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Message: <blockquote data-quote="primarchone" data-source="post: 4376463" data-attributes="member: 26826">Hi!I'm somewhat amused by internet polls regarding D&D and the conclusion some would like to derive from them.The reality is that such polls are statistically meaningless. Why? People whom play D&D AND post thier opinions about it are a VERY small minority of the player base.How to know this? I tried an interesting exercise where I went to all the main sites and looked up the number of members.Enworld has around 71,812 members. WOTC boards have 362,643 and rpgnet has 53,318. This totals around 487773. Let double than number to include every single D&D forum on the net (a gross overestimation since, besides the three sites mentions all others have orders of magnitud less members), and round it to an even one million.According to what I have seen posted here by and mentioned by the media there are around 20 million D&D players worldwide. That means that even with my overestimated 1 million that is a paultry 5% of the consumer base.Now, if we took just ACTIVE members (which after all will be the ones expressing an opinion and voting on polls) that number is even lower, since the WOTC boards places that number around 48,000 (About 1/6 the total membership). If we were to apply this to the total overestimated number then we'd have 166,666.Also, we know that many active posters not only have an account on one site by probably all three of the main sites (3), but lets split the difference and say some only have to 1 or 2 and divide the 166,666 by 2. Thats 83,333 active posters for D&D. Thats a whopping 0.4% (approximately) of the total player base.Given that most polls here show about 60% for 4e and 40% against that would mean 0.24% pro 4E and 0.16% against of the player base.While we all like and enjoy posting our opinions on the net (it is a fun after all), but we must keep in mind that it is a TINY fraction of all those whom play D&D and no position (for or against) may be representative of the base at large.Personally, the only objective paramter I use for how any game is doing is sales. IF sales are good and continue to be good then the game is doing well.As of today 4E is doing well in this department (very well according to WOTC), if time passes and continues to do well, then that answers the overall question of the lines success.Primarchone</blockquote>

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