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potatocubed posted:https://twitter.com/Owen_Stephens/status/1126207820464939008 Was Todd Howard recently cursed by a witch so that everything he touches turns to poo poo or is it just that Skyrim/FO4s success inspired Bethesda to be the dipshits they always were deep down inside?
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May 8, 2019 21:32
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Goddamn, it's not even like they don't have a wealth of material to use as the seeds for an extremely weird, cool Elsweyr adventure and setting in general. Why?
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May 8, 2019 21:33
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Mors Rattus posted:Goddamn, it's not even like they don't have a wealth of material to use as the seeds for an extremely weird, cool Elsweyr adventure and setting in general. I'm genuinely starting to believe Bethesda no longer hires anyone who actually enjoys RPGs.
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May 8, 2019 21:34
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Either that or they treat their devs like garbage and give them poo poo deadlines and pound them mercilessly until "just present someone else's work as your own" becomes very attractive.
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May 8, 2019 21:36
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Hell they could have just put a contest on the web page asking people to submit modules in exchange for some random piece of swag they had laying around. And they probably would have gotten hundreds of entries.
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May 8, 2019 21:39
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I went to go look up the original adventure because I wanted to see the whole thing. Like if it was ripped off it has to be good, right?  If anyone else is curious, it was incorrectly cited as DDAL08-02 when it turns out it's DDAL05-02.
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May 8, 2019 21:40
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Somebody had to copypaste that, then go through it making slight changes here and there, all the while thinking that the fans of a heavily D&D inspired franchise would not notice.
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May 8, 2019 21:43
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I have to assume that whoever was responsible for the writing was getting crushed by a deadline or had their own work completely nixed, and decided that this was the only option. Or they just did not give a single poo poo.
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May 8, 2019 21:48
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Either that or they treat their devs like garbage and give them poo poo deadlines and pound them mercilessly until "just present someone else's work as your own" becomes very attractive. But it is an industry practice to make sure you hire people that aren't fans of your own game, some go further. The idea is your employees are less likely to slow down development with petty concerns like making sure its good. Non-fans have no vested interest if the next Elder Scrolls is gutted of features, as they've been doing since Daggerfall. I mean hell, Todd Howard was hired specifically to make the company profitable, it's his whole job. I think he was even responsible for getting the creator of The Elder Scrolls sacked, but I don't remember where I heard that.
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May 8, 2019 21:50
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Green Intern posted:Or they just did not give a single poo poo. in my experience, when Bethesda is involved it's this
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May 8, 2019 21:57
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potatocubed posted:I've seen some bold plagiarism moves in RPGs in my time... and this is one of them. Wow, you are not kidding, this is straight-up copy/paste with a heavy touch on the thesaurus. Dungeons and Dragons posted:There's nothing like the desert to make people feel small and insignificant. In every direction, huge dunes roll across the landscape, and an even bigger sky looms above. The oasis of Vuerthyl is a motley collection of sun-bleached tents in the vast Anauroch desert. The Elder Scrolls posted:Nothing beats the desert to make people feel small and unimportant. In every direction enormous dunes roll across the landscape, and an even larger empty air skies above it [sic]. The oasis on the border between Cyrodiil and Elsweyr is a colorful collection of sun-drenched tents in the vast desert of Elsweyr.
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May 8, 2019 22:06
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It's amazing to me they used Argonian/Dragonborn. Idk why that particular detail stands out. Would it have been that hard to make it a Khajit or something?
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May 8, 2019 22:22
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Dreqqus posted:It's amazing to me they used Argonian/Dragonborn. Idk why that particular detail stands out. Would it have been that hard to make it a Khajit or something? Yes, because it's not the laziest option.
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May 8, 2019 22:23
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Yeah, they used Khajit as their stand-ins for Teiflings.
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May 8, 2019 22:31
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wizzardstaff posted:Wow, you are not kidding, this is straight-up copy/paste with a heavy touch on the thesaurus. That's a thesaurus, that's an automatic article spinner.
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May 8, 2019 22:43
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Kurieg posted:Yeah, they used Khajit as their stand-ins for Teiflings. Which is ridiculous because in the quoted paragraph it would make sense for fire-resistant tieflings to not be bothered by the heat, but furred Khajit... not so much.
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May 8, 2019 23:57
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:I'd heard those allegations - are they fibs? Pretty much. Worse thing the dude did was trace a photo for a herd of sheep or something.
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May 9, 2019 00:39
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LashLightning posted:Pretty much. Worse thing the dude did was trace a photo for a herd of sheep or something. Worst thing he did was copy someone's mecha design, copy elements of stills from films, and possibly copy artistic photographs. Those are genuinely bad things to be doing, though people tend to overstate the volume by including things like copied herds of sheep and photos used for pose references.
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May 9, 2019 01:03
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Man all they had to do was plagiarize something not owned by WotC (or paizo or another major publisher) and no one would have noticed. People would have noticed, but just about anyone else wouldn't have the financial (and therefore scary legal) backing WotC can bring to bear and so probably would have been poo poo out of luck.
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May 9, 2019 01:07
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TheArchimage posted:Which is ridiculous because in the quoted paragraph it would make sense for fire-resistant tieflings to not be bothered by the heat, but furred Khajit... not so much. In total fairness, khajiit live in Elsweyr, it's where they're form. That particular bit struck as one of the less stupid plagiarism bits.
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May 9, 2019 01:23
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Reene posted:People would have noticed, but just about anyone else wouldn't have the financial (and therefore scary legal) backing WotC can bring to bear and so probably would have been poo poo out of luck. Would Hasbro actually have anywhere near enough lawyer-power to make Bethesda flinch?
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May 9, 2019 01:54
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lots of desert and high-heat environment animals have fur, so that by itself doesn't say anything about whether a creature is or isn't heat-adapted.Arthil posted:Would Hasbro actually have anywhere near enough lawyer-power to make Bethesda flinch? First, LOL, but second, an open-and-shut copyright infringement case doesn't have an unlimited upper bound on cost, to litigate or to defend. Both companies are orders of magnitude larger than the minimum needed to press such a case in court. Not that it will make it to court, because the guilty party's corporate lawyers will inform them that they haven't got a prayer, and should immediately and generously capitulate to a settlement. But uh yeah Hasbro market cap: ~$12.7B, Bethesda net worth: ~$2.5B. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:07 on May 9, 2019 |
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May 9, 2019 02:04
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Arthil posted:Would Hasbro actually have anywhere near enough lawyer-power to make Bethesda flinch? this is a joke, right?
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May 9, 2019 02:05
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LatwPIAT posted:Worst thing he did was copy someone's mecha design, copy elements of stills from films, and possibly copy artistic photographs. Those are genuinely bad things to be doing, though people tend to overstate the volume by including things like copied herds of sheep and photos used for pose references. Ah, right, my bad. Arthil posted:Would Hasbro actually have anywhere near enough lawyer-power to make Bethesda flinch? I'm sure they have Transformers money. I don't know if ZeniMax could go toe-to-toe, but I'd think they could dunk Bethesda easily enough.
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May 9, 2019 02:07
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Leperflesh posted:lots of desert and high-heat environment animals have fur, so that by itself doesn't say anything about whether a creature is or isn't heat-adapted. Yeah, the real problem with the khajit is they're an entire race of the Weasley Arab Merchant, except when they're dope fiends.
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May 9, 2019 02:29
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Scion 2E is apparently a terribly-edited, typo-ridden mess. https://twitter.com/BasiliskOnline/status/1126275004029489153 Pope Guilty fucked around with this message at 02:54 on May 9, 2019 |
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May 9, 2019 02:31
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Finster Dexter posted:this is a joke, right? It wasn't no. Guess I figured the not-a-lot-of-money thing applied to Hasbro too, that and I completely forgot they own Transformers so $$$$$$.
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May 9, 2019 03:17
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Pope Guilty posted:Scion 2E is apparently a terribly-edited, typo-ridden mess. I don't know what the scion team was doing, editing wise, but it was a typo-ridden mess from pretty much the initial backer releases on. It was incredibly glaring when compared to the Aeonverse manuscripts that were getting released right about the same time, and were massively better. I had hoped, given how early on the differences were made apparent, that the scion team would have buckled down or OPP assigned a freelancer with more experience editing or something, but it seems like they didn't.
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May 9, 2019 03:19
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It also looks like Scion 2e suffered from 'realizing gods needed more Purviews' partway trough Hero being written, and they chose to update the original rather than change Hero to fit. Honestly, I prefer errata like that rather than letting a mediocre or mistaken first book drag down the line.
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May 9, 2019 03:20
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Desiden posted:I don't know what the scion team was doing, editing wise, but it was a typo-ridden mess from pretty much the initial backer releases on. It was incredibly glaring when compared to the Aeonverse manuscripts that were getting released right about the same time, and were massively better. The Scion team had little to do with the problems updating the PDFs - that work got done on the team’s end several times. Neall put in the effort but something apparently went wrong in the part of the process where the changes get pushed to the PDFs, which none of the Scion writers or devs have anything to do with.
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May 9, 2019 03:31
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Unfortunately that's not really a good string of criticism, because the guy is basically saying "even though you already had a bunch of printed books with these errors, you should have scrapped them all and reprinted them for backers," which is a demand so ludicrous that it makes even a cock-up this monumental look good. Like, there are a lot of things you could criticize about the way Onyx Path makes books, but asking them to scrap and reprint a traditional printing run because it had a bunch of minor errors isn't reasonable. (Also, this always makes me remember how Eos managed to ship the Weapons of the Gods companion without noticing that large portions of the text were missing. God, I am so glad those guys have left the industry forever until they try to kickstart another board game and people say they "deserve another chance.")
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May 9, 2019 03:42
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The errata that was needed was a single page worth for Origin, and a second single page for Hero. The email also explained the processes, and failures that had been made, that had lead to the errors being in the version that went to print. Like, I was pissed as anyone when I heard the books were gonna come with errors, but a single page of errata in an RPG release isn't like loving horrible more like par for the loving course this is not an industry where perfect happens.
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May 9, 2019 03:47
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MollyMetroid posted:The errata that was needed was a single page worth for Origin, and a second single page for Hero. The email also explained the processes, and failures that had been made, that had lead to the errors being in the version that went to print. Like, I was pissed as anyone when I heard the books were gonna come with errors, but a single page of errata in an RPG release isn't like I will say that I can kinda understand the point of "the main financial engine driving this edition's very existence is Kickstarter backers, why is it that Kickstarter backers are getting an inferior product," but, you know, that's kinda the sort of thing you should be expecting as a Kickstarter backer
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May 9, 2019 04:25
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PinheadSlim posted:Was Todd Howard recently cursed by a witch so that everything he touches turns to poo poo or is it just that Skyrim/FO4s success inspired Bethesda to be the dipshits they always were deep down inside? Todd Howard is a hubris golem, so none of this is surprising. Arthil posted:Would Hasbro actually have anywhere near enough lawyer-power to make Bethesda flinch? Hasbro could buy and sell Bethesda out of petty cash. They've made more money off of My Little Pony alone than Bethesda has in the last decade. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 04:57 on May 9, 2019 |
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May 9, 2019 04:41
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Desiden posted:I don't know what the scion team was doing, editing wise, but it was a typo-ridden mess from pretty much the initial backer releases on. It was incredibly glaring when compared to the Aeonverse manuscripts that were getting released right about the same time, and were massively better. the most recent scion kickstarter update posted:Greetings, true believers and Scion backers — game was delayed by 2 years, but in the end it turned out to be another Quality Onyx Path Production.
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May 9, 2019 07:04
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PinheadSlim posted:Was Todd Howard recently cursed by a witch so that everything he touches turns to poo poo or is it just that Skyrim/FO4s success inspired Bethesda to be the dipshits they always were deep down inside? Bethesda has, according to scuttlebutt, a real problem with nepotism and seniority. The general notion is "Don't go to Bethesda Softworks expecting upward mobility." Which was less of a problem when they were just making Amerijank RPGs that had little competition, iterating on the same engine over and over. But I think the more they try and stretch outside of that, the more their inability to develop and grow shows. Especially now that they're chasing industry trends they're already years behind on.
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May 9, 2019 07:42
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Rand Brittain posted:Unfortunately that's not really a good string of criticism, because the guy is basically saying "even though you already had a bunch of printed books with these errors, you should have scrapped them all and reprinted them for backers," which is a demand so ludicrous that it makes even a cock-up this monumental look good. Would it be reasonable to offer at-cost-POD reprint codes with the errata to people who request it? I'm asking this because I'm really not sure of the financial breakdown of this and for all I know DriveThru RPG secretly charges like $5.00 to the seller every time someone does POD or something dumb. It doesn't take the sting out of a nicer print run book having issues, but it might be better to have a cleaner book for play, at least.
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May 9, 2019 13:45
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Everyone who backed at a level to get physical books is getting at-cost POD codes anyway, they've included that in almost every kickstarter since Exalted 3rd since the POD was available so much earlier than the deluxe books. Honestly I think the actual errata is shorter than the apology for needing to have errata. unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 14:06 on May 9, 2019 |
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May 9, 2019 13:56
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Okay, it looks like there's reasonable solutions to the mismanaged errata, at least. It's dumb that this was a point of failure to begin with, and it's not surprising that it'd lose them customers in the future, but it looks like fixes are already in place. What's the note about abused freelancers about? I'm guessing the note about shielding rapists and abusers is related to Matt and his wife?
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May 9, 2019 14:20
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Nuns with Guns posted:Okay, it looks like there's reasonable solutions to the mismanaged errata, at least. It's dumb that this was a point of failure to begin with, and it's not surprising that it'd lose them customers in the future, but it looks like fixes are already in place. No, it's primarily Holden trying to throw up dirt to shield himself by claiming that people knew about Matt and his wife. (People did not know about Matt and his wife.)
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May 9, 2019 15:02
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