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Blackmoor VituperativeAloha, Hero Games
An open letter to Steve Long and Darren Watts, aka “DOJ dba Hero Games”:
You’ve had more than a week to respond to my concerns, but you have not done so. Neither of you has seen fit to apologize for the treatment of your customers, nor even to acknowledge my letter. I had hoped that it would not come to this.
It’s bad enough that one of your representatives attempted to bait me into an argument, and then banned me (without warning or provocation) from your site when I failed to take the bait.
It’s bad enough that when I offered you thousands of dollars’ worth of professional editing and layout work, as a gesture of support at a time when you announced publicly that you were having financial difficulty, that you preferred to jerk me around for weeks, wasting my time, rather than simply refusing my offer.
But to ban people in my gaming group, who (to my knowledge) have had no interaction with you other than to give you their money and support for the past six years — I can’t overlook this or interpret it as simply a misunderstanding. I have given you ample opportunity to apologize and to make things right. You apparently don’t think you have anything to apologize for. So be it.
You have taken our good will for granted, allowed your online representatives to treat us with contempt for years, and the blame rests on your shoulders: it is your company. Until you publicly apologize to your customers — all of your customers — and make a believable effort to change your ways, you will not receive another penny from me, or, to the limited extent it is within my power, from anyone I know.
Despite this, I can’t bring myself to actually wish you ill. You have published some of the best sourcebooks ever written for Champions and the other Hero System games, and for that you will always have my gratitude. But I do hope that you eventually realize that treating your customers poorly does impact your bottom line, and that you alter your behavior — and that of your representatives — accordingly. When you do, you will have regained both my respect and my patronage.
And if you never do, well, Hero Games has changed hands before. It will change hands again. Perhaps the next incarnation will place more value on the respect and loyalty of their customers.
–
Brandon Blackmoor
Champions player since 1985
bblackmoor@blackgate.net
2006-04-08
I was not going to actually email this to Long and Watts. They haven’t responded up to now, so why bother? They’d just, as one member of my gaming group so delicately put it, ball up the letter and say “fuuuuuuck him”. But my game group urged me to send it to Long and Watts anyway, so I did.
But I am disappointed. It did not have to be like this. Oh, well. More money to spend on d20 stuff and the new Battletech HeroClix. 
(Hero System (TM) is DOJ’s trademark for its roleplaying game system. Use of the mark “Hero System” and the “green man” logo constitute nominative use of these marks.)
April 8th, 2006 at 21:14
Sorry, but not surprised, to read this.
I hope the next people who own the rights to Hero do a better job.
DOJ’s “My way or the highway!” approach does not seem to make any sense, especially considering what a niche market Hero is.
Do they actually think they can alienate so many longtime customers without it hurting their business?
Every time they lose someone like you, our group usually goes with us.
Hero takes a while to learn, and it takes someone who knows the system to teach it to you.
The best shot they had at attracting new gamers was Sidekick, and they never supported it at all.
Steve seemed to have a personal stake in never creating any Sidekick genre books.
Many of us suggested, on multiple occasions, that if they would come out with something like Sidekick Champions, with a relatively small paperback combining a sourcebook, villain book, and introductory module, they might have a shot at gaining new players.
Instead they seem committed to producing more and more ‘luxury’ products that only a wealthy, hardcore, Hero fan would dream of buying.
Except those are the exact people that they are driving away on a daily basis.
This business model seems to be close to insane.
Maybe they are making way more money than we think, and new players are busting down the doors of the online store to get what they are putting out, but I sure don’t think so.
I wish they could see how wrongheaded they are being before it is too late.
And if they can’t, I hope that someone is around to pick up the pieces when they fall.
KA.
April 9th, 2006 at 09:03
Sorry to hear, they haven’t responded, and how is battle tech hero click?
April 9th, 2006 at 16:15
Battletech Heroclix is pretty fun. It’s much, much simpler than old-school Battletech. You don’t keep track of armor by location, or various kinds of weapons, or anything like that, like you did in the old days. You get in range, you attack, you do damage, you spin the little clicky base. So if you got a kick of out the little fiddly bits (and I confess that I did), then it may seem to be missing something. But it’s still pretty fun. A decent battle between three sides can be resolved in about a half-hour.
Of course, you have to drop $100s of dollars to have a really nice selection of mechs, but what’s money? Also, the background is a long time after the succession wars, so the setting is completely different from what I remember.
April 9th, 2006 at 22:18
[…] also CC’d to Ben Seeman, another Hero Games representative), I did get responses to Aloha, Hero Games from Darren Watts and Steve Long. From Darren Watts: I’m sorry […]
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