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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4240247" data-attributes="member: 1054">Compare these two:"Did you love Big Macs? Well, then you'll really love the Big Mac Deluxe! Everything you liked, and more! Here's what we've added..."vs."We decided to try some Big Macs, and we'd rather be eating ground glass mixed with maggot puree! My god, how did we ever inflict that vile crap on you, our beloved customers? We're sorry! We're so sorry! To show you how sorry we are, we're introducting the Big Mac Deluxe. Our new motto:'The Big Mac Deluxe -- It Won't Make You Puke Your Guts Up, Like The Old One Did'."Which advertising campaign is more likely to win over fans of your current product?Which is more likely to make potential new buyers think, "Well, if the old one sucked so bad, can we really trust them to make a new one which doesn't?"Or, to put it another way, which is more appealing -- a political ad which focuses on your candidate's strengths, or one which focuses on the opposing candidate's weakness? You can sell "New and improved" without taking every chance you can get to kick the old one. Honestly, it's looking less and less like a marketing campaign and more like developer spleen-venting. What, did Monte, Skip, and John strangle Mike Mearls' puppy or something? It's hard to focus on objectively evaluating the mechanics when the previews are wrapped in this kind of bile-spewing.I mean, they don't even say WHY the old swarm rules were boring, they just assert it, as if it was self-evident. Well, it's not. Why not do the following:"The old swarm rules set out to do a, b, c. They did a, but in actual play, you hardly saw b because of x, and c never worked as intended -- remember (famous gamer inside joke ala pun-pun here). So we took the core goals of the swarm rules, applied the 4e design ethos to them, and fixed the problems we perceived as follows..."A lot better than "We'd rather be EATEN ALIVE BY ANTS than play 3e!"The new swarm rules look cool and playable, and I have some great swarm ideas. However, they're not THAT different from the 3e rules, and actually are a step backward in "making you feel like you're fighting a swarm" -- you can flank the swarm, you can sneak attack it, you can knock it prone (I'm guessing, in the absence of anything which says you CAN'T). So the self-congratulatory crowing on how much the old rules sucked is really out of place. It's an incremental advance, at best, and its achieved at the cost of reducing, not increasing, the "swarm feel" in the name of simplicity.</blockquote>

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