When did We Stop Trusting Game Designers?

[Calithena]

I'm sure this has been said already, but people stopped trusting game designers in RPGs immediately upon publication of the first D&D books.

That doesn't mean we didn't respect what they did or learn from them. But the cars didn't run back then until you put them in your garage and worked on them for a while. I actually liked that better than the cars we have now, that do seem to clunk along by themselves off the showroom floor but are much harder to chop to spec.

 

[Ulrick]

More than a lifetime. I think the greatest source of animosity towards the latest edition of any game is not so much the product support but rather the difficulty (real or imagined) of finding people to play the older editions.
Such players can be found but it increases the difficulty of the seach check.

I agree, but I've also experienced the opposite.

When game designers keep coming out with a new edition every few years it adds to the problem. I liked 3.5e, but I was content with 3e. I switched to 3.5e because I didn't want to get left out of a social group.

Back when 3e came out and I joined a gaming club, nobody in that club would play 3e. They liked 2e. It got so bad that one DM ended up running a 20 player game one day (partly his fault for not saying "no" to people). Meanwhile, I tried to syphon off some players from that game, but I had no takers because they didn't want to convert to 3e.