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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7664397" data-attributes="member: 996">The Encounters program was exclusively run in retail establishments, that doesn't mean it was run in every such establishment.  And, the Pathfinder Society was quite active in promoting organized play, as well.  So that doesn't seem like a huge confounding variable.It does point to it capturing more data about the new players in question, though, since in-store programs are one place they tend to show up. Speculation and confirmation bias, yes, data, not so much.  Look, folks crowed over Pathfinder beating the Essentials release on Icv2, so apparently, it's good enough when it aligns with confirmation bias. The Amazon rankings of 5e everyone was going nuts over a while back turned out to involve only a few thousand books - and Amazon is much more significant now than it was back then (and, AFAICK, we have no solid numbers from that period, either).  So, no, a ranking with no attendant volume data means vanishingly little. I didn't say 'show' or 'prove,' only 'support.'  That Essentials fell from the top spot only to recapture it, for instance, suggests that new players retained made up for the hard-core 4e fanatics who ragequit over the change in direction.  It could, alternately, support the theory that said 4e hold-outs relented fairly quickly.  I did, I was in on it from the second season on.   Like I said, it was something that surprised me.  I never expect to see many new players come back after trying D&D.  It always seemed like it just wasn't for everybody, that we D&Ders were a special breed.  What I saw with new players entering the hobby with 4e made me re-examine that perception. I was thinking 10 years to build up a large fan base of entirely-new fans, not merely make up for the loss of old ones.  It seems making up for the loss happened fairly quickly, either that or the loss just wasn't that large (or both) or 4e wouldn't have held the top spot while pitting supplemental material vs the Pathfinder core release in 2009.  Because it was a radical change in direction (and the new direction was arguably 'backwards').  Fanatical 4e fans would not have liked that at all.  I know I didn't.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 'Attacks' like "4e is no more grid dependent than 3.5 was" or "Yes, 4e has a lot of named conditions to track, but 3.5 had even more?"  I'm sure you did.  Besides, it's not like problems with 3.5 hadn't been long-established.  Fans of 3.5 had been complaining that the "Fighter SUX," that combats were static, that WoCLW dependence was silly, and that prepped casters dominated play, among many other things, for a long time.  Those weren't things made up to defend 4e, they were established shortcomings of D&D that 4e tried to fix or minimize.  You can't defend AEDU on the grounds that it greatly improved class balance without admitting that class balance was always a pretty serious problem, before, for instance, and the same holds true throughout the exchanges of the edition war.   No one can force you to have fun with a better-balanced, more playable, clearer, and easier-to-run game.  Just like no one can force you to drive fast in a Tesla roadster.  Clinging to pre-conceived notions in the face of evidence to the contrary is easy.  Being open to new ideas is hard - and, often, not worth it at all (if you're completely satisfied with an existing product, the fact that a new one might be objectively better by some quantitative measure doesn't reduce that satisfaction).  That's just human nature.   What did you think 'fan' was short for?</blockquote>

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