Games Workshop sales from Miniature Market

The four pages of rules seem pretty clearly laid out at least.

I know they're working on the General's Handbook mk2, so maybe that will be better organised, and will be more like a "rulebook" than the previous iteration.

TL;DR - The crazy ex analogy is bad, Haight pontificates. News at 11.


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Here's why i don't like the "abusive ex" analogy. For one thing, its hyperbole to the extreme (even past ridiculousness invoked to prove a point). GW has not lived in one of our houses, boiled our rabbit (dating myself with that reference!), thrown all our shit in hefty bags out on the curb at 2 am the night before trash pickup, etc.

They are a business: they made business decisions we didn't like or maybe even hated, but they never actively (key word) and directly (next one) took harmful actions against us, unlike the "abusive ex". As a business they may have made decisions that had effect on you (say, "ruined" your favorite codex with a new release, or "made obsolete" something you liked via power creep, or stopped making a game you love).

ALso, and this might be up for some philosophical debate, but I don't know about any of you but i don't make any direct payments in cash to my wife on the regular in exchange for goods. Yes i realize there's a joke there, though its pretty hamfisted.

This is far and away from an unstable coupling partnership ; its a consumers tastes and a Company business plan / action plan diverging somewhat to majorly. Relationships are inherently emotional. Consumer relationships start as logical but we (the consumer) allow ourselves to become emotional about products (fair point: businesses know this and appeal to the emotional. It's why luxury cars still continue to be viewed as symbols of status and success despite being able to "lease" them for usually less than you can make payments to own a nice, but non luxury, sedan - and why people continue to fall for that.)

So this is why i hate this abusive ex. analogy. I was bummed out when GW discontinued Necromunda and Fantasy. However GW never moved out with my models and dogs, or showed up at my work and made a scene, or threw a vase at me.

NOt a shot at anyone because on the surface i get the analogy and why people make it, but its just such a lazy and obvious analogy to draw, but i don't think it actually gets to the heart of the matter. It also cynically infers that companies cannot change, which is flat out false. I.E. We are witnessing PP change its identity and rules of engagement with its customer base. Some are fine with it, others not. GW did the same thing years ago. They appear to be changing again or trying to. To invoke this "oh, its just the crazy old ex who's lost weight but hasn't changed her ways" is wink-and-noddery assumption that once bad, always bad.

It's similar to (extreme examples on purpose) - "People that invoke the 5th amendment must be guilty, because otherwise they'd have nothing to hide." or "People that invoke rights to privacy over not being videotaped - well that says a lot about a person doesn't it?". They're convenient tropes used to comparmentalize a snap judgement or response, rather than analyze them. Sure, the Ex to GW comparison is much less serious than the other two, but the thought train is the same. Its rationalizing an otherwise emotional response to an issue.

I think the truth is somewhat more complex ; that good companies can make bad decisions, and bad companies can make good decisions, and there's a ton of grey matter in between.

Sorry for the rant there. Here's my position: whichever company makes fun games to play that treats me, personally, as a consumer whose business is valued, is going to get my money. I do not have brand loyalty past those factors. In that regard,  I am a tabletop Mercenary.  If Shadow War comes otu and it is hella fun, i'll play the heck out of that game until i get bored with it, something new piques my interest, or they stop supporting it, or they make decisions that make it not fun / my business is not valued.

I got stung on 40k decisions and fantasy, and absolutely once(or twice...) burned, twice shy. Thing is: no game company is innocent on this front (from my perspective). I have active gripes with every company that produces every minis game i ever played. GW's codex creep and Fantasy murder, and not supporting specialist games, and neglecting a huge portion of their line for years. I dislike how edition change made it literally impossible to put one of my theme lists for Hordes on the table, and another one possible but functionally futile for another one, and also how the game is developing around theme lists. I pretty much stopped playing Malifaux due to the episodic update model. 1st ed Infinity without enough terrain (which when first picking it up was not well explained) devolved to rock,paper,scissors between snipers, tags and artillery. Got burned on magic too by format evolution. Bioware stung me on Dragon Age INquisition. I think Beth Soft did a Meh job on fallout 4.

If i treated every one of these companies as a "crazy old ex" and never touched a product again, i'd be missing out on an awful lot of good stuff i think, rather than if i apply a - perhaps even cautiously guarded - analytical eye. It's also not as if the first cool decision GW made has us all forgetting the past. It's been 9-12 months of really cool, good decisions in terms of releases and customer listening.

A'ight this post is large enough.

Yes I'm aware that the rules are 4 pages and IN THE VERY BACK OF THE BOOK. Like it was an afterthought "ohhh yeah here are your rules instead of an index"
And even those 4 pages aren't very clear in my opinion. like the first little paragraph is about creating your army and it basically says "make your army using a system" it doesn't even reference different page numbers in the rest of the book that have different systems. I had to get someone's help to understand where all the point costs are at. And let me tell you it is a little embarrassing to have to ask someone to explain 4 pages of anything.

OK let me rephrase.

I was flipping through someone else's rule book. And he pointed out where the 4 pages of rules were. "It's super simple its only 4 pages" after reading through them i had to then very embarrasingly ask for further explanation because i didn't figure out the "simple rules"

The "4 pages of anything" was a hyperbole to drive the point further.
I'm sorry if it was not recognized as such and lead to confusion.

That's probably the crux of it, and I agree with the much better analogy of GW maybe for some people is like a girlfriend that all of a sudden changes on you. She no longer does that thing that you really liked when you started going out, and therefore you don't like her as much anymore.

Which is a totally valid reason to break up with her, i.e. stop buying GW products and buy into another game instead. And I get that this is a really sad thing, because you would have preferred it if she had kept doing her thing that you liked. But that's not the same as her being an abusive monster, which is what many people are acting like GW is/was.

GW have a right to change what games they support and how they support them. And we as customers have a right to stop buying their products if we dislike their support or lack of for the products of theirs we are interested in.

I also agree that "Just play the old edition" isn't a very good answer in this hobby. Because a large part of the appeal of any collection hobby game is that it is alive and growing. As soon as the game stops growing, collecting for it isn't as interesting anymore. We lose interest and move on to another game that is alive. Like Warmachine. The commitment lies in the collecting, and the collecting relies on inspiration, and the inspiration usually depends on new releases.

There are exceptions to the above... but they are quite rare. I am a reasonably passionate collector of cool 2nd edition Blood Bowl models for example, and I use them to play my own version of Dungeonbowl. This is a hobby activity that I am very interested in, which is based on an old edition of a GW game, and has no relation to new releases. And there are people who play many different old editions of WHFB out there. But these are niche things that people tend to do on their own in small groups. The most common way to engage in this hobby is to go out and find other current active players of a game in your local area. To do this, the game you are into has to be current and popular.

True for sure. People are very good at getting emotionally invested in things, myself included. If a company announced that it was closing down and discontinuing any game that I currently really enjoy, it would make me upset, obviously, because I would no longer be getting a product I love.

And I can also see how this could hurt my ability to "trust" that company again in the future. Like if I was a big fan of WHFB... they closed that down to produce AOS instead. I could see myself not wanting to play AOS, not just because I am bitter about WHFB, but also because I worry about the day that AOS will be closed down too. I don't want to commit to something that I feel will be taken away.

The only part I question, I guess, is the part where people take it personally. Like, GW shutting down WHFB makes GW evil. Like they did it to hurt you. Like they are laughing at you in their corporate tower, about how they won your trust and then kicked you in the nuts. I know that being upset by losing a product can hurt, and that hurt can make you feel abused and betrayed. But we should understand that those feelings are irrational, rather than wallow in them.

It would be just like if I was a big fan of Monsterpocalypse or High Command. I could say all the same things about PP that people say about GW. I had a legitimate expectation of permanency, but PP callously ignored my feelings and expectations and closed down those games, without even publically recognising it... they just stopped producing the product. Now the games are dead, nobody plays, and I feel betrayed by PP's indifference to my plight. I invested myself, dammit, monetarily and emotionally... and I got the cold shoulder.

These emotions would probably be met with "Yeah!" by anyone in a similar boat... but people who are more neutral would probably feel like my emotions are a bit over the top, and that I shouldn't take it personally.