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3E & 4E Love and Hate Polls - What does it mean?
- Thread starter Mercurius
- Start date
Rel
Liquid Awesome
Well, 4e is like New Coke. I hear people like it over the previous version, but I have never, personally, met one of them.
You're in LA. Go find Mistwell.
No kidding. I'll leave this as my last post on this subject.
My claims:
(a) New Coke was a massive product launch failure, due to a mass consumer reaction against it. In the Coca-Cola Company's the launch of New Coke caused a "firestorm of consumer protest".
(b) That this product launch disaster is so well-known in popular culture that "New Coke" is now synonymous with "business blunder".
In contrast, NoMan claims only a "vocal minority" opposed New Coke.
My sources:
Coca-Cola Company:
New Coke: History of New Coke: The Coca-Cola Company
Coke's own words prove my claims at least to my satisfaction:
-- "spawning consumer angst the likes of which no business has ever seen"
-- "firestorm of consumer protest"
-- "the story that the "old" Coca-Cola was returning to store shelves led two network newscasts and made the front page of virtually every major newspaper."
Snopes urban myth debunking site:
snopes.com: New Coke Origin
MSNBC "New Coke and other marketing disasters" New Coke and other marketing fiascoes - U.S. news- msnbc.com
Key quotes from the Coca-Company Company:
"To hear some tell it, April 23, 1985, was a day that will live in marketing infamy.
That's the day The Coca-Cola Company took arguably the biggest risk in consumer goods history, announcing that it was changing the formula for the world's most popular soft drink, and spawning consumer angst the likes of which no business has ever seen.
The Coca-Cola Company introduced reformulated Coca-Cola®, often referred to as "new Coke®," marking the first formula change in 99 years. The company didn't set out to create the firestorm of consumer protest that ensued; instead, The Coca-Cola Company intended to re-energize its Coca-Cola brand and the cola category in its largest market, the United States.
That firestorm ended with the return of the original formula, now called Coca-Cola classic®, a few months later.
. . .
The fabled secret formula for Coca-Cola was changed, adopting a formula preferred in taste tests of nearly 200,000 consumers.
. . .
The events of the spring and summer of '85 -- pundits blasting the "marketing blunder of the century," consumers hoarding the "old" Coke, calls of protests by the thousands -- changed forever The Coca-Cola Company's thinking.
. . .
Calls flooded in not just to the 800-GET-COKE phone line, but to Coca-Cola offices across the United States. By June 1985, The Coca-Cola Company was getting 1,500 calls a day on its consumer hotline, compared with 400 a day before the taste change. People seemed to hold any Coca-Cola employee -- from security officers at our headquarters building to their neighbors who worked for Coke -- personally responsible for the change.
Mr. Goizueta received a letter addressed to "Chief Dodo, The Coca-Cola Company." He often said he was more upset that it was actually delivered to him! Another person wrote to him asking for his autograph -- because, in years to come, the signature of "one of the dumbest executives in American business history" would be worth a fortune.
. . .
the story that the "old" Coca-Cola was returning to store shelves led two network newscasts and made the front page of virtually every major newspaper. Consumers applauded the decision. In just two days after the announcement of Coca-Cola classic, The Coca-Cola Company received 31,600 telephone calls on the hotline.
. . .
Later, the name of the new taste of Coca-Cola was changed to Coke II; the product is no longer available in the United States."
These claims were countered by NoMan, who said only a "vocal minority" disliked New Coke, and that the vocal minority derailed a product that most people preferred. His evidence is that in taste tests, people preferred New Coke.
NoMan is correct that the taste tests revealed a preference for New Coke IN SIP TASTE TESTS, but he, like Coca-Cola Company in making their spectacular flop, is misinterpreting the sip taste tests as revealing consumer's WHOLE BEVERAGE CONSUMPTION PREFERENCES.
The problem is that what people prefer in a sip taste test is different from what they prefer in a full-sized drink, and over time. Which is why harsh, acidic Coca-Cola still outsells the sweeter, blander Pepsi. Citations and marketing data on that below.
Pepsi Challenge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"The challenge takes the form of a taste test. At malls, shopping centers and other public locations, a Pepsi representative sets up a table with two blank cups: one containing Pepsi and one with Coca-Cola. Shoppers are encouraged to taste both colas, and then select which drink they prefer. Then the representative reveals the two bottles so the taster can see whether they preferred Coke or Pepsi. The results of the test leaned toward a consensus that Pepsi was preferred by more Americans.
. . .
In his book, Blink, author Malcolm Gladwell ascribes the success of Pepsi over Coca-Cola in these tests to being a result of the nature of "sip tests", which would fail to account for the cloying effect of excessive sweetness and glutamate, and a complementary (but counter-intuitive) long-term preference for an item – disregarding situations such as the Pepsi Challenge, in which it would consistently lose in blind sip-test comparisons. That is, a blind-sip test may believe that a less-sweet drink tastes better in the long run."
Pepsi VS. Coke: The Battle of a Century - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com
"The actual market share shows Coke still leads 42 percent to 31 percent for Pepsi. All the other guys generic, etc. equals the other 27 percent of the market. Coke Classic alone controls 17 percent of all soft drink sales followed by Pepsi with 11 percent. Then Diet Coke is third with 9.8
percent with Mountain Dew a Pepsi product 6.6 percent and Diet Pepsi 6 percent of the sales. Outside of Coke classic and Diet Coke the best Coca Cola drink is Sprite with 5.7 percent of all soft drink sales. This gives Coke the clear edge in public preference and Pepsi has had a very tough time generating any additional market share through advertising in many years. They did make some inroads with their taste test commercials, but it swiftly disappeared and they continue to trail in market consumer preference about the same as they did ten years ago.
. . .
Coke is much stronger than Pepsi seems to have a lot more acid or carbonation or whatever creates that strong taste. Pepsi tastes good to me it was sweeter than Coke and went down smoother with less burn."
So you are saying that the OGL allowed more options to fill the gaps in what you didn't like about 3E, but there were less gaps to fill than 4E for you? Well, that's fair, but it sounds like that even if the OGL was in place for 4E, you probably still wouldn't be satisfied with 4E. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think you simply prefer the 3E style overall, just as I prefer the 4E style overall (even if both of us would change some things about each of our preferred editions).
I don't agree here, but I can understand where you are coming from.
Skill challenges have a lot of potential, and I truly believe that they can be run in an effective and fun way that promotes a good narrative. On the other hand, many modules, players, and DMs implement them very badly. In fact, I'd say the vast majority of the times I've seen them used, they've been used poorly with little player or DM satisfaction. I don't think we need to throw them out necessarily, but we need more people who "get it".
Rituals I've had mixed feelings on. I think that the biggest problem for me is the psychological barrier of people just not wanting to spend money to cast spells. Of course, older editions had a lot of pricey spell components too, that often kind of got winked at. When I get to DM, I like to sprinkle ritual components in with with the treasure to encourage more of their use. It's a strange thing, but people are more willing to use components if they got them free than if they have to pay for them.
On the other hand, I think Healing Surges, Second winds, and Action Points are great. That's probably because I don't see as magical effects, as some people often like to reduce them to.
And you still didn't produce any numbers in those posts that addressed what the actual sales were, taste tests, annual sales for that year, or all of the other things that were addressed. You don't have to tell me about the terrible reputation the campaign had, or how there was a lot of media hype about it, or that there were people very upset by the change. We already know this, I didn't deny it. I just said it wasn't this mast majority, or zeitgeist, as you like to say.
The only actual quantifiable reactions you quoted were the number of complaint calls on the Hot-lines, which there were quite a few. However, more than 31,600 calls doesn't really tells us how many were apathetic to the change, just that there were a number of people who were passionately against, which I never denied.
We all know in the long-run, people went back to a preference to Classic in most places and the sales rebounded nicely. There's no point in arguing that either. I'm certainly not arguing that they wouldn't have suffered in the long run. I think that the vocal minority would increasingly infect the rest of the society eventually, especially when the media is stirring things up, and would have led to declines and more of a backlash *if* they hadn't of brought back the Classic. But that's not what happened.
My dislike is that I would like to see them all handled under one mechanic (call it action points or hero points) with a lot more options. The current treatment including seperation, recovery and variance in starting healing surges by class are, in my opinion, inferior to Mutants and Masterminds's Hero Points, Savage Worlds's Bennies, and similar mechanics to these in other games
Jack99
Adventurer
Either way, you may call it a crutch and hide behind the "good DM doesn't need it"-argument (which sounds to me as yet another poorly disguised attack on those who like 4e), but the fact is that the racial powers and abilities given to the monstrous humanoid races in 4e make them very different in combat. Orcs are truly harder to kill, kobolds shifts around, never staying in one place, goblins are cowardly, moving away from you whenever possible, gnolls gang up on you to rip you apart, hobgoblins work in concert, protecting each other. They play differently for the first time since '74. When it comes to fluff, well, the fluff that has been made over the years still exists, so your 4e campaign needs not to be lacking any.
