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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Radiating Gnome" data-source="post: 7650772" data-attributes="member: 150">Believe it or not, I own many pairs of Big Boy Pants and can totally handle criticism -- especially when it's as thoughtful and well argued as yours.  I appreciate it very much. Excellent point.  I think that it's interesting that these pressures have not prevented Wotc from making dramatic changes to the services they provide. The most significant example of that was the change from the downloadable character builder to the online one. That was one feature that was in the "it ain't broke" column -- at least from the customer point of view -- but by making the transition they were able to deliver a version that made many improvements. There was (and still is) plenty of rage over that change, like any change, but it was a move IMO that was the right way to go. Right again. Certainly the first two advantages are equivalent.  The data mining you can get by studying the way an online service is used is a lot easier to gather and study than the data you can gather from a content subscription's membership.  If Paizo wants to find out which articles in the Adventure Paths are being used the most, they don't have a good way to get that data without asking for it. But if Wotc wants to know which character classes are being used the most, all they need to do is write a query of their user data. Paizo can probably gather something similar by studying traffic statistics for their online version of their PRD, but that's actually studying the data the get from the service they provide (the free online version of the rules) rather than the content. -rg</blockquote>

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