Hilarious
Less than one week ago, I made a two brief comments on two game industry mailing lists that apparently reminded the amnesiac members of the roleplaying community of a certain someone's unethical and improper accessing of elected GAMA Board members e-mail communications.
It seems this may have caused him some discomfort. A mere five days later, this same person pops up to spontaneously "review" some of the books we've designed for Black Industries, first attempting to establish his "fairness" by giving one book a good score (and loading the review with plenty of backhanded complements: according to the review every good thing that Pramas has done in his designs is directly attributable to what he "learned" at Wizards of the Coast) so that he can pretend some credibility when giving the next a poor one (a book well-received by the roleplaying community and award-nominated to boot, but let's not let that stop a us). The retaliation is so hilariously transparent I can't even bring myself to be annoyed: suggestions to improve the books included lines like "A system for creating magic items, and more magic items" and "Treasure tables and guidelines for determining what can be looted from the bodies and lairs of the monsters." Creating magic items?! Killing the monsters and taking their treasure, in WFRP?! Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha. Holy missing the entire point, batman!
Of course, our illustrious (and surely impartial) reviewer isn't exactly known for his design chops himself, if the ratings and reviews of his book are anything to go by...
It seems this may have caused him some discomfort. A mere five days later, this same person pops up to spontaneously "review" some of the books we've designed for Black Industries, first attempting to establish his "fairness" by giving one book a good score (and loading the review with plenty of backhanded complements: according to the review every good thing that Pramas has done in his designs is directly attributable to what he "learned" at Wizards of the Coast) so that he can pretend some credibility when giving the next a poor one (a book well-received by the roleplaying community and award-nominated to boot, but let's not let that stop a us). The retaliation is so hilariously transparent I can't even bring myself to be annoyed: suggestions to improve the books included lines like "A system for creating magic items, and more magic items" and "Treasure tables and guidelines for determining what can be looted from the bodies and lairs of the monsters." Creating magic items?! Killing the monsters and taking their treasure, in WFRP?! Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha. Holy missing the entire point, batman!
Of course, our illustrious (and surely impartial) reviewer isn't exactly known for his design chops himself, if the ratings and reviews of his book are anything to go by...
I believe you forgot "And reviewed those books on a site hosted by his own [at leat in part] company."
Fascinating. With that kind of thinking Monte Cook must be affiliated with Ryan as Monte's site is also hosted by his (Ryan's) own [at leat in part] company. Does that mean Monte is against Nick and Chris too?
Just because a site is being served via a company which hosts 10s of thousands other sites doesn't mean there is any mutual beliefs....
The annoying thing is that Ryan mixes valid criticism (I disliked full-page artwork when TSR did it, too) with invalid criticism (saying "It has an index but no glossary" implies that a glossary is mandatory, but what about the lack of a bibliography, or star charts, or logarithm tables?) so that you can't even consider his "good" review a good review. I wonder how many other books Ryan's been inspired to review over the last decade; and I wonder how many of those other reviews were as tiresome.
Spike Y Jones