Expectations aside, halving rule aside, my post was really about what I saw as screaming at the wind. Again, “If you like it, buy it; if you don’t, don’t. Complaining about it is pointless.
I disagree. Mongoose, like any good company, uses customer feedback and such to determine what they do and what the players want. Complaints (as long as they are constructive and presented in a fair and polite manner) are valuable to any company. In fact, aside from our spending habits, it's the only means we have to let companies know we don't like a certain decision (and spending dollars only goes so far -- unless they hear the specific somewhere, the company does not know if Person X didn't buy the game because they didn't know it existed, simply wasn't interested, or didn't like something about it).
As for me, they pretty much lost me because of several design changes they made that I felt was integral to what made "RuneQuest" for me, and a lot of little avoidable typos, mistakes and such that I've seen in the Previews and heard about here on the forums. I'm still holding out a shred of hope by waiting to see whether they bother to fix those known tpyos and errors when they release the public OGL SRD of the game, but if not, I'm done.
The, as you say, expectations seem to be the real argument. But I never saw Mongoose say they were bringing back Greg Stafford to do the game, nor that it would be the same game it was in 1978, or 1980, or 1982... 25 years is bound to bring changes to a system. It is only us old codger’s who are being nostalgic about an out of print game.
Again, I'll have to disgree. They in no way
needed to use the name RuneQuest, and, since they weren't the original holder of the name, that means they had to explicitly go out and get the rights to use the name.
By them using that name, they set up expectations. Now, I'll admit, it may vary from person to person, but you can't blame people from making those expectations. Mongoose was
counting on those expectations to help drive sales, to a certain point. Otherwise, they would have not spent the money on getting the name and just called it something else.
Now, if they knowingly set up expectations, they have to accept that some of us will feel they failed to live up to them, and sales would suffer as a result. Maybe not enough to make a real dent -- perhaps the new people coming in to the game would be sufficient to even thing out -- but a dent regardless.