were to be done well, with attention to what that company's customers/audience actually want, it could be beneficial to that company. However doing well what your customers actually want seems to me as if it should be common sense in business.
It should be. My experience of marketing people unfortunately is that a lot of them sit in some sort of ivory tower and make decisions based on what they think the customers should want, rather than what they really do want.
And I have no idea if anything like this has been going on recently at Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro.
To put it mildly, I doubt it. What they have is a pretty good way of driving their customers away with poorly thought out features and bugs. Just as an example, some people have found that logging into Wizards also logs them into the supposedly unrelated online community of the site designers. That's got scary implications for both programmer competency and privacy/security. There's no way to delete your account with their new community either. If that isn't fixed quick they're going to be open to legal action in a lot of countries. Facebook just had to change things because they were breaking Canadian law by making it hard to find how to cancel.
More prosaic annoyances are things like 1224 pixel fixed width graphic designs don't help either. No BBCode. The smiley collection which was one of the draws for people with things like MtG symbols erased. All private messages and thread subscriptions deleted.
It's one thing to add a whole lot of new features. It's another to take out a whole lot of things which people are used to to shoehorn in things they could get elsewhere.
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Okay I had to go look. *sigh*
first time on WOTC for ages *sigh*
It looked more like MySpace than Facebook to me. Still, same concept.
The forums themselves didn't look all that bad, honestly. The vast majority of users didn't even have avatars. But it wasn't horrible to look at.
The Star Wars forums were okay from what I could see. Not really themed sci-fi, but not horribly D&D oriented either. Kind of a generic celtic-fantasy feel really.
Okay, now maybe I don't have to go back there for another year or so...
I got an email from them saying I needed to log in and update things or my account would be deleted, presumably because of all these new changes. I thought about it and realized I hadn't been on the WotC forums in over a year. So I figured,"Meh, why bother?"
Everything said here is simply confirming my decision.