estirose

I'm going to make a rare public, English-language rant on this. Wizards of the Coast basically ordered companies selling WotC PDFs to stop selling them/making them available to people who bought them legitimately. Well, Paizo warned its customers in time but RPGNow/DrivethruRPG didn't, and guess who had PDFs through both sources?

(Oh, and I realize it's not WotC's fault that RPGN/DTRPG didn't send an email, but they should have given the companies more time so that they could have, so that customers could get their legit PDF copies.)

Wizards of the Coast has now practically given people a green light to pirate PDFs. Especially PDFs people bought *legitimately*. I can go to Pirate Bay and download my PDFs if I wanted to; heck, I could download 4E if I wanted to. I'll go for buying legitimately over pirating every time; were I not boycotting MPAA and RIAA, I'd be buying a lot of movies on DVD and buying songs on iTunes. (And maybe someday I can get my KRs on legit DVD too! That would be so good!)

Dear WotC,

I have been a Dungeons and Dragons player for years, from Basic D&D to 3.5. (I could not get into 4, sorry.) I am very much reliant on old-edition PDFs for my gaming.

I am not very happy about the sudden demand to remove all WotC PDFs from the online gaming stores. For one, it was very sudden; if Paizo had not warned its customers of the impending removal, I would
not have been able to pull the PDFs from them. However, I did not find out until this evening that this affected all online PDF distributors, and now I cannot retrieve PDFs for old WotC from retailers like RPGNow/DrivethruRPG.

I realize that WotC is concerned about piracy. However, I believe that this policy will backfire on WotC. There are already many, many unhappy gamers out there because these PDFs were pulled with little to no notice to the companies involved, and therefore to us. And quite a few of us are tech-savvy and know how to use Bittorrent, if we had to.

I would really rather buy legitimate PDFs and compensate the companies involved. I want to give companies their due for their efforts. I realize that my $5.00 a pop old PDF downloads were not exactly high revenue stream for WotC, but I bought quite a few of them. I would like to get the ability to buy them back, with no more restrictions than the watermarkings that these companies already offered.

Please reconsider your decision to pull PDFs from online retailers, or at the very least, give your customers (because I *am* one, whether I'm buying 4E or not, and whether I go through other distributors or not) a chance to download those PDFs we didn't have a chance to download before you abruptly ended your agreement with them.

I really, really do not want to be a pirate, thank you very much. I just want my legitimately-purchased downloads! And I want to keep buying them.

Thank you,
(me)

From Johnathan Drain on the Wizards boards (http://forums.gleemax.com/showpost.php?p=18276220&postcount=539):

Wizards,

I woke this morning to find you had reposessed several of my Dungeons & Dragons books. The good folks at Paizo are letting me rescue as many as I can carry, but the internet is slow today and I don't think The Great Modron March or Iuz the Evil are going to make it.

Could you find it in your heart to return my missing books? I expect you'll sell them back to me later, but I haven't had as much money to spend on D&D books ever since the magazine I wrote for closed down.