D&D 5E Has 5E Restored or Diminished Your Faith in WotC?

[Banshee16]

1st point - Pathfinder was/is a 3.5 retroclone with some minor(ish) changes to it. Im definetly not knocking it as I love PF, but the type of playtest that WoTC is doing here is way different. They are playtesting a 100% brand new system, not a tweaked version of a 5 year old pre-existing ruleset that anyone can get for free with the SRD at any point. The PF playtest was a great idea, but they had the benefit of using a base system that basically 100% of their user base were already familiar and comfortable with. Not to mention the fact that some of the issues folks had with 3.5 were already well documented, so they really had an easy stepping off point when it came time to tweak and adjust.

2nd point - I dont think the poster was trying to say you are not customers of D&D type games, just that you are not WotC customers - you are another comapny's customer. I dont think there is any reason to get defensive about that, its certainly not an insult.

We are all D&D fans, some prefer particular editions or retroclones, but that doesnt mean anyones opinion is less valid because of edition/system preference. Seeing as WoTC's goal is to attract and retain D&D fans of all editions, the playtest is our way to make sure they stick to that, and if they still fail for anyone out there, at least you know you still have your options elsewhere. Just at least wait and see what happens with it, you wont have to buy into it or anything, so you dont have to be worried about being tricked into spending hard earned money on a system you dont care for. I imagine by the time they actually get the first retail book out the door, you'll have a pretty definitive idea as to whether or not D&D Next is for you or not.

Obviously, I understand Paizo was modifying a predefined system. They were also a much smaller company than WotC and still managed to find a way to solicit customer input effectively. The situation is still relevant. Contrast with the development of 4E where the game was effectively sprung by surprise, with very little input from the eventual customers.

I feel I understand what the original poster was saying about whether or not WotC should be taking the input of other company's customers. I'm not defensive about it. I was just pointing out what I felt was an incorrect analysis. Those of us who left are not currently WotC customers. That is true. BUT WOTC MADE THAT CHOICE with the game that they made, how they marketed it, etc. It's not incorrect for me to say that we WANT to be WotC's customers. But they have to make a game that we feel is worth spending money on. The fact that WotC has announced 5E a short 4 years after the release of 4E tells me that there's probably a truth to the idea that they lost a significant proportion of their customer base. And created probably their strongest competitor. So they have to fix the situation by getting an edition that somehow doesn't lose a large percentage of current customers, and also brings back a good number of lapsed customers. Lots of sales information (from limited sources) has seemed to indicate Pathfinder was doing a great job of catching up.

As to waiting.....absolutely.....that's entirely my plan. I just feel that if they state they're doing open playtests etc. they're not truly open if they're dependent upon flying to a convention across the country. Heck, I just talked to one of my old players who's currently playing 4E and Pathfinder (mostly Pathfinder....gave up on 4E), and he wasn't even AWARE that 5E had been announced. So we'll see how much information came out. For 3rd Ed., there were a tonne of articles in Dragon Magazine, giving a lot of information about what the game would be like.

Hopefully 5E is more in tune with what I'm interested in running/playing. But it's premature to discuss if WotC has restored people's faith. We don't know enough.

Banshee

 

[KarinsDad]

Listen. I know most of you don't share this opinion but as a 4E fan I'm feeling particularly rubbed raw by WotC. Not only have they ripped off the tablecloth from underneath me by shelving 4E but they have also made me and players like me the butt of many snide jokes and comparisons since the announcement. On top of that they released a horrible MTG set in the same timeline.

So no they haven't exactly restored my faith in them. I'm feeling pretty hurt and betrayed both as a fan of D&D and a fan of MTG.

Hmmm.

WotC appears to be wanting to maintain the 4E online tools for some time to come. There are 44 classes, 43 races, and many thousands of powers, feats, and items in the game system at the moment. A person could play a different PC concept a year and it would still take thousands of years to run out of new PC concepts.

Is the problem that Dragon and Dungeon won't probably support 4E anymore?


I look at it this way. WotC is a company that has to make money. They aren't going to do that sitting on their laurels and by putting out similar material over and over again like they have. There gets to be a point in time that there is just too much material and people stop buying new stuff.

In order to survive, WotC has to adapt and they have to put out new material that people will buy. I don't like the fact that a new edition is coming out so quickly after the last one, but I do understand that the business has to move forward. Personally, I think WotC ran out of ideas on how to do that while staying within the current edition.

I don't think WotC wants to piss off any of their customers, but they are between a rock and a hard place and that's how I view it. I don't take it personally. I take it for what it is: WotC adapting and trying to survive in the market. And I figure that with all of the 4E material out there, I can play 4E for the rest of my life without buying a single other WotC product ever. It's not like someone is holding a gun to our heads.

 

[Banshee16]

Apples and oranges. Paizo copy-pasted humongous chunks of 3.5 and improved several elements of it. Anyone can offer snapshots quickly doing that.

Fixed it for you

Banshee

Mod note: Please refrain from "fixed it for you" style responses. It is okay to disagree, but this is a particularly snide and disrespectful way to present your position. ~Umbran

 

[Feeroper]

Obviously, I understand Paizo was modifying a predefined system. They were also a much smaller company than WotC and still managed to find a way to solicit customer input effectively. The situation is still relevant. Contrast with the development of 4E where the game was effectively sprung by surprise, with very little input from the eventual customers.

I feel I understand what the original poster was saying about whether or not WotC should be taking the input of other company's customers. I'm not defensive about it. I was just pointing out what I felt was an incorrect analysis. Those of us who left are not currently WotC customers. That is true. BUT WOTC MADE THAT CHOICE with the game that they made, how they marketed it, etc. It's not incorrect for me to say that we WANT to be WotC's customers. But they have to make a game that we feel is worth spending money on. The fact that WotC has announced 5E a short 4 years after the release of 4E tells me that there's probably a truth to the idea that they lost a significant proportion of their customer base. And created probably their strongest competitor. So they have to fix the situation by getting an edition that somehow doesn't lose a large percentage of current customers, and also brings back a good number of lapsed customers. Lots of sales information (from limited sources) has seemed to indicate Pathfinder was doing a great job of catching up.

As to waiting.....absolutely.....that's entirely my plan. I just feel that if they state they're doing open playtests etc. they're not truly open if they're dependent upon flying to a convention across the country. Heck, I just talked to one of my old players who's currently playing 4E and Pathfinder (mostly Pathfinder....gave up on 4E), and he wasn't even AWARE that 5E had been announced. So we'll see how much information came out. For 3rd Ed., there were a tonne of articles in Dragon Magazine, giving a lot of information about what the game would be like.

Hopefully 5E is more in tune with what I'm interested in running/playing. But it's premature to discuss if WotC has restored people's faith. We don't know enough.

Banshee

Ah I see, I must have misunderstood your previous post.

However, in regards to this part: "I just feel that if they state they're doing open playtests etc. they're not truly open if they're dependent upon flying to a convention across the country" -they did state the open playtest is going to start in the spring, and that before that they would do a sneak peek at DDXP, so they were up front about it from the get go.

As for whether or not or not WoTC has restored faith in the customers they lost, I absoloutly agree, its way too early for someone to make up their mind about that yet. I just hope people give it a fair shake regardless if the end up liking it or not. As a fan of both 4e and PF, Im tired of all the edition warring that goes on. I hope with this new edition they can repair at least some of that fracture in the community.

 

[Dausuul]

As to waiting.....absolutely.....that's entirely my plan. I just feel that if they state they're doing open playtests etc. they're not truly open if they're dependent upon flying to a convention across the country.

DDXP was not the open playtest. That comes later.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Listen. I know most of you don't share this opinion but as a 4E fan I'm feeling particularly rubbed raw by WotC. Not only have they ripped off the tablecloth from underneath me by shelving 4E but they have also made me and players like me the butt of many snide jokes and comparisons since the announcement. On top of that they released a horrible MTG set in the same timeline.

So no they haven't exactly restored my faith in them. I'm feeling pretty hurt and betrayed both as a fan of D&D and a fan of MTG.

If you feel hurt and betrayed when a bad set of MtG cards comes out, or a new edition is announced... well, i would hate to see how you react when someone steals your car.

 

[KarinsDad]

If you feel hurt and betrayed when a bad set of MtG cards comes out, or a new edition is announced... well, i would hate to see how you react when someone steals your car.

It just means that with a name like Keefe the Thief, you now know whose car to not steal. If you did, Ratinyourwalls might come after you.

 

[Roland55]

As some others have said, I don't put my faith in companies ... or organizations, for that matter.

Only in individual people.

And, truly, not in too many of those.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Too soon to say.

 

[Windjammer]

No, it doesn't restore my faith, because it looks haphazard and disorganized.

In short, it's the same we've seen from WotC for a while now, and last month's events haven't broken the trend.

Here's a nice quote from Ryan Dancey which summed up the "WotC in late 2010" mood for quite some people:

Oh, there's an on-line product too [for 4E]? Is that an MMO? No? What is it then? Magazines? Can I read them on my iPad? No? So it's digital tools. OK, that sounds interesting. Can I use those tools on my iPad? No? Requires Silverlight? You gotta be kidding me! Do I get PDF or eBook versions of the physical books? No? In fact, Wizards removed all the PDF support from D&D from the internet? Srsly? How about a way to organize my campaign, track my NPCs, record the actions of my player characters, manage their inventories and experience points, and make clear what parts of the game are and are not used in my game? No? But there's a "Virtual Table" in Beta? The irony of a tabletop hobby making a digital playspace doesn't seem to have produced any cognitive dissonance...

(The above might sound sarcastic, but it's the closest I could come to my stream of consciousness thoughts as I read through Wizards' DDI pages just now...)

Here's a little exercise I did earlier this week.

Suppose you've never heard of D&D but want to find out what it is.

Your third google hit sounds promising: "Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page".

You click it. It's a pain to navigate, and you finally (!) find an entry buried in the mid right which sounds promising. It reads "Quick Links... New to D&D".

Yeah, that sounds right, let's click it.

Hooray!

"Unexpected ErrorWizards of the Coast
There was an unexpected error on the Dungeons and Dragons website. If you know what might have caused this error, please:

• Visit our customer service webpage to report the problem."

Yes, great! I'll do just that. All the while (everytime I click on anything) I'm getting bombarded with an invitation to "write gaming history". I have no idea why or how.

Or suppose I try to visit the wizards forum. Just this week, they were down most of the time for "maintenance". So no luck there either.

Now if D&D was something you were vaguely interested in, you'd by now have given up on this "Wizards of the Coast" company.

And that's just a small window into a larger problem.

WotC is inefficient, they are understaffed, and they have encouraged vastly disproportionate expectations.

What makes it worse is that they continue that strategy Ryan discusses above - they are just a terribly confusing in whatever they do.

Mid January. Press news pop up right and left to announce that there's a new edition of D&D.

Three days later (!) WotC scrambles together two brief columns to explain that, yes, that's indeed the case.

Then a lot of more tidbits follow about an OPEN PLAYTEST which will be WONDERFUL!

Then, nearly two weeks later, a con goes up where three dozen people get to actually play this thing. But they can't tell anyone. Because as WotC has just announced, it's an open playtest for everyone!

Sorry, but this cements that once again, WotC botched a nice roll-out of a new edition. The press release was premature, their own announcements don't synch up with what they actually have, everything is pretty hazy, and a lot is inconsistent. To make it worse, people who've been exposed to the material are under an NDA, so they can't clarify the situation either.

That, combined with the webpage mess documented above, does not restore or diminish my faith in WotC. It cements my opinion that they carry on exactly as they have for a couple of years now.

 

[Feeroper]

Then a lot of more tidbits follow about an OPEN PLAYTEST which will be WONDERFUL!

Then, nearly two weeks later, a con goes up where three dozen people get to actually play this thing. But they can't tell anyone. Because as WotC has just announced, it's an open playtest for everyone!

Sorry, but this cements that once again, WotC botched a nice roll-out of a new edition. The press release was premature, their own announcements don't synch up with what they actually have, everything is pretty hazy, and a lot is inconsistent. To make it worse, people who've been exposed to the material are under an NDA, so they can't clarify the situation either.

I suppose you missed this part on their official website:

"We have begun obtaining feedback from a limited Friends & Family playtest consisting of internal employees and their gaming groups and soon we will be expanding that group to consist of members from our existing body of playtesters. Then at the D&D Experience convention in late January, Wizards of the Coast will conduct a special playtest of ideas currently in development. The D&D Experience will be moving to Gen Con in 2013, so as a convention special this year, we will be offering show attendees a first-look at a draft of the new set of rules. Then beginning sometime in the spring, we will begin open playtesting. Through our web site, we will release a growing set of rules, classes, monsters and other materials for your study and feedback."

This was in their initial article announcing D&D Next. It quite clearly states that there will be a special playtest at DDXP, a first look at a draft of the new rules, not an open playtest. Then in the spring, they will commence with the open playtest.

This was the article they kept bombarding you with. I think alot of confusion could have been cleared up if it was read all the way through. If you still think that starting a new edition off by soliciting feedback from fans during the development process is a bad way to roll out a new edition, what would you suggest be done to improve it?

Edit: Just want to add that when I read this back it seemed like I may sound snarky, but I didnt mean it to sound like that. I just wanted to point out that they have already spelled out what they plan on doing, and so far have stuck to it. I figured you probobly didnt fully read the article they posted about it when it was initially announced. I know the NYT article wasn't as thorough in that way.

 

[marleykat]

It's far too early to give an informed answer to this question. Until I have FAR more information I'm in "wait and see " mode. So far though it looks like "all systems are a go Houston ". I like what I see far and fail see use in getting more than curious at this time. If they screw it up I have Pathfinder and FantasyCraft, no problems here in my little corner of the universe.

 

[Dausuul]

Ah, yes. The "WIZARDS LIED TO US!" complaints with nothing to substantiate them. How well I remember them from the transition to 4E.

 

[Windjammer]

Edit: Just want to add that when I read this back it seemed like I may sound snarky, but I didnt mean it to sound like that. I just wanted to point out that they have already spelled out what they plan on doing, and so far have stuck to it. I figured you probobly didnt fully read the article they posted about it when it was initially announced. I know the NYT article wasn't as thorough in that way.

Thanks for this. In part this was my point though. The real announcement was the first one with the presses. As you point out, that announcement made it seem that a new edition is not just on the horizon - but that it's playtest is imminent.

And to answer the other poster: my point wasn't so much that they are 'lying' but that WotC have lost the initial momentum. That makes the roll-out look a bit confused, just as their announcements surrounding Essentials weren't so much insincere as confusing.

 

[Consonant Dude]

And to answer the other poster: my point wasn't so much that they are 'lying' but that WotC have lost the initial momentum. That makes the roll-out look a bit confused, just as their announcements surrounding Essentials weren't so much insincere as confusing.

That is the price you pay for getting feedback. WotC is in a tough spot. It's easier for a company to operate internally, work on the edition and then carefully announce it.

However, the company totally screwed up last time and it seems they are dedicated to making sure 5th edition gets lots of feedback and playtest this time around. I do believe this is as much for PR purpose as for practicality.

Unfortunately, these "waves" of playtests, the various polls, etc... mean that it will be frustrating for fans. I'm really happy that they kept the initial playtest to DDXP. I hope they refine things before the next playtest wave. I wish I could know everything right now but hey, I'll survive

 

[tlantl]

Listen. I know most of you don't share this opinion but as a 4E fan I'm feeling particularly rubbed raw by WotC. Not only have they ripped off the tablecloth from underneath me by shelving 4E but they have also made me and players like me the butt of many snide jokes and comparisons since the announcement. On top of that they released a horrible MTG set in the same timeline.

So no they haven't exactly restored my faith in them. I'm feeling pretty hurt and betrayed both as a fan of D&D and a fan of MTG.

I'm sure a lot of current edition fans are feeling the same way. I know I did when they did it to us when 4e was released. I also happen to be a 1e/2e fan so I've been here a couple of times.

My faith in the company never really existed. All I see is a corporation looking to grab all the cash they can from us fans of the game then doing it all over again when the well runs dry. the last time they did it they tried to reinvent the wheel as well as put out new core material and a whole lot of their customers refused to buy their game.

To me and a lot of other people regardless of whether the new rules were more balanced and the game worked like a finely tuned automobile it wasn't what we knew as D&D. For me it was something entirely different with the D&D brand plastered on it.

On top of that I had several hundred dollars invested in a system, that to me was reasonably new and certainly hadn't been played out. Being told to go buy their new game kind of sucked in the most insulting kind of way.

If there's a silver lining it is that in five or six years if they survive this edition they will do it all over again. If you are young enough you'll likely live through five more editions of D&D.

 

[SensoryThought]

As a 4e player I am concerned about ongoing DDI support but this is unlikely to be an issue until 2014 at the earliest.

I only hope that 5e will allow me to transition to similarly developed online tools (that I am happy to pay for). This may be challenging for a modular game with a plethora of game options.

 

[Banshee16]

Ah I see, I must have misunderstood your previous post.

However, in regards to this part: "I just feel that if they state they're doing open playtests etc. they're not truly open if they're dependent upon flying to a convention across the country" -they did state the open playtest is going to start in the spring, and that before that they would do a sneak peek at DDXP, so they were up front about it from the get go.

As for whether or not or not WoTC has restored faith in the customers they lost, I absoloutly agree, its way too early for someone to make up their mind about that yet. I just hope people give it a fair shake regardless if the end up liking it or not. As a fan of both 4e and PF, Im tired of all the edition warring that goes on. I hope with this new edition they can repair at least some of that fracture in the community.

I remember reading about the open playtest for the spring. Admittedly, when announcements came out about people trying it at the con, that's what I thought they were referring to.

In this day of instant information availability, it's easy to forget the "soon" doesn't always mean "tomorrow"

I look forward to seeing whether they actually come out with playtest material in the spring. If they do something like Paizo did, I think it'll go a long way to alleviate concerns.....even if the answer is "wait until April/May".

I also hope the new edition can repair the rift. But I'm of a mixed mind.....I hope it doesn't take all the wind out of Pathfinder's sails, as I happen to like what Paizo is doing.

Banshee

 

[TarionzCousin]

I am optimistic, but still hesitant. WotC has disappointed me too often in the past. I'm afraid of being too enthusiastic and having 5E blast me in the face with stuff I don't like.

 

[wingsandsword]

It has made me cautiously optimistic about 5e.

I don't know if I'll switch to it or stick with 3.5e, in fact I'll probably still stick with 3.5e because by this point I have over a decade of experience with 3.x and have really got a system I like.

However, from the sound of things I'll probably at least buy the Core Rules for 5e and be a lot more willing to play a 5e game than a 4e game.

4e was an Epic-level botch from WotC on a few levels. The notorious early marketing of it came across as "3e isn't fun, and you aren't having fun right if you play it, we know what fun is and we'll tell you what is fun! Soon everybody will play 4e!" Not literally what was said, but that was the attitude that bled through.

It looks like WotC is trying to be conciliatory and officially acknowledge the broken fanbase. I remember when here on ENWorld, early in the Edition Wars, when 4e proponents would claim there was no broken fanbase and only a "vocal minority" online still played pre-4e games and the overwhelming majority of players had switched.

The idea that WotC knows it's competing against its own products, it can't arbitrarily create a new game and "force" everybody to play it because they can stick with prior products. If WotC wants 5e to succeed, they need to be inclusive of a variety of play styles and respectful of the entire heritage of D&D, not scrapping it all for Johnny-come-lately new cosmologies, lore and terminology.