Signs of the beginning of the end for 4E.

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 9:52 am

How about trying to gauge interest about something from google searches being done in the past few years?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Dungeons ... all&sort=0

http://www.google.com/trends?q=D%26D&ct ... all&sort=0

User · Post by **User** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 10:00 am

That's interesting data. It would appear to show that interest in D&D has been in decline for a while, but not any special drop correlated with 4e. In fact interest seems to be relatively stable after the launch of 4e.

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 10:18 am

Yup. Only anyone with any knowledge of business whatsoever will tell you that its absolutely natural for customers to to lose interest in a product after some time. So then you either renew a product (give out new version of it with some enhancements) or make a new product.

However you treat 4E, if you take # of google searches as relevant data to judge interest in D&D, it is obvious it has failed to increase interest in the product.

User · Post by **User** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 10:22 am

That's completely in line with my unsubstantiated gut feeling, which says that 4e enjoys about the same player population as 3e had in 2008, but not like 3e had when it came out.

Kobajagrande · Post by **Kobajagrande** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 10:44 am

And that's not a serious failure, exactly, how?

User · Post by **User** » Sun Jul 19, 2009 10:52 am

Certainly its not good, but its not the same as players fleeing the game like rats from a sinking ship as some earlier posters suggested.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 8:54 pm

To partially derail the thread in order that I might not create a new one:

What do you look for in a new edition? Do you want the mechanics of the old edition cleaned up, or do you want a large system "reboot"? Personally, I want the former, which is why 4e is such a big turn-off for me.

ggroy · Post by **ggroy** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 9:18 pm

erik · Post by **erik** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 2:37 am

Psychic Robot wrote: What do you look for in a new edition? Do you want the mechanics of the old edition cleaned up, or do you want a large system "reboot"?

If it is a whole new edition then I want a full reboot of crunchy mechanics.
I want cleanups to just be spinoffs like Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed setting or True20. I was peeved when they tried to pretend 3.5 to be a new edition instead of an alternate to the same edition- especially when so many 3rd party products were more ambitious in their changes.

I would have been more excited with 4e if they went a different direction with their new edition. The hype about faster/streamlined combat wasn't quite up to my expectations. I wanted less time consuming miniature wargaming, and more of using crazy magic out of combat to alter the world setting via story outside of combat.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 4:11 am

Mostly a cleanup. I mean problem areas should be fixed, the new edition should be cleaned up, and the opportunity should be used to create a better basis.

There shouldn't be a overhaul of the system unless it's broke because honestly, I want to play the same game not a new game with the same name. If I want a new game I'll go to a different game.

RandomCasualty2 · Post by **RandomCasualty2** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 5:32 am

clikml wrote:
I would have been more excited with 4e if they went a different direction with their new edition. The hype about faster/streamlined combat wasn't quite up to my expectations.

It was in fact pretty much the exact opposite. While the actual writeups for powers were simpler and more streamlined, combat itself took much longer, and had tons of things you had to keep track of, because effects often lasted only a single round, and to make things worse, they ended on the turn of the effect originator, not the person who had the effect. So to know when the orc warrior gets undazed, you have to remember who dazed him in the first place.

And that's just a book-keeping nightmare.

Flumph · Post by **Flumph** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 5:34 am

The traffic at paizo appears to be steady over the last two years, at least compared to wizards.com, enworld.org and rpg.net.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/paizo.com

Paizo's reach isn't that much lower then WotC's right now. I wonder how the Wizards folks would react to that little bit of info.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 12:46 pm

I would go for a reboot. I want it to be recognizably DnD - accelerating power growth being the most important aspect of DnD gaming, but also with 3e's ability to easily create classes to fit archetypes.

4e's biggest problems for me are the bookkeeping and combat lengths, and the annoying amount of effort required to create a class to achieve the intraclass balance I want to see in my game. I can accept that the classes won't be balanced out of the box - it's not ideal but I can accept that achieving balance is very difficult - but they need to make a lower hurdle to perform personal rebalancing.

The combat... eh. That's fixable.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 12:47 pm

Also, the traffic numbers require a little massaging since gleemax contains a ton of subforums:

...but the basic and shaky conclusion is that it looks like DnD has a noticeably smaller web presence with no corresponding uptick in 3e interest.

Thymos · Post by **Thymos** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 1:27 pm

Wait, I thought he meant new editions in general.

With 4e I want a reboot back to something more like 3.x only you know, balanced.

That and I want the skill system to be fixed.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 1:34 pm

Psychic Robot wrote:To partially derail the thread in order that I might not create a new one:

What do you look for in a new edition? Do you want the mechanics of the old edition cleaned up, or do you want a large system "reboot"? Personally, I want the former, which is why 4e is such a big turn-off for me.

Somewhere in the middle, really.

I'd like the bulk of the mechanic cleaned up, but I'd like to see a total reboot in some clunky parts if it makes the edition as a whole better.

I was slow to switch from 2E to 3E. I wanted to make sure I liked what I saw before I went ahead. After reading, it seemed to contain a lot of the same basic principles with a cleaned up d20 mechanic. I liked that a high d20 roll was always good, and that every d20 roll followed the same formula of d20 + ability mod + other mods to beat a set DC (where higher is harder).

When 4E came out, I liked some things and others bothered me on a level where it just didn't seem like the same game to me. In addition to cleaning up some mechanics (largely good), I didn't like the way they tried to abstract things that I didn't feel needed to be abstracted. The parcel system bothers me. Getting rid of differences in diagonal movement bothered me (firecubes!), but then again, I never had a hard time with the counting. Some other things were iffy to me. I can see why they didn't include summoning, but it's a damn good trope, and I'd like to see it fixed instead of banned. Banning is just lazy fixing. All in all, it seemed like a reboot on things I liked and the improvement from cleanup just wasn't worth it to me.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 5:52 pm

mean_liar wrote:Also, the traffic numbers require a little massaging since gleemax contains a ton of subforums:

...but the basic and shaky conclusion is that it looks like DnD has a noticeably smaller web presence with no corresponding uptick in 3e interest.

I don't know about no 3e uptick. I've noticed that we are vastly more active here since 4e came out, I'd say the same is true of gitp and BG, I'm assuming that's because Wizards 3.5 forums were abandoned in mass when they razed support for them.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 6:01 pm

I dunno about GitP (other than it being made of Fail, obviously) but from what I've heard, BG is slowly self destructing due to massive amounts of Meg Fail.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 6:30 pm

Roy wrote:I dunno about GitP (other than it being made of Fail, obviously) but from what I've heard, BG is slowly self destructing due to massive amounts of Meg Fail.

I think a lot of that stems from the BGs trying to get the forum back to its podcasting roots. That, and I guess she talked to people who didn't like her forums, so she's trying to change the tone of them. Certain things that were allowed a year ago are now frowned upon.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 6:36 pm

It appears that 4e drove most people off the web with a fat dose of "don't care" - there wasn't a shift between editions, as there's no real uptick in 3e-devoted sites.

mean_liar · Post by **mean_liar** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 6:40 pm

The numbers crash around 6/08, right at the release of 4e.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 10:46 pm

Roy wrote:I dunno about GitP (other than it being made of Fail, obviously) but from what I've heard, BG is slowly self destructing due to massive amounts of Meg Fail.

Indeed.

User · Post by **User** » Wed Jul 22, 2009 11:00 pm

Here's a much better explanation, which also explains drops in sites like penny-arcade at the same time:

"On April 16, 2008 many users reported dramatic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released the new Alexa ranking system, claiming that they now take into account more data sources "beyond Alexa Toolbar users"."

-from wikipedia

These changes are only apparent changes due to shifts in the way alexa measures traffic, not real changes in popularity.

Also: http://slashdot.org/articles/07/07/23/152243.shtml

Absentminded_Wizard · Post by **Absentminded_Wizard** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:27 am

These changes are only apparent changes due to shifts in the way alexa measures traffic, not real changes in popularity.

Except that WotC's numbers keep declining after the initial slide (even going down during the time after 4e's release, despite the big surge in traffic when they first put it on the D&D home page). Everybody else, OTOH, holds steady. And that includes Gleemax, which should have been awash in analysis of the fresh new rules.

User · Post by **User** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:46 am

Looks like random variation to me, and it looks like they received a recent uptick. If we are going to dismiss the uptick as magic related we can equally well ignore similar but opposite movements. To me jumping on the notoriously unreliable alexa results and ignoring evidence such as this: http://www.goodman-games.com/forums/vie ... 324#p25324 seems like denial and wishful thinking. Let's face it: lots of people absolutely love 4e, some are apathetic towards it, and a small group of holdouts hates it. 4e caters to a generation raised on CRPGs, where RPG means nothing more than having playing pieces that increase in power over time. If 4e is really on its last legs where is the sudden interest in some other replacement? Where is the rush to pro 3e or anti-4e boards such as this one?