glass said:
The correct pronoun would have been 'I', since you were the one making the assumption. Unless you have royal blood, I suppose, them the 'we' was correct.
Sorry my use of pronouns is so objectionable to you. In an attempt to help you get over your bias I hope you will enjoy my, excuse me,
our following post.[/random smiley face]
nothing to see here said:
However, you give too much credit to intuition and tea-leaf reading in your analysis. A company the size of Hasbro (or even Wizards) will almost certainly engage in substantive (and, unfortuantley for us, propietary) market research that, when done professionally, can identify factors as variable as the the discretionary income in their market sector, or tghe brand loyalty of their existing player base. This is particularly true for an established brand line like D&D where brand reputation is an important incredient in their overall value-mix.
<snip>
One thing about professional research is that it proves 'smart' people's intuition wrong with remarkably regularity. I doubt Hasbro will fall into this trap.
When WotC was developing 3e they first began to use marketing surveys (at least according to an article by Charles Ryan talking about that time period)… we might assume they continue to use these surveys now.
To our mind marketing surveys are tricky creatures. In the ideal world they would allow us to perfectly map the psyche of a given group of people. We feel that the reality is a bit more complex.
For example one could reasonably create a marketing survey about the need for a PHB II, basically you could talk about the kinds of things people want in a book (more base classes, more feats) as well as ask marketing topics (“If you had to evaluate the attractiveness of a new DnD book based only on the title what would you think of: a) Players Handbook Reloaded, b) Players Handbook Advanced, c) Players Handbook: Total Pwnage, etc.
(
The following underlined sections constitute an assumption; if reading other people’s assumptions cause you to well up with bile and hatred we suggest you skip those bits)
If we assume that DnD will have a new edition put out at some point then I think it would be very difficult to create an effective marketing survey about when and how to release the new edition. With 3e there –was- going to be a new edition. It was a fact. So the research could be targeted at very specific areas: what parts of DnD do you like the most, when you play a game how much time do you spend on combat (and do you think it is a) too much b) too little c)just right).
Most of the “tea leaf reading” that I think would be involved in that isn’t really going to be reduced by having a marketing study done. Asking about problem areas (i.e. grappling rules, etc) or areas of frustration would, of course, greatly help in development of said book but the broader marketing reaction would be a lot more difficult to grasp.
If you ask people point blank “would you buy a new edition of DnD” would provide a Yes/No kind of answer but you’ll run into trouble with preconceived notions about what a “new edition” means. Asking indirectly would get you a very interesting and complex can of worms; far more so than when WotC used marketing surveys to assist in the development of 3e.
The biggest one is that
a lot of DnD consumers are concerned that an edition change has caused their books to be outdated (as it has in the past… I recently junked my 3.0 phb for example).
I, sorry, we think that you’d have a very difficult time working up a marketing survey that could get the DnD consuming population to give you quantifiable answers about their need for a new edition relative to an old edition.
Hypothetically if there was a new grapple rule where [improved grapple was touch attack -> strength save (fortitude save mortified by your strength bonus) OR an Escape Artist Check vs DC = to 10 + the creatures HD/2 + str bonus + racial grapple bonus] and you wanted to find out whether that rule would encourage someone to buy a new edition (its simpler than the current system) or not (its not like DnD, its hard to understand, etc) how would you execute that as a marketing survey?
You can’t cold call people (too few people play DnD), write-in and internet servys are unrealable.
As a lot of people buy books from Amazon now having survey people stake out rpg shops would be difficult; even if you could corner “DnD players” to do a face to face or paper survey the number of people who could understand the difference between the new rule and the old rule and give you an-on-the-spot-answer is very low.
You can get around that by asking “would you like the grapple rules to be simpler and easier to understand?” but that’s just going to generate a bunch of “Yes” answers without answering the “when/how should we create a new edition?” question.
It’s always tea leaf reading; the difference is how you’re looking at the leaves.
nothing to see here said:
The design arguments and the 'fairness' arguments around a new edition always be fair game. However from an economic point of view -- I'm sure that Hasbro's decisions regarding the future marketing of the D&D line will probably end up being correct.
Almost impossible to prove, since, unless things go tremendously well or tremendously poorly it won’t be clear what the lost opportunity cost was.
Personally I do agree that WotC’s current pattern of behavior seems economically sound.
The current behavior being: hint about an extra edition, release news articles aggressively attacking “damaged” parts of the rules, and
prep a new edition while continuing to release materials for the current one is correct because it allows them to do both. Once sales fall they can launch a new edition relatively quickly, but still enjoy much of the revenue stream from prolonging the game now with new supplements as well as “compellation books” (Spell Compendium, etc)
