Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University.  This week, Thorne continues his look at WotC's retailer portal (see "Rolling for Initiative--Of Portals and Palladium") and follows up with a broader discussion of DCI Reporter and other aspects of the WPN program.

I'm still having problems with Wizard of the Coast's email portal.  It appears to not like the saved password I put into it and, when I answer the questions to retrieve the password so I can change it to one it finds better, the retrieval email vanishes into the internet either.  According to the WPN customer service representative, who answers the phone quite quickly and is very helpful in resetting the password and otherwise getting me back into my portal account, even on a Saturday evening, it might have something to do with my using an AOL account as the portal does apparently not like AOL email addresses.  Hopefully, the company's IT people will look into that as I have no intention of changing my email address for the portal's convenience.  By the way, WotC, I do appreciate your having customer service people available on Saturday AND Sunday.  Very impressive.

On the plus side, WotC keeps making changes to the DCI program that makes it easier and more time saving for stores to use.  Several months ago, they adjusted the sanctioning methods for D&D Encounters so that stores did not have to hunt for the specific dates when sanctioning the next period's series of events.  Now only the specific days of the week (i.e. Wednesdays) show up in the scheduling software, making it much quicker to sanction them.

Now if the company would just set up one click sanctioning for Encounters.  What store, after all, would start running a series of Encounters and plan on stopping partway through the campaign?  It's not like Friday Night Magic, where stores might choose to run different events on differing Fridays, or the Lair Assault program, which lets stores pick and choose any day of the week, nay month, we want to run them.  WotC has emphasized, over and over, that we are to run Encounters on Wednesdays, so setting Report up to sanction them for every Wednesday until the season ends makes sense.

WotC has, thankfully, implemented another useful change to the WPN program and to DCI Reporter.  Starting with Dark Ascension, the next release, when a store sanctions a pre-release for the set, WotC automatically enrolls the store in that set's Buy It by the Box program. That makes sense and should have happened a while ago.  I don't know of any store manager who would think, "Yeah, I'm going to sign up for the next pre-release, but that Buy It by the Box program, I think I'll pass on that."  On at least two occasions, our store failed to sign up for the BIBTB program, not because we decided to pass on it but because we overlooked it during the process of sanctioning pre-releases, launch parties and Game Days.  I have even heard of a couple of stores that missed pre-releases due to missing the dates in Reporter, so a store missing a BIBTB due date is quite understandable.  Now, in order not to miss the BIBTB due date, we just have to remember not to overlook the cutoff date for the pre-release.  Always glad to have one less thing to have to remember.  Now, if the company would just notify stores ahead of time before they send out cool promo stuff, like all the support materials have received since Innistrad released.  Maybe stick a note announcing them in the Wizards' Weekly Email update and include ordering ability in Reporter?

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those  not necessarily reflect th views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.