Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9342802" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Well, there is a concept that is quite relevant--and that I think CR and the others demonstrate with how they went after that initial push."Churn."In the MMO world, "churn" refers to player turnover without growth. Every game necessarily loses subscribers/players over time. That's just the nature of the beast. Nobody is truly a forever player. But you can at least keep a rough consistent average by having churn. New players flow in to replace the old ones. That isn't a bad thing, but it also isn't necessarily a good thing, especially if there are issues with the player-onboarding or player-support process. A game that excessively favors long-term fans at the expense of, or failure to listen to, its newest players is one that has a tendency to die, but slowly, sometimes painfully so.At this point, two of the flagship D&D podcasts have switched away from it, namely Critical Role and The Adventure Zone. And there's been a surge in interest in other things, e.g. several content creators I know of have started doing Vampire or Werewolf games. Point being, these people--who have a lot of pull and influence!--are bringing other, newer ideas and interests into the hobby. Even if people stick with 5e because of familiarity (a common pattern in gaming of all stripes), it's entirely possible that dissatisfaction will linger.That's a recipe for problems if the game creators continue to listen to only a narrow, unrepresentative slice of the fanbase...and a narrow, unrepresentative slice of the fanbase is exactly who dominated the discussion during the D&D Next playtest, and who continue to pull extremely hard now with the 5.5e playtest. WotC has demonstrated that they're really goddamn bad at actually understanding the wants and interests of their fanbase (see: the OGL debacle), and their survey design is and always has been utterly goddamn abysmal. I have seen no evidence that they've improved their ability to do statistical analysis.If the merits were only a smaller slice of the pie, and now have to carry the whole thing themselves with the free marketing gone and WotC stuck listening only to a fraction of a fraction of their new, massively-larger customer base...that could be why both might not be true.Just because something sells, doesn't mean it's great. Sales are only a loose proxy of quality, not a guarantor of quality.Just because something is commonly used, doesn't mean everyone is always excited about using it. People stick with things they're familiar with even if they aren't happy about it--and that often means the choice becomes "stick around or leave," and leaving is not any better than switching to a different game instead of leaving the hobby entirely.Just because something has done well or even been praised before, doesn't mean opinions will remain static. For years and years, everyone told me the 5e DMG was a perfectly fine, even great book, worthy of comparison with the best of the best in the field. Nowadays, it's hard to find anyone even willing to complement it around here, and more than a few people are apprehensive that the 5.5e DMG will end up being just a slight tweak of it, rather than the major improvement they believe the game needs.5.5e is going to actually have to think about competition now, in part because of the OGL debacle, in part because ten years is a long time and people change, in part because they aren't getting the free marketing anymore, etc. Perhaps what's past is prologue. Or perhaps they need to be thinking about how all the new fans think and feel about D&D, rather than exclusively maintaining the hegemony of the 3e fanboys.</blockquote>

Verification