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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 4292518" data-attributes="member: 2174">Living City was a huge hit, but at its height it only had about 7,000 players. The last number I was officially quoted by WotC for Living Greyhawk was 15,000 active players, meaning players who had played at least two four-hour events in the last year. I have reason to believe that number stayed relatively stable over the year or two since, so I think it's an accurate estimate.There may be 150,000 gamers on the RPGA mailing list, but 15,000 probably represents the maximum current size of the "core" RPGA audience you're speaking of. A lot of those people are casual players who may have polished off their two slots at a single game day, so if you trim a bit of fat you're at about 10,000 members. Or so. A lot of those guys really do buy everything, and just about every one of them certainly has a complete set of core rulebooks and two or three class books useful for one of their characters. A small percentage are "completists" who purchase just about every single book. Many fly from convention to convention, or drive long distances to play exclusive events. The RPGA is a lifestyle for a lot of people. These folks are hard core, and they spend a lot of money on their hobby.These customers are, without a doubt, the bedrock of Wizards of the Coast's RPG business. They can be counted on, more or less, to buy the books. If WotC can hook them into a monthly subscription (which will not be difficult), they will have a very solid foundation on which to build an enormously successful online business. When I was at Wizards of the Coast, the company had an uncanny ability to squander and overlook this audience, but these are the players that fuel the Magic: The Gathering business on the DCI side of things. Shortly after I joined the staff in 1999 the RPGA became an official part of DCI (the Magic org play division). I am not sure, but I believe that the RPGA database has been merged with the DCI database, so that RPGA members are DCI members and vice versa.I have a strong feeling that Wizards of the Coast, taking the success of Magic's relationship to its tournament players to heart, no longer takes the RPGA members for granted. In 2000 it would have been unthinkable to center strategic and game system design decisions around the needs of the RPGA, which was mostly an afterthought in those days as far as strategy was concerned.I don't think Wizards is trying to target this audience specifically (book trade sales probably dwarf this audience by an order of magnitude, for example), by any means, but I definitely think this is an interesting lens through which to view the rules changes and overall strategy for the new edition.--Erik</blockquote>

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