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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9164881" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Oh, I absolutely do. That's been my going theory since 2013: a specific subgroup of D&D players were over-represented for several reasons (they were the easy-to-reach group; they had grievances they wished to air; they were being actively courted; etc.) and the edition was heavily shaped specifically for their interests.Then the thing exploded, and a flood of brand-new players came in, whose interests had not been catered to because no one expected D&D to explode like it did. And "catered to" is, IMO, a perfectly valid description, since during the playtest, the minimum acceptability rating was something like 70%--if at least 70% of players didn't like it, it wouldn't be included. That's pretty clearly saying that the target group's interests are the most important thing, and everything else must follow from it.But the aforementioned explosion increased the player base something like tenfold, if not more. Any data collected during the playtest is no longer representative, not because WotC necessarily did anything wrong,* but simply because the population is radically different from what it was back then. It is on average much younger, more diverse in both gender and ethnicity, less TTRPG-experienced, more narrative-focused, etc., etc. Even if it coincidentally turned out that they'd stumbled into the correct choices for both the original target and the new audience, their 2011-14 data would be completely inadequate to tell them that.But it's still pretty bad to have the satisfaction ratings so low. It means that dissatisfaction has only gotten worse with several things they put in, knowing they weren't as good as they could've been. E.g., they've always known the Ranger wasn't in a good spot, they'd just hoped they could address it with spells, subclasses, feats, etc. It seems that that is...not the case.Kinda makes me wonder if they won't try new psionics stuff once 5.5e is out.*I personally think their data collection methods were terribad at best, but that's a wholly separate topic.</blockquote>

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