DaveMage said:
The interesting thing is to look at the lengths of the discussion threads both here (EN World) and at GitP. They've *really* shrunk during the last 5 months compared to pre-Gen Con.
The buzz has left the building.*
Good. I think the comic (and its fan community) will be better off once all the people who have nothing to say but, "Meh, filler," to each strip give up and stop reading. Most of the people who commented on the strip back then had nothing meaningful to say anyway.
I'm also pretty sure Rich has said that he's not ever going "back to its roots" with a random dungeon crawl and rules jokes, and that he accepts the loss of any readers who don't like it.
So I'm guessing he doesn't worry about "buzz", whatever that is. It certainly is not synonymous with how many people are actually reading, though. Because as far as I can tell, Rich's traffic has actually risen since he returned from his September hiatus:
Yes, I am aware that Alexa is not a perfect tool by any stretch; it's what I could find. But if he were experiencing a substantial drop in readers, it should still be visible, even if the exact numbers are inaccurate. He clearly isn't, so we can surmise that there are still plenty of readers enjoying the strip as much as ever...maybe even more such readers than ever before.