WOTC’s new Anti-Piracy Measures
I logged in with my D&D Insider account this morning to check out the new Psion class. The .pdf downloaded without incident and I began to read through the new material.
Then I saw the new anti-piracy measures.
Purely mechanical items, such as powers and feats, appear only as list items accompanied by brief descriptions and/or flavor text; the mechanics of these items appear in the D&D Character Builder and D&D Compendium.
Oooooh. Is that how its done? So when it came to the Powers section, it showed the Power’s name (with properly color coded background), the flavor text,
In to your enemie’s mind, you inject naked images of their grandmother.
and then a clickable link to the Compendium entry that would have the entire power as listed in a book. Clever..yes. Will it stop pirates? Heck no. Popular D&D pirate mesage boards are already full of requests asking for people with DDI accounts to please (Yes, pirates use the magic words) provide the missing content.
And it`ll only be a matter of time until someone delivers. After all, the Eberron guide is already scanned and available.
Sit back and wait for the uprising when folks don’t renew their D&DI subscriber accounts and realize this means they no longer have access to content they were promised they would be able to use, forever, as they bought it during their subscriber period.
And just wait for people who don’t have an always on internet connection to try to use these PDFs at the table. Or at work.
Honestly, I’m hoping that it is just for the PHB 3 preview materials. I’ve been paying my DDI subscriber fee mostly out of guilt, but as Greywulf mentioned — if I lose access to everything I had purchased by not renewing, I’m going to be pissed.
That is the difference between a Zune and an iPod. I think we all know which one wins.
This method is just going to encourage piracy because players need portability. If the player goes somewhere without internet access then his book is now useless. So therefore game sessions must always be somewhere with internet access… or the player could just get the pirated PDF and not have to worry… gosh what to do?
What to do? Not give WotC your money. Easy.
It’s an extremely sad method indeed.
Wyatt´s last blog ..Nevermet Press Is Online! (And Drama.)
Ugggh, that is a really awful development.
why download the document, i liked the commentary, but i was let down big time by the powers not listed there. Do i really need something else to be clicking around on the internet? i want to read the article, then when the full end of month PDF is out, i want to read that in full.
i don’t want to have to constantly go back and forth between multiple locations
Unified Gaming is what 4e should be about, not making things more difficult.
I printed the pdf out this morning to read on the bus and was disappointed that the powers etc weren’t included. I can understand why they did it but it’s really annoying!
Richard´s last blog ..Gods of the Sahasran Pantheon
This is wrong on so many levels! Wizards decisions are going from bad to worse!
I think WOTC’s argument is going to be that the character builder works offline and that`ll have the needed info for the classes with `missing` power descriptions. That having the CB at the table will allow for full functionality. But not everyone is going to have computer (even offline) access at the game table.
Time to warm up the printers and start making paper backups of the compendium for offline usage? Lame.
@Czar
Yes, that’s true but I have a Mac so can’t use the Character Builder.
Richard´s last blog ..Draconians: 25 Years On!
Czar, according to Mearls’ twitter, that is indeed the argument on Wizard’s end. You have the CB, so you’ll have the information. Except for Mac users. Back that thing up often or you’ll have wasted your money.
Wyatt´s last blog ..Nevermet Press Is Online! (And Drama.)