Quote from: Ravenswing;809835Game companies didn't start taking opinion polls when the Web got underway; they've been doing it in publications and prozines and at conventions throughout.

I recall that their feedback process was a big thing for SPI. (And that it didn't protect them from some bad decisions, either.)

The Internet has definitely been a net positive for me. Without it, I would never have found out I'm a raging psychopathic lunatic.

The Internet is like panning for gold in an open sewer.  You will find an occasional nugget of great value, but you have to wade through a lot of shit to get there.

Whether the subject is RPGs or anything else.

The Internet, like everything else, is subject to Sturgeon's Second Law, so it's no place for people without filters.

But it's made a lot of information available, so net positive.

Quote from: rawma;810116I recall that their feedback process was a big thing for SPI. (And that it didn't protect them from some bad decisions, either.)

SPI polled their customers. Not a bunch of faceless nuts online who may have never played a game in their life.

Quote from: Omega;810134SPI polled their customers. Not a bunch of faceless nuts online who may have never played a game in their life.

And they asked pretty frickin' complicated questions sometimes, too.

Quote from: Old Geezer;810137And they asked pretty frickin' complicated questions sometimes, too.

I got an old copy of Dragonquest (boxed 1st edition), and it had one of those mail-in polls. Likert scale, a ton of questions, then some short answer variety at the end. It was obviously produced by someone who cared about the people buying their games and looked like legitimate market research. A couple Avalon Hill games I bought had the same sort of thing. Does anyone actually think that equates to posting a "poll" over at rpg.net?

Quote from: Omega;810134SPI polled their customers. Not a bunch of faceless nuts online who may have never played a game in their life.

Nah, I'm sorry, but no.  Sending in a card doesn't mean that you're an avid gamer, it just means you got your hand on a card and that you've bought the game.

And c'mon, listen to yourself.  Do you really think that a large swathe of the people on RPG forums don't give a damn for, and know nothing about, RPGs?  That's nonsense.  I certainly believe that as many people on RPG forums are boobs as is the case in the general population, and I'm certainly ready to concede that you might feel that anyone you disagree with is ignorant by definition.  But if you think that the forums are riddled with anti-RPG activists who participate in polls just to screw up the percentages, I'd recommend you get some help for that paranoia problem.  :confused:

Quote from: Ravenswing;809539My point precisely.  There are a bunch of people who equate "the hobby" with a thriving local FLGS or their favorite game company doing well.  I think that especially now, the hobby would manage perfectly well if every FLGS vanished tomorrow, and people would still find a way to roleplay if every game company folded the day after.

This and a thousand times this.

For me, Internet has brought a Golden Age of Gaming. All games are available (out of print is not a concern anymore), communication and flow of ideas is better than ever, finding players is easier than ever and you don't even have to sit face to face witrh people, so you can play via Hangouts or whatnot even if you live in Godforsakentown, Alaska, or in a fucking Antarctic station.

And you cannot read and use all the awesome ideas being thrown around in forums, blogs, G+ and the like. Seriously, my gaming bookmarks folder is huge, insaenely huge, and it keeps growing.

Trolls and morons are non-entities and don't impact the hobby at all. They're easy to ignore and avoid, and don't stop people from going on and producing more awesome stuff.

There has never been such a variety of games, styles and approaches to design. Best time ever to be a gamer, thanks to internet.

For those who play rather than engaging in frothing rhetoric - overwhelmingly positive!

There are so many RPGs legally available for free online, some of them great, that a person could enter the hobby with no greater a dollar investment than buying a set of dice.

Quote from: Ravenswing;808962This is such a breathtakingly obvious answer it's not worth posing the question.

Before the Web, give and take came from APAs and proprietary BBS forums.  For a few years, I was part of Alarums & Excursions, the most popular RPG APA there's ever been.  A lot of then-present and future pros contributed, and there was a good deal of give and take.  With two or three months lead time.  Something of yours I read you might have given to Lee Gold two months earlier; it'd be at minimum a month before you saw my response, and a minimum of a month for you to reply.  And at its absolute height, A&E reached fewer than 500 gamers.

The BBSes?  Well, they were influential, in their way.  I'm proud of the number of spells I contributed to GURPS and the give-and-take that happened on the run-up to GURPS Grimoire being published.  And for Grimoire alone, I blew $300 in connect charges to the old Illuminati BBS.  Few gamers knew about the forums -- the number of people who had a serious impact on Grimoire, for instance, were just a handful more than a dozen, most of whom were Austin-area gamers.

Or how about for writing games?  In writing GURPS Scarlet Pimpernel, it took months to get hold of all of the books in the series, almost all of which were long out of print.  A friend had to smuggle one out of the Yale University library.  My wife's high school librarian smuggled one out of the University of Pittsburgh library.  I spent nearly a tenth of what I made on the gamebook on rare book services.  One book I never did find (and had to admit it in the bibliography), and one book I didn't even know existed.  A couple things I had to make up, because in 1989, I just didn't have the sources ... and the library I was using for research was the largest public library in the Western Hemisphere.

Now?  Quite aside from the blizzard of free sites and material on the Net, the give-and-take is immediate.  I don't have to wait months for feedback -- I get that in moments.  I can, and get, feedback from the line editor of my favorite RPG, same day.  Untold thousands of gamers have access, from all over the world.  And it's all free.

Those out-of-print Scarlet Pimpernel books?  They're all online on Project Gutenberg, each and every one of them, and Wikipedia has all the information I lacked back then.

I fought long and hard to keep Dark Bolt spell during play test... Sadly, John thought it too silly to keep...

I just wanted it switched to Cut or Crushing damage... Piercing was a bit silly...

Quote from: Ravenswing;810181Nah, I'm sorry, but no.  Sending in a card doesn't mean that you're an avid gamer, it just means you got your hand on a card and that you've bought the game.

Nah, Im sorry, but no. You havent seen the polls SPI used to send out. Try again.

Quote from: Omega;810348Nah, Im sorry, but no. You havent seen the polls SPI used to send out. Try again.

Hrm.  My advice would be to go back to Cracker Jack and ask for your money back, because the crystal ball you got from the box is obviously defective.  I had a sub to Strategy & Tactics for three years.  Try again.

Well, I bought GURPS Conan and all the Solitaire adventures anyhow.  I played them too.  I think Beyond Thunder River was the best one.  Never did buy the flawed Horse Clans one or the  Humanx one.  I certainly filled out cards and sent them in.  The Roleplayer Newsletter was a wonderful thing to find in the mail box.

On the subject of the internet, I honestly suspect it saved the hobby in the nineties when roleplaying really took a dive due to Magic the gathering.  It gave us a broader place to meet and talk and argue philosophy.  It gave us access to information about everything that was out there well beyond Dragon Magazine or the convention circuit.

As for FLGSs well I'm in the process of selling mine.  I lost a fair bit of money doing it but I can say that rpgs and rule books in general don't sell well.  Not even when a drooling fanboy like myself is running games regularly.  Another thing I've observed is that many people aren't willing to come to the store and play rpgs, they'd rather play at home.  I can respect that, you don't have to worry about offending people who wander in or including trolls who want to join.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I now game exclusively online, as otherwise our group would have long since been split up as people move around. So that's plainly a net positive.

On the other hand, I find that modern RPGs are far worse for my tastes than those published back in the pre-internet days. Of course, I can't positively link the internet as a causal factor there, so I suppose overall I have to say things are better. Or at least not worse.