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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nemesis Destiny" data-source="post: 5439787" data-attributes="member: 98255">I don't know if it's true or not, but that was the rumour.I disagree that it backfired though. There was so much negativity over the decision to push out a new edition that they felt that they had to do something to get gamers talking about the game again, rather than how much WotC sucked for ruining D&D (sound familiar?).The folks that didn't like what they saw in leaked PDFs were probably not going to like 4th edition anyway; it's pretty similar to the piracy argument. There's no point in trying to please gamers that were never going to be your customers in the first place, either because they'd decided this before reading it (as I initially did), or because the game mechanics are genuinely not to their liking, or because they're happy with what they already have. This has been the case through EVERY edition change.As I pointed out, I was initially in the "I hate you, WotC" camp because I'd grown tired of the many glaring problems with 3e (just as I had with 2e, back in the day) and felt that 4e was going to be more of the same, and releasing after only 8 years, just felt like a cash grab to me, so I was all set to boycott 4e in protest, and head straight on over to Pathfinder, or E6.One of my group convinced us to give 4e a try, saying that we would just do a one shot, and if we didn't like it, then we would drop it and look at other options. I'm glad he did, but I don't think I would have done that if not for the pirated PDFs. As I read them, the more I realised that even though I didn't agree with a lot of their business decisions, 4e wasn't so bad after all.You may agree, or as many in this thread clearly do, disagree with my assessment, but that is beside the point ENTIRELY. That point being that in at least my case, and likely thousands more, leaking the printer's proofs in PDF actually won them back some customers. And in more cases than that, I'm sure, it changed the mood of the conversations on boards like this from "I hate WotC" to "look what is in this book."Even if they hated the book content, at least they were back to talking about the game.I think more than anything, that's the kind of thing they need right now. There has been a huge shift in conversation to their recent business decisions and flip-flopping and a whole lot less talking about the game.If you've ever been over on the 4e section of the boards here, you would have noticed this. There is always at least one foolish "sky is falling/sky is not falling" type thread, but when those books got pulled from Amazon, the doo-doo hit the Fan of Speculation.The mods have (wisely, I feel) mitigated this problem somewhat by moving most of the threads like that to the industry forum. It has restored a modicum of sanity in the 4e section, but the flipside is that there are a lot of 4e haters in the industry forum, so a lot of the 4e supporters are reticent to comment for fear of being slammed publicly, or starting an edition flamewar. I feel that this is a legitimate concern. This thread has been fairly civil, however.</blockquote>

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