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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 5535103" data-attributes="member: 957">But you are responding to an argument that no one is making.I have not met a single person who claims, "I don't play 4E.  I am typical. Therefore 4E is hurting."If you find me one, then I will agree that they are wrong and your dispute stands.I encounter people who play 4E.  Each event is nothing but an anecdote.I encounter people who have left D&D since 4E came along.  Each event is nothing but an anecdote.However the frequency of the two events is quite notable.  You could still say that this is "just an anecdote" of my personal random encounters, biased by my geography and online habits.  Fair enough.But a couple points apply to that.  First, this is at least a different tier of anecdote.  Second, the odds of me finding this distribution by pure chance, ten years ago during 3E was astronomical.  It is like winning the lottery.  Ok, people do win the lottery.  So I'm just that guy and my lottery winning anecdote doesn't mean anything about the frequency of lottery winners.  So you are still leading this debate.But then I talk to other people who have the exact same experience in completely different areas.  Huh.  There sure seem to be a lot of lottery winners out there.  Weird.Then we look at other anecdotes out there.There is plenty of serious flaws in looking at Amazon data.  People misuse it constantly.  Very small flurries of activity can wildly swing that data and make it look completely wrong.  So if GURPS releases a new book, you can probably capture a screenshot showing GURPS as the #1 RPG.  But you can also look at trends.  In the past 3E was dominant, now it varies.  The pattern has changed.  What does that tell us?  Well, something has changed.What is it that has changed?  Dunno.  Maybe Amazon's methods just changed.  Maybe the people shopping online have changed.  Maybe someone learned how to hack the system.  Dunno.  What are the odds that this change would happen just in time to hurt the appearance?  Dunno, but lottery winners happen, that doesn't mean everyone wins the lottery.We hear from people with knowledge of retail bookstores that the sales are not the same.  Well, that is just an anecdote of big chains and everyone knows that they are going through a lot of trouble right now.  No telling what that means.  Just bad luck for 4e on the timing.  We hear from distributors that things are completely different now.  Well, they only service a segment of the market and don't provide a full picture.  Not sure why that segment of the market would not be dominated by the 800 lb gorilla the way it used to be.  But hey, lottery winners happen and lottery winners are just meaningless anecdotes.We hear from game stores.  As you said, some game stores report 4E sales are great and some report they are terrible.  Now, clearly game store owners have some likelyhood of being gamers.  So we have a bias issue.  Yep, need to be careful here.  Now, if we stick with the null hypothesis that everything is the same now then there should have been the same distribution of anti-3E gamestore owners then as there are anti-4E game store owners now. And yet, we didn't have game store owners complaining that they could not move 3E/D20 product.  We had "the glut".  We had "stiffling".  Maybe game store owners were just as biased against 3E then as they are against 4E now.  But for some odd reason they have started electing to put their biases above their profits now.  It is just really bad luck for 4E that this change in values has happened now.  Or it could be that the distribution is just the same, but the luck of the draw was such that game store owners completely randomly happened to be clustered in the tiny anti-4E segment of the population.  Just another lottery winner.  One starts to wonder how many lottery winners are needed before one is permitted to draw the conclusion that there are more lottery winners than there used to be.  Those are not all the examples, but I think I've covered the frequently discussed ones.If you try to take any one of them out and say it means something, then you are wrong.  But understanding that those data points are all parts of one large population is important.  If someone now says they can look at that and say "4E is failing" then they are deluding themselves.  If someone looks at that as says "PF has more revenue than 4E" then they are deluding themselves.  If someone looks at all that and says "it is 70/30 4E" or "it is 50/50" or it is any X0/X0, then they are deluding themselves.  We really do not have ANY information to answer any of THOSE questions.But a rational person CAN look at all that and conclude that something is very different now from what it used to be.And if you can't find any difference, then you are just not looking honestly.  And, humorously, the fact that deniers of the change participate in this thread is a drop of evidence against them.  This kind of claim 10 years ago would not have merited conversation.Now, the one big thing left of is DDI.  People will say that DDI makes all the difference.  Ok, fair point.  There is some quibble over whether the DDI subscriber base is 30K or 50K.  For a second, lets assume 30K.  Well, let me just say, that is a hell of a lot of money.  Congrats!!  Now, lets changes the assumption to 75K.  And lets assume that not a single one of those people is double counted because no one with a DDI subscription anywhere ever buys  a single book again.  The deck is completely stacked in 4E's favor.  If all of that is correct and 75K DDI subscribers is swaying the whole marketplace, then I stand corrected.  The D&D brand is doing far far worse than I thought.I certainly wonder, what anecdotes are there to suggest that 4E is just a dominate as 3E was?  Or to suggest that the market is largely unified and not "deeply split".</blockquote>

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