I am of the opinion that people were being "insulted" simply because they were pissed off about 4e and wanted to find something to be insulted about.
That's the party line. As Scot Rouse once put it, there's some negative perceptions surrounding 4E products and their marketing. These perceptions are wrong so we (WotC) have to change them. Apparently people like Scot and yourself have never heard about the causal theory of perception, preferring instead to assume massive perceptual errors in the customer base.
Heck, a ways back upthread Windjammer mentiones the "cloud watching" blog post. Yet, when that post was re-examined a few months later, nothing insulting was found.
Feel free to link to the re-examination thread. As far as I recall, Dave Noonan made a blunder in that post. He came off as extremely insulting
without meaning too, and he apologized for the post a day or two later
on these forums. He even owned up to the fact that his blog entry was
badly expressed.
And that's the crux, really. A lot of statements that get castigated as bad marketing in this thread boil down, not to outright insulting statements, but to a healthy mix of statements which
are expressed far too carelessly to prevent people feeling insulted. Which equates to bad marketing, full stop. I mean, Noonan having to even post an apology reflects the fact that he had made a blunder. 4E's prerelease marketing was replete with such blunders, and that's why people remember them.
As for statements being expressed misleadingly, also take the passage on the fey which some here tell us has nothing in the least insulting about the fey. Well, the way I read it is actually Wyatt saying that fey in D&D sucked pretty hard prior to their 4E overhaul. People complain "how dare he say that about how I handled fey in my games". 4E fans say "he didn't insult fey - he just insulted how prior editions handled them". That's splitting hairs. What people felt got insulted was not fey per se but
a way of handling of fey in D&D - namely their own. If you think Wyatt's statement doesn't contain such an insult, I wager that's because the way of handling fey in D&D he degrades isn't your own.
Or that other statement by Perkins "we will make leveling up a meaningful choice at every level" which, 4E fans now tell us, doesn't by implication carry the statement how, prior to 4E, it wasn't a meaningful choice at every level.
The only thing I can see from this sort of rhetoric defense is that 4E fans don't feel insulted by statements which say that X sucked pretty hard, was less than "meaningful", etc. prior to how 4E handled X. What a surprise! Well of course
you don't mind these statements, since their negativitiy doesn't effect your preferred edition's handling of these elements.
