isn’t that what you were advocating for when you wrote ‘ The only thing is that you can stop people from mixing things and can properly balance things if you push to a new edition/version’?
If all you were talking about were a label, then nothing would change anyway, invalidating the whole point.
No, there's a difference between a PHB and an Adventure. The PHB contains mechanics, adventures are implementations of those. They're not quite the same. Adventures typically are easier to transfer over, and I think you can maintain a decent level of compatibility with those compared to actual books carrying rules, like the PHB.
Basically the big thing here would be that your adventures still will work if you use them, what won't work are your PHB and such because they are changing what the classes are. The problem is not with adventures (Which would likely transfer over pretty easily) as much as not wanting to mix PHBs because that is where you are going to create all the confusion. Is that more clear?
... but the problem is that they aren't moving away from the 2014
PHB, which suddenly introduces the problem where have competing classes that are not balanced the same way. The new druid is not going to be the old druid, and it's difficult to see the new druid taking hold if people can just choose the old one to avoid any balancing nerfs that might be placed on it.
no, it’s bad marketing as it implies incompatibility based on how that was used in the past
No, you just say "These rules will work with the adventures we've made in the past, they just won't work with player-facing materials". Again, if everyone is going to just buy the new rules
anyways and are basically going to toss the old rules by the wayside (which seems to be one of the big assumptions here), then formalizing it as a new edition basically changes nothing.
That just isn't how most players play D&D, especially new players. That may be how a lot of us hardcore players, who hang out here discussing D&D for hours every day may play. The overwhelming majority of players just don't care about min-maxing and optimizing there character. Most players just page through whatever book they have and just pick something that look fun.
Do you know that? I don't think you understand that min-maxing isn't just a D&D thing, but a gaming thing in general. Plenty of people look for the best stuff when they come into a new game, especially this sort of thing. Kids absolutely look through the internet to figure things out and see what works: I know, I teach them and I listen to them. They absolutely look up guides, videos, etc, on what works and get what you want. They will figure out if there is a better version of the Warlock out there pretty quick.
More than that, just playing a bit and finding out that there is a better version of your class out there somewhere will get enough of them. Once you start interacting with the community, they'll find out that there are older, "better" versions of things out there.
Again, the most popular subclass is the Champion Fighter. If that doesn't show that people here are not on the same page as most plyers, I don't know what would.
How much of that is for quickness of build, though? I need a spare character, I can put together Human Fighter on the spot. Like, are we not going to say that the Fighter needs a ton of improvements because apparently it's the most popular class? How could it be bad if so many people play it?
The thing is WotC is saying "You can use whatever you like", and "We are changing things and we think we'll be better for it". Over and over they have been saying if you like the current 5e and don't want to switch, you can still us 5e, all of the new adventures will still work. I see it more as rather than WotC not say that, they are, and people just refuse to believe them.
Saying "You can use whatever you like" is the problem, because it can basically nullify the second part. The easier thing to do would be to say "We are changing things for the better, your adventures will still work and we think you'll be more satisfied with the experience we create after using 10 years of data to address things" because it doesn't let people reach back to the things they are trying to move away from. It's honest and you don't have to worry about people bringing back old classes not built to be in their new version of the game.
