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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 5622182" data-attributes="member: 7006">To comment on your three points...If people are still paying for DDI, then 1) gets taken care of.  So long as WotC continually adds things to all their databases to keep people signed up, then it works for them and they get their money.  If they can have a big expansion that delivers a whole new thrust of material to possibly get even more people to sign up (whether that's called Essentials, or 5E or something different) then that's even better.As far as 2)... the reason they haven't cleaned out the junk options yet is because they didn't want to eliminate things that people might still be playing.  Which was the point of my post.  If the new Builders have more aggressive and flexible toggles for showing/hiding information... they won't need to "eliminate" anything.  They can just let people turn stuff off.  So someone who signs up purely to play whatever "5E" type expansion that gets released can go in and turn off ALL 4E material.  But at the same time... someone playing 4E who doesn't want to move to the "5E" material can turn THAT off as well, and stick with what they've had before.  It solves the problem for both sides of players.  You can keep the databases active for both of them.It's your 3) though that I think you're not on the right track with.  Because to move back that far with 5E to regain the 3E players, means you alienate all your happy 4E players.  Thus you've just made the same mistake twice.  I think what we've seen from both Essentials and all the Mearls pieces is the idea of returning to earlier concepts in D&D while still staying within the 4E architecture.Some 3.5/PF players are gone regardless of what WotC does--  some are the ones who got offended by the "badwrongfun" of 3.5 they perceived WotC were claiming when they rolled out 4E.  Others are ones who use and enjoy so many third-party-products that they won't go to any future system that won't include an OGL.  So there's little to nothing WotC can do to get those players back, short of selling the game to another company or having a new OGL... neither of which are at all likely.The rest of the players are ones who just have problems with many of the game mechanics of 4E (ranging from healing surges to multiclass rules to power similiarity or disparity etc. etc.)  And for these people... WotC can most certainly move things back in that direction while staying within 4E game architecture, considering that much of Essentials has already started going that way.  Now, we and they know it's impossible to get all of the PF players back... but I believe they'll try to find a good balance of creating various game options to inspire the 3E player, as well as the 4E player, as well as the all-new "5E" player, and as well as the basic/advanced game and miniatures/no miniatures game schism of players too... especially if they can set up their Character Builder to turn all of these options on and off depending on personal campaign choice.They do that... and they can have a D&D game that can play a lot like 3E, 4E, "5E", a hybrid of any of them, and perhaps even harken back to 1E or BECMI.  All while using the same base game architecture that can be run through the VTT and the various game Builders.</blockquote>

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