Bad Netflix, no biscuit!

Grrr. I've been a Netflix member since *wayyyy* back in 2000. It was a pretty awesome service back then. Then in 2005 they added "queues", which let you split your account up into virtual sub-accounts. This was fantastic and I've been a big proponent of the feature ever since it launched. In brief: our account is on a grandfathered four discs at-a-time plan. It used to be that if Karin wanted a movie I didn't want to watch I had to go futz with the queue to put it on top, and then if I sent back the next disc I'd rearrange and so forth. It worked but the queues made things much simpler. Karin got her own queue, she could log in and get her own recommendations, manage her own queue and so forth. If she sent a disc back, she got the next disc on her queue. I had my own queue, we had a queue for discs we both wanted to watch, and then the final disc was a queue for television DVD's. I loaded up all of the Sopranos into that queue and whenever we sent back a Soprano's disc, then next one showed up. It was really very cool. I wish I could write it is very cool but Netflix has decided to remove the queue feature. All the work Karin put into customizing her recommendations or I put into customizing mine? Simply thrown away. Here's the very short blog post on the matter. While I'll admit it was a bit clunky and some improvement would have been nice, there's a serious baby & the bathwater problem here. I skimmed the 200+ comments and found this one which seems reasonable to me.
I called customer service (1-888-638-3549) about it, hoping to register my complaint through official channels (if you do this, be polite! It's not the phone rep's fault). Anyway, it sounded like she had already heard about this a few times, and the suggested approach to deal with this is to post a suggestion on their site. If this bothers you, I would recommend making sure that Netflix knows about it. Post your complaint to their Suggestions page. (http://tinyurl.com/yvmtcs) Be honest, be sincere, be polite, and let them know how much it bothers you (likely to the point of seeking competitors). Good luck! Like others have said, for me, this is a deal breaker - Profiles is the key feature keeping us with Netflix. Without it, in-store drop-off and in-store rental is far superior. I'm sad to leave Netflix after evangelizing it for so long, but if it goes away, I'll go with the superior product.
I'm not quite sure about using the "Suggestions" page to send a complaint, but as far as I can tell Netflix doesn't have an email address for customer support, and they list their current wait time at over 10 minutes for the phone support. So I just posted the following message to them:
I received an email about your elimination of the Profiles feature and like many other customers I'm very disappointed. I've been a Netflix subscriber since 2000, and a happy Profile user since they were introduced int 2005. Profile were one of the key differentiating features that made Netflix superior to the competition in my mind. Don't remove Profile unless you have a comparable replacement service. Furthermore by removing Profile you are apparently discarding rating information that improved your recommendation service. Every time we return a disc we receive an email imploring us to rate the returned movie to improve our recommendations. If you discard all this data, you're intentionally "resetting" your recommendation algorithm to lose 3 years of rating data. If a competitor introduces the Profile feature I will almost certainly switch my account to them. Netflix has been a fantastic service for the past 8 years, but this is a major step backwards in service quality. Please reconsider this. Your email states "this change will help us continue to improve". I strongly disagree. If you want to improve or rework Profile than do so. But eliminating the feature outright doesn't help customers that don't use it and is a serious disappointment to the customers that do.
I'm entirely serious about being willing to investigate competition. If Blockbuster capitalizes on this and implements a similar feature I would switch from Netflix in a heartbeat. I've been a big fan of Netflix for years but this is just a dumb move. I've been a big fan because they've had a better solution than anybody else. Now they are choosing to both lost functionality and discard the data (recommendations and profiles) that would nominally tie the user to staying with them. Phenomenally poorly thought out. I have to assume that they know all this and that they have decided that enough of their user base doesn't care about Profiles. But I also suspect that the "taste makers" and the people who jumped onboard with Netflix back when they were the only game in town will skew more towards the heavy users who derive a lot of value from Profiles. Netflix is in the opening stages of convincing their users to switch from discs in the mail to streaming, and that's a dangerous window because if I make that switch I could switch to an Apple TV or Xbox 360 at the same time. It's a poor moment to anger their hardcore consumer base.
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Players Handbook

I can't decide if I think reviewing the Players Handbook is ridiculous or not. On the one hand, it's a book, and I read it. On the other hand, I've already nattered on about D&D recently and it's not like anyone reads the PHB as a work of literature. So maybe I'll cheat a little a bit and do a "review" but mix in a little 4th edition discussion. We'll see what happens. (Editing? We don't need no steekin' editing!) There's an obvious elephant in the 4th edition D&D room and oddly enough that's World of Warcraft. I guess this is some sort of circle of life thing where you'd have to expect that WoW only exists because my generation grew up with D&D and now it's time to for WoW to return the favor. The first time you see the influence in the PHB is when they start talking about character "roles". They've defined four: defender (cue Crow T. Robot saying "It's not a tank."), striker, controller, and leader. They explicitly describe how each role works in combat and it's a tag on each class - fighters are defenders, clerics are leaders and so forth. In fact they explicitly set out the "classic party" with a fighter (defender), cleric (leader), rogue (striker), and wizard (controller). I think this change is positive really. Putting this explicit focus up front means it's easy to see how each class works and you can see where it helps both a player understand their role and helped the designers really reinterpret each class and "focus the beam" as it were. The next thing a reader will notice is all of the powers. Everyone has a big stack of powers, no matter their class. Fighters have special attacks they use instead of the "basic melee" attack. Rogues have funky moves where they can move during the attack, or trip their target or force them to move or whatever. Wizards can cast a Magic Missile every round of combat if they want. The basic melee attack is pretty much something that somebody only does if it's because they were doing something else that includes a basic attack. Everything is broken up into "At-Will" powers (which can be used every round), "Encounter" powers (usable once per fight), and "Daily" powers (once per day, naturally). Somewhere around here a WoW player will envision a toolbar with powers and recharge timers on it. Again I think this is a great addition. Sure they didn't even bother to file the serial numbers off the WoW implementation, but that's OK. It cleans up so much stuff, it's worth it. Paladins Lay On Hands? That's a power. Wizard casting Acid Arrow? (Melf apparently got demoted. Poor out some CLW potion for the homies!) That's another power. Cleric's Turn Undead? Yep, a power. It makes everything in D&D work in one framework for really the first time ever. But the fact that all of these Powers now have the same structure means one finely honed game mechanic lets everyone do their stuff. Paladins still play completely different from Wizards, but it's not because they have unique game mechanics it's because they have different stats and powers. This means it's possible to grab a character sheet, skim it quickly and nod. You're ready to go and play the game. It doesn't require memorizing your class description so you know how all of your special exceptions work. You still have exceptions but they are all listed as Powers (well, or as Feats, but still. It's standardized.) So, I really like the new rules. From that perspective the PHB is a great success. It' not necessarily that much of a gripping read, but I've read much dryer and less readable gaming rulebooks. I don't think I'd recommend reading the whole thing straight through unless you plan on playing, but it's organized more as a reference than a linear read. I haven't actually played yet with the PHB (but we are Thursday! Huzzah!), but I have done some character creation/review work with it and it seems well laid out. I've already begun to be able to say "OK, for that we'll need to look at the XP chart, which is over here (flip to roughly the right spot)." If you're curious about 4e, you might find enough of interest in the PHB to own a copy. If you're playing or even thinking of playing it's definitely worth acquiring. There's a nice "gift set" you can get if you want the DMG and Monster Manual as well which comes with all three hardovers in a slipcover case.
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Welcome back, good old habeas corpus!

I think everyone knows I don't like blogging about politics much and I'm already flirting with politics in the comments thread discussion about rocket fuel contamination, but I blogged back when we suspended habeas corpus so a brief note welcoming that the Supreme Court just struck down the suspension as unconstitutional seems in order to me. (It's a Hyperlink-a-pa-looza!) Even an "enemy combatant" has the right to see the evidence against them and to have a lawyer present. Somehow I still think the republic will survive. I also can't resist snarking that Justice Scalia dissented because we're "at war with radical Islamists" which first off in a strictly legal sense isn't true, so it doesn't belong in a Supreme Court statement. Second off, maybe we'd do better if we decided to be at war with people seeking to destroy the American way of life? Me, I say the right to a fair trial and the right to confront the evidence used to accuse someone of a crime is pretty key to that American way of life. People who say we have to give up that right because Daddy Government knows best and it's too dangerous for us to know what's really going on? Those are the ones that I think are dangerous to America.
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D&D Reviews - For Real This Time, No Fooling

OK so yesterday's post was originally intended to be a book review amalgam before I put on the rose-colored glasses and got out the scrapbooks. Today I want to talk about a pair of book(let)s and I may talk a bit about the first 4th edition module. The books are called Wizards Presents Races and Classes, and Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters and together they are the bulk of the "preview" materials for 4e. The module serves a bit of this as well - it's called H1 - Keep on the Shadowfell. I call them book(let)s because each book is only about 100 pages long. At first I was sort of dubious about them, and I still think they are badly titled. But they aren't really a "This is wizard and look we had somebody draw a picture!" What they are is actually a series of essays by the people who created 4th edition. (Well and to be fair, there is a "This is a wizard" component.) Sticking with wizards, there are six pages about wizards in the Races and Classes book. The first two are clearly going to be in the Player's Handbook and are pretty much "So you wanna be a wizard? This is what you'll do." and some pictures. But then there's a half column on the role of the wizard in combat and talking about how the wizard now has an implement such as a wand or orb (Pratchett fans will wonder if the the implement has a Knob on the End) and that implement shapes what the wizard does. Next up is some "crunchy" (i.e. full of rules information) details about the changes from 3rd to 4th edition, including why the changes were made. Next up is discussion of how the wizard class is balanced against the other classes, both how it worked in 3rd edition and what they changed for 4th. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes these books do cover the fluffy "Wizards cast spells and suck at combat" aspects, there's also a good bit of crunchy "this is how 4th edition works" and a whole big helping of "This is what the design goals of 4th edition are and how we got there." It's almost like these two books are the directory's commentary track of the Player's Handbook. For somebody like me with a more than passing interest in how gaming sausage gets made this stuff is just great. The split of the books is a bit odd. I actually read all of the Races and Classes book and the first quarter of the Worlds and Monsters one before I got the logic. They talk about how 4th edition was developed by two teams - a mechanics/rules team and a flavor/creative/art team. The first book was written by the mechanics team and the second by the creative team. This makes a lot of sense but it's not said explicitly anywhere. Once I got that it was a lot easier to flow with which topic was covered where. I think this is even further obscured by the fact that the "Races" topic is the blurriest and it's what the first book opens with. Are dwarves and elves mechanics or flavor? The answer of course is "Yes". The book focuses a bit more on the mechanics side of the fence but it dabbles more in flavor than the other sections do. The second book shows a lot of good thought. The whole planar system has been redone and one mantra was "lose pointless symmetry". Did anyone ever really adventure in the Positive or Negative Material planes? Even most of the elemental planes were cast in a way that A ) made them uninteresting and B ) made them impossibly difficult to use. "So it's an endless plane of fire? The ground is fire, and the air is fire? And this rock? No, it's fire too huh? And we can't breathe, because of the fire? What a great place to go." Instead now they have a plane called the Feywild which is an eerie mystical echo of the "real" world. All of the fey/faerie creatures come from the Feywild, and ancient elven (technically they are eldarin, but that's a technicality) cities might exist in the Feywild except for the solstice when they materialize in the real world for just one night. Bam! Already that has more adventuring potential than the Inner Planes ever got in 20 years of D&D. I'd say if you have any interest in D&D, or even much of an interest in game design as a topic this are worth reading. I really liked reading them, and if it wasn't clear already they really piqued my interest in reading the actual rulebooks.
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Dungeons & Dragons - A Retrospective

This post is somewhere between a couple of book reviews and just some general commentary. I can do that, it's my blog and I'll organize however I see fit :-) Turns out I'm just going to go down memory lane. I'll post more about the 4e products another time .... The venerable Dungeons & Dragons is getting a new version this week. The fourth edition rules are supposed to be available on Friday (you can easily find PDF's via BitTorrent if that's how you roll (pun not intended)), but there's a wealth of information you can soak up now if you'd like. A good place to start would be at the D&D Insider web site, but there are also two books Wizards of the Coast released about the new edition, and already one adventure is available with "quick-start" rules and pre-generated characters that lets you play in advance of the full rules dropping. I should probably talk a little bit about D&D and me I suppose. I remember the original "box set" game but we didn't do much with that. I have memories of my Dad trying to figure out exactly what it was, but not much more. At some point later we got the Advanced D&D books (back when there were only three). I still have those three books, they are probably some of the oldest books I own. The Player's Handbook has lost the spine and they are in general completely beat up. I have a second copy of the first edition Player's Handbook in the more "modern" orange spine covers. I played AD&D with my Dad for years. In my mind we did it throughout my entire childhood, but looking back with an adult eye, it couldn't have been more than a couple of years tops. As I became a teenager the system was getting ridiculous. I just counted, I have *8* different orange back books as well as the five volumes they put out before adopting the orange spines. Believe it or not, at one point in time I could navigate that fluidly and tell you (without looking) where a particular obscure rule was. Oh, and there's so much stuff I didn't keep - years of Dragon magazines, modules by the linear foot, it's crazy. Looking at my 2nd edition Player's Handbook that's copy-righted 1989 - my freshman year of college. Which surprises me, I thought I was playing second edition in high school, but yeah I definitely think of 2nd edition as my college game. Of course, I spent a lot of time in college with GURPS, and even with DC Heroes for a while (I never gamed in the DC setting, but those were really good rules for running a superhero campaign.) The campaign withered and died after college though, and there's been no significant RPG'ing since then. There was third edition D&D - the first version done by Wizards of the Coast after the buyout of TSR. This is also the first version where the "Advanced" moniker disappeared and it is not AD&D anymore. I have the basic books for that set but looking at them next to the first and second edition books tells the tale. As I said, my first edition PHB doesn't even have a spine anymore, and I think the binding was starting to fail. I know I wouldn't let anybody but me touch it for a few years - that's what the second copy was for. My 2nd edition PHB isn't that bad, but it's been through the wars. The black spine is worn white in spots, the corners of the binding are rounded from countless trips in backpacks. The 3rd edition PHB? Still pristine. No noticeable wear and tear. It is copyright 2000, and I'm somewhat humored to notice there's a CD-ROM tucked in an envelope in the back that claims to have "Character Generator" software on it. So high tech! (It also has a "GDC Hotel Information Card" from 2003 stuck in it as a bookmark.) I remember when the 3rd edition PHB came out - Jeff Gregg and I spent an awfully long lunch one day trolling for copies. We talked about playing but I think we both knew we wouldn't ever do so. It was just nostalgic then, seeing what they've done with my old toys. I was aware of a revised "3.5" edition of the rules, but by then I couldn't see the value of buying another PHB. I mean, the last one won't even lay open flat on a table! Practically virginal, which is perhaps a poor choice of words, considering how "virginal" the entire topic is ;-) Amazon says that the 3.5 PHB came out in 2003, but I don't have a copy of that. Wow, I ran really long just looking at the old books. I suppose it's somewhat telling that I can put my hands on all this old crap and do so almost instantly. It's easily fifteen years since I opened a first edition book but I knew exactly where they all were in my office. GURPS may have more primary shelf space than the AD&D books but I can't imagine setting up my office without a place for those thieves prying the gem from the statue.
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