Xechnao, I get that you would prefer to limit the terms of the discussion to the period between this moment and the announcement of Pathfinder, but my point is that Paizo's relationship with its audience, the give-and-take between creators, editors, and publishers that takes place on our messageboards (and elsewhere) has been part of the company's philosophy from the very beginning. It helped to guide our stewardship of Dragon and Dungeon, and it is even a part of our retail sales and customer service operations.
Admittedly, the launch of the Pathfinder Adventure Path and later the Pathfinder RPG brought the company to a new plateau in terms of sales of our own brands, but our philosophy of listening to the readers and considering their comments in our design and publishing choices has carried through. If anything, it has become an even more important part of the way we do business.
I willingly concede that the Pathfinder RPG audience has yet to go through something as tumultuous as an edition change, and should the time for such a thing ever come about I expect a lot of current champions to feel as though we have left them behind or that we have somehow betrayed them. We've been through several edition changes of several games since the Internet hit big, and it's clearly part of the cycle of these things (and should be taken into account by publishers when it comes to marketing, community outreach, etc.).
That said, if past practice is any indicator, should we ever go about such a plan I suspect we would roll out a huge playtest effort in order to guage community interest and acceptance of some of our ideas, and then make modifications as necessary. We did this throughout the Alpha and Beta Playtest periods for the existing Pathfinder game, to great effect. The commentary of the player network--positive and negative--influenced the design choices that went into the final game.
Of course, even today you can find people who feel that we were dismissive of fan suggestions, or that we didn't test the math hard enough, or that we went too far (or not far enough), or whatever. Lots of people have lots of complaints about the playtest, but the fact of the matter is that reader feedback had a huge influence on the game, and we were so pleased with the public playtest's ability to find errors, generate cool suggestions, and get people excited about the game that I honestly cannot image us doing another major RPG effort (a new "edition" of Pathfinder or otherwise) that didn't implement a huge public playtest.
Just like there is a lot of "static" in a public playtest, there is a lot of "static" in the discussion of just about every Pathfinder-related topic discussed on the internet. Posters have their own biases, their own pet peeves, their own soft spots, and so on. Trying to plug all of that stuff into a spreadsheet and run your life (or your business) according to the result would be impossible and insane.
But there is a lot to be learned if one listens closely through the static, and I think those lessons can lead to better products from the perspective of publishers and the public.
--Erik
