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Dazmiuth wrote:

celloshane wrote:

There is a subset of fans who purchased DDI aware that not all tools have been completely developed, with the hope that the remaining tools would be completed soon. This is the subset that the OP appears to belong to. Personally I find that view somewhat deluded, but I chock most of it up to those people being unfamiliar with software development and/or out of the loop on Wotc news.

I don't know how you can justify that statement when all the information provided by WotC at that time indicated that the software was COMING SOON and being actively developed. At no point at the beginning of pay-for-DDI was it mentioned that the VTT might not appear. That's a fact.

Well, if you're suggesting that some customers came to the website and saw COMING SOON and purchased a DDI subscription based on the assumption that "SOON" was a range of months (I'd guess that most people would think Soon was 3-6 months for a product like this) now feel mislead, I'd say you've got a point to an extent. I think it was wrong of Wotc to have COMING SOON up there in the first place, at least without clearly explaining what was going on. I also think that anyone who signed up without bothering to do any research on how long SOON was made an incredible leap of logic; it wasn't very hard to find out the info by the time COMING SOON was posted. There was a lot of confusion at that time, but if you parsed the fact from the opinion it was fairly obvious what was going on; Wotc had a lot of trouble communicating with the fans, but there were statements about what was being done. So one hand you've got a company that posted misleading info in their ads and didn't come clean with the fans because management couldn't decide how to proceed with the project (clarification: this is a summary based on my PoV), and on the other hand you've got a customer who made a baseless assumption about an impulse purchase. If you ask me who's wrong in that scenario I'd say it's 50/50 with a lot of grey.
Now, I still think that there should be a statement on the DDI webpage or in the DDI FAQ about the current status of the VTT and other tabled tools; to me that's the ethical choice considering someone was incompetent enough to put an ad in the PHB that implied all tools would be ready use at 4e's rollout.

brotherjgizmo wrote:

Again it is the duty of a consumer to be informed, if they are not an because of that buy into something they don't like it is their fault an nobody else's.

Even if the company whose product they are buying makes very little effort to get the word out ot the public that parts of the product would not be ready when the product would be out?

I understand WOTC put it up in the news and in these fourms that DDi would not be ready at launch. But they should have made sure that info would be on the main DnD page for at least 2 weeks before and a month after launch. They did'nt. WOTC should have put out press relases and told there main disributiors about the delay in DDi. They let the info stay buried in the fourms. How many people do you know goes digging through a message board to find every bit of info on a product before buying?
WOTC did tell the public about the delay. But they should have done a much better job at it. They wanted to sell books so they let it get buried.

Loki5654 wrote:

I'm trying really hard not to say "Prove it."

Well I rememeber coming to the DnD site and the fourms on a pretty regular basis, almost daily, leading up to the relase of 4th ed and I don't remember seeing anything about the delay. But I have been sent links proving that the info was there, just hard to find. My point is WOTC could have done a much better job letting the public know about it.