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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 6801328" data-source="post: 7334711">Ok, so you meant the massive group of anonymous volunteers who claim they have used the rules in an actual game and are willing to fill out surveys.  Not what is usually meant by "playtesters", which is the much (much) smaller, trusted group that tends to get credits in the product.  That's cool, but as I said and I'm sure you agree, you have to take those results with a large dose of salt.I think you are missing my point about how the pricing of magic items is unlike, say, a rule for grappling or the mechanics of a spell.  You can test the latter by saying, "Hey let's have a mock combat and see how grappling works and test Witch Bolt."  But how do you do that with magic item prices?  "Ok, I'm going to give you each 100,000 gold and 10th level characters.  Let's pretend you're in a magic shop and haggle over prices."I hope you see the problem.Sure, you could ask only for data from actual purchases (or refusals to purchase) from long-term campaigns, but you would have to also ask for how much total gold was rewarded/won per character in that campaign, what other avenues for spending gold were provided, and what other magic items were available.  World of Warcraft, with millions of players doing frequent...sometimes daily...buying and selling under nearly identical conditions with very strictly controlled rates of gold generation still sees big price differentials across servers.  How many times in a D&D game does one player actually buy a magic item?I could go on...but hopefully do not need to.  "Playtesting" is not a useful option here.  Well, that's not completely true: the bizarre numbers that would result would at least make the current rarity pricing look logicial.</blockquote>

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