When did I stop being WotC's target audience?

[Mallus]

"shouting on the internet" certainly has nothing to do with it, but check back in two years before declaring victory.

Ari said 4e was a success, right now, as that's what the sales figures show. He didn't proclaim 'victory' in the 100 Years Edition War.

 

[jensun]

Is there data to back up that claim?

That depends on whether you consider a small number of vociferous complainers on the internet data.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think I read the same DMG, and I don't know what you're talking about. Care to give an example?

I don't have the books with me at work,and I would not want to mis-quote, but there was another thread not too long ago where I already gave examples.

 

[AllisterH]

This is what I'm curious about, too. Instead of "fixing" 3.5 they went straight to a (and let's not pretend it isn't) a pretty much new set of rules. Why? Why not tidy up the errors from 3.5? Why did they decide to re-tool the entire game?

I would dearly love to hear from one of the WOTC staff justifying the (almost) complete overhaul of the D&D game.

Um, because they realized that you fundamentally can't have a per day mechanic class balanced by a at-will mechanic class.

The assumption is that "a few tweaks is all D&D needs" but for many people, that doesn't fix what they see as problems with the game.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Um, because they realized that you fundamentally can't have a per day mechanic class balanced by a at-will mechanic class.

The assumption is that "a few tweaks is all D&D needs" but for many people, that doesn't fix what they see as problems with the game.

That's of course assuming "balance" is a concern. This seems to be part of WotC characterization of its target audience, and might be why I still fall into it. I don't want to play second fiddle or be limited to a particular class/race to avoid the second fiddle.

But it's not the only concern, obviously.
Variety, different archetypes, character creation/build options is another. 3E had this in spades. 4E puts more constraints on this, but still has this as a goal.

Another concern is "tactical interestingness" - resource management during combat encounters. 3E had this at different degrees- very strong for spellcasters, very weak for non-spellcasters. 4E things that everyone wants a similar amount of options and management during encounters, they just like the different focus (the roles are a shorthand for the directions they identified as important.)

Another concern was "playability" or "usability". How is the game played? How can it be played? How can we remove the parts that people rarely use or find annoying? How can we add stuff that people already do or would like to do, but don't know yet how to? 3E did something in this regard, by trying to streamline certain aspects of the game, but it still managed to get very... complicated in certain areas (monster and NPC creation?). And this also lead to stuff like no Craft/Perform/Profession - not used by enough people, too vaguely defined, seen as a "skill tax" for some classes (Bard). Use at the table is minimal, so off it goes.

Yet another concern might be "flavor/fluff". I am a fan of the 4E cosmology and races, but there are others apparently are not. Still, I think the "implied setting" is interesting and no worse then the 3E ones. but it's not the 3E or earlier editions one.
Maybe here WotC made a mistake, believing that fans were ready for a new implied setting. I certainly wouldn't have expected people to see the lack of the Great Wheel as a problem, because I never experienced it as something "core" to D&D (especially after Manual of the Planes showed alternative cosmologies).

Of course, I am not sure how much all of this was internally written down as design goals based on marketing research, and how much can be attributed to the preferences of the design and development team (and their ability to find compromises between their preferences.)

The priorities that have been assigned to these concerns have changed between 3E and 4E. And thus 4E became a better fit for gamers with shared priorities. And now many 3E players find out the new priorities are more to their liking, and many others find out they had different priorities.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

There's an awful lot of misinformation involved in this post.

1) 4E is a runaway success, sales-wise. The transition was quite smooth enough, and there was no misjudgment of the market. There may have been a misjudgment of a small portion of the market, but if so, it wasn't enough to substantially harm the launch of the game.

Sales wise, yes. But is there data on how many of the people who bought the core books are still playing the game?

Normally, this would be the part where I say "I know a bunch of people who bought the game but have decided that they dont like it". What I am going to say is this: I was prepared not to like the game. As information began to leak out I saw things that I hated about it, and things that I liked about it. I ordered the gift set off of Amazon and read through it. I organized and ran a single session of 4E at a D&D meetup in NYC and found while it's not a terrible game, it's not a game that I'm interested in supporting. It sits on my shelf just like Champions, M&M, GURPS & Spycraft. It's just another game system to me and not the one that I'll be using for fantasy adventure gaming.

So again while one side is claiming that the game is a runaway success, I'm more interested in what happens a year or two from now. How many people will be still playing the game with close to same enthusiasm that they are right now. I've tried to like it even though I have thousands of dollars invested in 3E - 3.5 materials. It just feels like a more detailed version on the D&D miniatures game to me. Which is not a bad thing if that's what youre interested in playing. Me not so much.

 

[Sunderstone]

1) 4E is a runaway success, sales-wise. The transition was quite smooth enough, and there was no misjudgment of the market. There may have been a misjudgment of a small portion of the market,

<snip>

Yes, a large number of the old fan base doesn't like it.

with all due respect but..... "lol".

Ill follow that up with an agreement with ProfessorCirno, im seeing a much bigger split of the fanbase this time around than any other.

Disclaimer #2.... The following is my uninformed yet consumer-ish opinion....

Regardless of how successful 4E "really" is , I also believe WotC had to go this route no matter what. Bottom line is that their products after the Core and OGL have not been on par with the quality of some 3PPs. There were some gems here and there but few and far-between.
While WotC may have had most of the market because of the "Official" seal itself, some 3PPs like Necro, Goodman, Green Ronin, Malhavoc, and later Paizo probably cut into their profit margin by consistently releasing better product.
This was a no-brainer... "the ogl effed us up, we are losing sales, lets make a new edition so we can keep a tighter hold of the market with less competition (the draconic but necessary GSL) this time".

End Disclaimer from an uninformed yet consumer-ish opinion.


Someone else said (as many others have said).... "Play whatever edition you want". This is what most of us non-4E fans have done and will continue to do by supporting other companies we like.

I'd appreciate if we could drop the "embrace, adapt, evolve with the game" though. I really do not want to embrace the current edition for whatever reason, and imho the game hasnt evolved at all. Its just taking a turn elsewhere.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

So again while one side is claiming that the game is a runaway success, I'm more interested in what happens a year or two from now.

We will know this in a year or two from now.

But as much as we'd like to believe this time its special, I suspect the customer retention for games is a constant. If more people buy 4E Core then 3E Core, this means it will lose more people and also retain more people then 3E Core. It will just be different people gained/lost/retained.

But we'll see this in a year or two from now. We can speculate as much as we want till then. For EN World, here is the poll I plan to re-use. If we're actually still interested in this matter in 1-2 years.

 

[Sunderstone]

For EN World, here is the poll I plan to re-use. If we're actually still interested in this matter in 1-2 years.

Would be nice to have similar polls posted on other sites and compiled into the total. Probably would be alot of work though.

 

[jdsivyer]

I think WotC were in a practical dilemma. The business cycle really mandated the D&D product line to be relaunched, lest that product line go out of existence entirely. However, to launch a new D&D product line, you've only got two choices. Either an ever so economical (read: minimal) re-touch to your latest edition, or an edition that is a new game in its own right. Take your pick, and try to tell me that either option wouldn't have caused a flamewar. "Why do we need to shell out another $90 on the core rulebooks when all that was needed was a 20 page PDF errata file?" I can see that reaction arising regardless of whether WotC would have gone 3.75, or 4.0 as they did - it's just the 3.0/3.5 issue all over, which caused plenty of flaming back then. Customers don't want a re-launch of their product line, they only want continual support - and free of charge, at that.

My main problem is that a mere 3 years after 3.5 (which supposedly "fixed" 3.0) was produced, along came 4e. Even if 4e had a been a re-tooling of 3.5 (not an almost complete overhaul) then I would be less than happy still the same because it was only 3 years after the previous one. So what I'm saying is that I would like WOTC to explain why they needed a new edition 3 years after the "fixing" of the previous one - I am yet to hear a logical or reasonable explanation.

As far as customer only wanting continual support (and free of charge), I'm not too sure, to be honest. If the product is good, and justified, people will purchase it. I'm just not sure if 4e was justified at this time (2008) when 3.5 came out only a few years back.

And why dooes a business like WOTC only have two choices when re-launching a game? Why do they have to re-launch a new game in its own right? If they realised there were errors or glitches in 3.5 then they simply should have been fixed. I'm still not 100% sure of what the reason behind re-tooling 3.5 to what 4e has become is.

Maybe it's just me, but the decision to bring out 4e still leaves me a little baffled. Whether the game is good, bad, great, or downright shocking, it doesn't matter. I'm just simply curious as to why they released it so quickly after "fixing" the previous edition, that's all.