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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Windjammer" data-source="post: 4924537" data-attributes="member: 60075">One of the most harmful, edition-wars-stirring, things to happen during the pre-release time of 4E was the claim that 4E rendered 3.5 obsolete. And you know who made that statement? It sure wasn't fans on the net who hadn't seen the game yet. It was two types of people: designers and playtesters. To make it worse, the only playtesters to be vocal on this point were guys who later miraculously landed a freelance job for the 4E project line, or people closely related to them. Two examples from the top of my head,- Ari Marmell's DM during the playtest time, Massawyrm. He produced the worst ever pre-release "neutral playtest" by describing how, having played 4E for a fraction, he went to put his 3.5 books into the dumpster and/or sale them off for a couple of dollars. Wow! What a nice image! "I loved 3.5 so much that I sell off my 3.5 books cheaply to strangers!"- That Transformer-movie-script witer who wrote the chapter on the Feywild in the Manual of the Planes. Feel free to peruse his online "contributions" in early 2008, and note how he conveniently forgets to mention that is in any sense commercially involved in 4E.The same vibes were coming from most designers as well, like Chris Perkins describing why they stopped support for 3.5 (he didn't say "look, it's for commercial reasons", no, he said "it's not a game we would even WANT to play at the office any more, EVER again!"), or a couple of remarks by Mike Mearls, some of them on the podcast surrounding GenCon 2007, some of them on forums, saying that he disliked 3.5 to a degree that he would never want to play it again.For me, it was those remarks which really put fuel to the (then only small) fire of the edition wars. They contained two things which in my estimate are not just ill-worded but ill-intended1) People say they won't ever play 3.5 again. A needless overstatement to drive home the point they like 4E better, because it's stated in terms of dislike and condemnation of an edition that most other D&D fans at the time were still heavily enjoying, preparing campaigns for, and so on. It put a bad vibe on people who at the time enjoyed 3.5, when they should have been told instead "you're playing a great game now, but we're making that game - your game - even better!". They should have congratulated fans for playing the game, for making the choice to commercially support a game produced by WotC.2) It basically started the claim that once you start to play 4E meant you would no longer play 3.5. How silly! 4E and 3.5 are both great games, and if you like to play one of them, that should never automatically mean you won't touch the other. People like myself, who enjoy both editions - and enjoy them for precisely the reason that they are both great games which cater to different play styles - can only shake their head at this (mutual) edition exclusivism.And that exclusivism wasn't started by fans. It was started by the marketing. It was the worst marketing move ever, because fans didn't need to be convinced to no longer commercially support a (now defunct) product line by buying 3.5 product. Fans couldn't buy new 3.5 anyway, so why tell them they shouldn't support it by playing it?</blockquote>

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