For me, I've always liked 4E because of its structure and how easy it was to expand on that structure in a balanced manner. Additionally the steady improvement in nearly every book - with Dark Sun and Psionic Power being two of my favourites (coincidentally, released right before Wizards clear decline IMO).
To be frank, it's because I have nothing to look forward to anymore. There is no Dark Sun this year. There is no Eberron (from the previous year). There was no "Just about everything" like in the first year (albeit in fairness that would be hard to reproduce, as the system was new and I was excited to see where it went!). I should be endlessly excited about Threats to the Nentir vale. I mean the preview they showed absolutely 100% knocked it out of the park.
IMO WotC has two problems - one, they've oversaturated the market, leaving themselves with too many classes, races, etc. to actually support, and two, they really would have been served by not releasing their core products before they had years or errata and feedback under their belts. Paizo got this right with Pathfinder, and even beyond that they had a clear idea of what they wanted to do and they did it, while WotC fell into the trap of trying to launch a million ships with a new setting every year, constant stream of power books etc... WotC needed to exploit the advantages they had, and instead we got the DDI.
If they have no intention of doing it anymore, I'm really not going to put in the huge amount of work required for it (which is a shame, because I really want to do it).
AFAICT WotC have said quite plainly that they do
intend to support epic tier, the issue is just whether and how much they can follow through on that intention.
I mean it's the DMG, it has a lot of DM advice in it and it's widely considered very good advice. What on earth were people expecting?
From what I saw when the DMG2 was released? Crunch.
You already had a book that limited it's customer base, leaving out those who only play and never DM, and a lot of people seemed to flip through the advice section at the front, go "meh, I already know all this", and put it back on the shelf. It sold worse than the DMG1, which sold worse than the PHB1 or nearly any player book. I see the return of magic items to the DM book (and probably the impetus behind the whole rarity scheme) as an attempt to get players buying these books again (which is hilarious as the compendium totally undermines that effort anyway).
DMG2 was a fantastic book, even as someone who has been involved in DMing since the mid-90s. DMG1 was actually a great book too, if not especially novel for someone with a lot of experience who already knows the basics of running a game.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I saw a number of people here and elsewhere pan the idea that WotC dare suggest they where not 100% perfect DMs already, an that they needed to be "told how to DM".
As I understand it, the last update to MB screwed it up.
Not entirely; IMO pulling development on the OMB "screwed it up", because a lot of little, niggling issues went from "ok, I can deal with this until it gets fixed" to "fffffffffffffffffffff". Even before that update I was having to export monsters into OpenOffice to do a final run-through of editing, adding back in things that where dropped, etc. because trying to do it in the MB just dropped more stuff. The last update did introduce a slew of new problems, though, and that was just "icing" on the "cake".
Which is extremely sad, because pre-essentials Wizards were succeeding at all three. Especially because you knew support would come eventually under the old model, just a matter of time. Now? Who knows.
Personally, I'd put the "point of failure" a bit further back, with the release of the PHB3. Again, I think that it's kind of an issue that when PHB3 was released a number of classes in there seemed like WotC might have been able to fix them with future products (there was never any hope for the races, unfortunately). The idea of subclasses really seems like a (somewhat stopgap, I'll admit) attempt to address the issue of "support". WotC can't really afford to "support" all of the classes it's churned out in these last few years, but if they can make new concepts support old ones then they have lessened the issue, at least.
IMO seeker and runepriest (and even going back to things like the artificer and swordmage)
would have worked better overall as sub-classes. The runepriest in particular* could have been designed with more generic effects surrounding the runestates, then they could plop a list errata-ing keywords onto select cleric powers, and hey wuddyaknow? The class launches with "support" built right in.
(* In particular only because it's the only one of those four concepts I'm really that interested in seeing "salvaged".)
The thing is - go back to the PHB1. Look at the cleric section.
That is the cleric. If that's not good enough to play without "support" forthcoming, then the class is dead in the water (ok, it may have had some traction if it was the only divine leader in existence at the time of it's launch...). That's my issue with the runepriest, etc. If they aren't good enough to play without "support", then they aren't worth throwing good money after bad.
So, yeah, I think that unless they manage to pop out a class that the entire player base just goes nuts over, I think that "fire and forget" is the way they're going to go. And, personally, I'm more than fine with that if the classes are good in the first place. I do not want to see any more classes that rely on "support" to make them worth playing. And, furthermore, I don't think we're going to see a new class that creates enough excitement within the playerbase to make it really worth WotC churning out more "support" at this point; personally I have dozens more characters I want to give a go in 4e than I will ever get to, even if I gave up on DMing right now, just in the HoWS* books...
(*Heroes of Whatever Something, thanx domino for that one...)