WotC are deleting their 3.5e web articles

[awaken DM golem]

Niice ... way to go WotC.

And the obligatory NOT AGAIN   


**


Let's see, I've gotta find that T.O. 4e Warforged thingy I was working on ...

[The_Mad_Linguist]

OK, midway through 2006 now.  Still downloading.

Would go faster, but I'm grabbing everything including wallpapers and art galleries.

[Ramaloke]

I just downloaded a buttload of stuff, something on the order of 2.2 Gigs. Im hoping to condense that by running some sort of script to combine all of the web folders into one (and thus get rid of any duplicate Jpegs) on all of the html files.

-edit-

With a handy apple script I managed to convert all of the html files into pdfs, which cut the size down to about 130 megs for everything I nabbed, I may compile the PDFs into one massive one later, but right now I am lazy. If I do so though, I will make it available for download via scribd.

[veekie]

It looks like WotC isn't deleting their 3.5 archives, but rather their 4E archives.

...


That makes even less sense!

Pre-Essentials 4E material is being nuked, from what I could tell.
Obviously non-Essential 4E material never existed.

It would not split a unsplit fanbase even further.

So the entire point of this move is to cut down on confusion regarding pre-Essentials material?

The theory being if they kill all pre-Essentials 4E material everyone would switch to Essentials instead of clinging on to their free material and having fun anyway.
This is helped by the Insider support for 4E being one of the bigger perks of their web initiative(and also having all pre-Essentials materials purged I'd bet)

Basically they figure they can avoid the 3.0/3.5 edition war for 4E/Essentials by assassinating 4E.

[PlzBreakMyCampaign]

Okay, we need to go about this systematically. Let's make a list of all the useful/interesting 3.5 Web content

I was thinking of doing a "Online Only" saved cache. I have a significant store of this already, it would simply be saving my bookmarked links.

I would store everything in HTML format just as it would show up on the site but without those size-inflating pictures. Let me know if this sounds good.

[Maat_Mons]

There are many instances in which I would favor dividing a single article into multiple pages.  For example, when an article lists several alternate class features, several new spells, et cetera. 

If there is going to be a site, it should have better organization the the Wizards site.  The ability to browse by type of content (e.g. new prestige classes) would be very helpful. 

I think the most sensible option would be to create a wiki. 

[Solo]

The theory being if they kill all pre-Essentials 4E material everyone would switch to Essentials instead of clinging on to their free material and having fun anyway.
This is helped by the Insider support for 4E being one of the bigger perks of their web initiative(and also having all pre-Essentials materials purged I'd bet)

Basically they figure they can avoid the 3.0/3.5 edition war for 4E/Essentials by assassinating 4E.

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

[Flay Crimsonwind]

The theory being if they kill all pre-Essentials 4E material everyone would switch to Essentials instead of clinging on to their free material and having fun anyway.
This is helped by the Insider support for 4E being one of the bigger perks of their web initiative(and also having all pre-Essentials materials purged I'd bet)

Basically they figure they can avoid the 3.0/3.5 edition war for 4E/Essentials by assassinating 4E.

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Solo, you just put one helluva shiver up my spine...

[Prime32]

There are many instances in which I would favor dividing a single article into multiple pages.  For example, when an article lists several alternate class features, several new spells, et cetera.  

If there is going to be a site, it should have better organization the the Wizards site.  The ability to browse by type of content (e.g. new prestige classes) would be very helpful.  

I think the most sensible option would be to create a wiki.  

I've created a few wikis. I figure there could be individual pages for each feat, etc., and article pages could include them (that way lists of certain content types could be generated automatically). Here's something I started to work on for a project at GitP (warblade and maneuver cards are on the WotC site).

If anyone could suggest a list of categories?...

[Maat_Mons]

A few categories spring to mind:

Articles

Monsters
- Races (monsters with LA)
Templates
- Playable templates (templates with LA)
Savage progressions

Classes
- Base classes
- Prestige classes
Alternate class features
Epic progressions

[Skills?]

Feats
- Item creation feats
- Psionic feats
- [other categories]

Spells
Powers
[Soulmelds?]
Vestiges
Maneuvers

Items
- Mundane items
- Alchemical items
- Magic items
- - [subdivisions for armor, weapons, wondrous items, et cetera]
Special materials

NPCs

It would also be nice if classes and prestige classes with arcane casting, divine casting, and psionic manifesting could be searched separately, with the ability to separate out prestige classes that grant casting and prestige classes that advance casting. 

[McPoyo]

So is there being a wiki being put up with all of these, or...?

[Sohala]

What makes certain webpages hang when attempting to download them?

[PhaedrusXY]

The theory being if they kill all pre-Essentials 4E material everyone would switch to Essentials instead of clinging on to their free material and having fun anyway.
This is helped by the Insider support for 4E being one of the bigger perks of their web initiative(and also having all pre-Essentials materials purged I'd bet)

Basically they figure they can avoid the 3.0/3.5 edition war for 4E/Essentials by assassinating 4E.

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Solo, you just put one helluva shiver up my spine...

He made me LOL. I don't think anything a gaming company did could make make my spine shiver... unless they start assassinating their most zealous critics, or something. 

[Aliment]

The theory being if they kill all pre-Essentials 4E material everyone would switch to Essentials instead of clinging on to their free material and having fun anyway.
This is helped by the Insider support for 4E being one of the bigger perks of their web initiative(and also having all pre-Essentials materials purged I'd bet)

Basically they figure they can avoid the 3.0/3.5 edition war for 4E/Essentials by assassinating 4E.

We are at war with Eurasia. We have always been at war with Eurasia.

Solo, you just put one helluva shiver up my spine...

He made me LOL. I don't think anything a gaming company did could make make my spine shiver... unless they start assassinating their most zealous critics, or something. 

I'd feel really bad for Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation then.

Wait, so is WotC, actually reverting back to classic style D&D?  That's some F'ed up fesces right there.  I thought the 4e direction was fine, and eventually the 3e players would run out of people to play with.

Actually, writing this post, I realize that just this year I converted 3 new players to 3.5.  So I guess Wizards might really have a large segmented base, despite 4e being really popular.  Why not continue to push 4e, and just push out a "conclusion" style book for 3.5?  I would love to see a PHB written with Errata that would fix major headache items (Grappling, Wizard Spells, CoDzilla, Monk, Fighter).  Or maybe just start another magazine like Dragon that pushes more 3.5 content?

[Bauglir]

The "conclusion book" was the Rules Compendium, complete with stealth errata.

[Talore]

The "conclusion book" was the Rules Compendium, complete with stealth errata.

Is it coincidental then that the 4e Rules Compendium is being released soon?

[Garryl]

It doesn't seem to be as bad as it first appeared. Looks like WotC just removed some of the older Dungeon/Dragon articles from before 4E previews really started, and the last few 3.5E preview articles that came out after they "upgraded" the website for 4E. Epic binders/warlocks and a few other things are gone, but everything else is right where it was before. The 4E era archives are still alive (at http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Archive.aspx), albeit missing a few of the earlier articles (in particular, the download of Dragon #360 and a few 3.5E previews and articles, as mentioned above).

[nijineko]

i've already downloaded the entire 3.5 wotc content. started years ago and have been updating it until they quit 3.5.

if anyone wants it, let me know. preferably by email, since my work has now blocked my lunchtime access to these boards. sigh. just use my username over on gmail. i'll have to post it on an online site as it is something like 800mb worth of files.

[Gods_Trick]

i've already downloaded the entire 3.5 wotc content. started years ago and have been updating it until they quit 3.5.

if anyone wants it, let me know. preferably by email, since my work has now blocked my lunchtime access to these boards. sigh. just use my username over on gmail. i'll have to post it on an online site as it is something like 800mb worth of files.

Would appreciate knowing its all up somewhere. Sadly I see this as a practice run.

[nijineko]

i correct myself. the amount of content is ~2.8gb. i'd forgotten how much it has expanded over the years.

i suppose that i should throw in my archive of the dragondex as well.

the content includes pretty much every web article ever published by wotc on 3.5, plus all of the maps, all of the archived materials, the forgotten realms stuff, the eberron stuff, the greyhawk stuff, even some of the miniatures stuff.

i've been collecting them steadily since 2001 or so.