D&D 4E Sales Figures Debate

[MGuy]

Accidental double post here.

[Aryxbez]

Then they should point out WHY, unless of course they just like to feel smart by insulting people.

For one, you didn't answer FBMF's question. So, instead of spouting to me why ye didn't answer it, or re-explaining the response in that quoted post, answer the question(s). In this case, I've no interest in anything other than answering those specific queries in the linked post.

I'm thinking conceptually, ye think, sorry FEEL, you want explanations and would work this way, but in execution ye forget to follow this philosophy. Again, not interested in the explanation, but to see you follow this in that quoted post above. If wanting a "why", seriously re-read this thread, and that's where it seems the inconsitency comes from. Where you'll go from asking "why" to then ignoring questions, or spouting about your philosophy seemingly ignoring what's being phrased to you.

Personally, I find your spamming of solipsism silly, as it seems just want to reduce conversation down to what YOU Want, to reduce conversation down to moot so that nothing can be discussed. Despite in the 4e case, we've seen the reality of its fate, despite the lack of sales numbers (again, don't confuse this with me wanting to see your explanation for the upnteenth time).

So in this case, should I follow your Solipsism jazz, what is the conversation then, whatever you want, 4e is magically the mary sue edition, something else? (Feel free to explain this viewpoint, least its new)

I am serious about that list

Use actual arguments, and not solipsism. Also, answer FBMF.

[MGuy]

Yes, we all have seen your ole song and dance. As I said, no one is confused, but more importantly, no one is impressed by it. Again, people have told you why and you've casually dismissed it.

As opposed to what? having all my opinions formed in a vacuum that can easily be changed by facts found anywhere?

If I believe something that is because I have a good reason to do so (unlike say those here who think things are true just cause alot of people think it is true). That means you need to do more then point at things I know to prove me wrong.

Well if you have 'good reason' you should lead with that. So far all you've done is dismiss any piece of evidence contrary to what you already believe. It's bullshit and not particularly clever bullshit. People have called you on it. Hell I've called you on it. I even told you exactly how to fix your confusion REREAD THE THREAD. Seriously go back read it. And instead of reading it with the intent of holding your position, consider that you might be thinking about this whole thing wrong (because you are).

[Leress]

I know for example that when someone assumes that a company is acting perfectly I should NOT point out that they are making a mistake because humans are not perfect.

No one is assuming that the company is acting perfectly. Just not assuming that they are fucking gits.

I also know that 4e failed, no it does not matter that we lack the data for pathfinder so we have no context for 4e, and no it does not matter that we lack DDI data.

To show that it failed you don't actually need the data for pathfinder. That would only show that it lost to pathfinder or not.

if I question any of these I will be called an idiot and not taken seriously regardless of my logic am I missing anything?

Your logic is shit, you have committed numerous logical fallacies.

[angelfromanotherpin]

As opposed to what? having all my opinions formed in a vacuum that can easily be changed by facts found anywhere?

I know, right? Just imagine having to change your opinions every time you came across new information.

[CaptPike]

Then they should point out WHY, unless of course they just like to feel smart by insulting people.

For one, you didn't answer FBMF's question. So, instead of spouting to me why ye didn't answer it, or re-explaining the response in that quoted post, answer the question(s). In this case, I've no interest in anything other than answering those specific queries in the linked post.

I'm thinking conceptually, ye think, sorry FEEL, you want explanations and would work this way, but in execution ye forget to follow this philosophy. Again, not interested in the explanation, but to see you follow this in that quoted post above. If wanting a "why", seriously re-read this thread, and that's where it seems the inconsitency comes from. Where you'll go from asking "why" to then ignoring questions, or spouting about your philosophy seemingly ignoring what's being phrased to you.

Personally, I find your spamming of solipsism silly, as it seems just want to reduce conversation down to what YOU Want, to reduce conversation down to moot so that nothing can be discussed. Despite in the 4e case, we've seen the reality of its fate, despite the lack of sales numbers (again, don't confuse this with me wanting to see your explanation for the upnteenth time).

So in this case, should I follow your Solipsism jazz, what is the conversation then, whatever you want, 4e is magically the mary sue edition, something else? (Feel free to explain this viewpoint, least its new)

I am serious about that list

Use actual arguments, and not solipsism. Also, answer FBMF.

sure show me the data we need to see to KNOW and I will admit I am wrong, show me enough for us to calculate the odds and I will admit there is a [something]% chance I am wrong. without either you have nothing, just random numbers and the actions of random people.

got it, you want what you want and you do not facts or logic because they might hurt your viewpoint in some small way.

I am sure I may have high standards for facts but I guess you do not.

I always steer conversations to logic and reason. Why else do you have conversations, in what other direction should I steer them?

I DID answer the question several times, but given the overall denseness of this group I will do so again.
I THINK IT DID BECAUSE I HAVE LIMITED DATA. I HAVE ADMITTED SEVERAL TIMES THAT IT IS LIMITED, AND NOT ENOUGH TO KNOW.
If I say I think that means I think there is at least a 51% chance to something being true, but that it is probable that some or all of that data is not trustworthy.
also see: the English language for the difference between "think" and "know"

[MGuy]

As opposed to what? having all my opinions formed in a vacuum that can easily be changed by facts found anywhere?

I know, right? Just imagine having to change your opinions every time you came across new information.

[CaptPike]

I know for example that when someone assumes that a company is acting perfectly I should NOT point out that they are making a mistake because humans are not perfect.

No one is assuming that the company is acting perfectly. Just not assuming that they are fucking gits.

I also know that 4e failed, no it does not matter that we lack the data for pathfinder so we have no context for 4e, and no it does not matter that we lack DDI data.

To show that it failed you don't actually need the data for pathfinder. That would only show that it lost to pathfinder or not.

if I question any of these I will be called an idiot and not taken seriously regardless of my logic am I missing anything?

Your logic is shit, you have committed numerous logical fallacies.

ah the unnamed fallacy that is the worst one.

you would need the pathfinder data to know how much of the RPG market 4e had, if it had 70% of the whole market then it did the best it COULD have done, and the people to blame are the exec's and the market.

As opposed to what? having all my opinions formed in a vacuum that can easily be changed by facts found anywhere?

I know, right? Just imagine having to change your opinions every time you came across new information.

you are joking right? or are you just that stupid?

I form my opinions because OF FACTS that means there are no easily found facts that would change them because if there were I would have changed it before.

Do you hold views so quickly and easily obtained that a quick Google search will change them? do you spend that little time thinking things through?

[Leress]

ah the unnamed fallacy that is the worst one.

Which one did I or someone else not name? Or incorrectly attribute?

you would need the pathfinder data to know how much of the RPG market 4e had, if it had 70% of the whole market then it did the best it COULD have done, and the people to blame are the exec's and the market.

No, you would needed everyone's in that market.

[MGuy]

ah the unnamed fallacy that is the worst one.

Which one did I or someone else not name? Or incorrectly attribute?

He doesn't want to reread the thread. I'm pretty sure he's forgotten exactly what people have said about him and his position.

[CaptPike]

ah the unnamed fallacy that is the worst one.

Which one did I or someone else not name? Or incorrectly attribute?

unless you are going to name one there is no point in mentioning them at all.

its just as much a waste as telling people what your feelings are is.

[MGuy]

He did. You just refuse to reread the thread. You should probably get to doin' that.

[Gnorman]

Here's a convenient list for you.

By my count, you've committed the following:

Argument from anecdotal evidence (my friends think 4E is cool)

Argument from ignorance (you can't prove that I'm wrong, so I'm right)

Argument from silence (you can't show me data [even though we did] so I'm right)

Shifting the burden of proof (you have to prove me wrong, despite being the one who made the claim)

Moving the goalposts (well, you may have presented me with data, but I don't find it COMPLETE enough to believe you)

Nirvana fallacy (rejecting global warming solutions because they are not perfect)

And those are just off the top of my head, without diving back into the thread. I don't even know how to begin to categorize your repeated insistence that WotC's decision to discontinue 4E was the product of one person; companies do not generally kill off successful (if indeed it was) product lines without some kind of a justification beyond one executive's whim. I'd like to unofficially term it the Pike Fallacy: wherein one makes the mistake of assuming a complete and utter lack of rationality on the part of an actor or actors, in order to disprove a theory that is based on people making, at least to some degree, reasoned decisions.

ALSO, moving from another, non-full-of-your-bullshit thread:

4th edition D&D was a pile of ass. That much was obvious from a bit before the books actually got released. Paizo was offering a straight 3e D&D plus good art. Even without the name, it was obvious that they were the horse to bet on. K and I tried to get them to make a better 3e, but even "some dude on the internet's house rules with good art" was still number one with a bullet when their opponents were a dying 4e D&D and a dead nWoD.

-Username17

Well, playing Devil's advocate a bit here, it was just more than good art-It was also their OGL policy. Pathfinder has a giant, well organized and free wiki with pretty much all of their rules. 4e did not.

If you want to attract people to play Pathfinder, you can just point them to the wiki and let them check the classes and feats and skills and whatnot at their leisure without them spending a single dime. That's HUGE!

Meanwhile if you wanted to get a person to play 4e, you have to tell them first to get PHB I+II+III+vaults+whatever for hundreds of bucks up front. And then drag around hundreds of pages of errata. Or pay the online subscription.

Well, that and Pathfinder welcomed all manners of 3rd party publishers, while Wotc told them "If you want to do supplements for 4e, you gotta bend backwards to us".

hardly, you needed to know enough of the rules to build a character, so a PHBi or something. Plus the online sub, which were shared often and before they went to online only you only needed it once to download it.

from what limited data we have 4e succeeded before they soured the water with essentials. pathfinder appealed to people who had bought into the 3e mindset enough to not see its flaws anymore, while 4e was new and its flaws were glaring.

[Aryxbez]

how me enough for us to calculate the odds and I will admit there is a [something]% chance I am wrong.

The desire to be showed this information, and then have it explained to you how it falls to these conclusions, I think is a valid criticism. I think its been mentioned already in the prior pages, if anyones willing, they can link to that information and/or the explanations linking that information together. Otherwise, I'm not interested in doing the workload that isn't mine to make.

I always steer conversations to logic and reason.

Incorrect, you've committed Fallacies, if you want those explained, the links to them are present in every post that they were brought up (or nearly so at least). With brevity in mind, could you explain to me despite those illogical "fallacies", how you steer to "logic" & "reason"? No, you can't repeat yourself like have before, explain to me in more refreshing and less stale-repeated word manner how this is the case.

I DID answer the question several times, but given the overall denseness of this group I will do so again.

You didn't answer his question (I promise you, it's five letters to barely a sentence, albeit it did get followed up by a short sentence above it).

He did. You just refuse to reread the thread. You should probably get to doin' that.

CaptPike, reread the thread, reread the thread, reread this thread, you should be rereading the 10 something pages of this thread. By the way, you should probably reread this thread for the sake of discussion (I'm being serious here, refreshing your perspective is vital to discussion, something your logic/reason should understand).

[ishy]

Why do people keep getting confused by this? I said I THINK it did, that means I think it is probably via limited possibility unreliable data. were this not the case I would have said I KNOW.

Is it a highly probable you are right? sure I will grant that, but you can not know that and claiming that you KNOW that 4e failed because of the actions of Wotc is wrong just as me claiming that I know it succeeded because they published a PHB2. The data provided is not enough to KNOW that.

To think that sure, but not to know it.

EDIT: I am NOT saying that I know that 4e was a huge success, I am saying that we do not have enough data to know, I personally THINK It was but that does not matter because that is what I THINK not what I know.

I like how this is in the same post.

---

But yeah, 4e is such a huge failure, that at most every single fucking individual being on this planet, would sooner drown themselves in the ocean rather than ever play in a 4e game.

[violence in the media]

I am serious about that list, I want a way to post here without everything getting derailed when I point out, what are to me, obvious problems.

Here's one:

No one is going to put up with your bullshit shell games involving "THINK" "FEEL" and "KNOW". Nobody cares about your feelings. This is casual conversation, for the most part, and you're generally going to get called out for trying to defend yourself with pedantic phrasing particulars.

[sandmann]

I form my opinions because OF FACTS that means there are no easily found facts that would change them because if there were I would have changed it before.

Do you hold views so quickly and easily obtained that a quick Google search will change them? do you spend that little time thinking things through?

I am serious about that list, I want a way to post here without everything getting derailed when I point out, what are to me, obvious problems.

I'm a nobody here, so just for my personal shits-n-giggles, do you believe the holocaust happened, how old do you think the earth is, and would you vaccinate your kids?

[violence in the media]

I'm a nobody here, so just for my personal shits-n-giggles, do you believe the holocaust happened, how old do you think the earth is, and would you vaccinate your kids?

You're a bad, bad man.

[sandmann]

I'm a nobody here, so just for my personal shits-n-giggles, do you believe the holocaust happened, how old do you think the earth is, and would you vaccinate your kids?

You're a bad, bad man.

Hey, I'm just going for the hattrick. He asked for the topics.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm reminded of a scene in Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Two Ronin charge each other in a mock duel. At the end one insists it was a tie. The other insists that he won. The lower insists on doing it again, for real, and is promptly slain. Turns out it wasn't nearly as close as he believed.

Regarding topics that are verboten, nothing springs to mind. Just be prepared to bring your evidence. I wouldn't suggest arguing for a position that is contrary to all available evidence. MRA stuff would be bone headed to talk about - you won't have any support here because everyone here has considered the evidence and understands the advantages of having been born a white male in a liberal democratic society.

Regarding 4th editions 'success', your argument is that you can't find any definitive evidence that it succeeded. Every other data element points to 'abject failure'. You might want to spend some time learning about 'confidence values'. Heck, you might even spend some time with literary forms. For example, if I say 'the earth is round', the existence of the Himalayas does not 'prove' my statement false.

The funny thing is that nobody besides yourself would care of 4th edition were successful - even the most successful. You consider yourself on a crusade to correct misinformation - presumably for the benefit of people besides yourself. At some point, they're either going to understand your position or they'll recognize you are incorrect. Repeating yourself ad nauseum is unnecessary.

[nockermensch]

I'm a nobody here, so just for my personal shits-n-giggles, do you believe the holocaust happened, how old do you think the earth is, and would you vaccinate your kids?

You're a bad, bad man.

I just skimmed this whole fractal trainwreck of a thread, getting more and more amused by the page. Right now, I'm think sandmann's questions are the most pressing ones, to whose I'd add the following:

Captpike, would you agree that modern women have too much freedom for their own good? And on a scale of 1 to 10, how concerned are you about the fate of the white race?

I have a Bingo to fill up here.

[Orion]

I think what would be most interesting for me would be if everyone, but especially CaptainPike, would define what they mean by the word "failure."

[Leress]

You know what Orion that's a good point. I define failure as not meeting expectations within a given set of time.

[Insomniac]

Captpike, what do you think about this idea?

The thing that sunk 4E was their pie in the sky promises. They didn't want to just try to duplicate 3.5's roaring success, a difficult enough task by itself, no, they said they were going to be an online-integrated, autonomous, 50 million dollar a year enterprise like Magic: The Gathering. DDI, Virtual Tabletop, Gleemax and the like was supposed to be their Magic The Gathering Online killer app and this was going to be supplemented with a very ambitious set of books that look to me to be modeled after Magic the Gathering's block/expansion model. 3 major things coming out sequentially at a rapid pace (Powers books, PHBs and Renown books).

All of that stuff had problems, some unforseen and catastrophic, like the sad suicides of developers. The ambitions failed. I don't think 4E as a line lost money, at a minimum it broke even and likely made several million dollars.

So I don't even think 4E lost money. It might have even made millions. DDI for any other game company (tens of thousands of subscribers paying 5 dollars a month, generating millions even after expenses) would have been HUGE for any other gaming company. The subscriber service is a very big reason for Paizo success,for example.

I think 4E had hundreds of thousands of players who were happy with the game, tens of thousands of players paying for an online service, by any other metric this would be a stupendous success.

But when you're DUNGEONS AND MOTHERFUCKING DRAGONS promising to be as financially lucrative as MTGO, and you're not number 1 in the market and you're tied or number 2 to 3.5 Houserules with Production values, second place sucks. HASBRO was told 4E was going to make Dungeons and Dragons a Magic-caliber moneymaker. That is what 4E failed on.

[MGuy]

I personally don't care about 4E's financial success. It failed me as a TTRPG. It was supposed to be that thing that did what 3rd did but 'better' in every way. They made sure to push that point home by pulling 3rd off the shelves an with their little 'previews' where they talked about how 'bad' 3rd was. Ok, whatever. It's fine to be confident about taking the product in a new direction and all but the product was shit. Where 5E came out with token fanfare 4E came out with a bunch of hype, hype videos, hype events, hype interviews, the works. Tons of books boasting 'tons' of options, new RPGA, blah blah. All for nothing because what they gave me was garbage and the first hint of something else that was at least 'as good' as 3rd and I pounced on it.