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Post by colobos on Mar 9, 2017 7:42:00 GMT
I think it's 100% the right decision from PP to stop the Press Gang thing.
Speaking as someone who's been playing the game 1.5 years after moving from other games systems, it seemed insane to me that a company would give away as much free stuff as they did.
If you play a game an enjoy it, the incentive to promote it is already there - so you will have a wider variety of local players and broader community.
The greed and entitlement I've seen with a lot of the Warmachine community is one of the small negative for me about the scene. I noticed a similar thing at Smogcon this year (huge 400 man UK convention)where loads of people were complaining there was not enough free stuff on offer as a reward for playing in the Iron Area. Why on earth should there be any free stuff in the first place?
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Lanz
Junior Strategist
Posts: 685
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Post by Lanz on Mar 9, 2017 7:53:18 GMT
I think it's 100% the right decision from PP to stop the Press Gang thing. Speaking as someone who's been playing the game 1.5 years after moving from other games systems, it seemed insane to me that a company would give away as much free stuff as they did. If you play a game an enjoy it, the intensive to promote it is already there - so you will have a wider variety of local players and broader community. The greed and entitlement I've seen with a lot of the Warmachine community is one of the small negative for me about the scene. I noticed a similar thing at Smogcon this year (huge 400 man UK convention)where loads of people were complaining there was not enough free stuff on offer as a reward for playing in the Iron Area. Why on earth should there be any free stuff in the first place? Uhm. As far as we know, the 'free stuff' isn't the part that's changing. The press release suggests that event packages will still be available, just to retailers instead of PGs. I'm pretty sure the potential loss of 'free stuff' is exactly NOT the reason people are disappointed.
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zich
Junior Strategist
Posts: 690
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Post by zich on Mar 9, 2017 10:33:13 GMT
I'm a bit concerned for the European comminity where game stores are the exception rather than the rule. It seems PP is thinking exclusively in terms of the American market nowadays and that is worrying.
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Post by Tekanan on Mar 9, 2017 10:57:02 GMT
I'm a bit concerned for the European comminity where game stores are the exception rather than the rule. It seems PP is thinking exclusively in terms of the American market nowadays and that is worrying. Interesting perspective. What makes EU game stores an exception rather than the rule? Also, what evidence do you see that PP is thinking exclusively in terms of the American market? (honest question btw)
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zich
Junior Strategist
Posts: 690
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Post by zich on Mar 9, 2017 11:09:05 GMT
Well from my personal perspective the entire LGS is more of an American concept. Around here we mostly play in clubs of various kinds. There are LGS but they are simply rare and most of them are GW stores.
Another indication of them shunning the (mainland) European market is the Outposts getting cancelled. Or the fact that the exclusive models, army boxes and model parts are still not available over here.
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Levyathan
Light Addition
"I am Everywhere."
Posts: 67
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Post by Levyathan on Mar 9, 2017 11:15:20 GMT
I'm a bit concerned for the European comminity where game stores are the exception rather than the rule. It seems PP is thinking exclusively in terms of the American market nowadays and that is worrying. Interesting perspective. What makes EU game stores an exception rather than the rule? Also, what evidence do you see that PP is thinking exclusively in terms of the American market? (honest question btw) Can't speak for the rest of Europe, but in the my little patch of the East of England every city I've been to often has maybe at most 1 Independent games shop and often times they use Magic and other card games to keep themselves afloat, which makes them prioritize smaller area games, like Magic, over large area games like Warmachine.This coupled with the fact that rental space for cities over his is astronomical for what you get space wise makes it very difficult for justification in regards to Wargaming in general. My local, which is 26 miles away, is lucky in that he owns the store outright and so can justify the Thursday evening for Tabletops, though having talked to him on occasions he wishes that he could make more from the community money wise, unfortunately as a market we, wargamers, don't buy much or at least in comparison to our card game playing friends, and that's speaking as a former Magic player, which makes us an unattractive market financially. Essentially the loss of Press Gangers is kinda huge as they should be prime leverages to get people from the interested stage to the playing stage. /\ Wow that was a waffle load from me, I sincerely apoligise. And as with everything, yes this is my 2 pence based entirely on speaking to several shop owners who run warmachine nights regularly and from observation of the rental market in major cities over here, I have many weird hobbies.
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kaos
Junior Strategist
Posts: 268
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Post by kaos on Mar 9, 2017 11:26:06 GMT
I think it's 100% the right decision from PP to stop the Press Gang thing. Speaking as someone who's been playing the game 1.5 years after moving from other games systems, it seemed insane to me that a company would give away as much free stuff as they did. If you play a game an enjoy it, the incentive to promote it is already there - so you will have a wider variety of local players and broader community. The greed and entitlement I've seen with a lot of the Warmachine community is one of the small negative for me about the scene. I noticed a similar thing at Smogcon this year (huge 400 man UK convention)where loads of people were complaining there was not enough free stuff on offer as a reward for playing in the Iron Area. Why on earth should there be any free stuff in the first place? Because PP is making more money (hopefully) from your activity. If I was a game company I would even give you 20% profits on the orders you organize online for your community. So instead of rely so much on shop owners I would rely on players pushing the community up. I don't care if you play at the store, at a club, at your home. If you can push to me $1000 or $2000 dollars of sales, you well deserve a profit out of that. I think companies who get away with some freebies are really getting away with nothing. Other businesses pay stratospheric amounts to affiliate in affiliation programs and such. Privateer press and other companies with voluntary programs are really getting away with peanuts, stuff they pay for like $1 per production cycle. If a company had people working for such amounts they would smile hear to hear... I don't really care about press ganger programs and such, also because being a club PP never entitled us to have one, going trough the process was just too painful for us. But looks like a strange move to me, to nuke a program potentially bringing you thousand of dollars at basically no cost.
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Post by LordLauri on Mar 9, 2017 11:34:00 GMT
My view of EU game stores is from Finnish perspective and it isn't exactly sunny. There aren't many and most of them are concentrated in the capital city area (which frankly has the largest population so it's just natural), leaving a large portion of the country with minimal access to physical LGS stuff.
I live in a medium-sized city (on Finland's scale so it's probably tiny for everyone else) and luckily we have two game stores. I highly prefer one over the other but that's because it's run by my friend and the whole atmosphere is just way better there. But I digress. The wargaming community is kinda small or very hidden, at least compared to the MTG community.
I think one reason why MTG overshadows wargaming is because they have a weekly event, Friday Night Magic or FNM. The stores are supplied with FNM promo cards which you can win only by playing in those events. I'm not sure how obligatory it is for a MTG retailer to organize these but they seem profitable enough here.
This sort of thing might help with wargames, especially with WM/H where the games are short compared to 40k where you gotta invest several hours for just one game. Even more so in communities where there were no PGs. I'm pretty sure we didn't have one. Right now it's up to the stores and the community itself to organize anything.
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Haight
Junior Strategist
Posts: 396
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Post by Haight on Mar 9, 2017 11:44:27 GMT
In my community, we have zero PGs. In fact, we have one in the entire country. Guess what? People still run events. They run events because they care about the game and the community. When new players emerge, people within the community take the time to help them out, give them advice, get them started etc, for no other reason than they care about the community. Now, with the advent of the new rewards included in tournament packs, all EOs get recognised, instead of the elite few who happened to get PG status. I was actually only informed a few weeks ago that PP finally hooked up their PG's accounts directly to the online store for cashing in their points. Seems weird they only just got that up and running barely a month before they cut out the program entirely. On this point Greytemplar, not too weird. The store only got an overhaul to its new look a relatively short time ago, and it was a bit bumpy. All volunteers were migrated over but it took some time to convert items from cash to volunteer compensation, and there were account hiccups, etc. Nothing too major but it was a bit bumpy. I don't honestly think there was a connection between cashiering volunteers and the store account, i think that was an efficiency move. It's actually WAY easier for volunteers to make orders and track them. This goes for PG's and Mod's and i would therefore assume infernals, judges, and external playtest. I honestly don't attribute any malice to the coincidence of the store deployment and the cashiering of volunteer corps. We all have to remember they had a legit small army of volunteers. Ofc, i might be wrong, but who knows. d
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Post by PiperMacB on Mar 9, 2017 11:47:50 GMT
Very sad. I have seen that with other games in the past. I will still go on and try to organize events, not for PP but for the game I have been a PG only for a couple of months, but it has been great to support the game so far.
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Post by wayniac on Mar 9, 2017 11:52:36 GMT
Re: game stores. These do seem to largely be a u.s. thing where you congregate at a game store. In Europe it's mostly clubs that meet monthly or whatever and as a result they don't have the same gang turf mentality that you find in a lot of us stores. Personally and this is 100% my own opinion I feel that the age of a game store is in its Twilight. In my area I can count probably about 10 or so game stores that have lived and died since I've lived here and not one of them is really sustainable. Especially not for wargaming since most of their income comes from card games and as a result wargaming gets treated like a second-class citizen yet nobody wants to try and organize a club in this day of social media where it is trivially easy to do so
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Post by Cood on Mar 9, 2017 12:08:19 GMT
It was a downward spiral since they hired valerie. Bans, locking threads, killing community without reason or explanation. I defended PP's every move including free ruder policy, regardless of not having a store around, but now I'm done with this company. If they don't want to have a community I'm moving to a different game and I sincerely hope that they will register losses in sales. Maybe then someone in HQ will realise that community and consumer friendly approach from the past was the backbone of their success.
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Post by foolishmonkey on Mar 9, 2017 12:18:53 GMT
It really surprises me given how much the PG's support the community, I just think about Australia with Haido and the competitive community wouldn't be the same without him.
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Post by Tekanan on Mar 9, 2017 13:10:52 GMT
Especially not for wargaming since most of their income comes from card games and as a result wargaming gets treated like a second-class citizen yet nobody wants to try and organize a club in this day of social media where it is trivially easy to do so A bunch of guys is trying a club concept here in Malaysia. www.facebook.com/theatticdj5 months old if I am not mistaken. Supported mostly via membership fees. I casually ran a 10pt WM tournament there some time in Jan. Everyone is interested to see if it is sustainable or not.
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Haight
Junior Strategist
Posts: 396
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Post by Haight on Mar 9, 2017 13:16:26 GMT
It was a downward spiral since they hired valerie. Bans, locking threads, killing community without reason or explanation. I defended PP's every move including free ruder policy, regardless of not having a store around, but now I'm done with this company. If they don't want to have a community I'm moving to a different game and I sincerely hope that they will register losses in sales. Maybe then someone in HQ will realise that community and consumer friendly approach from the past was the backbone of their success. So i'm gonna step up and defend Valerie here, having actually worked with her. Valerie was VERY open minded in all my dealings with her, and i was a contrarian devil's advocate a lot of the time: arguing positions i may not actually agree with, but shining a spotlight on perspectives that were contrary to what we were trying to achieve. She was always very cool with that. I do not know for sure, i cannot prove it, but I do not think these harsher directives were coming directly from her. She also almost always went with what her moderators suggested ; even when there was a mini tack towards enforcing things more stringently (it may have been hard for users to perceive, but there was a period of time a few months back where things were getting.... Orwellian... for a hot minute), I made a case against that, backed up by a couple other mods, and we reversed course allowing for a more permissive environment (more deletings rather than fracts / bans, etc). So respectfully, I have to disagree. I can't prove it, but I strongly, strongly believe that these directives were not being enacted by her. I could be wrong, but i've got a really strong feeling about it after having worked with her for over a year. I mean... there was a classic case of someone comparing her to Trump / Orange-Hitler which she took no punitive action on (we all had a good laugh about it). If she was the source of draconian crack-down, that would never have flown. I know that open mindedness doesn't translate down to the user base, and its probably hard to parse what i'm saying having not been on the side of the board i was on, but that's why I've defended her and the other mods in public places. If you were ever on the receiving end of moderation it probably doesn't appear that they/we/she was open minded, but we were. They are good people who were doing their best for the most part. I'll agree with you though, i'm having a real crisis on whether or not i want to continue playing the game. In the last year its just started to resemble something that is more effort than its worth. I haven't been excited to play the game in months, my playing has dropped off. Oddly I like the corps rules more than i ever have, but its just something about it i can't quite put my finger on. I tried to get up the gusto to go play this week, but defaulted instead to practicing some music. It sucks, i've played their games for like 13 years (maybe longer ? i came in at Escalation era mk1), and i've volunteered with them for 6 of those years - Strategic Academy which were content writers in MK1, Infernal in MK1/2, Mod in MK2/3. It really sucks to just be like "meh" on a game i've gotten so much enjoyment out of for years and years. Hopefully its jsut a funk, but the funk has lasted almost 4 months.
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