I'm pointing out that the "almost simultaneously" mention in the article isn't as wrong as you claimed it was. Your mention of counting 4E from when it was announced (in terms of 4E and Pathfinder being competitors) was a salient point; that's why I didn't disagree with you in my previous post.
It's still pretty wrong.
Like, believe me, I would
love for it to be right! Because that would mean 4e never had any period where it truly stood on its own--it would mean that the edition wars were there from effectively the instant it happened. That would be
incredibly useful to me, because then I could
objectively say that the vast majority of haters never even gave 4e a chance, they just complained for two months (or whatever) and then immediately switched to PF1e, complaining all the while about a game they never played. Of course, many of the things people said then, and still say today, are conclusive proof that a lot of the complaints came from people who had never even read the rules. But it would be
so useful to be able to point to an objective, unequivocal "see?! SEE?! PF1e strangled 4e in the cradle!"
But it didn't. 4e had at least a full year to stand on its own, and the response was very bad by the end of that year. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, and I think the article is about as fair as you can get from someone who still had a stake in the edition wars against 4e. That is, there are still several inaccurate or openly edition-war statements (like roles being "rigid", which is factually untrue!), but apart from those occasional incorrect jabs, the article is
generally pretty good.
The more frustrating thing for me--other than the objectively inaccurate, edition-war-y statements--is that it glossed over many of what I consider the
really important reasons why 4e stumbled so badly, giving them barely more than a sentence or two, while hyperfocusing on issues that were things people
complained about a lot, but which weren't really that central. Again, in part because of people making complaints that had nothing to do with the content of the books.
Big example: Every "critic" and their sibling loves to say 4e explicitly said you could only use level-locked combats and difficulty class numbers, so levelling up became pointless, because you'd just face level 5 goblins instead of level 4 goblins the instant you hit level 5. This is objectively untrue, and I have quoted to many such "critics" all of the relevant passages (a total of four of them, I believe?) from the 4e DMG. Not only do the books
not say you can only use level-locked combats, they explicitly and repeatedly say you SHOULD NOT only use combats at the party's level, but instead provide a healthy mix of many different combats, while providing specific cautionary advice for what can happen if you over-use either very low-level or very high-level fights, and for how to re-imagine extremely high-level fights as instead skill challenges to avoid being pasted. I don't think it's explicitly mentioned, but the most common example given by 4e fans for this is how the hobbits respond to the cave troll the Fellowship faced in Moria. They can't meaningfully harm it, their goal is to
survive it, and Frodo straight-up benefits from one of his signature magic items, a literal Elven Chain Shirt he inherited from Bilbo--it's simultaneously one of the most cinematic battles of the early series (hence the films' focus on it!),
and such a perfectly D&D-like situation up to and including magic items being involved, a rarity for LotR.
Like, it's literally right there, in the 4e DMG1: "If every encounter gives the players a perfectly balanced challenge, the game can get stale." (p 104) The books
explicitly tell you not to do that, and give specific, clear advice for other things you can do instead. And yet it's on every "critic"'s lips anyway! Show them the evidence against it, and naturally, the goalposts move to a far weaker claim...but the "critic" still claims a victory nonetheless.
I suspect there's a reason for that.
I mean, when there are objectively false statements also present, it's not hard to conceive of what that reason might be--and it's not one that would inspire a winky-face emoji.
