I'm amused that given the rantings about errors & errata to correct those errors in various products, and the general acceptance of said rantings, that anybody is surprised or doesn't understand why people would be annoyed at having to buy whole new revised books three years after launch.
I think the annoyance is in part caused because there will be (allegedly) new material, and new changes, in the revised versions. Thus, one may
feel as if they "need" the books, so they can be "up to date". The revised books may be backwards compatible with old sourcebooks, but will new sourcebooks be compatible with the old core rulebooks?
If not, then I think it's a very curious decision, because it looks like WotC is risking fracturing their market again. v3.1 or 3.5 or whatever they call it, vs. v3.0.
I look forward to hearing more from A.V. about this.
I also wonder how retailers & distributors will feel about this; I imagine that the more word of the revised editions spreads, the more trouble they'll have moving the old versions. Last couple of game shops I've went to had plenty of copies of the current, soon to be obsolescent, rulebooks.
Hmm, the last
bookstores I went to had a few copies; are they going to be returning them?
For myself, it annoyed me when other games (wave to White Wolf, folks!) did the "new version after 2-3 years" thing, too. But mainly, I think it's just that (a) I recently (last year) bought second copies of the core rulebooks to use as a pooled resource for my group, and (b) I've just been grumpy & out of sorts the last couple of days in general.
