Jester David
Hero
There's really only two years to choose from: 2009 and 2010. The game released in 2008 so half the year was filler content.What's unfair is you pretending that's the totality of what I said. As I said (and it was in the quote you just quoted - so you knew I said it) is you can compare it to "even the peak two years of 4e". I also said choose ANY two years of 4e.
You'd have to compare that with 2012 and 2013 with Paizo.
Feel free to count pages.
First, I wasn't moving the goalposts, I just opted to count only the generic RPG content, the must-buy stuff, omitting campaign specific content and adventures.Yeah you making an arbitrary determination between crunch and fluff is not meaningful to me in any way and is massively moving the goal posts here. We're not talking about that topic, we're talking about glut of material, not how crunchy that material is to someone (and even what is and is not crunch or fluff is debatable and often subjective, as things like campaign material is crunch to some DMs and fluff to others, and sometimes dependent on whether the DM feels the need to be familiar with it to run a published adventure and things like that, while sometimes powers contain a large amount of fluff in them, etc..).
Regardless, we're not talking about which particular content, as that's not what glut means.
Crunch and fluff is also not arbitrary,
You don't need to test fluff. Fluff does not need to be balanced. A glut of fluff doesn't result in power creep, option creep, or option paralysis.
Crunch is different. If you release crunch faster than you can test you have problems. It's bad for the game.
Think of it this way: because of the crunch glut the 4e books were devalued, as you didn't know if a particular power was errata-ed. And there was little other reason to buy the books but the crunch, so it was easier to get DDI which cut into sales.
If 4e had a more balanced crunch:fluff ratio allowing better balancing, the edition might have lasted longer. But WotC opted for quantity over quality. Ditto most of the books during 3e. Slowing the release schedule would have extended that edition as well.
Plus a slower schedule focusing on fewer must buy books is better for sales: everyone gets the same book rather than every second book.