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they're not upset about the rule change. they're upset because wizards has pretty much just cancelled the campaign setting for absolutely no apparent reason whatsoever.

now if WotC had said "hey, we're not going to offer to let you renew the license in 2010 because we're planning on doing something with it in that year" chances are there would be a lot fewer angry fans of the setting.

instead, wizards are being a bunch of morons and have basically just announced "hey, we're shutting down this setting to you, and we're not going to even tell you whether we're actually going to do anything with it or not."

personally, i rather suspect they're planning on doing something with it, which is why they're ending things. that doesn't change the fact that they're being incredibly stupid about how they go about doing it though. kinda like when they consolidated the other world boards. they asked for opinions on what to do on a board that (almost) nobody from here ever visits, and then went ahead and changed everything based on the fact that nobody said anything. sure, they have their reasons, but when they just do something like this and then don't tell anyone, it's a slap in the face to the fans, and nobody (well... almost nobody) likes getting slapped in the face.

so basically, what's happening is that the marketing department at WotC appears to be dumber than a rock. the entire department apparently doesn't have the slightest clue about how to keep their fans happy. they don't have any idea what they're doing, as far as i can tell. or if they do, then they simply don't care (in fact, i can say that regarding the change they made to these boards, they knew people wouldn't like and they have openly said they don't care if it does upset their fans). frankly, it's a really stupid move to cancel a successful book line, and it's even dumber to make the one fan community that actually stayed strong enough to keep their favorite setting commercially viable mad at them.

so actually, based on the fact that it's pretty clear dragonlance was a successful setting and that there is money to be made on it (based on the fact that someone was presumably making money off it even after paying licensing fees to WotC) i rather suspect it's 3rd or 4th on the list of settings WotC will be reviving. if their marketing team had any idea what they were actually doing, the instead of running around making everyone mad, they would be telling the fans that they are *not* killing the setting, but that they are instead planning on bringing it back soon and so they need to have the rights back to it.

but hey, if they want to make everyone mad at them, that's their prerogative. i don't own any shares of WotC (or hasbro), so i certainly don't get any input into how they run things. if i *did* own shares though, i'd be really PO'd about how things are being handled there. they've done some things well, but they have also really badly screwed up in a number of other things with 4th edition. too bad they don't actually bother paying any attention to these forums, or they might be able to get some easy market research done... instead, they pretty much just seem to assume they know what we want, and go with that. and unsurprisingly, that can sometimes backfire on them. this is one of those times.