Lately I've been wondering what the majority of users think about the new edition. I was noticing the negative article on the Starter Set found on the home page today.
I wanted to directly comment on this news headline. I see it's possible but I don't know how. If someone knows, I'd love to hear how. Some read these articles and think that the the writer's opinion is the way most think.
Yeah, that's confirmation bias. The guy who wrote the article was clearly wanting Pathfinder to 'win' his 'impartial test,' so he made it as partial as he could, and spun the results.
(Ironically, a couple of things that popped up that his testers 'liked' about Pathfinder - the use of tokens & grid, the encapsulation of all monster abilities in their entries, rather than referencing spells or feats in other books - were things 4e did, and edition warriors, including pathfinder fans, criticized it for.)
I wonder what the majority think of 5e so far? According to Amazon's customers, most like it. Are there other sites that are unbiased where you can get a good idea of the general feeling toward 5e?
Good luck ever figuring that out. Edition warriors argued for years over which was the majority - but, the most likely truth is the vocal ones doing the warring were /both/ tiny minorities - and the situation was superficially similar. The new ed selling well on Amazon while getting the odd negative review from a 3.x partisan.
There were a lot of nasty factors that combined to make the edition war snowball, though, and not many of them are present today, so there's every reason to hope that it won't be as bad. There'll always be hold-outs from the prior edition, and the OGL has created a stronghold for 3.5 fans, specifically, that means they'll probably never go away or get any quieter, but that's the only issue left that could lead to strife this time around.
The bar for 'success' this time around is just much lower. Mearls doesn't have to worry about trying to bring in unprecedented revenue with an untried product (DDI) that hits a brick wall in development. Project Morningstar is just going to be a 'nice to have' complementary good, not a bet-the-farm bid to pull down an MMO-like revenue stream, the failure of which dooms the line. So, regardless of whether it trounces Pathfinder in the market (it /is/ still D&D, so it really should be able to), it's run won't need to be shortened to deal with sudden a withdrawal of development resources, and Mearls should be able to more or less realize whatever vision he ultimately has for the game.