"However what is not included is the ability to scale rendering beyond your workstation whether it is to your own render farm or to the cloud. This will be a significant change for some unfortunately. "
By "change", in this circumstance, it would appear you mean one of two things for people that have signed contracts and use MR, both of which are not good.
1). A bill.
2). A waste of money, for sticking with 2016 and wasting your subscription benefits.
The way I see it, you had four options here, to make this a fair trade-off, none of which were done.
1). You could have negotiated with Nvidia to give everyone a temporary license of standalone MR for the remainder of their current subscription. This meets the expectations we had upon signing our contracts, which is that the ability to do default high-end network rendering, out of the box, wasn't going anywhere, given that it's been supported for several years. Once your time is up, you have the informed, rational decision making power to decide whether or not to continue your subscription knowing that you're getting less for your money out of the box, going forward.
2). You could have done the same thing with Arnold as #1. You own it and certainly have the power to do so. This would not be a long term detriment to 3rd party render partners, as the terms of our subscriptions would only exist for a maximum of three years from now.
3). You could have made Arnold be feature comparable to MR, out of the box, including comparable networking abilities. In my opinion, this is what you should have done. There is not a good reason why something as arbitrary as batch rendering should occur with watermarks. You're pretty blatantly asking us to accept that this "upgrade" is predicated upon switching out our current high-end rendering solution for something that is less functional, and asking to double dip to regain that functionality. That is not an upgrade. "Upgrading" is supposed to make things better not worse. You made us pay for something that is intentionally worse, by design, in a fundamental way. You're asking us to pay again, to reverse the conditions you implemented.
4). Given the radical changes you're making to the expectations we had when signing our contracts, you could have given people the option to pay out the difference of our contracts to have perpetual versions of 2016, if we wanted to stick with the version indefinitely - instead we have to keep throwing money in a hole to achieve the same thing, all while getting none of the benefits of updated features.
Again, I understand if you have to move away from MR. However, I strongly believe you're not doing so in a way that's fair to people, and have pretty much only considered your own best interests in the transition, instead of even the smallest of bones thrown to your customers, who are pretty much, themselves, getting thrown under the proverbial bus.
Like I said, contracts were paid for under the expectation that Maya/Max contain stock high-end rendering with network rendering supported by default. It's been that way for years and years, and no reasonable person would have expected otherwise for the foreseeable future. It's not just an "unfortunate change"....and the situation is in no way out of your hands, or outside of your control. You own Arnold, and decided, very, very, intentionally, to give us less value in the trade-off. You could have given us something of equal value for the money we've already given you, and chose not to. This is very important to me. It's not like Arnold doesn't support these things - you don't want it to support those things. We're talking about hundreds and hundreds of dollars, approaching the price of the subscription itself - per seat!. This is not a small change.
Again, none of this would matter if you offered perpetual licenses. You basically want people to pay for things in advance, in good faith, even though you're obviously proving that you will not honor that faith in your "product", which far from being an improvement, is going to come with a surprise C.O.D. price-tag attached, if you want to continue to use it to do real work. The take-away from all of this is that your subscription model, far from being a "good deal" is actually something that has negative value. It's a literal waste of money, due to you intentionally hamstringing our expected bundled renderer, and forcing us to either spend money to restore functionality we already paid for in previous upgrades, essentially double-dipping, or waste money on versions we won't use - forever - if we want to keep working, and not lose the right to run 2016.
We didn't purchase our contract under the condition that you must pay for a render solution plugin to use high-end network rendering and have current, up to date software. You're asking us to accept that condition after the fact, and after you sold us a service that did the opposite.
In summary, you didn't give proper warning, offer no compensation whatsoever for the trouble and chaos your decisions are causing, and you are blatantly asking to us to retroactively accept less value for our money, because it's primarily good for you and your render partners, all in the middle of our contract terms, after your sales pitch, once you've already cashed our check. I'm sure the fine print makes all of this ok, it always does, but that doesn't make it morally ok.
