D&D (2024) What is your oppinion of 5.24 so far?

[DEFCON 1]

Hence only 3 new Wizard subclasses after a decade and some very interesting proposals.

Well, we know that is because (based on everything we read about here on EN World)... WotC LURVS their WIZARDS more than anything else in this whole tippy-toppy widey-wide world... and all the folks here that HATESES THE WIZARD CUZ IT'S OVERWPOWERED AND GETS ALL DA GOOD STUFFZ!!!... would do everything in their power to make sure Wizards didn't get anything new.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

From what I can suss from watching these for the past decade: the main target metric for WotC is the median response. If most people respond with 5/5...that's good, the median (or mean, I'm an Engliah lit major) is 70%. Not enough by itself, because if people give 5/5 and say "I could tolerate this change" that can still not pass muster for them. But if more people give a 1-4 reaponse...which the median/mean result would be under 70...not worth it to WotC to pursue.

I really don't know what you mean with median in this case.

Median is the middle value in sorted list.

So if people voted 1,1,2,3,4,4,5,5,5, the median is 4.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Well, not necessarily. If everyone voted '4', then that would have been 80% preferred and thus it would have most likely been iterated on.

But you couple a whole bunch of '4's with massive amounts of '3's, '2's, and '1's... you drop that 80% down to below 70% and and that says "ambivalent" down to "actively disliked."

If 4's are interpreted as 0.8. They could as well be weighted with 0.9.
We don't know if they used a linear scale.

 

[mamba]

Well, not necessarily. If everyone voted '4', then that would have been 80% preferred and thus it would have most likely been iterated on.

assuming 5 is 100%, 4 is 80% and so forth, at which point 1 is 20%, which I am not sure is how it breaks down, 1 should be 0% imo, whether the rest is linear is unclear.

But you couple a whole bunch of '4's with massive amounts of '3's, '2's, and '1's... you drop that 80% down to below 70% and and that says "ambivalent" down to "actively disliked."

yes, and the 4 is easier to vote down than the 5 is. If everyone who badly wanted the change to long rest voted 4 because there was something else they think should be different, there is no chance it meets the threshold because some people will always vote 2 or so because they do not want it.

So 4 as a vote for something fails right out of the gate (unless it is immensely popular, moreso than anything can realistically hope to be). A 5 can still be voted down if there is enough resistance, but at least it does not trip over itself at the starting line.

 

[Laurefindel]

…WotC LURVS their WIZARDS more than anything else in this whole tippy-toppy widey-wide world...

Well, they’re not called Fighters of the Coast…

 

[Parmandur]

yes, that is my conclusion, if you want something to survive, definitely vote 5, no matter how flawed the proposed form is. If you want it gone, vote 1. If you do not care, why even fill out the question. So vote 1 or 5 and focus on stuff that matters to you.

I assume this is very different from how most people actually fill out the poll however. I assume most people see 5 as 'great', 4 as 'I am for it, but it could be better', 3 as 'I do not really care either way', and 1 and 2 are 'I do not like this' to varying degrees.

I expect most votes of 4 to mean 'I like it, but I want improvements', and yet you have it as 'a vote of undesirability'. You are probably correct that it gets interpreted that way by WotC given the results, but I don't think most people understand that and vote that way, and that is my problem with the approach.

However, from WotC position, they do want to know of repaonae is tepid: they have frequbeen on record as only wanting to publish options that people actually really, really want. Hence why a full two-thirds of the Subclasses they proposed for 202e books, and the only Species options, were shot down.

 

[cbwjm]

the early UA gave us a Warlock that was not short rest based, but since it didn’t ‘delight’ enough people they scrapped it

Which was a shame and one of the things that reduced my desire to purchase. I preferred it to the current warlock as I'm not a fan of pact magic. I'm guessing more than enough people are though which would explain why it got scrapped.

 

[Oofta]

With a scale of only 1 thru 5, I just don't see the 1s or 5s having an outsized impact. It's not like we're looking at a dozen values that between 1 and 1,000. Taking the median when you have millions of responses does not mean you ignore all the results between 2 and 4 any more than if you had used the average.

I also haven't seen a quote that said they used the median, although I could have missed it. Sometimes you want to use the median, sometimes you want to use the average for analysis, neither is preferable. Since I'm not a statistician I have no clue which one is best.

But I would assume that with spending as much money as they did on the survey, they did discuss the analysis of the results with someone who actually knew what they were talking about. Not just a bunch of second guessing Monday morning quarterbacks who don't really know the details of their internal analysis.

 

[Parmandur]

I really don't know what you mean with median in this case.

Median is the middle value in sorted list.

So if people voted 1,1,2,3,4,4,5,5,5, the median is 4.

Lookong back at earlier posts on the topic, I meant mean. And achieving a C grade of 70% does require a lot of 5s, though I think a preponderance of 4s with tepid written comments can account for some of those 70% breaking features they abandoned.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Lookong back at earlier posts on the topic, I meant mean. And achieving a C grade of 70% does require a lot of 5s, though I think a preponderance of 4s with tepid written comments can account for some of those 70% breaking features they abandoned.

Yes. Mean makes more sense.

Bit we still don't know if they use the unweighted mean value. Or if they had some weighting or a nonlinear scale.

star rating -> satisfactory score

Linear:
1 -> 0
2 -> 0.25
3 -> 0.5
4 -> 0.75
5 -> 1

So votes of 1,2,3,4,5 would average to (0+0.25+0.5+0.75+1)/5 = 0.5

They could well have used:

1 -> 0
2 -> 0.3
3 -> 0.6
4 -> 0.8
5 -> 1

The same votes of 1,2,3,4,5 would average to (0+0.3+0.6+0.8+1)/5 = 0.54

So without these values, we actually don't know what their treshold of 70% means.

They could also have some flexible valies attached: depending on how many 1 stars you gave, the less they count. This would be done with weights, but this is too comolex for me to write down here.