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Post by octaviusmaximus on Sept 15, 2017 5:17:50 GMT
I'm personally not bothered by themes being mechanical instead of thematic. It just plain old doesn't bother me. Then again I play Skorne, so there's no chance I have theme fatigue. My only worry was the Merc thing. Like what did they expect to happen? Themes become ubiquitous and Merc sales drop. So they have to hammer them back in. What did they think would happen? That person would mostly play in themes but buy mercs anyway? This is the instability that worries me the most because of more than a minor or even a major model imbalance, it indicates something not thought through logically. Themes are a really good idea if the idea is to allow for a new type of play. Even an organization of models in a sense. But what did they wish to achieve? In mk 2 there was a loud group of people who didn't like that merc options were preferable to in faction options. Pp listened and felt theme forces were something that people wanted, benefits for bringing models in faction. Mk 3 themes start to settle and a loud group of people start to say that they don't like that they couldn't play their mercs anymore. Pp starts to add mercs back. No real mystery, imo.
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skormedlover87
Junior Strategist
Desperately searching for days off to game...
Posts: 517
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Post by skormedlover87 on Sept 15, 2017 5:45:38 GMT
If you will humor the concept, it's like pp went to a class or read a book or something. And someone very influential in the company had a eureka moment. And they shared all this with their co-workers and influence in the company hit critical mass and they decided to go down this path. Mini factions from themes. Separate, non book derived releases. Regular errata.
But they were already part way through transition to MK3. And they didn't have a long, well thought out plan. I mean the sort of plan you take years to develop when changing the model by which a successful business does business. And they've had to jink and jank to respond to the world they exist in. These responses can be seen as mk3 being rolled out before it was really ready. To hit the artificial timeline of Lock and Load. The dropping of the Press Gang program, while I'm sure it was in the works, was almost certainly accelerated by the Magic lawsuit. Who knows of CiD was originally planned or just an AHA! moment that came after initial mk3 release issues.
In short, I believe PP has 2 plans. One is probably mocked up through the next three years or so. But it's based on releases. It isn't implementing programs, rules, any of that. The second plan is trying to get through the next 3-6 months. Trying to hit every release date, ship date, art deadline, fill positions, hit up cons, and oh yeah, deal with customer relations stuff. It's the plan to deal with the day to day muddle of the business.
There aren't broader plans then that. There's no truly deep thinking going on at pp to ask "what about mercs and minions". I'm fairly sure the original thought was "they'll be their own faction and everyone who owns parts of that will have a leg up on buying into that faction". Because if you follow the logic of sub-factions, that's exactly what should happen. Then they backed out on that for whatever reason and now it's oh crap oh crap of crap what do we do? The seminar didn't tell us how to deal with this.
Now I'm not trying to say pp is a bad company. Far from it. I'm just saying they're not being led by a genius level intellect, and everything is obvious in hindsight. But hindsight typically ignores the various other things that are going on, that may have contributed to questionable decisions. I understand, I think they're doing their best. But no, I don't think they're Marvel, following some grand overarching plan conceived over years, looked at by hundreds of the best minds in the industry to most fully entertain you while simultaneously sucking as much money out of your pocket as possible.
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Haight
Junior Strategist
Posts: 396
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Post by Haight on Sept 15, 2017 22:22:18 GMT
My only worry was the Merc thing. Like what did they expect to happen? Themes become ubiquitous and Merc sales drop. So they have to hammer them back in. What did they think would happen? That person would mostly play in themes but buy mercs anyway? This is the instability that worries me the most because of more than a minor or even a major model imbalance, it indicates something not thought through logically. Themes are a really good idea if the idea is to allow for a new type of play. Even an organization of models in a sense. But what did they wish to achieve? In mk 2 there was a loud group of people who didn't like that merc options were preferable to in faction options. Pp listened and felt theme forces were something that people wanted, benefits for bringing models in faction. Mk 3 themes start to settle and a loud group of people start to say that they don't like that they couldn't play their mercs anymore. Pp starts to add mercs back. No real mystery, imo. No real mystery, but also no real direction. One could argue "well they're trying to find a happy medium", but after all the ping-pong stuff that has happened in the last 15-18 months it doesn't feel like trying to strike a centrist position. It feels haphazard.
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Post by tapecrawler on Sept 16, 2017 1:09:02 GMT
I agree with pretty much everything the above posters have said, I just wanted to comment as well. Haight said haphazard but I feel it's more reactionary in nature. It seems like somebody influential had a "vision" and has led us down this road. It seems like once the vision was revealed to the players (who weren't present in the boardroom to be persuaded) the pushback just absolutely flabbergasted the PP staff. And so ever since then they've been in a mad scramble to try to placate the masses so we don't leave. It seems to only be working more or less depending on the location Val meta. And to be honest, I'm still pretty pissed about buying THREE decks of MKIII cards and having them invalidated in less than six months. That was a bullshit move by desperate people trying to keep from losing their core customers.
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