Misleading? No, I don't agree in the least.
1. WWG didn't have any product on hand to do the promotional material with. Not even prototypes. The promotional material had to be done before they got any product at all to work with, because you need something on the front of the box/bag/whatever at the time of manufacturing.
2. The earliest WWG could get their hands on the product itself was at GenCon.
3. The tentative decision was made to use the virtual promo images as an interim measure for the first run. Once there was product in hand, we'd be able to use the actual product itself to create the later-run promotional imagery. I don't know what the official decision on that is yet, but it was brought up and discussed at one of the staff meets.
4. This is by no means unusual or deliberately misleading. In nearly every industry, packaging is a chicken-or-egg thing. You need imagery for the box, but you can't get that imagery until the things have been manufactured, so you have to get around that somehow. The most common way is to use virtual imagery for at least the first production run.
5. Denny has stated publicly that the promotional images are virtual, and he has explained why.
6. When Denny did the promotional images, he and Matt were also working at breakneck speed and with great effort to get all of the die masters finished against a frightening deadline. He did NOT have the time to screw around painting in hundreds of transparent clips that you wouldn't even see unless you took a loupe to the packaging anyway. It wasn't a profitable use of extremely limited time that was better spent working on, like, the actual product itself.
7. In order to be misleading, WWG would need to have actually lied about it. Nobody told any fibs or porkies, and nobody went around trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes.
So, no. Not misleading at all. Misleading implies some sort of dishonest intent, and there was none.
-Mel
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