Celebrim
Legend
I don't think it was merely that they were dismissive toward 3e or running down their own product by calling out its problems. There was a distinctive dismissiveness towards the people who had purchased and were playing their product. This was the period on the boards, inflamed by 4e's actual marketing department where it was acceptable to imply that there was something wrong with you if you had enjoyed 3e. I think that stuck in my craw more than them complaining about 3e itself in dismissive language. It was the distinctive "you are a bad person if you run 3e" that became pervasive if you even mentioned the edition in the run up to 4e. It wouldn't have mattered to me who it was that was saying that.
Beyond the fact that dismissive of the game soon overlapped dismissive of those that played the game, much of the problems that they were talking about felt like problems specific to a particular community - namely the "Living" tables playing officially sanctioned adventures with characters that could be shared across adventures. Most of the problems they were talking about weren't actual fixes to the problems that I had, so when they went on and on about those problems and how they were planning to solve them, it felt very much like the design was going to be intended not to support the game that I had but some other game I wasn't participating in. And I can't help but feel in retrospect that they viewed playing the game as a sort of a multiplayer "raid" and the overriding rules concerns were around making that sort of game functional, even though for the most part that was not the game I had ever played in then 30 years of gaming.
I think the thing you miss is that when 3e had come out I had ceased to be a consumer of their product. I'd gotten fed up with 1e/2e and left, and when I saw 3e's design what I saw was a game that was tightly focused on fixing the actual problems that I had with 1e/2e. Like for example, I can't express how much joy I felt when I saw "Darkvision" had replaced "Infravision", or when I saw the "Scent" ability replacing the old table for creatures detecting invisible creatures, or even just that every creature would have all six attributes defined and use common rules. This was clearly designed for the game I actually played. By contrast, when 4e came out I was still actively in a 3e campaign that I was enjoying, using a modified 3e ruleset that my players still to this day call out as the best rules set they've ever played under, and so I wasn't in need of a radical fix because I was an existing customer.
To your point though, were I an existing customer of 2e and then WotC came out super dismissive of it, I might have had the same emotional response to at least some degree as I did with the 4e marketing. Maybe not as strongly, because at least they would have been talking about problems I likely concurred with, but probably some. And that could explain the mythical 2e/3e edition war that I've heard about but didn't experience.
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