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How does acknowledging people who hate everything about 2e help make 2e a better game?
Like if you have nothing to say besides "everything is bad, make it like it used to be" I don't know how anybody could view that sort of commentary as constructive or in good faith?
Thank you Messrs. Radney-MacFarland & Seifter for checking in here. We appreciate you & your hard work.
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The thing is, hostility to 2e is legitimate feedback. There is a portion of the fan-base that want to have nothing to do with this new edition. They get to vocalize this. And Pathfinder should want them to so they can be aware that there could be some impact to the size of the audience they're selling to.
Trying to dismiss that voice isn't going to help 2e at all. It's simply trying to deny that 2e might not have the same number of fans that 1e did.
While it's true that there are a lot of people who don't want PF2 (I'm in that camp). It doesn't take much reflection to recognise that such commentary isn't really helpful in playtesting the second edition. Paizo aren't going to cease PF2's rollout and PF2 isn't a minor tweak to PF1 it's a significant change. In my mind, telling them I'd prefer they stick with PF1 (or PF1.5) is as useful as telling them I'd rather they produce material for 5E or some similar, off-the-table option.
My opinion isn't any less valid just because I keep it to myself and posting it in the playtest forum for PF2 isn't going to have any productive consequence, is it?
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I wouldn't be surprised if the vocal hostility that seems to fill every single thread had something to do with it. They have tried to get player and customer feedback before and the forums were so lacking in constructive criticism that it all seemed to stall.
I know reading these forums makes ME less likely to take part in the playtest process.
Hopefully it is just the just con schedule and technical problems.
The thing is, hostility to 2e is legitimate feedback. There is a portion of the fan-base that want to have nothing to do with this new edition. They get to vocalize this. And Pathfinder should want them to so they can be aware that there could be some impact to the size of the audience they're selling to.
Trying to dismiss that voice isn't going to help 2e at all. It's simply trying to deny that 2e might not have the same number of fans that 1e did.
I do agree that letting people vent and tell us what they don't like is instructive and can be mined for useful changes even if the tone is quite hostile. I would never try to tell people who dislike things not to speak up if they are moved to do so. However, it's important to note that while negative feedback, even couched in a hostile fashion, is certainly legitimate and potentially instructive, the people reading the feedback are human and will have emotional responses that make us not be motivated to read as often (especially when some of the reading might be extra-curricular after work hours), if it's phrased in an extremely hostile manner, and possibly set up subconscious parts of our minds to be less likely to agree as well. So while everyone is welcome to express their opinions however they like and I will do my levelheaded best to read them all and analyze them in an unbiased fashion, being less hostile is probably a way to increase your chance of success (basically, Diplomacy works better than Intimidation at getting ideas across for someone to change the way they are thinking or doing things).
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Thank you Messrs. Radney-MacFarland & Seifter for checking in here. We appreciate you & your hard work.
You're welcome. Thanks to all of you for putting so much thought, effort, and skill into all your playtesting and analysis. From your great collection of errata in the errata thread, to deep mathematical analyses that have revealed a few archaisms in our benchmarks to thorough rundowns of cross-sections of the game and more. I wouldn't have 100 discussion points (not counting the ones we already discussed and changed, just pending ones) if you guys didn't discover a massive amount of useful things!
Mark,
I agree with everyone else : just droping a "noted, thanks" would be enough to reassure us. Magnus is not the only one spending time writing studies of the system. As he said, it's a bummer spending so much time and not knowing if someone on the dev team saw it.
If you're worried about how this will be interpreted, you could go for something a bit longer, like "Noted, we are going to discuss this with the rest of the team. Thank you for your feedback".
Thank you Mark for taking the time to read those posts.
On the subject of people being aggressive :
I think this is a combination of not hearing about the devs (thus being aggressive to the dev team), and lack of moderation in the forum (thus being aggressive to each other). There are some threads that get pretty heated and start belittling others. I even saw some personally attack others. They don't use insults because they know they will get banned if they do so, but sometimes you can sense the pedantry. Without some moderation, they will not think what they are doing is wrong (the magic of being anonymous).
Of course, mods can't read all threads. But they can read some.