Hussar
Legend
This from someone who has been posting about D&D, online, for over twenty years.I think whatever they can glean from what people do online is useful addenda to their "regular" market research and sales data. Also, my guess is that the cohort that has more recently discovered the game are far more likely to engage with it online, from reddit to tik-tok to whatever else the youngins are doing these days.
@dave2008 - you've obviously given the whole 4e/5e thing a lot of thought. Fair enough. I disagree with your conclusions, mostly because I simply don't see the things your see as being major issues. They are, IMO, mostly design decisions that are based on edition specific assumptions - healing in combat for example is a thing when your combat is assumed to be 5-10 rounds long and much less of a thing when combat is assumed to be 3-5 rounds long, thus, all the stuff around healing surges just doesn't apply to 5e. If combat was assumed to be 3-5 rounds in 4e, then healing surges and tactical combat would cease to be a thing there too. These are applications of design principles, not part of the basic design of the game. The basic design of the game is that characters will have these pre-packaged game units (powers as they are called in 4e, various names that are conspicuously not powers in 5e, mostly to bury the lede) that will be used by the players to overcome challenges. These packages will be largely pre-defined with very little wiggle room, and will almost always focus around combat. Powers that are outside of combat will be far fewer on the ground. The rate at which characters gain these powers is standardized across the classes (at least after 3rd level) with very little variation. This is just one example where 4e leads pretty directly into 5e.
Again, we're not going to convince each other. To me, it's self-evident that 4e leads to 5e and that 3e is largely left on the cutting room floor. Since all three are d20 games, they will share some similarities, but, to me, any similarities to 3e are largely cosmetic. And all three games share virtually nothing with AD&D mechanically.
But, hey, this is very, very far removed from the topic. So, can we drop this and move on?