Are we getting the GW we deserve? That is the question that came to mind when reading 2 opinion pieces on other blogs in the last week. Both made some good points but seem to absolve GW of a little bit too much of the blame in my opinion.
One pretty much claimed that we need D weapons to balance the meta since they help against the 'star' builds and could be countered with effectively with other meta forces to make a more balanced system. This seemed a lot to me like accidentally cutting off one big toe and then intentionally cutting of the other so that you would still be symmetric. Maybe that would help you walk better. This argument would probably be better if there were a ton of D weapons and they were not limited to a few very expensive model. There are lots of rules that can give D like affects but are more limited where it is not like roll one test then place the template and just remove everything underneath. I also enjoy that the model that is the size of a normal tank that should actually have a D weapon (d6 Titankiller can knock out a Reaver) does not if I recall correctly.
The other was pretty much blaming the players for exploiting the broken rule system. Its point was that GW does not make you min max out your list, spam units, or play with super heavies. You do it in to fulfill your desire to win which then causes your opponents to respond in the same way. GWs many expansions and decisions recently are designed to make the game more open and more fun allowing you to bring what ever you have to the table top for any game you play. This is of course really true. We do all control exactly who we play and what armies we play but that choice for many people is either play what the rules allow and have a chance to win, play with what you have and lose badly, or just not play.
Players are caught in a bind. You have invested considerable time and money into the game and at some point enjoyed it. Now GW has taken the game and pushed it to a new level on multiple directions: Allies, Flyers, Super Heavies, Detachments, Dataslates, Formations, Forge World and Fortifications. Before it was possible to actually have a good idea of what an armies rules where from the dozen or so 20 dollar codexes. It was a considerable investment to own all the codexes but you could keep up with the rules by talking to friends. Now I think you can field an army in a 2000 point game where you might need 7 books just for the rules of your army (BRB, Escalation, Stronghold, Codex, Allied Codex, Inquisition, and Knight Codex). It might not be a good army but that just seems extreme.
I drew my line a while ago at the Allies and Flyers rules. 6th edition might have actually solved one of the issues I had with 5th in the hull points (ignore new rule problems in wound assignment and random charge) but I never seriously thought about investing the money GW wants for it due to the Allies and Flyers. Both of these new rules areas gave a decided advantage to players willing to spend more money on either new models or just a bigger collection in general. This did not seem good to me.
So I walked away. I packed up the models and I put away my wallet. I still spend plenty of money on toys and games but Lego and Fantasy Flight have been getting what GW used to from me. I go on blogs related to the game because you guys are my brothers and we need to be one gaming community as there are just to few of us to be split up between 20 games. I am not Trolling, and I trying to convince people that the current GW way does not have to be the only way for it or the community. The new knight kit is a nice model that is just over priced by about 20 percent compared to GW's own expensive products (which would make it the same as the taller Wraith Knight or Stompas) and the community just bought it up. GW is definitely going to feel that this release was a great success at this price point so next time lets move it up another 10%. That is what is really feeding the troll.
There is a joke on warseer about the declining player base that GW would not mind if it got its money selling 10,000 dollar tactical marine boxes to people 1,000 people compared to selling 35 dollar tactical boxes 250,000 people. While it is never going to get to that but when you see the new hot models at 90-140 dollars for the single model and the push for use of 200-500 dollar forge world models where you need 350 dollars worth of rules books I really see it heading in that direction where you still need all your old models but you need all these big ones that are even more expensive also. I do not know about you but I would much prefer a 250,000 player base than a 1,000 player base.
So if all you do is complain but still buy, you are getting the GW you deserve but if the have put your money where your mouth is like me, we are trying to get the GW we deserve but to get that we need to convince you that you deserve better also. No one wants to see GW die but we need to stage an intervention so that we can save the games and fluff at the core. GW's significant sales and profit drop was a start but judging from the recent behavior of doubling down on more and more low value products that missed the message. No worthwhile mention of customers in the corporate reports.
Pretty pictures are nice but they are also easy for the expert modelers we have in the hobby. Just look at the forums and blogs and you will find tons of awesome models and paint jobs. One person can create a great model in a day and truly exceptional stuff in a few days. No one person can make a great miniature battle game with the breadth of forces in 40K in a few days. It is a ton of work to devise and test and alter and test and throw out and start again and test, etc.
Making a big kit now with all the digital design tools is not any harder than a small model. It the concept art is good like the knight you can get a great looking model be it 1 inch or 10 inches tall. Honestly someone like Jes Goodwin should make more money at GW than the CEO or the heads of any of the Sale Departments. I am positive I could replace the CEO with many people inside or outside the company and get similar results for the company. It is the model and game designers who really matter. For example Forge World makes great looking models but anything Forgeworld makes in resin, GW could make in plastic where the detail will be essentially the same but the quality will actually be higher. Imagine everything from Forgeworld available in plastic at 75% or less the cost.
It is all a question of volume, more players = more models sold = tooling costs spread across more models = lower prices = more models sold which goes in a nice cycle. GW probably spends more on the boxes, warehousing, and transporting for the plastic kits than it cost to make each one other than the tooling cost. GW production division makes more profit for the internal sales than the whole company makes in profit without about 10% of the workforce. Due to the corporate structure alot of the overhead related to the retail side gets placed in corporate and results in retail supposedly being "profitable" but the total profits for the company are lower than what production got from sales paying them probably 40% of the kit retail prices. The high prices and money grabbing rules are decreasing the players which is then decreasing models sold and has the whole process going backward. GW has not admitted that to itself yet so we have to keep trying to intervene because we love you GW and we want to see you stop hurting yourself. GW corporate does not listen to our words only our dollars. Not just my dollars but our dollars so that is why we are out there commenting and posting.
Agree that 40k is an expensive hobby, but this critique is a little hollow coming from someone who promotes Lego as a hobby. Just looking at your top posts side bar, if I go to Amazon I see the following prices, from top to bottom: Mon Calamari - $95, Hoth Echo Base - $150, Battle of Endor Set - $160, Slave 1 - $170, Millenium Falcon - $130.
ReplyDeleteOf course, these are discontinued pieces so I can understand if that's not the original price, but if I go to Lego's site and do a search for the Star wars stuff, similar items range from $75 for mid size ships all the way up to $400 for the Death Star and Super Star Destroyer. Luke's Red Five even goes for $200. I guess they justify those prices by listing them as "Hard to Find," but I was able to find them in ten seconds by going to their web site and doing a search, so seems like that's a marketing ploy.
Anyways, I'm not talking smack about Lego, they make a great product, but my point is, if you want to talk about the rules, that makes sense, they've been growing more and more convoluted and disorganized as 6th edition has gone one. But if you want to talk about price, which you devote about half your article to, GW is really on par with most other Manboy hobbies out there.
Thank you for coming by and taking the time to not only leave a comment but do some research for it. I have been thinking about Lego vs GW recently and might have to write an article about it. As a very similar company Lego crushes GW on every front.
DeleteThe short of it is that yes, Lego sets are very expensive but generally they are constantly on sale at various local and internet retailers. I very rarely pay full retail price for sets. Generally I am at 20-30% off but sometimes I am at 75% off for MIB sets including on sales at Lego Stores or Lego Online. Now you can get GW on sale but I want to support where I would play since they are providing a value added service to me by providing game space and organizing events compared to meijer or target for Legos who really give me nothing different than any other store. We can discuss ways to work on the prices but that is not the issue.
One thing I know is that Lego have always been expensive. The original Yellow Castle retailed at like 50 dollars in 1983-84, now the similar scale item is 100 dollars. So double the price. Pretty similar to other toys I see as I shop now for my kids. GW 4-5 metal figures were like 6.25 back in 1989 when I first bought their products, when they last sold 5 metal guys in a box it was like 40. So more than 5 fold increase. Even looking at the current prices I can see that the new Hellbrute is almost 20% more than the current price of the Venerable Space Marine Dreadnought which is not that old for what is going to be very similar in all respects(model size,options, details) other than styling.
If you want to talk value we can compare piece counts where legos are like 10 cents per piece of plastic compared to GW at which even a set with tons of pieces (Space Marine tactical squad at 179) is twice that and kits with big pieces like the knight are 1 dollar a piece. Individual lego bricks do not have the details of GW stuff but they come in multiple colors, are ready to use (no cleaning or clipping), and are sorted out form massive piles to just the right pieces for the set. In my ~20,000 lego bricks I believe I have had 5 bricks missing from the sets total. I have had whole bags of bases missing from GW boxes. You also get a full color assembly manual which might actually be 50 or more pages in length. For the really expensive stuff you have to remember that those things are big. My Tantive IV which was about 130 retail a few years ago is 20.5 inches long. That makes it almost twice as long as a Forgeworld Warhound is tall which sets you back 500 dollars with weapons. The 400 dollar super star destroyer model is 50 inches long. I would love set like that but it is expensive and I have no where to put something that big.
There is one more very important point. Lego is not a network affect product. I can happily assemble and model with Lego all by myself (or with my little kids). Lego can release a solid Gold C-3PO and while it would be awesome to have one it has no affect on my enjoyment of playing with the Legos. The same cannot be said for a GW model were the hot expensive stuff can directly affect my enjoyment of playing the game when those models crush my army. They can release 4 different A-wings at progressively higher prices but my first one can still serve the purpose just fine. But if I want to play a game down at the store with GW it is hard if I want to use my 4th edition marine codex that was 1/3rd the price of the current marine codex. I actually remember when the 5th edition codex for nids dropped. I had a small force of about 1250 points that over night was not legal as all of my HQ’s were not HQ’s anymore. Finally along this line, if I want to be able to play the game I have to find other people who also can afford their ever increasing prices. It is a real problem with entry cost and maintaince cost to keep up with the meta changes. I calculated that a 1250 point starter marine force that would lose against any competitive list is still going to cost you like 300 dollars. The bare minimum to play the game at any level with all the rules is what 150 dollars for a starter and a codex. From like 65 when I started with 40K during 4th and 85 at the start of 5th edition.
Deleteoof, Forgeworld, I try not to look at that site because I can almost never afford it. It makes me weep tears of longing.
DeleteLook, you make solid points, and I want to be clear: Lego is the whale's balls, especially the Star Wars stuff. I think what I was trying to get across, though, is that value is subjective. I started collecting at the tail end of 4th, but was originally only into the hobby side of things, I didn't even play my first game until 6th, and the group I do play with is pretty loose with the rules. I play in local tourneys every couple of months, but most of my enjoyment comes from having a few beers in my friend's basement while rolling dice. So for me, there's value in the cool new shiny because it's the cool new shiny.
It also helps that I've never had a major issue except with an Exorcist I ordered a while ago, and that issue was cleared up right away. Also, my FLGS sells at a 20% discount, so when I see the $140 knight, I actually see $112, which is about as much as you expect for premium plastic models of that size.
Anyways, I'm off on a tangent. To bring it back home: You're right about the rules and that it's an expensive hobby, and it's not odd or unexpected that people have become disillusioned with GW, especially with the glut of options there is out there these days. But, there's nothing wrong with people who do still find value in GW and the models and even the game, convoluted mess that it has become.
PS: I may be a first time poster but I do read your blog regularly and enjoy it, just to let you know.
I have a forgeworld catalog in the bath room but it is there for the articles ;-) Seriously I would love to get a whole slew of heresy era forge world marines but I already have 250 marines models. I do not need any more even if they are really cool. That was one of my issues in 5th was that vehicles were the shit and my fourth ed army had restrictions from the trait system about what vehicles I could take. I added some more but just got sick of building rhino chasis models after the third or so one.
DeleteI have been through 3 local stores that sold at 20% off. All out of business now. There is a great blog written by a game store owner:
http://blackdiamondgames.blogspot.com/
where he talks about the business of games stores. If the only way your product can sell is if it is discounted then you are cutting your margin. You can hope to make it up on volume but the number of players is not really in your control unless you spend a lot of time trying to recruit and run events but that costs money also which eats your margin. Plus since GW is taking 75 cents on the dollar for your sales but you are doing all hard part of recruiting the players why not find a game to work on where the margins are better and put your efforts there. You can try to keep costs down by having a down market location and cheap fixtures but that can be detrimental to sales across the board as a lot of people do not want to go to nasty rundown stores.
A glut of options can be a curse as well as your spend money on all these games that never build up enought players to be sustainable. If your club as 15 players all playing the same game that is 105 different arrangements for the games but if you have 15 players playing 5 different game 3 each that is only 15 possible arrangements and 5 people being out of the game at all times.
Thanks for reading and coming back. The comments are now way longer than the post which is cool.
"So if all you do is complain but still buy, you are getting the GW you deserve but if the have put your money where your mouth is like me, we are trying to get the GW we deserve but to get that we need to convince you that you deserve better also. No one wants to see GW die but we need to stage an intervention so that we can save the games and fluff at the core. GW's significant sales and profit drop was a start but judging from the recent behavior of doubling down on more and more low value products that missed the message. No worthwhile mention of customers in the corporate reports."
ReplyDeleteWhat about those of us who don't complain and still buy? Are we the Ultimate Enemy to your GW counter-culture/wall sapper tactic?
I'm lost trying to read your last paragraph. Yes, volume of sales is important, but you also have to realize that the SUPPLY of players is finite. There is a saturation point, because not every human being on the face of the planet is a potential customer.
What does "GW production division makes more profit for the internal sales than the whole company makes in profit without about 10% of the workforce." mean? What is a "production division" and how do they make profits for "internal sales?"
What you call "money grabbing rules" isn't really that at all. GW's strategy now seems to be "sell models everyone wants and can use." The Knight Titan rules are evidence of that. In the past, GW ran a structured and rigid release schedule. Space Marines were released at a fixed point in the cycle, then Orks, IG, etc etc etc. As a result, the players who ran Space marines only spent a significant amount of cash every time they rolled around on the cycle. Let's say that's every three years. Bob spends all his money at the release date, let's say it's $300. That's a good infusion of cash to GW, but then Bob disappears from the income rolls until three more years have passed. When you have certain lines that outsell others, you end up in a peaks and valleys income stream, which is terrible for stability. If you instead mix up your release to include a bit of everything, the peaks and valleys flatten out into more stabile rolling hills. But there's only so much you can produce for a given line. Space marines are just about max'd out. To keep the dollars from Marine players, you need a non-Marine kit they can buy and enjoy. Enter the Knight Titan, Escalation, Stronghold Assault, Allies, etc.
All of this is an effort to stabilize the income stream by getting players to spend the same or more money over a longer period, instead of plopping that money down once every three or four years.
Thanks for the comment. You are total right I started to lose focus toward the end. If you are happy with the rules and prices and GWs direction, that is fine by me. Ofcourse everyone would like cheaper kits, and cleaner more balanced rules, and a company that thought about pleasing its customer base as the way to build a better and more profitable company for its owners. The issues might not have gotten in your way of enjoyment. Great but you cannot pretend they are not there.
DeleteCertainly there is a market saturation point for players. UK is essentially saturated with GW stores and if it was a baseline for what other territories should be selling every other GW area manager would get fired as all of North America only sold 20% more product that just the UK. Maybe everyone who was going to play GW games were put even if that is the case the goal is to keep those customers not bleed them away.
GW has its business divided into two parts sales(retail and trade representatives) and production(design studio and factory workers). Production makes the kits, sells them to sales who then sells them either in GW stores or through trade accounts. In 2013 production and supply sold 67 M pounds of stuff to the sales division. One those 67 M pounds they listed 27 M pounds of profit for the difference between their cost to produce the full kits ready for retail and amount they got from sales for them. Sales Division took that 67 M pounds worth of stuff and sold it out at 137 Million pounds so a 70 million pound improvement but once their costs are accounted for that 70 million drops to 20 million. When you add in the corporate overhead costs which are not assigned to either unit it wipes out about 27 million pounds of the combined profit. Now if I think of overhead running 1 design studio and a single factory with 300 total people is not going to have 414 people in administration but add in retail on 4 continents which employ another 1100 people and you get an idea where those costs really belong. So the idea is without all the weight from the retail store side(trade is pretty profitable) GW if GW could sell the same number of kits at half the price they would end up with the same profit in the end but serious if the kits were half the price people would pay way more. Most plastic fiends I know used to end up with more kits than they had time to finish before the price increases.
While wall street likes to see stable income streams, the situation you are describing for customer buying patterns is only true for either very disciplined buyers who only get exactly what they are putting in their lists or very mature players who have everything but the new things. If you are in this for both the game and the hobby you need a constant influx of product to keep busy and thus you might spend more when your new codex drops but then a couple months later you will be back for X then the next month Y since very few people have everything they want from more than a few armies.
I think Flyers are a great example of the “Money Grabbing Rule”. You can describe flyers as cool models that can swoop in and shoot stuff on the board then zoom around ignoring terrain to get better flanking shots and such. Guess what, the game has had those forever called skimmers. Well I guess that won’t allow use to introduce a new class of models but if we say that they are moving so fast that they are very hard to shoot back. If they are moving that fast won’t they be off the board after the turn. That does not seem good enough such that people will want to buy them so lets just make them have to move some distance. That makes them way better as it keeps them in the action. We can balance it by adding new air defense units or fortification kits for people who have to face them right now and maybe some day we will say that just a unit with missile can buy an upgrade to counter them but not anywhere near as well as that 65 dollar rhino sized tank.
Gotcha. Thanks for clearing up what you'd meant in that last section.
DeleteJust as an anecdote, I'd read before that GW has done some extensive testing on sale prices of various kits. The example was WHFB cavalry units. WHFB cavalry units are some of the cheapest boxes in the game. The result of tinkering was that players only bought X number of cavalry boxes for their army, regardless of a $35 price point or a $25 price point.
I think that trend is even more striking when you look at how WHFB is structured from a list/collection standard as compared to 40K. A Space Marine army can only ever field and use three Vindicators. Therefore, a Space Marine player will only ever buy three Vindicators, tops. Why buy and paint more if you can't use them? So, those kits are priced at a point where you get the most profit out of the guy who buys three Vindicators, while also keeping in mind that the Heavy Support slot also houses Predators, Land Raiders, Thunderfire Cannons, Devastators, etc etc etc.
WHFB is structured in percentages, which means you can actually fit more and more of your favorite unit in your army as the points go up. You can't fit more Vindicators in your army, until you hit 2000 points. I guess that would be an instance of a "cash grabbing" rule, but it seems to be one that is largely reviled by the 40K community because it spawns spammy garbage lists that aren't any fun to play against.
I think that's also why so many supplements are eschewing the FOC and making everything an addable detachment. The FOC is a recognized sales-killer, so until they either strip the FOC out of the game or switch to percentages, they have to run the end-around on the whole thing to keep people buying.
Thanks for coming by a second time to read my long winded response to your initial comments.
DeleteWhile I probably give GW too little credit for their knowledge of their customer buying habits you are probably giving them to much. Remember this is the company whose CEO said that he did not know why the customers bought his companies products. GW until perhaps very recently was not really tracking customer purchases like say Target would. I know this because a well regarded source found out the store managers a few years ago did not have any data on how their customer demographics performed at the individual customer level. Now GW could do an excellent job tracking purchases by individual customers if they only shopped in GW stores or GW online (which GW would love) but in the states for example the revenue from trade is higher than the revenue from their stores and they are only get 60 cents on the dollar there so the volume is significantly higher. They could be using data from the UK but basing your US or world sales strategies on UK data is not the best idea since UK sales are essentially 5 times higher per capita than USA+Canada.
If you look at the data GW might have on me they would see that I have spent about 300 dollars on specialist games in the last 8 years and bought 1 40K book (Apoc reloaded) in one of there stores. They might also find some paint and primer purchases. If they looked really deep by accessing my customer service requests they would also find a space marine bike and a black reach set. That really does not represent my expedentures as I have like 40 blood bowl teams, 250+ space marine models, ~ 100 nid models, and some epic stuff. Losing a custmer you think only spent 300 dollars over several years is different than losing one who was spending 600 dollars each year.
Now if you consider the example you cite of the calvary models, you are right that any specific model is only going to be purchased at most so many times per player. But they do not sell just one model, or one army, or even one game. A great way to think about this is that you can claim the the specialist games like Blood Bowl did not sell enough models but if you look at the web you will see tons of examples of WHFB models converted into Blood Bowl teams. (I have one myself) Now GW counts that as a WHFB sale but it was not really. Now if we think about 2 types of models both either are 35 or 25 dollars where say you need two copies of the kit to make a unit. At 35 dollars one unit is 70 dollars both is 140 dollars vs 50 and 100, now the question is will the player who saved the 20 dollars then use that money to buy the next unit at getting you another 30 dollars when before they would not have. This is the point where we are talking about expanding a single army. GWs ideal customers are those who buy just not what is in their list at the moment but keep buying models not currently their first choice for options. Increased cost hits this group significantly since they do not "need" the models for the game they just "want" them. The next place where the price point shows up is how much it affects players adding the a new army where 300 for that next starter force seems better than 400 hundred. That extra hundred they are trying to get could cost them 300 dollars in sales which means it eats up the extra hundred from 3 other people starting armies. And that person still has that 300 dollars that they were interested in spending on miniatures games, maybe they will put it into a competitor now. I can get about totally distinct playable forces in X-Wing for that or less. GW certainly does not want that. The last place the price point shows up is of course just recruiting new players. As a new crop comes of age every year this is continuous process. We know that they can produce and profit off the starter set at 60 dollars but now it is 100. I know that they raised the price since they found that the starter set was eating other kit sales but I think they have iconed it up enough where this is probably a smaller problem now anyway.
DeleteFor GW to actually make wise decisions about pricing and such they really need to collect better data on the full sales paths of their products. I wrote a post last year describing how GW could leverage their digital content through a reward system to get all a wide range of information about what individual buyers are actually getting.
http://twilight40k.blogspot.com/2013/08/how-can-gw-get-to-know-their-customers.html
I also have a post about how GW could lower the start up cost here while encouraging more options for initial armies:
http://twilight40k.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-cost-of-getting-started-with-space.html
I honestly think we agree on a lot of points. You even admit that GW is allowing its sales considerations into the game design which is a bad direction to be going. Adding Super Heavies rules for standard games so that they can be more fun and customers want that is fine, but adding super heavies to main rules because people are not buying enough super heavies since they can only be used in Apoc is not. While the result is the same, the emphasis on player wants and the actual being fun for both sides of the table puts much more of a focus on how they are integrated.
DeleteThe network affect in miniature gaming is extremely important (compared to say video gaming) since it requires two people at the same place and time to make a game happen. GW once described their stores as like a moat keeping away competitors (or imprisoning their customers) which is probably fairly true in the UK but with the main avenue of trade sales in the US the stores having very little to do with their success here. GW stores just did not have the penetration in enough markets so how did GW become the dominate game. I think it is that those UK stores provided the sales volume needed to GW to get the economy of scale to actually make great games and miniatures and sell them a similar price as other companies were charged for inferior products. That got people playing who got other people playing since it was what the guys at the store play and what their friends play.
Now GW is essentially cashing out its dominate position(perhaps because 3D printing is coming) but they clearly went too far since no one can say last half year was weak in releases put out but sales down 10% and profit down like 30% are big deals (Stock drop erased 4 Million pounds of CEO's value). Remembering that new releases are more expensive that means your volume is probably down more than 10%. Those players are still out there looking for hobby products so most likely your competitors picked up that 10% and now when people go to the store they are more likely to see people playing other games. Not good.
The post really was not meant to be about price as it is a very complicated issue but general people have to complaints about GW: Rules Quality and Price Point. I have found very few people who are unhappy with model design or plastic model quality(ignoring finecast which is really a money issue also) or customer service. On the rules quality people get annoyed by the sloppy rules but do not think that GW is trying to write bad rules it is more the foundation of the rules is bad so they just keep building on making it more unstable. I think people get more angry about what they see as GW writing rules very much aimed at getting you to spend more money.
I wholeheartedly agree with your post. I've seen GW games disappear at my gaming club, replaced by X-wing, Warmachine, Heldorado and others, until there are just 3 of us left out of perhaps 20 regular attendees. Those 17 other guys all have armies, but refuse to play because they don't like the randomness, expense or flakiness of the rules. The three of us are all collectively trying not to start an arms race, because the 'meta' is now so distorted that it has become rock-paper-scissors listhammer, and we'd all rather have close games. Its difficult to maintain this though!
ReplyDeleteThere are now so many outstanding rules questions that the game is becoming unplayable. A FAQ is a cheap thing to produce GW!
Sorry to here that you club is so fragmented. As a player of several essential dead games (Blood Bowl, Epic, Chainmail) not having people to play against is a serious issue.
DeleteSince they do digital releases now the idea of never fixing balance issues between codexes is just stupid. Knowing your FAQs is essentially required so what is wrong with an occasional point adjustment in there also or a rules as written exploit fixed.
sadly its not just RAW or points, but fundamental aspects of game play that are open to different interpretations. Some of these questions have been around for ages. Mindshackle Scarabs anyone?
DeleteI agree. I read those other pieces too and felt similarly.
ReplyDeleteThanks for coming by.
DeleteI've certainly started building and collecting armies mostly for fun now. If I win, great. If not, I've played the army I wanted to and all too often get owned by an uber army list at the peak of the arms race. Hence, I've decided to simply be happy with the armies and units I use, even if they are sub-optimal.
ReplyDeleteYou are a better man than I, I hate losing and I really hate the idea of stepping up to a table where I have already lost before I have placed a unit or rolled a die.
DeleteI find its best to ask people what there army is like in terms of power level, then use a list that I think matches it. This is fun for everyone- when playing a noob I can use a really fluffy list for a change. The only difficulty is when playing a super optimised tournament list as since I play CSM and don't own any Heldrakes its hard to devise any kind of list that will suit.
Deletehttp://theimperialpatrol.blogspot.co.nz/2014/03/3-ways-to-enhancing-your-gaming.html
ReplyDeleteIts too easy to just blame Games Workshop and go with the flow, But its so easy to have a great game! Why complain about all these things that are only a problem because of how you play? I think the biggest problem is a lot of you guys just want to be told how to play. 40K is not that kind of game. 40K gives you guidelines and its up to you as the player to decide what to do with them. If thats not your game then sure play other games. I for one play a few game systems but the freedom and choices available in 40k makes it a far better game.
I dont like Cadians for example, so simple. I dont buy them. I dont like a lot of GW models, I agree they are expensive for the most part. So I simply buy alternatives. The result? I dont complain. If you dont like it move on is what im getting at. But if you do like the game (or at least want to like it), use your imagination and make the game better for you and your friends.
We play small games of 500 points to 1000 and the result is great. The battles are fun. Dense maps are important, its a darn gun war you cant play on an open map and complain. The list goes on.
Im not being mean or anything, but identify what the problem is and fix it. Generally its the players who are the problem and just need to change how they play. Dont like D weapons, easy dont play them. Dont like "Death stars"? Easy dont play them. Use the rules as they are. And they are not absolute. They are guidelines, the rules even state this.So give it a shot. Dont just complain and fix nothing. It gets annoying.
I love the game, but I love it with restrictions. I communicate with my friends and make the game fujn for everyone. Try doing the same. People will follow you when they notice you are enjoying it more.
If the rules arent for you move on to another game. No need to linger and pass the blame. I hate the models and most of the lore of GW games, but I love the rules and flexibility of modeling. So thats I dont buy GW models and I move on. No point complaining. But I like the rules so I buy the relevant ones and move on. Awesome.
So try make the game work by identify what you are doing wrong WITH the people you play and go from there. You may just enjoy it more. Remember there are plenty of very cool models out there, you dont need to spend thousands at GW like you used to.
Anyways thats just my thoughts. I can see where you are coming from, because I used to be the same.
Nice post :)
Thanks for reading.
DeleteYou are totally right. You and your friends can always make the game fun by adjusting this rule or that one. Saying that this game no flyers or no allies. Lets use escalation rules today. These are all essentially permission style rule structure and GW has specifically started to word things the opposite way now. Having to ask permission to use forgeworld stuff just seems better than forcing me object to your forgeworld stuff where I have to mail order 75 dollar rulebooks from across the sea from a company that used to never answer its email.
I have moved twice since starting mini gaming again, 3 stores that I have played both essentially pick up or organized events have closed in my current area, and it is also essentially a college town so you have high turnover of local players. One of the reasons I picked up mini gaming was my moves with idea that existing community of players it is easier to get 1 off games or go to events then organize roleplaying type of things where you need like twice the players to commit to semi regular stuff which is hard for me with my kids and job.
Getting a 1500-2000 point army just to the store can be an issue so it is hard to expect people to pack another 500 points since the guy you just meet says he does not want to play against your super heavy that GW specifically says is now considered just like any other unit. So if you do not play and everyone else is already playing now you have wasted you time coming down, etc.
Ofcourse I am currently 135 dollars out of date with my current army and with rumors of 7th edition this summer no rush to update now.
Maybe I will have to give up caring about 40K again for lent to free up time for other stuff. Ofcourse anything I say about GW yields 5 times the readers and actual comments to interact with people compared to most of the other stuff.