Community

Feb 24, 2010 -- 11:55AM, Mind_Flayer_Monk wrote:

Feb 24, 2010 -- 11:43AM, Thanlis wrote:

Or they'll quit playing, or they'll give it a try and slowly stop playing over time. If a significant portion of the player base does either of those two things, then either the influx of new players will make up for it, or it won't. I'm not sure we really know.

Fair enough, but people quit playing LG all the time-both DMs and players-and the campaign rolled forward. Most people are going to stick around and suck it up because they want to play with their friends or continue to support their game store etc.

The change apparently under consideration is significantly more dramatic than any that were under consideration in LG. Retraining, item replacement, item purchase, character tracking, etc are all changes that play at the periphery of the campaign. It is doing the same thing, but somewhat differently. Allowing the creation of any PC at any level (presumably with appropriate equipment) is a fundamental change in the campaign. At that point, while you could theoretically continue to treat it as an ongoing campaign, it isn't one anymore.

People quit playing LFR all the time too. The question is not whether people would quit given the elimination of the living campaign aspect of LFR, but rather whether enough people who would not otherwise have quit would quit or scale back their involvement to reduce the viability of the game. The assumption that we are a captive audience is both insulting, possibly incorrect, and is likely to lead to worse decisions than would be made without the assumption.

There are other ways that players could continue to play with their friends and support their local gamestore that do not involve LFR. A "home" game in the gamestore playing with WotC's non-LFR published adventures or Goodman Games adventures would accomplish both of those goals. For players who are not attached to the 4th edition system, there is also pathfinder society which at least in my area is already chipping away at LFR. (Now, by comparison, you could say that Living Arcanis was available as an alternative to LG back in the day but never stole LG's lunch in any of the big changes. That is true, but I think there are a number of important differences between the situations: First, whatever did change in LG, it remained a living campaign to the very end. The change apparently under consideration for LFR is more fundamental than any of the LG changes. Second, for all that it had going for it, Living Arcanis had some barriers to entry that Pathfinder Society does not have. First, it was much more heavily plotted than LG was and it was easy to be overwhelmed when you first played and to lose track of the plot if you played infrequently. (That does not appear to be the case in Pathfinder Society). Second, it was more distinct in its vision--Arcanis is less generic and less mass-market than Greyhawk was. (Again, I can't see much difference between Golarion and FR in this sense). Third, it introduced a vast number of new rules to the game system. While pathfinder society is not the same system as LFR, it does stay primarily within the core of the pathfinder system which will be familiar to many gamers--perhaps more familiar than 4e is if their experience with previous editions dominates their expectations. Finally, while I rather liked many of Paradigm concepts innovations and rules for Arcanis, their sense of balance was highly questionable and I fully expected half of the rules in any supplement to be unusuably bad and another 5-10% to be unbelievably broken. Paizo has done a better job than that with Pathfinder. In short, I think that LFR has more credible competition from Pathfinder Society than LG had from Living Arcanis, so it is not true that there is nowhere else to go.

For that matter, there is non-tabletop competition too. If organized tabletop play becomes unsatisfying, it would be trivially easy to spend the time I currently spend on LFR playing WoW, Eve, or any of the other MMORPGs.

Finally, the assumption that new players will magically appear to replace an exodus of old players is just that: an assumption. The D&D minis community lost a lot of players when they switched from 1.0 rules to 2.0 rules and the community crumbled in about a year. The game still survives as a community organized game, but when the core of commited players left there wasn't enough of a remaining community to attract new players. What was once a vibrant SF Bay area minis community disappeared almost entirely and that experience was apparently typical enough that WotC discontinued official support for the game. It is quite possible that a sudden mass exodus from the game could weaken local gaming communities to the point where even if after the changes it would really otherwise be more attractive to new players, those LFR communities no longer have the resources to attract or retain new members.

WotC would be hard pressed to do itself more of a disservice than to say, "who cares about our existing customers, they'll just suck it up and keep playing no matter what we do." History is littered with the corpses of companies who thought that way. The american auto industry, for instance, still hasn't recovered from coming to that conclusion around the 70s and even if any parts of it other than Ford survive, they will probably never recover their dominant position.

Feb 24, 2010 -- 1:19PM, Elder_basilisk wrote:

People quit playing LFR all the time too. The question is not whether people would quit given the elimination of the living campaign aspect of LFR, but rather whether enough people who would not otherwise have quit would quit or scale back their involvement to reduce the viability of the game. The assumption that we are a captive audience is both insulting, possibly incorrect, and is likely to lead to worse decisions than would be made without the assumption.

Well the fact is that someone feels attracting new customers is more valuable than losing old customers. If you can keep them both, great. If you have to choose one, you take the new customer.
Your opinions are valid and certainly those situations have happened in the past, but there is probably some very nice person from Hasbro with an MBA in Marketing that feels differently than you do. They might be applying some ideas that worked for another Hasbro brand that may or may not work for D&D. There might have been a meeting to come up with ideas of how the RPGA can improve some aspect of revenue-and this was both the easiest to implement and the most reasonable.

Whether this is a good business decision or not we don't know. It looks like the RPGA will find out through direct experience.

Also, if it doesn't work out, can't you just change it back? You would probably lose a little, but it seems like the risk is worth the reward.