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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8705461" data-attributes="member: 4937">Let me follow up the above broad post with a specific example particular to EnWorld.  The biggest "toxic fandom" fight in EnWorld history I'm aware of was the 4e rollout "edition wars".   I am probably the original EnWorld "edition warrior" in as much as I am almost certainly the first person that began expressing misgivings about the direction of 4e on the boards before it came out.  If you go back and read those posts, I was often very tentative in my opinions and would say something like, "You know, I feel like this is a solving a problem I didn't have at my table, and so the solution may create more problems for me than it solves."  Or I would say something like, "It feels like they are borrowing mechanics from World of Warcraft, and that's pretty cool.  I think it's cool that video game design can inform table top design."  And defenders of 4e would go ballistic on me.  People would start saying that mentally deranged or functionally insane for not being excited about 4e, and that if I liked prior editions of D&D that I must be a bad person.  And I'm not exaggerating that at all.And if you look at that in context, it goes back to the marketing of 4e.  Someone earlier in the thread offered the that fandom becomes toxic when it can't tell you why it likes something without saying why something else is bad.  Well if you look back at the articles WotC was releasing about the super secret 4e, they weren't focused on why 4e was good.  Those articles focused on why 3e was so bad.  The marketing on 4e was unrelenting with respect to the idea that prior editions of D&D were just bad, and finally the team working on 4e had gotten it all figured out and they were going to give you the D&D the presumably less talented, less knowledgeable people from prior editions should have given you all along.  People excited about 4e were jumping down my throat for saying I had fun playing 3e and calling me a bad person for enjoying it.  And this is a guy who famously had to write a 500+ page house rule document to make 3.X work the way I wanted to, who had hated 3.5 and at the time wasn't sure whether or not I was going to adopt 4e and said so, and who legitimately did try to convert KotB to 4e the way I converted Pyramid to 3e as exercise in seeing of the rules worked for me.EnWorld went so far as to formally ban criticism of 4e as a topic.  You weren't allowed to say anything negative about it.Can we not acknowledge toxicity by the brand owners?  Is it only fans that can be arrogant and hold arrogant opinions?  Is it only fans that go wrong and never brand owners that take the brand in directions that are a mistake?  Like can we say of the fans they always have the worst intentions in their criticism but brand owners can be excused of whatever crap they produce because they say they had good intentions?  I don't think so.</blockquote>

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