When did WotC D&D "Jump the Shark"?

[Tuft]

Given that his "trolling" consisted largely of legitimate concerns about the new edition, which were being made at the time it aired by fans of previous editions.....Sorry, but this was a really bad commercial, that directly targeted people who were concerned with the direction WotC was taking D&D in.

Painting such folks as trolls and then dragon-dunging them might have seemed funny to the developers at the time, but it was boneheaded, pure & simple. It also comes off as vindictive toward a segment of the gaming population who didn't immediately buy into WotC's new paradigm.

What amount to attack ads against people who don't immediately support your product is.....off-putting at the least. And some of the ones I've seen seemed to me to have been devised to aid 4e supporters in "winning the edition wars".

No, I am not happy with WotC's ad department. I would actually like to see some acknowledgement of this, and an apology, from WotC.

YMMV.

RC

Exactly. Casting those fans who no longer fit your "vision" as trolls, and then employing scatological humiliation on them is so petty and vindictive that it is astounding. It's also arrogance in the same class as BP executives ("I want my life back"). That's why it definitely is a major shark-jumping moment to me.

Rallying your troops by, well, flinging muck at an outsider is a well-known psychological trick, and it is easy to employ. It is also an ugly one.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But, one's opinions of the ads, like everything else, is subjective. I can see why you feel the way that you do, and understand it, I just don't agree with it.

Subjective, yes, but also in some cases, professional and based on empirical data.

As in, history has taught marketing professionals that, while it occasionally works, the vast majority of the time the kind of marketing WotC used to launch 4Ed backfires. You really can't belittle your prior product in your ad campaigns and expect everyone to agree with that viewpoint. It's bad marketing; it's bad brand management.

(That was my assessment of the live action ads, the "gnome interview" and some of the designer interviews...having never before seen the ad above. THAT was simply awful.)

 

[Stormonu]

Past decade? Don't think so. Did Paizo even exist in 2001? And, while Paizo has done fantastic things reaching out to its fans, what has it done to reach out to new gamers? What has any gaming company done on the scale of D&D Encounters? Or the Library initiatives. Or giving money to registered gaming groups as WOTC did a few years back?

Back around 2005, right after Katrina, I sent a meekly worded letter to Paizo that it looked like my copy of Dungeon had gotten lost in the mail during the chaos, and could I please get a replacement copy.

I was very shocked a few weeks later to get a box containing not only a replacement mag, but a handful of books, minis, dice and whatnot. I later found out I was not the only one who received such a "care package" from them (and I believe they have done this following other disasters) and I have never forgotten that small ray of sunshine in that otherwise depressing time in my life.

Paizo has done quite right by my standards of supporting the hobby, and their fans to boot.

 

[DaveMage]

(That was my assessment of the live action ads, the "gnome interview" and some of the designer interviews...having never before seen the ad above. THAT was simply awful.)

That ad above reminds me of why I think it's ok to "dump" on WotC and 4E.

To me, that ad made it looked like that if you criticized a WotC design decision, you were a troll to be "dumped" on.

If that was their opinion - screw 'em!

 

[ExploderWizard]

And, just to point out, Fonzy jumped the shark in Season 5, yet Happy Days stayed on the air for 6 whole seasons after that.

Many things linger on long after the quality that defined them vanishes.

The problem with things that jump the shark is that they don't dissappear.

 

[BryonD]

But, while it's totally valid to say that WOTC is not catering to you, it's not really all that valid to say that you are either A) a typical consumer (you might be, but, we don't know) and B) that your habits are indicative of anything other than your personal buying habits.

But you are responding to an argument that no one is making.

I have not met a single person who claims, "I don't play 4E. I am typical. Therefore 4E is hurting."

If you find me one, then I will agree that they are wrong and your dispute stands.

I encounter people who play 4E. Each event is nothing but an anecdote.
I encounter people who have left D&D since 4E came along. Each event is nothing but an anecdote.

However the frequency of the two events is quite notable.
You could still say that this is "just an anecdote" of my personal random encounters, biased by my geography and online habits. Fair enough.
But a couple points apply to that. First, this is at least a different tier of anecdote. Second, the odds of me finding this distribution by pure chance, ten years ago during 3E was astronomical. It is like winning the lottery. Ok, people do win the lottery. So I'm just that guy and my lottery winning anecdote doesn't mean anything about the frequency of lottery winners. So you are still leading this debate.

But then I talk to other people who have the exact same experience in completely different areas. Huh. There sure seem to be a lot of lottery winners out there. Weird.

Then we look at other anecdotes out there.
There is plenty of serious flaws in looking at Amazon data. People misuse it constantly. Very small flurries of activity can wildly swing that data and make it look completely wrong. So if GURPS releases a new book, you can probably capture a screenshot showing GURPS as the #1 RPG. But you can also look at trends. In the past 3E was dominant, now it varies. The pattern has changed. What does that tell us? Well, something has changed.
What is it that has changed? Dunno. Maybe Amazon's methods just changed. Maybe the people shopping online have changed. Maybe someone learned how to hack the system. Dunno. What are the odds that this change would happen just in time to hurt the appearance? Dunno, but lottery winners happen, that doesn't mean everyone wins the lottery.

We hear from people with knowledge of retail bookstores that the sales are not the same. Well, that is just an anecdote of big chains and everyone knows that they are going through a lot of trouble right now. No telling what that means. Just bad luck for 4e on the timing.

We hear from distributors that things are completely different now. Well, they only service a segment of the market and don't provide a full picture. Not sure why that segment of the market would not be dominated by the 800 lb gorilla the way it used to be. But hey, lottery winners happen and lottery winners are just meaningless anecdotes.

We hear from game stores. As you said, some game stores report 4E sales are great and some report they are terrible. Now, clearly game store owners have some likelyhood of being gamers. So we have a bias issue. Yep, need to be careful here. Now, if we stick with the null hypothesis that everything is the same now then there should have been the same distribution of anti-3E gamestore owners then as there are anti-4E game store owners now. And yet, we didn't have game store owners complaining that they could not move 3E/D20 product. We had "the glut". We had "stiffling". Maybe game store owners were just as biased against 3E then as they are against 4E now. But for some odd reason they have started electing to put their biases above their profits now. It is just really bad luck for 4E that this change in values has happened now. Or it could be that the distribution is just the same, but the luck of the draw was such that game store owners completely randomly happened to be clustered in the tiny anti-4E segment of the population. Just another lottery winner.

One starts to wonder how many lottery winners are needed before one is permitted to draw the conclusion that there are more lottery winners than there used to be.

Those are not all the examples, but I think I've covered the frequently discussed ones.

If you try to take any one of them out and say it means something, then you are wrong. But understanding that those data points are all parts of one large population is important.

If someone now says they can look at that and say "4E is failing" then they are deluding themselves. If someone looks at that as says "PF has more revenue than 4E" then they are deluding themselves. If someone looks at all that and says "it is 70/30 4E" or "it is 50/50" or it is any X0/X0, then they are deluding themselves. We really do not have ANY information to answer any of THOSE questions.

But a rational person CAN look at all that and conclude that something is very different now from what it used to be.

And if you can't find any difference, then you are just not looking honestly. And, humorously, the fact that deniers of the change participate in this thread is a drop of evidence against them. This kind of claim 10 years ago would not have merited conversation.

Now, the one big thing left of is DDI. People will say that DDI makes all the difference. Ok, fair point. There is some quibble over whether the DDI subscriber base is 30K or 50K. For a second, lets assume 30K. Well, let me just say, that is a hell of a lot of money. Congrats!! Now, lets changes the assumption to 75K. And lets assume that not a single one of those people is double counted because no one with a DDI subscription anywhere ever buys a single book again. The deck is completely stacked in 4E's favor. If all of that is correct and 75K DDI subscribers is swaying the whole marketplace, then I stand corrected. The D&D brand is doing far far worse than I thought.


I certainly wonder, what anecdotes are there to suggest that 4E is just a dominate as 3E was? Or to suggest that the market is largely unified and not "deeply split".

 

[Fifth Element]

But a rational person CAN look at all that and conclude that something is very different now from what it used to be.

As I've said before, there is something different now: the second-most popular edition of D&D is published by a different company than the company that publishes the most popular edition of D&D.

We used to have AD&D published alongside basic D&D, both by the same company. Would you call the market "deeply split" then? There was certainly some animosity between the two groups, if you only listened to the loudest voices. But most D&D players were probably interested in both editions, and many played both editions at the same time.

We have no basis to now say that 4E players play 4E, PF players play PF, and never the twain shall meet.

We do know that Pathfinder is popular, in a general sense. We have no basis to proceed from that to a "deeply split" market, since we don't know how many of those PF players are also into 4E, and vice-versa.

"The market is deeply split" is a positive assertion, and requires evidence to support it. Where is your evidence, not that there are two popular editions of D&D right now, but that this leads to a split in the market?

 

[BryonD]

As I've said before, there is something different now: the second-most popular edition of D&D is published by a different company than the company that publishes the most popular edition of D&D.

First, that is not the point most others are making. If we can first agree that there IS a split between 4E and PF, then we can certainly move on to discussing the significance of PF being a built on 3E D&D.

But I'd also say that there is a very real difference between PF / 4E and the coexisting versions of the past. Again, the existence of PF would not have happened if a marketplace of fans rejecting the new version of D&D had not been there for the taking. And the differences don't stop there. Can you show me the comparable event to debating whether or not a cartoon dragon taking a dump on a troll over his preference between basic or advanced was an issue? And why does PF seem to be MORE popular now than 3E was in its lagging days?

Honestly, my recollection is that basic D&D was a gateway game and AD&D became the big game. Honestly, I was a kid and really not paying attention to that kind of information. I don't think it was a head to head nearly so much as a pairing. (meaningful numbers of exceptions notwithstanding). But, if you say my memory is just wrong, so be it. I don't really care because I don't agree it is relevant.

And I know with an absolute certainty that there are absolutely people playing both games. But if you are trying to paint a picture of one big happy family, then that is just funny. I'm a "H4TER". I'm an "edition war-monger". (And I have a lot of fun.) But as I've said many time before, 4E is a perfectly ok game. It is easily on my list of top 20 RPGs of all time. Maybe top ten. But there are better and I choose to play those. Heck, there are better games that I still don't ever get around to. But I literally find myself running into other gamers completely at random and commonly hearing "4E SUCKS!!". If I'm a H4TER, you should check out those guys. And there are a lot of them.

But again, that is all tangent because the point is whether or not we even agree that PF is in the ballpark of 4E.

 

[Umbran]

And why does PF seem to be MORE popular now than 3E was in its lagging days?

Why does it seem that way? You want other people to give you reasons for your own perceptions?

Maybe it seems that way because it is, in fact, more popular. Or maybe it is because the available information is biased, or maybe because you are subject to certain forms of confirmation bias. The potential reasons why it seems to be one way or another are many and varied, and we can only guess at which ones apply to you, or any other particular person.

 

[Nagol]

As I've said before, there is something different now: the second-most popular edition of D&D is published by a different company than the company that publishes the most popular edition of D&D.

We used to have AD&D published alongside basic D&D, both by the same company. Would you call the market "deeply split" then? There was certainly some animosity between the two groups, if you only listened to the loudest voices. But most D&D players were probably interested in both editions, and many played both editions at the same time.

Actually, that has been the case historically as well more generally in RPGs.

Runequest 2e threatened AD&D's popularity for a short period and was poised to take lead just before the sale to Avalon Hill in the early '80's. oWoD systems from White Wolf hit t least 2nd in popularity in the '90s.