Community

To Whom It May Concern:

I feel that you owe us, your paying customers, a public apology for the way you have treated us in the last few months.  Specifically, the way that you have lied to and/or misled your customers since you first announced the delay of the September DDI update.  Here are three specific instances where we were at least misled if not directly lied to, listed starting with the most recent:

1. Paolo said on the forums that the coming online tools would supplement the existing tools.  Instead, we find that there will be a new character builder that will replace the old character builder.  Not only that, but it strictly loses functionality since it will not be usable offline.  "Supplement" and "replace" are mutually exclusive actions.  "Supplement" is defined as "to complete, add to, or extend."  Replacing an existing tool with a less functional version does not represent adding anything.

2. When the September/October update was finally worked out, Paolo and Trevor said: "We are now back in the groove and ready to keep out [sic] monthly update schedule."  Today, being the first Tuesday in November would be the normal monthly update, and no update.  Additionally, the news is that no update is coming, but instead a new tool replacing the old tool.  They knew when they posted that there would not be any more updates for the Character Builder or Adventure Tools (which has not been updated since August and still has no announced date for being fixed), but they still said that they were ready to keep the schedule.  Trevor said in a different post: "we are back on schedule to provide members with our regular content updates."  Again, I see neither a regular content update nor being on schedule.

3. The first two times the September/October update was delayed, the reason given was that Dark Sun and Essentials content were being added.  It is now clear that the reason was actually working on the web-based tools.  I don't have much else to say on this one, it seems to me like you were lying to string along customers, but I cannot know your motivations.  All I know is that it was a lie.

I am not complaining about the development of online tools in general, I am sure they will be very useful.  My complaint is that not only did you withold information about what was coming, the information you gave us was not true.  Please apologize for the lies and misinformation.

EDIT with addendum from pg 18:

Addendum to letter:

No amount of apologizing or otherwise  resolving differences will get me to resubscribe with only a 20  character limit.  I just checked and saw that I could get about 15 (out  of 66) of my characters onto a floppy disk.  I could email 70,000 of  them to my (free) gmail account and not fill the space.  I could store  approximately 5 million more on my current free hard drive space.  This  makes it even harder to believe that anyone could consider it an  "update."

EDIT: Another addition for WotC's consideration:
You should be careful with how you advertise the new builder.  In Today's (11/5) Ampersand the following comment is made:

There are five things I really, really like about the new Character Builder.

1. It’s ultimately portable. I can use it on any computer or computer-like device, wherever I am.

This is undeniably a false statement without further clarification (which is not present in that article).  The list of computer or computer-like devices that cannot run the new CB from what we've been told so far includes: any computer running linux, iPhones, iPod Touch, iPad, android phones, andriod tablets.  That's without even being ridiculous about interpreting it (strictly speaking something like the Kindle is a computer-like device, but I'm willing to grant that it would be silly to think he meant to include that).  There are a significant number of commonly used computers that will not work with the new CB, and the statement should have been more clear/clarified in the article advertising the product, not via searching through the forums.
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This is a modified version of an email I sent to customer service.  If any representative of WotC would like to discuss with me how these statements were or were not lies, I would be open to that.  If you are not a WotC representative, you have no more insight into what they were or were not trying to do with those statements than I do.  I'd be glad to debate those points in other threads, but that's not my goal here.

signed for what it is worth

Signed... Without going into a rant, I think this new change may pretty much be a kill shot in the foot of 4E...