Captain Pike is just another Titanium Dragon. A delusional fanboy who can't even bring himself to make arguments he could possibly win because he just can't let go of 2009 talking points that 4e was a glorious success that was going to take over gaming and only a few neckbeard grognards were going to cling to 3e the way insecure 50 year old virgins keep playing AD&D.
I mean, 4e fanboys
could make serious arguments that would be difficult to counter and very hard to dismiss outright. For example:
- 4th edition was a great game, but it came out during a massive recession and was no longer a "new thing" when the economy had recovered and its sales were permanently hampered by that.
- 4th edition was a great game, but it was released incomplete - the Paladin didn't have a full list of playable powers in the PHB and the real monster numbers weren't done up properly until the Monster Manual 3. Late period 4e is the best edition, but few people know that because WotC pushed it out the door when it was still basically a rough draft.
- 4th edition was a great game, but it was failed by marketing. Insulting videos to fans, a complete failure of the promised virtual tabletop to materialize, and so on.
I mean, you could make arguments like that, and people wouldn't point and laugh. I mean, some people would of course, because I don't think that 4e was a great game or even an
acceptable game. Indeed, I have counter arguments to those talking points as well. But they aren't slam dunks like they are with delusional arguments that 4e got onto an Amazon best seller list for some number of hours and that therefore it must have been an "objective success."
Anyway, the basic Fanboy Turing Test is quite simple: Can you accept that your fandom is not something that most people care about?
Even if you're a fan of Harry Potter, you're still a minority. And a tiny minority at that. Almost 32
million people went and sat through the 8th movie of that franchise, which is a titanic number. But that's still less than one half of one percent of the people in the world.
Most people did not see Harry Potter and the Deathly Whatevers Part 2. And it's of course completely obvious that most of the people who saw the movie are not people who concern themselves overmuch with Harry Potter "lore" and don't care to talk to you about your fan theories.
So if you're a fan of something that is smaller than that - and almost every fandom is smaller than Harry Potter - your cohort is
really small. And to be taken seriously as a human being rather than a Pokemon who shouts fan slogans, you need to be able to accept that.
4th edition is unpopular. It's unpopular
for an edition of D&D. D&D is in the fantasy genre, and fantasy is a small fandom. D&D is a roleplaying game, and roleplaying is a small fandom. D&D is a
tabletop roleplaying game, and that is a small fandom. There's more people who like Scifi than Fantasy. There's more people who watch movies than play RPGs. There's more people who play computer RPGs than tabletop and that's just that. But even within that context, 4th edition D&D is really small compared to 3rd edition D&D. It sold less books of all kinds in the first year than 3rd edition sold of Player's Handbooks alone in the first month. It's literally an order of magnitude
or two smaller than the previous edition of the same game.
Any Fanboy who can't successfully admit that their fandom is really small in the big picture is not even a human being.
-Username17