The WOTC Pricing Scandal Just Got Worse 

_Something_ wrong? Not, like, _EVERYTHING_ ?

@@Xenobears Well most of the game designers are really cool guys & gals in contrast of management, maybe just create an equity funded by fans to buy Hasbro and gives the management the boot. If anyone has a better idea I'm all ears.

​@@LowinBayrodThe thing is you don't even have to buy Hasbro. You just need to buy WotC and clean house. Though at this point the name has been dragged through the mud. So it's likely that a rebranding should be part of the house cleaning.

Konami just doubled the price to participate in a YCS (their official tournament) without changing anything. Somehow still not as bad as wizards and their product gouging.

Konami is not the good guy. At least the ones handling the North American product. WotC is no better.

Come to Quark's. Quark's is fun. Come right now. Don't walk, run!

I've already loved indie RPGs before. XD I feel even better about backing away from D&D already.

Shadowdark is pretty good... Going on 14 sessions currently

Yessss join the pathfinders friend. Explore Golarion with me...and for the love of God don't complain about the fighters proficiency. They need some win man

@@cedrickulacz8468 yeah, I want to play hard SF, but try out pbta. Scum and villainy was too science fantasy, like Star Wars... Went back to g'space for campaign design and solo, but should probably go to 2300

My arrow pointed at the word "arrow"

I agree. I've seen WotC going through this pattern for years, and dreaded what happens to the games after the market collapses.

Absolutely! It's rather disgusting how hobbies are ruined by people who are only in it for profits. Predatory. It is why we can't have nice things.

Man you and I saw the comic industry differently. I collected from the 70's to the 2k, and noticed something. In the later 80s comics for the most part were not for younger children at all. Sure some parents didn't care but man oh man the average content was tracking far more mature. I asked back then what this could do to the new kids that need to get in to this market to keep it alive in the future, but nobody cared because comics like the X-men were selling 750k+ a month. I said to an editor at a HUGE comic company back then that they are killing their future much like the WWF(E) was doing, in that no new fans would be replacing older ones. The WWF(E) did pivot and got back to their core business though. Then the real downfall started.... the radical SJW influence in the space. It started slowly much like an small infection, but grew over time. The comic writers wanted to push "new an diverse" characters and showed their hate of straight white males. First it was subtle but showing any Christian as an idiot and any minor straight white male character an evil guy but others as good people. They would introduce a new character that was part of the alphabet community, and it wouldn't sell though. Nobody cared if they did this though and sales stayed okay but started to fade a bit because comics at that time were basically made up of younger straight white males by a large percentage. Once the writers realized that nobody was going to buy their new characters, they started to do alternate universe characters that are already established but now they were gay and or race swapped. They hid behind the "it isn't the main universe" though. The thought was that this would expand their current base to new people and it might have but it did this at the expense of their current comic book base. Very quickly they just started to do it with the main characters that people use to love and that was the final nail in the coffin. Soon 750k a month was laughable as comics struggled to sell 200k. Even issue 1s. Now though the writers had gone total SJW and started attacking, what use to be their core fans for not supporting characters they hated, and it got even more deep in the rabbit hole. They wanted to push fat, ugly alphabet people as hero's and of course put any straight white person or Christian in a bad light in their comics. So yes they did in fact expand their brand to new audiences but those people don't really buy comics and make up less than 3% of the population. Now we see hot comics selling around 50k a month. This even with movies that had those characters in them. All this while Manga sells are super strong and now independent writers are actually outselling the big boys. I just had a discussion with one of the supporters of this at a convention break out session and he got angry. I don't want to name names but this dude has been around for a long time and I just pointed out the facts and his defense was that comics are just dying, until I brought up Manga, then he tried to say that Manga was just porn for straight guys.... I had to laugh because obviously he is wrong. The moral is that, in my opinion what killed comics was not the speculators at all but the radical SJWs that want to push and agenda more than tell a good story. I know for a fact that quite a few of the writers now HATE the original characters. Think about that. They hate the product they are trying to sell. It has become their religion and comics died because of it.

@@SteveMichael That's a really long post to say that your biases aren't letting you remember the 90s objectively.

Steve Jackson games always hit !

that's because we've always hated konami.

Wizards of the Coast make Konami looks like a Charity. 😂

That's just because Konami is newer at this and knows they need people to buy video games too.

@@michaellane5381 "newer" Unless you're century old, there's no way Konami is in any way "new"

@@bryanmerel is Konami 100 years old in the gaming space? I didn't that was even a thing in Japan until post WW2.

To be fair. Paizo does still charge people for their beautifully rendered, deeply written and incredibly fun adventure modules. So making the rules available online is really more like underpricing your laser printers so you can sell toner cartridges.

LMAO. Paizo's new ORC License turned out to be way worse than the OGL changes. So one evil for another evil.

@@SmolAnarchy How did it turn out to be worse? I haven't kept up on the ORC stuff lately

​@@xalxikaI want to know that too.

@@SmolAnarchy really!

woosh.

💯👍

AD&D 2e death came with the Players Hand (Splat) Books, Wizards, Thieves, Elves etc. Kits are the prelude to Sub-Class. With 2e and 5e, early on the books look like options. But after sometime, it just becomes confusing. Both cases, players try to break the game and have OP level 1 characters. Adding books boosts sales while killing the game. This is the life cycle of D&D and other TTRPG's. 6-One will do the same. Unify mechanics for a year or two. The as the new books come out, the cycle will repeat. Will likely be made worse with Mirco-Sales/Transactions.

@@TheNanoNinja Good point. If WotC are able to make their VTT get widely adopted then they're going to pump out so many micro transactions it'll make the d20 supplement glut look like an appetizer. Also with regard to your points about 2e and 5e, the same thing is true of 3rd edition and Pathfinder. But at least every rule in Pathfinder is free online, so you can look up a class or monster or item etc. without buying the books unless you want to. Speaking of wanting to, you can implement that "core+1 book" or "core+2 books" rules or just a curated list of supplements if you want to force a semblance of balance on 3.x/Pathfinder. But your players probably won't like it if you do, as the character building meta-game is a major attraction for a lot of players. Not surprising given that Magic the Gathering was an influence on 3e's design philosophy.

​@@TheNanoNinjayay Loot Crates but now I can touch it. Ooooooo New Book Smell. CoD has stuck again boys!

Ran/payed in a home brew 2e campaign and world (Multiple DMs) with my much loved but ancient PH, DMG, and MM until about 3 years ago. A friend finally convinced me to make the jump to 5e for his campaign. Decided I liked it, and grabbed the new PH, DMG, and MM. WoTC got $75 from me. That will be it, don't much care what they do moving forward. The 5e integration into our home brew world is essentially complete and any tweaks to those rules have and will come from us. WoTC has nothing to do with our worlds, and the ONE thing I wanted from them I already have. The D&D I play remains intact, no heart piercing going on over here.

I keep trying to like 5th just can't I run it, but really refuse to buy more than the core books I run D100 mostly and have since late 80s, but do run dnd for new players But 5th is the couch has jumped the shark,

​@@TheMemo659, after the neglect that wotc has been doing to my country, never translating the new books (not every player is fluent enough to understand English) and/or years of delayed products, I set sails to better seas. If I want something from 5e, I can wait for the d&d youtuber to make a review or go to dubious waters with my eyepatch. I also play MtG, and I don't buy a new product in a very long time, and the difference in power is ridiculous in each new release. Feels like they are trying to force the players in general to buy to keep playing fun. It's ridiculous.

@@stefanjakubowski8222 As a gamer, I want people to play games and have a great time. Having played for as long as I can say without a doubt that it is the people around the table that drive the fun not the rules. If you are having fun with D100 then why change? For those people still playing 5E, well the point is fast approaching where they are going to get to choose between buying a 5E book or making their mortgage payment (hyperbole is in play). If people want to play 5E I am NOT going to tell them otherwise. :)

@@Zarlos01 Can't argue with any of your points! :)

I'm having a real quandary here. I want to buy baldur's gate 3, and the developers really deserve my money, but then some of my money will go to Hasbro wizards of the Coast. I'm an old magic pro, and I know just exactly how fubar those guys are these days. What a bunch of slimy social justice sleaze balls.Everybody cool left for poker. I think I just solved my problem though: I will pirate the Gog version. Then I'll send Larian in 20 bucks in the mail and tell em to get a pizza at the office. Good talk!

YOUBDONT HAVE TO QUIT D&D JUST MAKE YOUR OWN ADVENTURES AND HOME BREW RULES.

It's best to quit D&D@@ceranko . YOu don't have to, but it's best. That way you'll be tempted to buy someone else's product instead of shitbag Hasbrosofthecoast. Not a fucking PENNY to those scum. For any game. Ever. If you gotta have Robo Rally, pirate it. Mtg? used or proxies only.

@@ceranko Ikr, I don't understand why people are quitting. Sure, you don't want to give Hasbros more money, but- but you already OWN the books and stuff you need to get started, I assume? JUST USE THOSE AND DON'T BUY ANYMORE! MAKE STUFF UP! CREATIVITY!

I agree. I can make better things than Hasbro. That company sucks. Also Dungeon Crawl classics, osr, AD&D, old school essentials ect are much better.

I haven't given WOtC a penny for years. All of my Magic decks are proxied printed from images skimmed off Gatherer.

@@artor9175 We have printed out proxies and bought some on Etsy as well.

Yeah it leads to short term profit, but it's a long term killer

Rifts was really good for that, fun game but still.

Could you tell me more of tht story? Mot of players in my country started with a blurred fotocopy of Palladium RPG 1st edition.

@@dungeonsanddiscourse That can be said about all drugs.

Still ha e a soft spot for the system

Which really was not the case in 4E or 3.x. Every single one of those splat books had awesome stuff inside. WotC grew fat and lazy with 5E. Their books over the last 2 years have been terrible.

I haven't bought since Frostmaiden 🤷‍♂️

​@CrunchBar-zi5jw reason they charge so much is to make a profit. The cardshops I go to are extremely transparent and they had to charge a lot because they payed a lot for them, less then the players obviously but still more than a normal product. There is not a single person that agrees with the pricing if the products but just because the MSRP has been gone doesn't mean shops wanna charge an exorbitant price for cards with fancy ink, if anything they want MSRP back so that way the price can be regulated, people know what they're buying, and the blame can go back to WotC like it truly deserves to be

I stopped buying and started proxying. There is no competitive scene anymore so why play with real cards? it doesn't make sense

Agreed, stopped buying magic over a year ago and switched from DnD to Pathfinder 2e

Little secret. You don't need any books to play dnd. A lot of info is online, and the rest you could simply home brew. I have been running a game for a year now without any books with players that don't have any books.

@@UnofficialTranslator same. Anyflip is a blessing for poor DMs

@@riccardozanoni2531 anyflip?

That was the reason why the Commander format was invented in MTG, to encourage people to use their old cards and cards that were ignored. It was a fan creation. But it's hard to do that when MTG releases products catered to that format primarily and all the rich kids got the good cards, forcing everyone to also play catchup. Now, the most accessible format is what WOTC is trying to squeeze money from.

@@UnofficialTranslator I prefer having the physical books since it's a lot easier for me to flip through them. I also have a no electronics policy at my table, so a physical copy lets me look stuff up if I'm ever unsure about something. I know what you mean though, all the information can be found fairly easily online. You could even print the books out yourself if you really wanted to, albeit a little effort.

That's the thing, it's not pay to play... If you already have the books there is no need to buy more books to keep playing. And if you really want to play with the Newest classes and monsters? Well eventually it WILL be available through unofficial sources for free more likely than not.... Or possibly the secondhand market. That and I keep hearing from the MTG community the advice being "Buy singles" (Don't buy from WOTC, just buy from the poor saps that think the cards are gonna be worth more than they end up being worth, assuming you're still buying at all...)

@@minnion2871 I understand what you are saying but i disagree with your position. Being a non playing player for an RPG or MTG game means YOU ARE CONTENT and you are keeping the game popular and so people WILL buy product. If you are playing the game people can play with you and that makes the game possible. You are content to keep players excited about playing the game. RPGs and card games are not fun if there is no one to play with, so you being someone to play with helps the company. Players need to do more than bitch and whine about D&D or MTG and actually stop playing. And you should invest in a different game because until hasbro sees their market share shrink which requires people buy other games. If people don't do this nothing will change.

@@AIRGEDOK Implying that I"m not investing in other games or that I have to play just one game.... (And yes I am thinking of getting more into Pathfinder now too.... ) I'm not a brand loyalist by any means. I just don't see any point in throwing out what I've already invested in just because the company that made it has ceased making products worth investing in.

@@minnion2871 whatever dude. This is a YOU problem, not a me problem. I was speaking generally. I explained what the community needs to do, I showed how you as a player are still content and help the company by playing even if you stop buying. i then switched over to PLAYERS in general. It takes a high level of hubris to turn general statements addressed to the community at large and read them as directed at yourself. Your mother lied to you, you are not the most important person in the world stop acting like it. I am done. The community can either take my advice or not. What I do know is bitching and moaning while buying the product or playing with your friends social games that build community participation will simply cause hasbro to change nothing. That is my position take it or leave it.

But then you find out that there are "Core" rules, and rules that nobody bothers with anyway. "Survival" games, where people actually care about rations and waterskins.. camping gear.. travel costs... coin weight.. encumberment...

She did talk about the Pinkerton incident in a different video that was completely about it.

If WotC values proxies over actual playable cards. Then, maybe you should too.

You are not alone - WOTR hasnt gotten a penny from me in Magic or DnD in over 3 years, and never will again. Products get worse as price goes up. Sickening!

I’ve been a paid DM now for three months, my sessions are booked solid and I’m making money off of WOTC published works. It’s the only way to play D&D 😂

I’m happy with my existing 5e books, need no more, certainly not supplements of more classes to buy

All you need is the core books and be done

Haven't bought a D&D book since just before the OGL fiasco. Paizo gets my cash now.

@@Sturmjaeger lol My wife surprised. Me with the core books and Tasha because I expressed an Interest and then I bought Ravinca because I had MTG players and thought it would be interesting I have since back converted all to BRP and Hero system

not even Disney should've gone full Disney

@@thisgoddamusernamestoodamnlong exactly. Hasbro/WOTC and Disney went woke and began price gouging their customers despite the product being of low quality.

@@zenvariety9383 woke=price gouging???🤨

@@Adam-ny5mz Sssh! Don't ask the people abusing "woke" to define it, they get so sad.

@@Adam-ny5mz They were price gouging before going woke. The wokeness made it more apparent. Especially since wokeness is a PR stunt and a cult.

They had delivery back then?!

Thirty bucks US for a poseable hard plastic scale model? Man, I'm in the wrong hobby.

@@stuartbaxter-potter8363 Yes, that is true. Poseable, and far cheaper than a squad of intercessors.

Back in 2005 someone described heroclix to me as a gateway drug to magic and d&d. And it looked like such a good game too.

Welcome to the family! I switched to PF1 when 4E was released. It’s a great company that actually appreciates their customers and the community!

Same. Passing that on as well with a new Pathfinder group for the Homeschool kids every week. D&D doesn't know it yet but it's about to be talked of fondly in all the Dead Games Facebook groups.

"They apologized, and I don't really care." That's the answer I've mostly gotten from WotC fans. A lot of people are only fans due to Critical Role, and have been with WotC due to Pokemon TCG.

It's addict behavior. Hasbro is their dealer and they are the junkie. They'll never stop, most of them.

With the booster packs and overpowered ultra rare cards being part of MTG's original design, the game was rigged from the start.

@@mikeyost3672 As a horrible, terrible bastard I feel obligated to remind you that the original MTG design was built around a world where a secondary card market didn't exist. The intention being that people would find cards they didn't even know existed when they played against new players. That the rarity of powerful cards would mean no deck ever had more than one of any one of them, let alone full sets of power nine. They were, of course, very wrong. But Alpha/Beta/Unlimited wasn't designed with lootbox exploitation in mind. Everything past that though... yeah, not defending that.

That's a fair point: Commander, when it was still EDH, was a fan-created format developed to give players a new way to play with their bulk/chaff in a creative manner. With Commander being marketed to, and products being tuned and developed specifically for it, the gameplay environment has changed. Commander decks have become more powerful, and the game has taken a more competetive angle, with starter decks now on par in terms of synergy and efficiency and middling-to-strong casual decks of 5-10 years ago. EDH/Commander was a casual way to play away from the competetive environments of Type 1 and Type 2, but the current-era marketing towards it is pushing it to become a more cutthroat format.

So never

No, I don't. I remember the million splatbooks of 3e. I remember the metaplot fad of the 90's where absolutely every game line seemed to be obliged to have some Big Mystery in the world which would only be revealed if you bought all the splatbooks and an adventure series where a bunch of NPC's would do stuff as the player characters got to watch.

Thats how it mostly still is outside the WotC sphere. I'm sure Paizo, Pelgrane and Pinnacle do what pays the mortgage and keeps the lights on, but they are all much smaller companies, not ruined by corporate pursuit of ever increasing profits. Evil Hat seems less evil in comparison. I'd be hard pressed to guess the second largest TTRPG company. Paizo, Chaosium, Steve Jackson Games? WotC is easily an order of magnitude larger than any of them. Beyond that there is a wealth of smaller companies and creators, and many do seem to make a living in the hobby and are driven by passion for the hobby.

@@Grimpen0 paizo engaged in illegal union busting, and evil hat is run by an antisemite. There is no such thing as a "good" corporation.

Nintendo doesn't sell DLC for MM2 though... so not a good comparison.

This!☝. While wizards/hasbro fucks things up, some of the blame goes to lgs's beeing greedy.

Sunk cost fallacy.

I have no problem never buying from them again. They have behaved very badly, and I'm done with them.

A lot of people have money to burn. Others are die hard fans. Others are new and see what is on RU-vid and it looks fun. A sucker is born every minute.

@@silverthorngoodtree5533 No, I just really like D&D.

If you’re really really good… you’ll be last as well!!!!!!!!!!

Everyone knows that mtg cards have no value given the woke nonsense. It's better to invest in Bitcoin mining.

Stick your bitcoin ads where the sun doesn´t shine.

​@@zenvariety9383lol, define woke

40K is no longer anything like what could be considered reasonable. Maybe reasonable in the same way as spending £5+ on a bag of popcorn at the cinema is 'reasonable' only because one happens to be in a cinema.

VERY relatively speaking. Games Workshop still shits on their fanbase knowing that they'll lap it up and ask for more. I recently embraced OGRE and already find it far better.

You mean like issuing a set with a single copy of one of the cards (the Ring)?

I have to respectfully disagree with you about Card Whales. They're out there. In fact, I'm pretty sure Card Whales were some of the first "Gaming Whales" that were ever encountered. I have watched people drop $1,000 per stop at a shop. That's not me trying to be sensationalist, and it was more than one person, and this was back in the late 90's. That $1,000 is on the extreme end though, sure. But if you've ever been in a gaming store of any kind (they are ALL CCG stores now, like it or not) on release day, you can watch people dropping hundreds and hundreds of dollars on as money boxes as the store will let them buy, and they only stop when the store cuts them off (so the store has product to sell to the rest of their customers). We used to call MtG "Gamer Crack" for a reason.

@@SoulSoundMuisc Yeah, Card Whales are mostly fished out these days. Competition in their ecological niche from Gatcha and Lootbox Whales kind of pushed them out a while back combined with the overfishing.

They're honestly TSRing themselves. The decline isn't going to be right away, but when their VTT blows up in their face... it's going to hit hard.

Unfortunately, even without anyone playing, MTG can function with speculators and whales alone.

​@@almisamibecause they've never needed players

You are quite right. I owned it to in 1975, the thing falls apart quickly. I still have all the beginning books though, even Chainmail.

Agreed, the architects of D&D are not as friendly as they try to appear on social media platforms. The Christopher Perkins space monkey slave trade debacle (with no repercussions) verified what I have been suspecting all along.

Securitas (who own the Pinkertons) are major Hasbro shareholders. Many Hasbro employees are former Pinkertons. So to a certain degree, Hasbro ARE the Pinkertons.

It's the same with the Bud Lite boycott. "Don't punish the workers because of corporates' mistake" LOL. How can you not see that as anything other than a Crisis Management ploy to avert a boycott? Boycotts hurt the company. The company is supposed to act in its own best interest, which is also the employees' best interest. If the company goes under, the employees lose a job. So the company needs to keep its customers happy in order to stay in business. WotC are the living embodiment of the Red Wizards of Thay. Easier to rule over a nation if the nation is full of braindead zombies.

thanks Jeff!!! :D

It's disappointing to me that so many people think they are D&D fans when they are actually RPG fans.

Umezawa Jitte was part of a premade deck back in Betrayers of Kamigawa but it's price skyrocketed nonetheless and stayed that high for many years, until it fell out of use in modern format

. . . As a person who played both in the early 2000's... your description of those players is just ignorant. Magic The Gathering is a _strategy_ game... where strategy and tactics is what brings about victory. It's not even close to being an RPG... *Shakes Head*