Shade said:
1.) Knight vs. Samurai style articles. That issue had me seriously pondering dropping the magazine the next time renewal was up. In fact, most of the post-"Dragon Unleashed" issues have excited me about as much as junk mail. About the only things I've really liked lately are the revised monsters from past editions in Winning Races (grippli, lupins), the occasional new monster, the comics, and Sage Advice.
2.) I'm going to second wilder_jw on fiction. I've never read a single fiction article in Dragon and never intend to (and I was a 1E subscriber for many years and purchased the archive on CD-ROM). Those pages might as well be advertisements for their usefulness to me.
3.) Maintaining that Dragon be "player-focused", at the expense of DMs. I'll be honest with you, the first thing I look for in a new issue is new monsters, followed by planar material and anything that brings back something great from past editions of the game.
4.) Increasing amounts of Eberron material. I know it has every right and reason to be in there, but I have no interest in that setting and would much rather see space devoted to any of the settings of past editions. I realize I'm probably in the minority on this one.
5.) More and more focus on educating new players on the simplest of ideas of the game. I don't need an article to tell me that I can deal more damage with a greataxe than a short sword, or that a party should have a cleric.
Thanks for listening and striving to improve the magazine!
I quoted this simply because Shade's summed it up pretty well for me.
Now first of all, please don't take it personally that we're not fond of Dragon these days, Erik. We still "LUUUUUUUUH" ya just as much as we always have.
Also, I devotedly buy/bought Dungeon (even when it was getting pretty awful, a few months ago), so I'm still supporting Paizo. Dungeon is useful to me becasue I can *YOINK* plot ideas, NPCs, maps, whatever. Dragon...well...for some reason it just doesn't do "it" for me.
I accidentally bought the most recent copy of Dragon because....well, quite frankly, because I thought it was a new copy of Dungeon--and that brings up a small issue/point, that the type used for the 2 magazines' titles are too similar. But I shrugged and leafed through it anyway.
I actually kinda liked the newest issue of Dragon (the one about dungeoneering), but (as Shade says) I felt it was geared towards 1) munchkins and/or 2) newbies. Much of the flavor text seems repetative, almost cookie-cutter nowadays. Not everybody is an Ed Greenwood or Wolfgang Bauer, but sheesh...it all seems so....so....bland, so "been there, done that".
I remember when TSR/WotC used to have 5 or 6 campaign settings going at once, and Dragon was supporting EACH of these settings with an article or two in Dragon. (And Dungeon featured 4 - 6 adventures in each issue, some of them also supporting those CSes!) There was variety. There was choice. Not everyone liked the CSes that were featured, but there seemed to be a little bit for everyone's tastes.
So, combined with what Shade indicated, those are the reasons why I've been feeling kinda tepid regarding Dragon. I still get it, but I find it's lost much of the spark that it once had.