Seriously, I don't know where the competitive scene would be without Cryodex and List Juggler. It's hard work that often goes underappreciated, and the community wouldn't be the same without you guys. I bet some people even believe Cryodex is the official FFG tournament software.

Thanks man, I appreciate the comments. I have not heard of anyone thinking Cryodex was FFG Official though that would be funny. I have heard many times people thinking that FFG was using Cryodex at one of their tournaments. GenCon was a big one. I was getting phone calls when their software failed after round 1. Many people thought they switched to Cryodex.

Man angry sozin still gets me excited.

You should listen to the GenCon interview he did with me (part of the scum and villainy podcast). We tried our best to not go on a tirade. It's an interesting balance between loving this company and its products and the frustration of running into road blocks and decisions they made regarding the space we develop in.

I'm sure Kelvan heard it since he is on the show.

Derp...I need to listen to their stuff more often evidently.

While the wine, women, song, international travel in private jets, and buckets of cash are nice, sometimes it feels like FFG underappreciates its community. Chris has done yeoman's work with Cryodex. Geordanr, Fergus, and Fabs have created some amazing listbuilders (YASB, voidstate, and Fabs respectively). WickedGrey tied everything together with the xws list specification. FFG is sitting on a goldmine of software development talent that is freely giving away its expensive services. It the normal business world that sort of community enthusiasm is a cherished and nurtured asset. With FFG, its like they actually don't like what we do and wish that we would go away. It's weird and negative. I wish it could get better but I do not have high hopes.

I have a feeling it's not that they don't like what you do, it's that they have no idea what to do with you.

As an organization, they don't seem... adaptive, I guess? They didn't hire you and they're not directing you, and so they're not sure how to account for you.

I've always looked at it as if they acknowledged, directed, or promoted us they would become responsible for us. Keeping us disconnected completely allows them plausible deniability in the event we go off the beaten path. Like if I made my software recognize someone's name and give them good matchups they wouldn't want it coming back on them. I get it. We may think that some of the stuff we're asking for is small, but if you've ever read the book "If you give a mouse a cookie" you will understand why they have to draw a line and refuse to cross it. It's an interesting relationship. I may not like it, but that's what we have to deal with. I guess I'm just glad we haven't gotten cease and desist letters!

That would play into Vorpal's point about not knowing what to do with us. With an employee, you can boss them around / tell them what to do / be responsible for them / indemnify them. With us, they are faced with the same dilemma that a bunch of Fortune 500 companies when first seeing the Linux Operating System for the first time: they didn't know what the hell to do with it, and has a result refused to ever cross the line into using it for fear of liability / IP infringement / inability to control open source codebase / etc.

(For coda's sake, many of those companies have since eaten lead, as is now Linux/*NIX is now the dominant mobile OS - 84% market share, the clear leader in server class -- 65% -- and absolutely crushing the supercomputer market with 98% market share!).

In our case, I think this is a straightforward example of Hanlon's Razor.

I like to be a positive, constructive fellow, and so here's some clear actions that FFG could take:

• Easy and cheap: incentivize and reward the community software guys with Organized Play goodies. Right now we can't even get them to publicly acknowledge that we exist, much less say 'thank you' for what we do. I'm happy to get paid in acrylic and cardstock.
• Medium difficulty but still cheap: work with us to take the information/data constructs -- ship, pilot, and upgrade specifications,tournament rules, interchange formats, etc -- and make them publicly available as JSON services via something like a Cloudant.
• Hard, correct, and probably cheaper than existing alternatives: Invite Chris, me, Geordanr, WickedGray, etc in to help out with the TOME codebase, architecture, team, project schedule, quality assurance, devops, etc. Goal is to open source the entire thing on Github.