_www.FantasyLibrary.com_________ [Visit Who Is Joseph Teller?]______ Synthesis & Synchronicity 009

Synthesis & Synchronicity #9

It's been a rough month to date, the kind of month that one wants to wipe from memory. Our basement construction project continues to drag on..... my guess is still that completion is somethig near to the end of summer or early fall, if it doesn't have too many setbacks (like this wonderful single Digit Fahrentheit day we're having were concrete just can't be worked with).

I'm just recovering from a nasty bug that's worked its way thru a quarter of the roster of the Western Ave Irregulars and this means we've had a number of missed game sessions, frayed tempers and general grumpiness. My favorite Cafe (the Putnam Cafe) is still closed, the next public meeting about trying to reopen it is a week from now on the 20th. I fear at this rate its pretty much a thing of the past, no matter how much we do to help.

Today I had a wonderfully annoying session of public stupidity with the contract programmer who's done the work on Hero Designer for DOJ, Inc. a barrage of website forum posts between him, myself and some other customers that more or less shows what is wrong with the attitude of many technical people today.

In this case its a matter of what I call the 'Microsoft Mentality', where the customer is not important, getting his cash is. Once you have the cash its not important that the software doesn't do as advertisied, or that its had 18 bug fixes since being released in January, or that it only runs on two out of the three platforms its supposed to work on, or that customers want a few minor features improved on that would take about a day to provide. It's the fact that you've gotten him to pay out the money.... after that the customer doesn't matter.

'This is the one true way' is part of the attitude I got. 'How dare you want the program to allow you to tinker with the rules in the book.' This despite the fact that since their invention in the 1970s, roleplaying games have always required a certain amount of tinkering space to deal with various concepts in genre, setting and need to deal with rules bias. This despite the fact that everyone I have ever met has always had some 'house rules' when it comes to using the Hero System because of its complexity in design. (Thats why you need a program to easily make characters for the game in the first place!).

Conformity is not my way. What I wanted was the ability to customize two features, one fairly minor. Both would require the programmer, according to several folks, about an hour to fix, and both of which have been requested by numerous people in the past month. Rather than take the hour, the programmer would rather spend several hours arguing about it and how we customers were 'too demanding' and that the customizing features in general were "not in the specs of the design" and were an extra he had put in to "be nice".

Funny, the advertising on the site since day one has been advertising the customizing features as just that, a feature and a big reason to buy the software. Thats at least in part why I bought the software back in January when it came out. Sounds to me like some real communication or misunderstanding of what the product is about to me.

All of this just peeved me off. So after a half dozen posts, I decided to get off line and let it rest. I went out in the bitter weather, had lunch and dropped off to visit at Pandemonium Books & Games, our local gaming shop in Harvard Square.

So I find little on the shelf to buy.... the shelves of new arrivals are full, once again, with D20 game material (which I absolutely refuse to buy, being a marketing scheme by Hasbro's subsidiary to trash the rpg gaming marketing in general to their own profit. This problem has been going on for over a year. The local game shop has not been in great financial state, has had to lay off employees etc.... and have been getting less and less sales from us, because the owner listens to the distributors and buys all the d20 material (good or bad selling as they might be) and doesn't keep up on the new stuff from the other companies.

The problem is that the gaming industry has become a forward lead industry, not a publishing industry that works off a back catalog of items. Its whats new and out the door this month thats important to the distributors, and they become difficult or impossible for stores to get stock of games and books published a few months to a year before. The companies have to make all their sales basically to folks 'sight unseen' as the customers can't find it by the time reviews hit the stands or the net. This means the stores have to buy blind, on the recommendation of the Distributors. So either they buy light on everything or they take the recommendation and buy what they;re pushing, which inevitably is the D20 stuff since they don't judge it based on the individual sales figures but on the category as a whole.

In Otherwords forced conformity. Buy D20 or don't get anything. Buy the latest D20 or don't have sales. Ram it down the customers throats and they'll give in and buy it all is the litany of the distributors.

The smaller, better companies that don't do D20 suffer. Those who don't like D20 suffer. I Suffer.

And thats why when a programmer at DOJ gives me a line of nonsense about 'the one true way' on his program and wants me to 'conform to the rules' after I've spent some $500 in the past year or so on Hero game materials, I get a bit hot under the collar and start thinking about whether its worth dealing with the game company or its product at all. If I wanted to conform, I'd be buying up the D20 crap and stop thinking for myself when I game... or simply play Munchkin.

It's this sort of thing that really gets at me after this really bad month I've been having. I want to have FUN. I don't want to be made to conform, I want to be creative. What good is gaming if it just stresses me out? I have better things I could do with my money.... and my time. I'm just hoping that Steve Long and some of the other DOJ people get the hint about the need of some flexibility and customer relations training for their programmer.... or they may have lost me as a customer for good. They are not the only game company in the world.

Thanks for reading thru this gripe...

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