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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8113645" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Depending on how one feels "addressed" is defined, anyway. Even granting that the most popular subclass doesn't change, the relative position really does matter here, doesn't it? E.g. if College of Lore goes from being 2/3 of all Bards (and thus clearly well beyond anything else) to being 20% of all Bards with College of Swords being 19.5%, we wouldn't really consider it that significant that Lore remained technically first.Not saying this is the case. Just that drawing firm conclusions that "X is really quite well-liked" from "DDB info indicates it is widely used" is not a shoe-in. Haven't even touched on the whole "old options will be more represented than new options" problem for a variety of reasons even with their efforts to only count "active" characters. (The whole "active only" isn't even necessarily helpful either, it's worth noting. It may be a useful thing to only check characters that seem to change over time, but anything that filters data may, in itself, be a bias. The perils of data collecting--you don't want to collect garbage data, but any time you throw out anything, you're necessarily ignoring an observation. Applies just as much to something like physics research as it does to surveys like this, and it's just as much of a headache there.)We have a summary of data, not the data itself. We can't ask different questions or organize the data differently. That's not a terrible thing (often that's all that is available), but it limits the strength and reliability of the conclusions we can draw. Popularity is also not a great indicator for quality among TTRPG fans. 3e and its descendants remain highly popular, despite the known (and arguably unfixable) issues with its design--including serious stinkers like its take on Fighters or Monks. (And, IIRC, Fighter was still the most popular class! Despite being terrible!)Popularity measures a lot of things, and when you have your choice of "get the thing closest to what you want, or get nothing at all," something can be popular while being not as well-received as an alternative would be if it existed. Consumers didn't figure out that a full third of Americans actually wanted "extra chunky" spaghetti sauce--Dr. Howard Moskowitz did, through research. Catering to those people who truly wanted extra chunky sauce transformed Prego, which had been badly lagging behind Ragu, into the top spaghetti sauce brand, and introduced the world to the idea of horizontal segmentation. Social desirability bias doesn't help either--e.g. many people buy and make coffee they actually hate because it is socially desirable to drink a "dark, rich, hearty roast," when most people like weak coffee that hasn't been roasted all that much. Consider how many people have been told, over the years, that they should make a Fighter because it's the simplest thing to play, and thus the thing newbies should get started with. That's going to massively inflate the popularity of the simplest possible Fighter, not because it is necessarily better-designed, but because a social norm has been enforced.So...yeah. We can see that X subclass is popular. It's hard to conclude too much from that. Maybe it's popular because Fighters are just generally popular. Maybe it's popular because half of people make one as a side-character or build one to introduce newbies to the game. Maybe it's popular because it is truly, deeply loved for every single detail of its design. Maybe it's popular because it's the closest thing to what people actually want but can't articulate because they don't know the thing they want, having never seen it "live" before. Trying to reason, even inductively, from "X is widely used on DDB" to "X has good design" is dodgy at best.</blockquote>

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