The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
No, they don't realize that. They don't know how the game is played outside of GWHQ and frankly, they couldn't care.
On the plus side, you can explore and find all the other amazing games out there.
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
No, they don't realize that. They don't know how the game is played outside of GWHQ and frankly, they couldn't care.
On the plus side, you can explore and find all the other amazing games out there.
assuming his local gaming shop isn't like one of mine (I have 3 gaming shops) where the only thing they sell is CCGs and a unwanted copy of the 4th edition D&D PHB
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
No, they don't realize that. They don't know how the game is played outside of GWHQ and frankly, they couldn't care.
On the plus side, you can explore and find all the other amazing games out there.
assuming his local gaming shop isn't like one of mine (I have 3 gaming shops) where the only thing they sell is CCGs and a unwanted copy of the 4th edition D&D PHB
Oh my word. That's terrible. Come on down to Utah, there's like a hobby store every five miles.
Losing store access is kind of annoying, but let's not forget that you can always play at home. Organize games online, pool your resources to get tables and terrain, and play all the games you want without being tied to a particular store.
Ghazkuul wrote: But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players?
No, what they realized is that the long term social storefront based model worked as much against them as it did for them. Hence they started moving toward a game that focused on garage/basement play built around larger, more diverse armies, larger models and fortifications, scenario based play, terrain that exists as more than just a cover save, and a *play how you want* mentality.
That maybe ok for US with its huge houses, but in some countries playing at home is out of the question, unless someone lives alone. And storing terrain is even a bigger problem.
In 5th we had more then 100players here. Now after 2 closed stores we are down to less then 30.
Online only stuff also means some people just can't get the stuff they need to play an army.
Massawyrm wrote: No, what they realized is that the long term social storefront based model worked as much against them as it did for them. Hence they started moving toward a game that focused on garage/basement play built around larger, more diverse armies, larger models and fortifications, scenario based play, terrain that exists as more than just a cover save, and a *play how you want* mentality.
Not really. They moved to a game that focuses on selling lots of starter sets to new players, with their stores reduced to little more than a demo table and a wall of starter sets. Modern GW doesn't care if you play the game, they just care that you say "wow that's awesome" and buy your starter set/paint/etc. And hopefully you keep buying every new release regardless of what it does in the game, but if you don't there's always another new customer ready to buy a starter set.
And no, GW's "social storefront based model" didn't work against them. In fact it was one of GW's biggest advantages. If you and your friend are playing in your garage you can play any game you want, GW's games are nothing special. But GW had something unique to offer: the ability to have guaranteed people to play with at your local store. When you bought a GW game you weren't just buying some fancy pieces of plastic, you were buying membership in a community. GW's stubborn determination to throw away this advantage is one of their worst business decisions.
Makumba wrote: That maybe ok for US with its huge houses, but in some countries playing at home is out of the question, unless someone lives alone. And storing terrain is even a bigger problem.
In 5th we had more then 100players here. Now after 2 closed stores we are down to less then 30.
Online only stuff also means some people just can't get the stuff they need to play an army.
This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement.
Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
No, they don't realize that. They don't know how the game is played outside of GWHQ and frankly, they couldn't care.
On the plus side, you can explore and find all the other amazing games out there.
assuming his local gaming shop isn't like one of mine (I have 3 gaming shops) where the only thing they sell is CCGs and a unwanted copy of the 4th edition D&D PHB
Oh my word. That's terrible. Come on down to Utah, there's like a hobby store every five miles.
ohh thats only one of the stores. the other two are great. one's a GW store and sells well GW stuff, the other is literally across the street and sells everything else. it's actually a nice arrangement and both store managers are happy to send customers to each other if they're inquiring about something the other place stocks it's actually not bad
Purifier wrote: This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement.
Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
You don't really need that much space. A 6x4 table can be built in sections and stored against the wall in a closet and takes up very little space. Then when you want to play you can put it on top of your kitchen table. For terrain storage you just need a small bookshelf, which probably takes up less space than models/paint/etc. It's not an awesome dedicated gaming space, but most people should be able to play 40k at home if they really want to.
Peregrine wrote: And no, GW's "social storefront based model" didn't work against them. In fact it was one of GW's biggest advantages. If you and your friend are playing in your garage you can play any game you want, GW's games are nothing special. But GW had something unique to offer: the ability to have guaranteed people to play with at your local store. When you bought a GW game you weren't just buying some fancy pieces of plastic, you were buying membership in a community. GW's stubborn determination to throw away this advantage is one of their worst business decisions.
Yes it very much did. While all the examples you cite are what work in their favor, you're ignoring the elements that I know from having read your posts for years that you know are true. The meta drives sales. The larger the meta, the larger the impact it has on those sales. GW wants to sell a wide range of kits across a number of armies, not just select units from a few armies. Optimally, they want to sell roughly the same number of kits of each unit that comes from the same size batch. They want to sell as many Eldar Jetbikes as they sell Necron Warrior squads as they sell Tau Crisis Suits. But in a storefront meta, your purchases become restricted based upon how the local scene plays and what they allow people to play with. In a meta in which there are a few loud players that don't like FW or superheavies, players don't buy them because they know they can't use them. In a meta where everyone thinks Eldar are broken, you can't get a game with them and, again, players won't buy them. In a meta that plays only EW missions, several armies which do far better in MoW can't compete and, once again, players don't buy them. And in a tournament meta things get bleaker, sales being restricted to only a handful of units in a handful of armies based upon whatever is dominating at the time.
In a Garage meta, your only restrictions are what you and your friend agree to, and the units you tend to run become more about what you like rather than what can handle whatever the beasts of the local meta are or what the local meta says you can use. It's a lot easier to convince your friend to let you use a Baneblade to see how it plays than it is to convince people to let you use one in an anti-LoW meta or a tournament scene that prohibits it. And issues of balance become a self correcting problem when you are dealing with friends at your house as opposed to a stranger in a neutral location. A friend who is TFG stops getting invited to 40k night until he can learn to play like a civilized human being. But finding a storefront 40k scene w/out TFG is a holy grail of a scene. So what you end up with is a broader number of sales across the entire range based upon the desires of each consumer rather than the desires of the herd mentality of local/tournament scenes.
Storefront scenes also focus upon pickup games at a very specific level. Models have to be transported and games kept relatively short, keeping armies generally small and larger models like superheavies and fortifications generally prohibited due to transportation restrictions. Games also tend to focus on one type of play - Eternal War - over the seven other styles of play that favor other armies or model sales, but require additional setup, terrain or special lists. In 5th when BATTLE MISSIONS came out, you couldn't find games using it, so it sold poorly. Now GW puts out specialized campaigns using specific armies and they sell out. Because folks can run a campaign over several weeks at their home in a way that is very hard to organize in a storefront scene.
And despite the fact that GW ceased all support of the storefront scene five or so years ago, that scene still exists. They don't need to support it for it to exist. So they get those communities where they need them, and they get a cavalcade of garage players buying armies and units from across the range rather than just whatever the big hotness on the tournament scene is.
There are serious upsides to this new model that counteract the downsides of abandoning the old one.
Peregrine wrote: And no, GW's "social storefront based model" didn't work against them. In fact it was one of GW's biggest advantages. If you and your friend are playing in your garage you can play any game you want, GW's games are nothing special. But GW had something unique to offer: the ability to have guaranteed people to play with at your local store. When you bought a GW game you weren't just buying some fancy pieces of plastic, you were buying membership in a community. GW's stubborn determination to throw away this advantage is one of their worst business decisions.
Yes it very much did. While all the examples you cite are what work in their favor, you're ignoring the elements that I know from having read your posts for years that you know are true. The meta drives sales. The larger the meta, the larger the impact it has on those sales. GW wants to sell a wide range of kits across a number of armies, not just select units from a few armies. Optimally, they want to sell roughly the same number of kits of each unit that comes from the same size batch. They want to sell as many Eldar Jetbikes as they sell Necron Warrior squads as they sell Tau Crisis Suits. But in a storefront meta, your purchases become restricted based upon how the local scene plays and what they allow people to play with. In a meta in which there are a few loud players that don't like FW or superheavies, players don't buy them because they know they can't use them. In a meta where everyone thinks Eldar are broken, you can't get a game with them and, again, players won't buy them. In a meta that plays only EW missions, several armies which do far better in MoW can't compete and, once again, players don't buy them. And in a tournament meta things get bleaker, sales being restricted to only a handful of units in a handful of armies based upon whatever is dominating at the time.
In a Garage meta, your only restrictions are what you and your friend agree to, and the units you tend to run become more about what you like rather than what can handle whatever the beasts of the local meta are or what the local meta says you can use. It's a lot easier to convince your friend to let you use a Baneblade to see how it plays than it is to convince people to let you use one in an anti-LoW meta or a tournament scene that prohibits it. And issues of balance become a self correcting problem when you are dealing with friends at your house as opposed to a stranger in a neutral location. A friend who is TFG stops getting invited to 40k night until he can learn to play like a civilized human being. But finding a storefront 40k scene w/out TFG is a holy grail of a scene. So what you end up with is a broader number of sales across the entire range based upon the desires of each consumer rather than the desires of the herd mentality of local/tournament scenes.
Storefront scenes also focus upon pickup games at a very specific level. Models have to be transported and games kept relatively short, keeping armies generally small and larger models like superheavies and fortifications generally prohibited due to transportation restrictions. Games also tend to focus on one type of play - Eternal War - over the seven other styles of play that favor other armies or model sales, but require additional setup, terrain or special lists. In 5th when BATTLE MISSIONS came out, you couldn't find games using it, so it sold poorly. Now GW puts out specialized campaigns using specific armies and they sell out. Because folks can run a campaign over several weeks at their home in a way that is very hard to organize in a storefront scene.
And despite the fact that GW ceased all support of the storefront scene five or so years ago, that scene still exists. They don't need to support it for it to exist. So they get those communities where they need them, and they get a cavalcade of garage players buying armies and units from across the range rather than just whatever the big hotness on the tournament scene is.
There are serious upsides to this new model that counteract the downsides of abandoning the old one.
I disagree with the statement that a storefront meta reduces sales. When people buy from an online store, they take the time to carefully consider each option before them. They think "will I use this?" and "do I actually need another box of these?" and generally make pointed, select purchases. A store meta is open to impulse purchases, people coming in and seeing "wow, you have that new Knight with the weapon options!".
Only having online stores hurts GW's ability to advertise their product. A store has the ability to draw passerbies in with displays of pretty models, allowing people that might be interested in the hobby to discover it. The stores allow people to see that there are games that involve these miniatures and what the miniatures actually look and, if people are generous, feel like.The online store does not have displays on the streets or even banner ads to advertise itself, people that use it are generally people that already play or collect models. While having a big online store might be useful for people already in the hobby, it makes it difficult and confusing to join.
Saying that stores are limited to playing eternal war is false, stores are just as capable as organising an event as four people in a garage. A store manager can decide that he wants to organise a narrative campaign or apocalypse battle and organise it with three or four of the regular players. They come in, set up, use a table with all of the narrative special rules. The only difference is that the manager might be able to help connect people that would be interested in a campaign to join you. I am taking part in a July 4th apocalypse battle with xenos trying to destroy an Imperial protected White House at my FLGS and there have been several long term campaigns in which I took part.
Back to the OP, the policy that is hurting the small retailers is the fact that they have to stock a certain amount of certain GW products, which they then need to sell to turn a profit. Shopkeepers that live in a meta without any BA players are then stuck with several boxes of BA. They are still charged for these must stock items, and GW's prices are not known for being cheap. Unless your store is in a meta where players of every army play, they are only a few releases of stuff that no one plays from being in deep trouble.
the Signless wrote: I disagree with the statement that a storefront meta reduces sales.
Back to the OP, the policy that is hurting the small retailers is the fact that they have to stock a certain amount of certain GW products, which they then need to sell to turn a profit. Shopkeepers that live in a meta without any BA players are then stuck with several boxes of BA. They are still charged for these must stock items, and GW's prices are not known for being cheap. Unless your store is in a meta where players of every army play, they are only a few releases of stuff that no one plays from being in deep trouble.
That wasn't my assertion at all. Instead what I was saying is exactly what you ended up stating at the end - the the local meta influences sales, and switching to a garage based meta means more well rounded sales, which is good for FLGSs. The problem FLGSs face isn't GW moving to feature more online sales, but rather the ebay retailers and mail order stores that sell GW at a large discount. GW didn't move to online sales to maximize their profits in the face of direct sell through - they did it to compete with the online retailers that were gutting those stores already.
Purifier wrote: This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement.
Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
You don't really need that much space. A 6x4 table can be built in sections and stored against the wall in a closet and takes up very little space. Then when you want to play you can put it on top of your kitchen table. For terrain storage you just need a small bookshelf, which probably takes up less space than models/paint/etc. It's not an awesome dedicated gaming space, but most people should be able to play 40k at home if they really want to.
I know how much space it takes up. Please see the comment where you quoted me saying that I have a setup. Understand me when I'm saying that it's more space than a lot of us have to spare. Out of the 4 of us main guys in my gaming group, 2 of us can store it. One with quite a lot of difficulty. The other two simply don't have the room to store three table tops.
No, what they realized is that the long term social storefront based model worked as much against them as it did for them. Hence they started moving toward a game that focused on garage/basement play built around larger, more diverse armies, larger models and fortifications, scenario based play, terrain that exists as more than just a cover save, and a *play how you want* mentality.
Pretty much sums up my gaming group.
We have about as many, if not more, regular players as the LGS.
Gaming in a store is only great if they people in the store understand the game and participate.
I owned the RT book but didn't really get into 40K and Fantasy until the owners of the LGS at the time wouldn't stop talking about it, the fluff, and how much they enjoyed it.
Years later, the current LGS offers us table space and product, but they don't have a clue about anything game related.
Unsolicited shout out for The Armory Wargames and Hobbies , who just opened last week in New Bedford, MA, and is run by an actual gamer. It's an amazing difference when the store owner actually knows what the heck he's talking about.
Raven Cowl wrote: the Signless is absolutely correct. My FLGS is currently running an Escalation League/Narrative Campaign that is going swimmingly smoothly.
Except that he's wrong when he suggested I thought this was the ONLY way storefront metas work. It's just the main focus of most storefront metas. Great FLGSs that know their business do this sort of thing and know how to support the scene while promoting sales. (Escalation is AMAZING for that.) But GW actually attempted this during their last gasp of store support with the LUCKY 13's campaign back in '08. It was a failure with abysmal attendance - even in large cities - and hence never repeated. So GW leaves that up to the stores themselves now.
But the meta also drives sales in a "garage" meta. People still read about what is powerful, and 40k's balance issues aren't exactly subtle. Powerful stuff will still sell to competitive players (yes, competitive players still exist in a "garage" meta) and "casual" players will still shun the overpowered stuff.
Storefront scenes also focus upon pickup games at a very specific level. Models have to be transported and games kept relatively short, keeping armies generally small and larger models like superheavies and fortifications generally prohibited due to transportation restrictions. Games also tend to focus on one type of play - Eternal War - over the seven other styles of play that favor other armies or model sales, but require additional setup, terrain or special lists.
Alternatively, "garage" players are less likely to make a massive investment in the game (since they're playing at home instead of organizing a gaming club, traveling to tournaments, etc) and will only buy fairly small armies, will play with cardboard boxes and other random stuff as terrain, etc. And they're much less likely to keep buying if their one opponent decides to move on to something else. Meanwhile the kind of people who invest tons of money into narrative armies/terrain/etc are going to do it regardless of where they play.
In 5th when BATTLE MISSIONS came out, you couldn't find games using it, so it sold poorly.
No, it sold poorly because it was a mediocre book at best. The missions were terrible for competitive and pickup games, and no better than the stuff the narrative players were already creating themselves. So its target market was the pretty small minority that don't care about competitive games but are too lazy to make their own story.
Now GW puts out specialized campaigns using specific armies and they sell out.
GW's campaign books (like a lot of GW's other books) sell out because they have small print runs, not because there's huge demand. It's a gimmick that might fool uninformed shareholders, but that's all. They aren't getting any additional sales for those products.
There are serious upsides to this new model that counteract the downsides of abandoning the old one.
No there aren't, because you're making the completely unjustified assumption that all of the former store players will become garage players and adopt the buying habits of the other garage players (which may or may not be what you think they are). If, instead, most of those store players just quit the game then GW has thrown away a major business advantage for nothing in return.
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Purifier wrote: I know how much space it takes up. Please see the comment where you quoted me saying that I have a setup. Understand me when I'm saying that it's more space than a lot of us have to spare. Out of the 4 of us main guys in my gaming group, 2 of us can store it. One with quite a lot of difficulty. The other two simply don't have the room to store three table tops.
I just don't understand this. Are your apartments the size of closets? Or are you just confusing "I don't have any space" with "I don't want to get creative with my storage arrangements"?
All due respect, brother, but it doesn't sound like you understand garage gamers at all. Nobody spends money on the hobby like a garage gamer. We're the guys who build our own tables, stock entire shelves with terrain and codexes (even for armies we don't play), own multiple armies and have no cap on what we *need* for those armies. Our chief enemy is shelf space. There were a series of pictures on one of the reddit subreddits yesterday in which garage gamers posted pics of their war rooms. Just glance around those pics and see what I'm talking about. We're talking about guys who own three Warhound Titans just so they can run one and make sure their buddies can each use one too so it's fair.
While excitement on the forums might encourage sales, we're not affected by its meta. Because in our garages, in our basements, we control it. No one is ever going to show up at my house with 40 scatbikes or 2++ rerollable anything. That doesn't mean lists aren't competitive. But "competitive" and ITC-hammer are very different things. With garage gamers COOL is king, and netlists aren't cool.
Are there gamers like you're talking about, the ones who buy a starter box, a few extra units and then never buy anything else? Sure. But those aren't the guys GW is catering to. Escalation and 7th Ed weren't about trying to force tournaments to allow Superheavies; it was about giving the garage gamers a reason to buy a few more variants of baneblade, and convincing them to pull the trigger on that Thunderhawk they've been promising to buy themselves.
The problem of course is that we're the silent majority. The two hundred guys who show up to GTs aren't keeping GW afloat. It's not the loud 200 dakkanoughts that responded in that poll that they've stopped playing or buying 40k. It's the 31k members of the warhammer subreddit - the 18k on the 40k offshoot - the ones who don't even read the forums because the negativity of places like dakka harshes their buzz. It's the guys who, as the manager of my FLGS puts it, "Show up on a Saturday with a buddy, drop $500, and then we won't see them for another three months until they come back and do it again."
That's GWs target market. That's who they're catering to. That's what they want to turn the noobs into with all the "Your hobby starts here," stuff. Nobody needs a storefront to create a community. We have the internet now. That buying into a community idea works here too. Garages are just as good as a storefront - except that we have beer.
Massawyrm that is good for you that you can do that, a lot of others can not do that. I don't have the money to sink into that kind of stuff, I have 1 army of about 3,500pts, maybe 4,000pts. A vast majority of players have only 1 army or at most 2 armies but neither one is massive. The very idea of walking into a store and dropping $500 is absurd to me. I have spent around $450 on my army because I used ebay and dakka to acquire what I have not a gaming store because I can't afford $30 for 5 stormboyz.
Regardless I think your overestimating garage gamers a bit.
Most people can't, Ghaz. I certainly don't. I have an absurd amount of 40k, comparatively speaking - though not nearly as much as many of the folks I know - but that's what 10 years in the same hobby and a lot of clever trading on Bartertown does for you.
My point isn't to defend richboy syndrome, but to point out where GW has put its priorities. These people exist, there are a lot of them, and GW is giving them what they've been asking for. There's a reason pricing, rapid releases, new ally-geared armies, campaign supplements and superheavy/fortifications have gone the way they have. And it's because GW is focusing on the hobby at home rather than in store, restructuring the hobby to broaden sales across the line rather than allowing the meta to drive it. That's all I'm saying.
Makumba wrote: That maybe ok for US with its huge houses, but in some countries playing at home is out of the question, unless someone lives alone. And storing terrain is even a bigger problem.
In 5th we had more then 100players here. Now after 2 closed stores we are down to less then 30.
Online only stuff also means some people just can't get the stuff they need to play an army.
This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement.
Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
Hahaha, 'muricas? Trust me, that's far from true. Course, in Sweden everyone's on the IKEA train.
Absolutely. I can't wait until the next release because the wider variety of stuff I face the better. I get one day free to game a week and not even everything week. Do I need 10'000 points of CSM for that? Not nessissarily, but it's anathema to me to use the exact same list twice, and I love playing big games. As a single adult with a 5 year old child to take care of, I have a very limited amount of disposable income. So I can't run out and drop 500 bucks every few months, but I can structure my budget to allow me to spend my limited 'me' funds on 40k. Because this isn't a a game, it's my hobby. I have the 80% of the NiB parts bits to finish building a defiler and 2 forgefiends, because I did 4 amazing conversions for defilers/soul grinders. I ended up making one into a small Lord of Skulls. For that I needed a chimera, so I bought a basilisk because I'll be left with a giant gun to put on something when I get inspired to. The kits I used to make 4 defiler/grinders were 2 Forgefiends, a hellbrute, a daemon prince, a basilisk, and 3 defilers. I'll be able to use, eventually, every bit left in those kits and it'll probably cost about the same if not more than if I just went out and just bought the models but if the hours of designing, building and painting weren't worth at least as much to me as the playing, I would have bought one defiler kit and have been done with it.
I have a great store to play at, but it's in a 40k lull at the moment. If I didn't love the game and where it's going, i wouldn't spend my limited resources on it. But I do, so I do.
Massawyrm wrote: All due respect, brother, but it doesn't sound like you understand garage gamers at all.
No, you're just imagining this utopian ideal of "garage gamers" that has nothing to do with reality. Playing at home instead of at a store doesn't inherently make you invest tons of money in "fluff" armies and perfect gaming tables or always bring "fair" armies, it just means that you play at home. Are there people who match your ideal? Sure, but there are also "garage gamers" who buy a starter set and play on the kitchen table with cardboard boxes for terrain.
And this is especially true when you're talking about getting rid of in-store gaming in favor of garage gaming. The former in-store players aren't going to magically become your ideal "garage gamers" just because they have to play in someone's garage instead of at the local GW store. They're going to keep playing the way they have been playing, except in a different location. Or they'll just quit the game entirely. Meanwhile your ideal "garage gamers" were already playing like they do now, and GW getting rid of in-store gaming did nothing to help them.
Escalation and 7th Ed weren't about trying to force tournaments to allow Superheavies; it was about giving the garage gamers a reason to buy a few more variants of baneblade, and convincing them to pull the trigger on that Thunderhawk they've been promising to buy themselves.
And this is just plain wrong. Your ideal "garage gamer" already had reasons to buy those units because they were able to say "hey, let's use some superheavies this time" if both players were going to have fun with it. For that kind of player Escalation was just an opportunity to pay another $50 for a literal copy/paste of some units from the Apocalypse rulebook (which they probably owned already). It was only a relevant product for people who care a lot about what is "official" and "legal". Escalation was aimed at the people who play pickup games, probably in a store, and needed a book giving them official permission to use (and buy!) their Baneblades and Thunderhawks.
Massawyrm wrote: All due respect, brother, but it doesn't sound like you understand garage gamers at all. Nobody spends money on the hobby like a garage gamer. We're the guys who build our own tables, stock entire shelves with terrain and codexes (even for armies we don't play), own multiple armies and have no cap on what we *need* for those armies. Our chief enemy is shelf space. There were a series of pictures on one of the reddit subreddits yesterday in which garage gamers posted pics of their war rooms. Just glance around those pics and see what I'm talking about. We're talking about guys who own three Warhound Titans just so they can run one and make sure their buddies can each use one too so it's fair.
While excitement on the forums might encourage sales, we're not affected by its meta. Because in our garages, in our basements, we control it. No one is ever going to show up at my house with 40 scatbikes or 2++ rerollable anything. That doesn't mean lists aren't competitive. But "competitive" and ITC-hammer are very different things. With garage gamers COOL is king, and netlists aren't cool.
Are there gamers like you're talking about, the ones who buy a starter box, a few extra units and then never buy anything else? Sure. But those aren't the guys GW is catering to. Escalation and 7th Ed weren't about trying to force tournaments to allow Superheavies; it was about giving the garage gamers a reason to buy a few more variants of baneblade, and convincing them to pull the trigger on that Thunderhawk they've been promising to buy themselves.
The problem of course is that we're the silent majority. The two hundred guys who show up to GTs aren't keeping GW afloat. It's not the loud 200 dakkanoughts that responded in that poll that they've stopped playing or buying 40k. It's the 31k members of the warhammer subreddit - the 18k on the 40k offshoot - the ones who don't even read the forums because the negativity of places like dakka harshes their buzz. It's the guys who, as the manager of my FLGS puts it, "Show up on a Saturday with a buddy, drop $500, and then we won't see them for another three months until they come back and do it again."
That's GWs target market. That's who they're catering to. That's what they want to turn the noobs into with all the "Your hobby starts here," stuff. Nobody needs a storefront to create a community. We have the internet now. That buying into a community idea works here too. Garages are just as good as a storefront - except that we have beer.
+1 on what he said.
I've probably played less than 10 games of 40k in the past year, but that hasn't stopped me from purchasing models for my 2 main armies that I play (tyranids and blood angels), picking up the ork codex and the Waahhh Ghazkhul supplement so I could buy, paint, and play the Dreadmob formation (which I still haven't gotten fully painted, but I have all the models and am slowly working on it), and purchasing an airbrush and compressor so I could better my painting game.
I'm not a tournament player and all of my games are with the same handful of guys, but I still follow the hobby through listening to the podcasts, watching the battle reports, and reading the forums. My money is just as good to GW as the guy who's playing a bunch of ITC circuit games.
To the OP: Sounds like the actual problem is the area you're now in doesn't have an active player base for the FLGS to sell to. Considering how niche a hobby this is, it's understandable. I live in a super small town between two larger towns that are around 20 miles away (one to the west and the other to the north). Both have decent FLGS, but only one carries GW product. I once asked an employee at the one that didn't if they ever considered it, and he said that they had tried in the past, but it didn't take off. In contrast, the other store's owner has mentioned that there are guys that show up and buy stuff every now and again and never even come to the store to play games. Warhammer 40k has such a fragile ecosystem.
Me and my friendst play at home..more freedom and its for the most part free..also in the fact that we don't have to deal with "power gaming". We use to go to various gaming stores but most charge "fees" and make you feel obligated to purchase stuff. well 40k is really not collectable..so i'm not going to buy a box of marines everytime to keep the store owner pleased. Which leaves store owners going hmmm well i could focus on a cash cow like magic the gathering or a game where once you have enough stuff, consumers don't really buy much more. Another semi big issue with warhammer or GW products in general is the large cost attached to it, its a double edged sword where for the most part it keeps the gaming population adults. But it also drives away the curious teenage crowd thats looking for a game with some complexity(and cool figs).
I'm not sure where the sterotype that americans have giant gaming basements, hell we use to have a big old table with terrain and all that stuff in a small apartment bedroom.
Raven Cowl wrote: the Signless is absolutely correct. My FLGS is currently running an Escalation League/Narrative Campaign that is going swimmingly smoothly.
Except that he's wrong when he suggested I thought this was the ONLY way storefront metas work. It's just the main focus of most storefront metas. Great FLGSs that know their business do this sort of thing and know how to support the scene while promoting sales. (Escalation is AMAZING for that.) But GW actually attempted this during their last gasp of store support with the LUCKY 13's campaign back in '08. It was a failure with abysmal attendance - even in large cities - and hence never repeated. So GW leaves that up to the stores themselves now.
GW does not know how to play their own game, nor do they care about it. Its about buying miniatures to them. People who actually game understand how gamers think and specifically how 40k works, do this much better. Also, a storefront meta is dependent upon the various personalities that attend the store. A couple nobs have soured entire games for me to the point I rarely play them. It is the pblic nature of an FLGS that is sometimes its own downfall.
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
Don't get me wrong, I've been opposed to dumping my 40k for quite some time (been playing for over 20 years), but relocating to a new gaming scene that focuses on other games has honestly made me look at 40k in a new light. I played 2 games yesterday, one goofy scenario game against an old friend of mine, and a pickup game against the newest flavor of the month Eldar cheeselist.
Game 1 was decided on the first turn when my opponent failed to seize the initiative (and, in his defense, he had a 75% chance of doing so account for scenario rules and special rules for his units). He lost over half of his army on the first turn. Bear in mind that I was playing a Renegade IG mashup with no FW or anything like that.
Game 2 was the stupidest game of keep-away I've played in my entire life, and were we not playing The Relic it would have been a one-sided stompfest. The game kicked off with the Wraithknight alt-ctrl-deleting a Russ, because str. D in regular 40k is slowed. The rest consisted of my Spawn handing off the relic to a bunch of cultists in cover, and plinking away at Scatterbikes behind AV14 hulls, praying to cause a casualty so they run off the table, and watching my opponent basically get the equivalent of 2-3 movement phases. Ultimately I won on secondaries, but it was ludicrously boring. Where is the fething narrative again, when your opponent is spamming 27ppm units that spray 4 shots, can option to cross the entire board in a turn (move, turbo, assault move), or move essentially unlimited times per turn (Warp Spiders relocating IN YOUR SHOOTING PHASE not once, but every time you shoot at them). It's not sour grapes, after all I won, but I have literally zero desire to play against the new Eldar. In a casual scene, I really don't want to be the guy who has the conversation, "Yeah sure I'll play. Oh, you play Eldar? Nevermind, I don't want to play anymore." But that's how it goes.
Tl;dr: The game simply sucks these days and thank heavens my local gaming group plays Infinity. Better models, better rules, better game, end of story. If you don't agree on the sorry state of 40k, it's because you haven't played enough games in other systems, or are otherwise incapable of comparing other games on objective criteria.
Makumba wrote: That maybe ok for US with its huge houses, but in some countries playing at home is out of the question, unless someone lives alone. And storing terrain is even a bigger problem.
Then Get creative.
Back home, one of my gaming buddies played in his room. He had enough space for his bed, workbench, 4 by 4 board for gaming as well as storing several old 40k armies, infinity and warmahordes armies. Terrain. And books. By the bucketload. And it was an average 3 or 4 metre square room. Über geek, to be fair, but it worked for him.
Several other gaming buddies had rooms in shared houses and all managed to have space to store armies, store terrain etc in their rooms as well as having a 6 by 4 board that they chucked onto the kitchen table to game, and it was not a big house by any stretch of the imagination - thry were just creative with the space.
Here in scotland, two of my gaming buddies do tge same and just have boards thst they can set up in their living room. One lives alone, one doesn't. My partner and I just bought a flat. I'll be able to have my own board there if I want to and storing it won't be 'out of the question'.
Unless you live in A hobbit hole makumba, there is no reason thst you can't play at home.
Online only stuff also means some people just can't get the stuff they need to play an army.
This again? Really? I genuinely wonder if you ever do any research. Credit/debit cards or things like paypal are easy to get and use, even in the former eastern bloc. I was selling some trollbloods stuff to a guy in Romania, and he used paypal, so don't go telling me it can't be done.
The idea that home-play is ever going to be as successful at generating a playerbase as opposed to a storefront/club is rather silly. I've played this game in multiple states and probably a dozen different metro areas. Now, this is largely up and down the US west coast, other places may differ, but in my experience, while yes, there are always the people who play from home, but they're typically a small minority, and the majority of them don't typically play that often.
In addition to the extra cost of buying and storing terrain or just an army, there's the space considerations (sure most people have a table, not everyone has a 6x4" table), and playing at home has it's own issues. The significant other or roommates may not want other people over like that, players themselves don't necessarily want people over, other people often don't want to go to another person's home to play, there may just not be sufficient space (parking is often an issue), there may be little kids running about interfering with stuff. Tons of people go out to play 40k specifically to *go out*.
You generally can't get anything near the variety of army and player variety that you do from a store or club, most people that just play at home have like one or two friends the play maybe 5-10 games a year (or if they're getting lots of games in, it's against the same couple of opponents over and over).
The stores and clubs are what builds player communities, and even those that do often play at home, typically meet such opponents through the store/club. Such places are also the only real exposure many will ever have to the actual game and miniatures.
Are there garage gamers that spend obscene gobs of money? Sure. There are typically more store/club players however that spend just as much, they just spend it on different stuff. Why buy terrain when you can buy a 2nd or 3rd army?
Stores dropping GW product is a huge deal, it typically signifies that the player community has died, not that they're simply playing from home.
Maybe they play elsewhere?cby your postings your group sounds rather extreme in how thry approach the game,
I live in fairly large city, I could technicly travel by train to the next big city, but it would take me 5-6 hours and then another 5-6 back.
Back home, one of my gaming buddies played in his room. He had enough space for his bed, workbench, 4 by 4 board for gaming as well as storing several old 40k armies, infinity and warmahordes armies. Terrain. And books. By the bucketload. And it was an average 3 or 4 metre square room. Über geek, to be fair, but it worked for him.
I share my room with my brother. If I invite someone home, he has to get out, because there isn't enough space in the room. And I can't have people in when he has training. To give an example of how good housing is here. 48% of all under 35year old still live with their parants, and not because they want to.
My partner and I just bought a flat
You have no idea how alien this sounds to me.
This again? Really? I genuinely wonder if you ever do any research. Credit/debit cards or things like paypal are easy to get and use, even in the former eastern bloc. I was selling some trollbloods stuff to a guy in Romania, and he used paypal, so don't go telling me it can't be done.
Sigh. And here I go again. To get a credit card you need a bank account, to get a bank account you need steady income and it can't even be money transfered from your parents account.You can have a debit card, if your 17+ and either have work or your parents have an account at the bank and they are more or less in full control on what your spending the money on.
Makumba wrote: Sigh. And here I go again. To get a credit card you need a bank account, to get a bank account you need steady income and it can't even be money transfered from your parents account.You can have a debit card, if your 17+ and either have work or your parents have an account at the bank and they are more or less in full control on what your spending the money on.
Why is getting a debit card so hard? The bank isn't giving you any credit, they're just giving you the ability to access money you have deposited at that bank with a piece of plastic instead of withdrawing paper money. At least in the US there's no job requirement, no minimum income, etc, nor is there any reason why there should be. As long as you're 18+ (IOW, old enough to sign your own paperwork) you can open an account and get a debit card in 15 minutes at most.
Obviously none of this applies to credit cards, which have much stricter requirements for good reasons, but you don't need credit to buy stuff online.
Crimson Heretic wrote: Me and my friendst play at home..more freedom and its for the most part free..also in the fact that we don't have to deal with "power gaming". We use to go to various gaming stores but most charge "fees" and make you feel obligated to purchase stuff. well 40k is really not collectable..so i'm not going to buy a box of marines everytime to keep the store owner pleased. Which leaves store owners going hmmm well i could focus on a cash cow like magic the gathering or a game where once you have enough stuff, consumers don't really buy much more. Another semi big issue with warhammer or GW products in general is the large cost attached to it, its a double edged sword where for the most part it keeps the gaming population adults. But it also drives away the curious teenage crowd thats looking for a game with some complexity(and cool figs).
I'm not sure where the sterotype that americans have giant gaming basements, hell we use to have a big old table with terrain and all that stuff in a small apartment bedroom.
My friends and I do the same. There are many motivating factors, like being able to safely store your models, not having to transport terrain, and not having to pay corner store prices for food and drink.
Also, as has been stated many, many times, 40k is more enjoyable for most between a group of friends rather than in a pickup environment. While it's possible to have hood tournaments, where everyone has the same expectations, I think 40k often lends itself to poor pickup games. I should add that while other games might have better pickup experiences, they are still better played amongst friends, IMO.
Personally, for the "pickup game with stranger" experience, I find an anonymous person on the other side of the Internet on a PC game superior.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I disagree that playing out of the store is not good for community building. In my youth, we had a group that played 1 day at the university and 1 day at a home every week, and we were 50+ in numbers, with 20 or so showing up any given day.
Our current playgroup actually descended from that, and although we are but 8 (with occasional visitors and guests), this is by choice -- we could double the number of regulars easily if this was our choice. But we're pretty picky, and we all have a lot less gaming time now, mostly because we're older and have families.
I think that gaming amongst friends at a home is just way better. Also, I don't subscribe to this whole thing about needing a gigantic house to play war games. Yeah, if you live at hone with your parents, it may be an issue. But heck, I've played 40k in ny very first (very small) downtown rental appartment. Just pop a folding table, and boom.
Blacksails wrote: Regardless of the why GW does what it does, do you feel that it's a good direction for the game?
I honestly don't know. I can say that I'm having more fun in 7th than I ever did in 5th or 6th, and I've spent more on the game in the last 6 months than in the entirety of 6th. They're catering to me and my friends in ways only Forgeworld did before, which is great considering that FW has become all Horus Heresy all the time. But I have a lot of friends that are tourney players, and they got boned pretty hard by this change. I hate watching the scenes die, hate seeing all the anger and vitriol on the forums by jilted players. But I also understand that sometimes to create, you have to destroy. And we won't know if this slash and burn of the old model will pay off in the longrun or if 40k will be limping to its grave D&D 4e style before having to "reinvent" itself by going back to the old model.
I know there are a lot of armchair CEOs on Dakka that are certain they know what's going to happen, but the truth is our hobby is in a weird place and none of us know. I have my fingers crossed that this works out and I don't end up as another oldhammer player bitterly telling anyone who will listen that 7th is THE BEST GAME EVER and GW screwed the whole thing up by changing everything. But that very well might happen.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Vaktathi wrote: The idea that home-play is ever going to be as successful at generating a playerbase as opposed to a storefront/club is rather silly. I've played this game in multiple states and probably a dozen different metro areas. Now, this is largely up and down the US west coast, other places may differ, but in my experience, while yes, there are always the people who play from home, but they're typically a small minority, and the majority of them don't typically play that often.
Stores dropping GW product is a huge deal, it typically signifies that the player community has died, not that they're simply playing from home.
But none of that is true. I've personally gotten a dozen friends into 40k from home because I love playing it, I love my friends, and invariably when one of them walks into my office and sees my shelves they ask about it and I offer to teach them. I build them a starter army and we knock back a few beers in the garage having a great time. I'm running a summer league out of my garage 10 strong and people organize painting parties and are starting to really get into it. 40k has always built its business on word of mouth. The idea that this word of mouth needs to come from a storefront is what GW figured it didn't need to foster anymore. I'm not against storefront gaming - I had years of fun doing it. I was blessed with going to the same store as the BoLS guys, and had some amazing times with them. But being able to play on my own schedule, drink, swear, play with whatever armies I wanted to without getting cross-eyed looks, and not have someone hovering over my table waiting to take it for their next game drove me to play at home.
Like any industry, the visible, vocal consumers are always just the tip of the iceberg. GW doesn't have the crazy sales numbers they do because of gaming clubs. They have it because there are so, so many players that you never see and don't even know exist. Austin has about 40 regular players on the scene. But they're not the reason our FLGS is picked clean of stuff by Sunday night after their Friday restock.
The conceit that people playing in stores is the only viable method of spreading word of mouth is wrong headed. Is it great advertising? Sure.It works. Clearly not enough for GW to believe it needs to support it anymore, but it DOES work. Though a friend saying "Hey, you want to come over and learn 40K," is 100x more potent.
But stores ceasing to carry 40k isn't a sign of a dying player base. It's a sign that too many folks are buying their stuff online for a 20% discount or getting stuff second hand on ebay. That's what's killing FLGSs, and it has been for 10 years. We have an UBER successful FLGS here in Austin called THE DRAGON'S LAIR. Started 20 years ago out of the owner's house and is now the second largest comic book and game store in the country (second only to Mile High Comics). The reason they thrived is they stopped catering specifically to gamers, hire as many women as they can, keep a clean, brightly lit store, and are geared toward selling games to soccer moms for their kids. They know their hardcore gamers will often chase down deals online, so instead they focus on their walk-in customers. Their rival, BATTLEFORGE GAMES, closed up a few years in because they did just the opposite. It was a 40k centric store that built an amazing community, ran tournaments weekly, had two 40k nights, but you could always walk in and get a game. They were awesome. But they didn't make any money because they couldn't compete with 20% off retailers.And walk-in customers always felt like they'd walked into some secret club where they weren't welcome. And that's what did them in. The idea that GW is choking out game stores is what's silly. The changing nature of niche commerce is what's killing them.
I honestly don't know. I can say that I'm having more fun in 7th than I ever did in 5th or 6th, and I've spent more on the game in the last 6 months than in the entirety of 6th. They're catering to me and my friends in ways only Forgeworld did before, which is great considering that FW has become all Horus Heresy all the time. But I have a lot of friends that are tourney players, and they got boned pretty hard by this change. I hate watching the scenes die, hate seeing all the anger and vitriol on the forums by jilted players. But I also understand that sometimes to create, you have to destroy. And we won't know if this slash and burn of the old model will pay off in the longrun or if 40k will be limping to its grave D&D 4e style before having to "reinvent" itself by going back to the old model.
I know there are a lot of armchair CEOs on Dakka that are certain they know what's going to happen, but the truth is our hobby is in a weird place and none of us know. I have my fingers crossed that this works out and I don't end up as another oldhammer player bitterly telling anyone who will listen that 7th is THE BEST GAME EVER and GW screwed the whole thing up by changing everything. But that very well might happen.
I don't think in this particular case you have to destroy in order to create. Obviously we'll see how it pays out for GW, and I'm glad you're having fun, but I haven't spent a dime in years on GW, and only a decreased amount on a few books from FW (knowing full well it still goes to GW, but still).
I'm hoping GW at least makes something of quality, regardless of how I feel personally about every little change. Basic things like writing formations that actually function, or entire codices that don't lose automatically on turn 1. You know, proof reading and play testing. My biggest complaints are in the rules quality and the price/value. Fix one of those things and I'll be substantially less bitter. Fix both, and I may have some positives to say about GW.
Massawyrm wrote:But stores ceasing to carry 40k isn't a sign of a dying player base. It's a sign that too many folks are buying their stuff online for a 20% discount or getting stuff second hand on ebay.
This is actually very true. In my area, there are three successful stores. The most expensive sells at 10%-20% discount depending on how much stuff you buy, but has TONS of inventory of all sorts of exotic, hobby-related product, from Xuron to Tamiya to Revell, all of the major brands of paint, to 40k/PP/etc, and RPGs and boardgames. The next sells at about 18%+ discount from sticker on everything, and has a lot of gaming space. The last sells product at 20% for walkins, and up to 30-32% for high volume buyers, but really just does 40k, PP, and CCGs. Almost every other store with 40k is either very small or has gone out of business.
IMO, the trick to a successful FLGS in selling any of the miniature wargames is heavy discounts, and lots of inventory, because if you don't, people will go buy it for 20%+ on the Internet, not to mention tax-free (because it will probably be out-of-state/province).
It doesn't really matter if it's 40k or WMH or DUST. If your prices aren't good in a relative sense, a lot of people will buy it online, whether you provide a gaming space or not. Kinda sucks, to be honest, because the cost of operating a brick and mortar is high, and people aren't willing to pay a premium to support it.
Blacksails wrote:I'm hoping GW at least makes something of quality, regardless of how I feel personally about every little change. Basic things like writing formations that actually function, or entire codices that don't lose automatically on turn 1. You know, proof reading and play testing. My biggest complaints are in the rules quality and the price/value. Fix one of those things and I'll be substantially less bitter. Fix both, and I may have some positives to say about GW.
I don't think I've ever found a time that 40k has been as balanced (internally and externally) as it has been since the 2015+ codex releases, with each other. Our group has the luxury of having tons of models that we've collected/painted over decades, so we're certainly not a good litmus test of "average players", but we've tried a lot of the different things that you can do with all the codex and formation releases since Necron, and I'm personally quite happy. With the exception of Harlequins (unless you ally Eldar), every book feels eminently playable, and you're definitely not locked in to monobuild situations (if you want to be competitive). The formations and such also make for fantastic scenario-based play, and finally allow players to combine fluff and effectiveness. Though this isn't for everyone, I understand.
I'm really hoping that GW gives every faction the "Necron treatment". Now granted, the power levels aren't identical, and you still get lopsided battles, and obviously, not every list is made equal. But, playing TAC lists, we haven't had any auto-wins, and even the lopsided battles are close enough that they could go either way; plus, not every list we play is optimized to the hilt.
With respect to the price for models, I don't think GW will be making you happy any time soon, unless it's with Sigmar/Fantasy. I honestly don't think that, at least in the perceivable future, 40k will be more affordable, and I don't think there will ever be a time when 40k is generally much cheaper (or more expensive) than WMH on a price-per-model basis, and 40k players as we know them today will always be looking with games with more models. I think both PP and GW eye each other in terms of model prices, and even though they're not directly competing on price, they consider their competition in terms of how high they can get away with raising their prices.
I think there is a possibility, however, that eventually, 40k rules could get cheaper. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that one day we have a different model for rules, like separation of fluff and lists; particularly, if GW's formula isn't working, and 40k sales decline. If 40k sales don't decline, I think the current mechanism of expensive books on a cycle of 2-3 years or so will continue.
+1 to everything Massawyrm said, from the garage aspect (what I've been doing since the end of 2nd ed 40k), to the silent majority, to feeling like some LGSs are a gaming club's private space, etc. And I've done GW Grand Tourneys from the late 90s through to Adepticon.
I also hoard 40k minis 'just in case' from many armies, like a squirrel hoards nuts before winter. My basement looks like a decently stocked LGS with all the shrinkwrapped product. A friend of mine has every.single.forgeworld.book ever produced, every terrain piece GW ever made, many apoc sized armies, etc.
I think Wyrm is correct that people with lots of disposable income and little access to information (or desire to seek it out) are Games Workshop's ideal customers. The impression that I get from reading about GW, though, is that they have no idea why their models sell so well or who is buying them. And that they're not just wilfully ignorant, but proudly ignorant about these things, to the point of doing no market research and making hiring decisions based on who will question their assumptions the least.
With that in mind, I think their de-emphasizing of the "storefront meta" is because they are blaming their line retail clerks and store managers for everything that goes wrong with their business, and terminating their jobs Imperial Commissar style. Except with fewer laspistols. That's why they bought the multi-million pound website; it's cheaper and less messy for them to run than people are, and it won't talk back or question them.
WRT having your own gaming table, I'm not sure it's uniquely American to have a ridiculous amount of living space. The hobby started in the UK, after all. I have noticed, however, the American tendency to blame other people for their circumstances.
Well I do have a garage and could organise a gaming room any time (it's what my wife insits on lol) but local shop dying was a blow anyway. It's not like I'm going to host a tourney or invite every random nerd I had 3 games with. We're only a few guys now and the need to synchronise doesnt help either, before you could just go to the shop alone if you had time and not look at others. Limited time brings hard choices too, I mean I hate Star Wars but Armada is times more tactical than 40k and I love to play it, there are chess boardgames etc. 40k very much suffered when it went underground, at least in my case.
Cruentus wrote: +1 to everything Massawyrm said, from the garage aspect (what I've been doing since the end of 2nd ed 40k), to the silent majority, to feeling like some LGSs are a gaming club's private space, etc. And I've done GW Grand Tourneys from the late 90s through to Adepticon.
I also hoard 40k minis 'just in case' from many armies, like a squirrel hoards nuts before winter. My basement looks like a decently stocked LGS with all the shrinkwrapped product. A friend of mine has every.single.forgeworld.book ever produced, every terrain piece GW ever made, many apoc sized armies, etc.
I read that originally as your friend having every single forgeworld MODEL. I'm still jealous!
Other than the realm of battle boards (I only own Sector Imperialis), I own about 5x of most of the terrain pieces, because I dream of building a ginormous castle. I can definitely understand the squirrelling aspect
This is what I squirreled away LAST YEAR (added to horde, sorted out this spring) - BNIB items things only, and it's not like I don't paint stuff
You can see there's a pretty good variety there, from a box of Eldar Fire Dragons to Druthu, to Necron overlord and a Bloodthirster My basement is entirely finished and almost entirely dedicated to wargaming for me & my buddies.
If I were a dragon, I would be keeping piles of plastic and resin miniatures warm... screw the gold!
Jewelfox wrote: I think Wyrm is correct that people with lots of disposable income and little access to information (or desire to seek it out) are Games Workshop's ideal customers. The impression that I get from reading about GW, though, is that they have no idea why their models sell so well or who is buying them. And that they're not just wilfully ignorant, but proudly ignorant about these things, to the point of doing no market research and making hiring decisions based on who will question their assumptions the least.
GW literally thinks it's a toy company, like Hasbro except more "premium" apparently, and that it's core demographic are 12-year-old boys. Explains the quality of some of their sculpts and how toy-like everything looks in general, the lack of effort put into the rules and the stupid-ass naming conventions for a lot of newer units.
Kirby doesn't seem to understand much about the modeling or gaming hobbies, like a lot of people who don't "get it" he looks at it all and sees a bunch of toys. He probably thinks all the adults that find their way into their shops and aren't buying for their children are just fething weirdos who are into something they shouldn't be, like bronies. Considering the state of 40k today I kinda wonder if maybe he isn't right, because 40k makes me feel awkward and like I'm too old to be playing it anymore...like playing with green army men in the sand box, except these army men cost more than your first car and the "rules" are somehow less structured.
Talys wrote: I don't think I've ever found a time that 40k has been as balanced (internally and externally) as it has been since the 2015+ codex releases, with each other.
Give it a couple months until the design paradigm shifts once again, then we'll see where your balance is.
Purifier wrote: This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement.
Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
You don't really need that much space. A 6x4 table can be built in sections and stored against the wall in a closet and takes up very little space. Then when you want to play you can put it on top of your kitchen table. For terrain storage you just need a small bookshelf, which probably takes up less space than models/paint/etc. It's not an awesome dedicated gaming space, but most people should be able to play 40k at home if they really want to.
Massawyrm wrote: All due respect, brother, but it doesn't sound like you understand garage gamers at all. Nobody spends money on the hobby like a garage gamer. We're the guys who build our own tables, stock entire shelves with terrain and codexes (even for armies we don't play), own multiple armies and have no cap on what we *need* for those armies. Our chief enemy is shelf space. There were a series of pictures on one of the reddit subreddits yesterday in which garage gamers posted pics of their war rooms. Just glance around those pics and see what I'm talking about. We're talking about guys who own three Warhound Titans just so they can run one and make sure their buddies can each use one too so it's fair.
You are making a seriously blanket statement there about garage gamers that isn't true. In my experience for every 1 lunatic like you describe, of which I am also one, there are another 4-5 people playing with that person, also as garage players, who range from having a couple newish purchases in the last year or so to others that haven't purchased a thing from GW in more than a decade and feel no draw to do so. Those who buy nothing as garage players, if regularly playing in a store instead, would be making some purchases here and there because most of us like to spend money in a store we regularly play games in. Without an in store model GW makes zero money off of those players, and will never make another cent from them. The lunatics spend that kind of money whether they play at home or they play in a local store, so it has nothing really do with them being garage players and everything to do with them being inclined to overspend on the game and doing so.
My kids are getting older so I had split my basement in half so they have a "kid cave" for the toys and console games and stuff rather than them taking over our living room and destroying it.
Now I am out of room for my fold-out Ping-Pong table I used for wargaming. I used to host so now I depend on visiting my friends and whatever they can fit in or the local FLGS. Thank goodness they started carrying GW again.
Cruentus wrote: +1 to everything Massawyrm said, from the garage aspect (what I've been doing since the end of 2nd ed 40k), to the silent majority, to feeling like some LGSs are a gaming club's private space, etc. And I've done GW Grand Tourneys from the late 90s through to Adepticon.
I also hoard 40k minis 'just in case' from many armies, like a squirrel hoards nuts before winter. My basement looks like a decently stocked LGS with all the shrinkwrapped product. A friend of mine has every.single.forgeworld.book ever produced, every terrain piece GW ever made, many apoc sized armies, etc.
I read that originally as your friend having every single forgeworld MODEL. I'm still jealous!
Other than the realm of battle boards (I only own Sector Imperialis), I own about 5x of most of the terrain pieces, because I dream of building a ginormous castle. I can definitely understand the squirrelling aspect
This is what I squirreled away LAST YEAR (added to horde, sorted out this spring) - BNIB items things only, and it's not like I don't paint stuff
You can see there's a pretty good variety there, from a box of Eldar Fire Dragons to Druthu, to Necron overlord and a Bloodthirster My basement is entirely finished and almost entirely dedicated to wargaming for me & my buddies.
If I were a dragon, I would be keeping piles of plastic and resin miniatures warm... screw the gold!
Not to give you ideas, but with enough superheavies and 40k terrain you can kitbash an Emperor Titan. I mean, what's 30 boxes more in the grand scheme of things?
not couting kitchen and toilet the flat on your pic is the size of an avarge home here. Now imagine 3-4 people living there, with beds, work room for children and parents. There would be no place to pop floding table.
Why is getting a debit card so hard? The bank isn't giving you any credit, they're just giving you the ability to access money you have deposited at that bank with a piece of plastic instead of withdrawing paper money. At least in the US there's no job requirement, no minimum income, etc, nor is there any reason why there should be. As long as you're 18+ (IOW, old enough to sign your own paperwork) you can open an account and get a debit card in 15 minutes at most.
Because there is a good chance they will never see the money back, as a lot of young people go to UK or Norway and are gone. And here there are many requirments you never heard of. Do you know what an official living place is? If you don't have it, you count as homeless, even if your renting a flat. And guess what you can't get with the OLP, ID, credit card, can't have cable, and it gets better. You won't get a place at school, but your still under the have to go to school till 18law, so your parents will be persecuted for you not going to, and you can't because you don't have an OLP. Banks always check your OLP, so they know if you live in an old part of town or if you live in one of those new ones. And guess who gets a no, if he asks for credit? and the 15min lol. Officials here are scared that if something happens they will lose their job, so a long time ago, in fact in communist times, they wrote the law in a such a way that there are always 2 or more offcials deciding on something. So if you for example want to get an ID, because your 18, you have to go to 3 different clerks in 3 different places, who all work at the same time, so you will never get to do a thing in a single day. Well for normal people of course, if your important then the ID is already waiting for you when you come with papers. Do you know how long it takes to officialy be allowed to work and pay taxs, working without paying is of course illegal, 4 months minimum and the clerks can stretch it to 6 months, because , prepare yourself, they have 30 days to give an anwser to any question. And if they find something wrong in the papers your brought , and it can be something like in their opinion crooked stamp, the whole thing resets.
And before you ask if it is the same in non goverment owned places, I tell you it is the same.
I really don't get the main point of the focus on garage gamers comments by Massawyrm. I would think that garage gamers would be least impacted by changes to rules and GWs current marketing ideas whatever they happen to be. Massawyrm even acknowledges that his meta limits what people can use, so the argument that store metas are limiting is meaningless. If I were playing with a garage group, flyers and superheavies would be out because I don't like them and have no interest in playing against them. In a store meta I may be forced to buy them in order to effectively compete. Those in a store meta can be more easily forced into buying stuff they really don't want by the ever changing rule set.
In a garage meta on the other hand it should be easy to homebrew rules that are significant departures from whatever GW is currently pushing so when it swings from focus on CC to shooting then back again, no need to keep changing armies. If you don't like the changes just stick with the rules you like and the models you like. Skip entire editions or just pick and choose from rules and codexes from different editions that your group likes.
Basically the garage gamer playing with a group of friends with a similar attitude about the game can buy what they want and shape the rules to their interest. The store gamer on the other hand is more easily forced to do what GW wants because they have to keep up with the current stuff. I'd really like model x, but the rules suck so I can't get it. Instead I have to buy model y which I don' t like at all or I can't be competitive. At that point maybe it is time to give up the game since you can't play it as you like.
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a large enough pool of like minded individuals who can put together a cohesive, diverse garage group. Why would GW willingly give up on those potential customers to cater to a group that doesn't need to be catered to since they can and I'm sure do mold the game to their interests? All you need to do to keep those people happy is keep coming up with new models and better casts.
Makumba wrote: Because there is a good chance they will never see the money back, as a lot of young people go to UK or Norway and are gone.
What? That doesn't even make any sense. I don't think you understand how a debit card works. You deposit cash in the bank, and your debit card allows you to spend that cash and only that cash. It doesn't allow you to spend any money that you haven't already given to the bank. If you try to spend more money than you've already given the bank the transaction is declined. So if you leave the country the bank still has your money (at least until you spend it somewhere else). It's impossible to have a situation where the bank has loaned you money and you don't repay it.
As for the rest, I think the obvious conclusion here is that your country has serious problems and I'm really glad I don't live there. But none of that applies to the vast majority of GW's customers and potential customers.
your country has serious problems and I'm really glad I don't live there.
Look Who's Talking Now!
Starring John Travolta and an infant...
As a serious note, maybe don't try to tell people in a different country how their system works? That's a pretty stupid thing to do. For someone with such sage wisdom regarding the current and potential markets of yet another different nations business, you sure are capable of some truly wondrous moments.
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
No, they don't realize that. They don't know how the game is played outside of GWHQ and frankly, they couldn't care.
On the plus side, you can explore and find all the other amazing games out there.
assuming his local gaming shop isn't like one of mine (I have 3 gaming shops) where the only thing they sell is CCGs and a unwanted copy of the 4th edition D&D PHB
Oh my word. That's terrible. Come on down to Utah, there's like a hobby store every five miles.
Gwaihirsbrother wrote: I really don't get the main point of the focus on garage gamers comments by Massawyrm.
The original point was that 40K 7E and rules light AoS cater perfectly to the garage gamer, who will buy GW products without obsessing about how tight the rules are, or how balanced each new release is for competitive play, or needing an expensive storefront to play in.
In my experience they are also more heavily invested in the game. The LGS is interested in selling you 40K, but they also run MTG, X-Wing, Dicemasters, and Heroclix leagues as well. The average local LGS player is invested in 2-3 games, and not as focussed on GW.
Massawyrm wrote: All due respect, brother, but it doesn't sound like you understand garage gamers at all. Nobody spends money on the hobby like a garage gamer. We're the guys who build our own tables, stock entire shelves with terrain and codexes (even for armies we don't play), own multiple armies and have no cap on what we *need* for those armies. Our chief enemy is shelf space. There were a series of pictures on one of the reddit subreddits yesterday in which garage gamers posted pics of their war rooms. Just glance around those pics and see what I'm talking about. We're talking about guys who own three Warhound Titans just so they can run one and make sure their buddies can each use one too so it's fair.
While excitement on the forums might encourage sales, we're not affected by its meta. Because in our garages, in our basements, we control it. No one is ever going to show up at my house with 40 scatbikes or 2++ rerollable anything. That doesn't mean lists aren't competitive. But "competitive" and ITC-hammer are very different things. With garage gamers COOL is king, and netlists aren't cool.
Are there gamers like you're talking about, the ones who buy a starter box, a few extra units and then never buy anything else? Sure. But those aren't the guys GW is catering to. Escalation and 7th Ed weren't about trying to force tournaments to allow Superheavies; it was about giving the garage gamers a reason to buy a few more variants of baneblade, and convincing them to pull the trigger on that Thunderhawk they've been promising to buy themselves.
The problem of course is that we're the silent majority. The two hundred guys who show up to GTs aren't keeping GW afloat. It's not the loud 200 dakkanoughts that responded in that poll that they've stopped playing or buying 40k. It's the 31k members of the warhammer subreddit - the 18k on the 40k offshoot - the ones who don't even read the forums because the negativity of places like dakka harshes their buzz. It's the guys who, as the manager of my FLGS puts it, "Show up on a Saturday with a buddy, drop $500, and then we won't see them for another three months until they come back and do it again."
That's GWs target market. That's who they're catering to. That's what they want to turn the noobs into with all the "Your hobby starts here," stuff. Nobody needs a storefront to create a community. We have the internet now. That buying into a community idea works here too. Garages are just as good as a storefront - except that we have beer.
While the above is a great speech worthy of Ramsey Bolton, I can't help but feel that you might get conked on the back of the head yet again by GW and their annual report. If GW is indeed catering to these incredible paragon of the hobby that you describe as garage gamers, it simply hasn't been working. Unit sales are down and so are profits. We'll see in another month if cranking the release schedule past ludicrous into plaid like they've done over the past 6 months has helped, hindered, or not affected the year end numbers.
Gwaihirsbrother wrote: I really don't get the main point of the focus on garage gamers comments by Massawyrm.
The main point is this:
Bill and Joe are garage gamers who play at Bill's house. Bill *loves* Dark Eldar and refuses to play anything else. He doesn't care what the internet says about his codex, DE are AWESOME. Joe likes Space Marines. As Bill gets better at cleaning Joe's clock, Joe starts thinking about picking up new models to combat his new DE overlords. He needs something speedy with AP4/AP5 weapons or that is great at withstanding poison shots. Up the street, unbeknownst to them, are Dave and Pat, another pair of garage gamers. They bought Deathstorm and are really digging this 40k thing. Dave is playing Tyranids and loves big bugs. Pat, on the other hand, is finding that the Blood Angels aren't cutting it as their armies expand. He decides to pick up a small ally army. Everyone is talking about Eldar on the forums, so he decides to give them a shot, adding a Windrider Battlehost formation to his BA. Now he's got Dave on the run, so Dave is looking for even bigger bugs. Across town is Steve, Jake and Ollie. Steve is a crazy obsessed garage gamer with LoW choices for armies he doesn't even own just in case one of his friends comes over playing them. Steve bought a Warhound and reuses to play a game without it. Jake and Ollie don't care because Steve will always lend them a Thunderhawk or Stompa whenever they want to run one. Steve plays IoM, Jake Plays CSM, and Ollie plays whatever the new hotness of the month is. Their meta is constantly evolving, with the only static constant being that GD Warhound. Every week these guys try to out do each other with netlists or crazy ally combinations.
Each of these groups buys according to their tastes and the meta inside their garage or basement.
But say all of these guys played at the same store instead. At first their meta is wide, varied, and pretty interesting. But over time their purchases revolve around that meta. Killing a warhound becomes something everyone has to think about, because if they don't, they either get trounced or say goodbye to Steve, because he won't play without it. Now the meta has a lot of anti-tank. All of a sudden vehicles are a hindrance, so most everyone lays off using them. Bill loves his Dark Eldar, but is getting whipped solidly by most everyone else and isn't having much fun anymore, so he opts for one of the newer top tier armies. He goes with Eldar as Dave does well with them (he's dropped BA entirely.) They're both running Wraithknights and scatbikes now because it does better against the current meta. There's a lot of 3+ armor running around now, so the meta adapts to that. After a while, most everyone is running lists with a lot of anti-armor and ap3 weapons/units.
While all of these guys still buy the same amount of GW in the store meta as they would have in their garage metas, their unit selection and purchases have become more homogeneous. GW is making the exact same money, but on a smaller variety of kits. The store can't sell DE anymore, because none of their players play it, and tanks tend to collect dust as they just aren't good in the meta. Now extrapolate that to a much larger level, and start talking about a nation of stores with some isolated metas breaking from the pack, but most of the bigger ones driven by the national GT meta. Add to that the issue with the ITC and its direct influence on sales, and you begin to understand why GW wants to move away from that model.
The metas drive sales. The wider and more diverse the metas, the wider and more diverse the sales are from the line - even when they're making the same money. Even product distribution is GWs optimal goal. They want product moving steadily through their warehouse, not sitting unsold in it.
How they're *appealing* to garage gamers is by incorporating rules that aren't conducive to open store play. Even their terrain kits all come with rules in the rulebook now, each providing special advantages, encouraging garage gamers to buy them. Could we do this before? Sure. And we did. But now it's official. If I buy a Sanctum Imperialis and deploy my troops in it, I get Adamantium Will and Night Vision FOR FREE. And it's not cheating broken rules! It's in the book! [Insert sound of Peregrine's *Ahem* here.] When was the last time anyone in your store used the terrain rules in a game, or even allowed you to bring your own terrain kits for a possible advantage? "Well, you can do all that at home," which is ostensibly what GW is telling us all.
So there it is. My point is GW wants us to play at home because we can use all of our cool toys there and they can sell us a much more diverse selection of their models.
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MWHistorian wrote: How does Massawyrm know about other garage playing groups? Is there like an organization for them? Kinda contradictory there.
We live in a digital age. We're not cavemen. Here in TX we have a forum for gamers to connect, trade and set up games. I talk about 40k in a number of forums and on reddit with other guys who play in their houses. I still chat with all the guys at the store about how things are going, what's going on in the meta and set up the occasional game with one of them. It's not about isolation or blowing off the community, it's just a change in location of where you play.
And down the street are Alice and Bob, who play the game exactly the way they would play it in a store, except they play in Alice's garage. They have a dozen friends who do the same. Or maybe Alice and Bob each buy a starter set, realize that playing each other over and over again is boring, and abandon the game because there's no store community to provide them with more opponents. See how much fun it is to make up hypothetical people that conveniently fit our assumptions?
GW is making the exact same money, but on a smaller variety of kits.
Who cares? Total profit is what matters, not some arbitrary "unit diversity" quota.
They want product moving steadily through their warehouse, not sitting unsold in it.
If GW has significant amounts of unsold inventory then that's unbelievable incompetence. If DE sell slowly then you reduce the production volume on those kits to match the sales rate.
How they're *appealing* to garage gamers is by incorporating rules that aren't conducive to open store play.
That's not appealing to "garage gamers" at all. If the rules suck and aren't popular with store players why are they going to suddenly be more popular just because the game moves to a garage? Why are the people who say "we hate this and won't use it" going to change their mind about those rules?
When was the last time anyone in your store used the terrain rules in a game, or even allowed you to bring your own terrain kits for a possible advantage?
On your point about GW's ultimate goal being even product distribution, couldn't they achieve that goal by...feth, I dunno...making the game more balanced in the first place? You said yourself that tanks don't sell in a "store meta" because people quickly figure out tanks are mostly useless...why do you think they're useless? Is there something about playing in a store environment that makes it so? No, it's in the rules, the rules are the reason why tanks aren't that good anymore and no one buys them. Fix the fething rules so that tanks don't gather dust anymore and you just might start selling a few of them again, without having to publish broken detachments that make them literally free as no one will take them otherwise. Stubbornly refusing to put any effort into the rules or do any research on how the game's actually being played and trying to appeal to this mythical garage gamer that buys everything GW wants them to buy and makes up their own rules isn't going to sustain GW in the long run, and we have evidence of that in their financial reports.
Peregrine wrote: And down the street are Alice and Bob, who play the game exactly the way they would play it in a store, except they play in Alice's garage. They have a dozen friends who do the same. Or maybe Alice and Bob each buy a starter set, realize that playing each other over and over again is boring, and abandon the game because there's no store community to provide them with more opponents. See how much fun it is to make up hypothetical people that conveniently fit our assumptions?
But they fit into my hypothetical model as well. The scene hasn't gone away just because GW stopped supporting it - for all the reasons people are mentioning in this thread. I'm not arguing for the abolition of store play, merely pointing out GWs trend of moving away from it...a fact *not* in dispute. Garage play isn't innately better. It's just a certain breed of gamer prefers it. And GW has decided to cater to them. As I mentioned above, I have no idea whether it will pay off in the longrun or not.
Who cares? Total profit is what matters, not some arbitrary "unit diversity" quota. If GW has significant amounts of unsold inventory then that's unbelievable incompetence. If DE sell slowly then you reduce the production volume on those kits to match the sales rate.
But you run into the Sister of battle problem in which it becomes cost prohibitive to update an army because you know sales are likely to be small. And yes, unit diversity is important for any successful business, especially one based upon the personal tastes of individual players. Having a wide variety of options rather than being restricted to what works in the meta improves player retention. People have been leaving GW for years - and returning players comment here on Dakka all the time with a "I got out when the meta did this thing," and "I hated croissant spam and Grey Knight cheese," and what have you. Homogeneity breeds boredom. This is just one attempt at combating that. When you control the meta, you are less likely to get chased off by what happens in it.
If the rules suck and aren't popular with store players why are they going to suddenly be more popular just because the game moves to a garage? Why are the people who say "we hate this and won't use it" going to change their mind about those rules?
How many threads have I read in which you swing your snark bat around in defense of Forge World, complaining how people won't play against it, leading to people not bringing it? The issue with the meta isn't that the rules suck, it's that when three or four guys at your store say "We hate this and we won't use this," it impacts the 30 others who would be fine with it but some people WON'T SHUT THE FETH UP ABOUT HOW BROKEN FORGE WORLD IS. Things get even dicier when it is your local store owner making the calls of what can and can't be played with in their store. "If I don't sell it, you can't play with it." ITC polls their players asking them whether they want things included or not. When 40% said they absolutely refused to play with superheavies after Escalation, they banned them whole hog. A number of stores use the ITC rulings for their tournaments, and the meta of virtually every game played in a store, be it MTG or Warmachine or Dicemasters, revolves around the tournament meta. "Oh, I'm practicing for an upcoming tournament which doesn't allow Forge World, so I'm not going to play against your Corsairs because I won't face any."
Last time I played at a store.
Congratulations. You answered the rhetorical question. You play in a cool meta. A lot of metas are not so cool. See above for a few examples.
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Sidstyler wrote: On your point about GW's ultimate goal being even product distribution, couldn't they achieve that goal by...feth, I dunno...making the game more balanced in the first place?
No. This is actually one of the biggest myths of the game, perpetuated here on Dakka quite a bit.
If D&D 4E taught us anything, it is that players aren't drawn to balance. Rather, they are drawn to imbalance. It's why power creep is an industry wide phenomenon. When everything is perfectly balanced, players aren't encouraged to buy more product. MTG handles this by cycling cards out of tournament play every few years, while offering new, uber powerful meta breaking cards that players have to buy pack after pack to chase down. D&D deals with this by releasing books with increasingly more powerful feats, classes and spells. Video games deal with this by making characters and items more powerful, offering ever more powerful enemies to keep players interested. When D&D 4E failed, what did everyone do? They ran to Pathfinder, a souped up turbo edition of 3.5 that *allowed* you to use your old books, except that their newer books had a higher power level than your old ones, promoting sales beyond the initial ruleset.
GW deals with this by making their newer units beefier than their older ones, and making their reissued kits the new hotness. When was the last time Dev and Assault squads were A-list units? Oh look, new Dev and Assault Squad kits! SUCK ON MY SKYHAMMER!!!!
Personally I think it's bad game design, but I feel like Decurion is their new attempt to try and give the illusion of balance in a game they acknowledge will always need some level of imbalance to promote sales. Personally, I wish the game were a bit more balanced. But then, I'm the guy who still plays D&D 4E every Friday night because I love the balance of the system. But I understand why the gaming industry needs the creep.
And this is where you keep going wrong. A garage is a location for a game, it is not a style of play. Your utopian ideal "garage gamer" has very little to do with reality.
But you run into the Sister of battle problem in which it becomes cost prohibitive to update an army because you know sales are likely to be small.
Then you don't update that army. I'm not saying that diversity is bad, I'm just pointing out that "diversity is good regardless of profits" is nonsense. All that matters from GW's point of view is how much profit they're making. Sales diversity is only relevant when it results in increased profits.
People have been leaving GW for years - and returning players comment here on Dakka all the time with a "I got out when the meta did this thing," and "I hated croissant spam and Grey Knight cheese," and what have you.
And what exactly makes you think that garage gaming solves this problem? A person that quits because of croissant spam is going to quit regardless of whether they play against croissant spam in a store or in a garage.
When you control the meta, you are less likely to get chased off by what happens in it.
But you don't control the metagame, since you still have another player (or players) making their own armies. In fact, the garage gamer is more vulnerable to being chased off by a bad metagame because they have fewer potential opponents available. A player at a store with a decent community can just play against someone else. A garage gamer who only plays with one other person has no similar option if their opponent builds an army that they don't like.
How many threads have I read in which you swing your snark bat around in defense of Forge World, complaining how people won't play against it, leading to people not bringing it? The issue with the meta isn't that the rules suck, it's that when three or four guys at your store say "We hate this and we won't use this," it impacts the 30 others who would be fine with it but some people WON'T SHUT THE FETH UP ABOUT HOW BROKEN FORGE WORLD IS. Things get even dicier when it is your local store owner making the calls of what can and can't be played with in their store. "If I don't sell it, you can't play with it." ITC polls their players asking them whether they want things included or not. When 40% said they absolutely refused to play with superheavies after Escalation, they banned them whole hog. A number of stores use the ITC rulings for their tournaments, and the meta of virtually every game played in a store, be it MTG or Warmachine or Dicemasters, revolves around the tournament meta. "Oh, I'm practicing for an upcoming tournament which doesn't allow Forge World, so I'm not going to play against your Corsairs because I won't face any."
Why do you think that any of this has anything to do with garage gaming vs. store gaming? Do you honestly think that "garage gamers" never do things like ban FW models or follow common tournament rules?
Congratulations. You answered the rhetorical question. You play in a cool meta. A lot of metas are not so cool. See above for a few examples.
And that's exactly the point! There are good store communities that encourage the same kind of playing and buying as your perfect garage gamer, and there are bad garage communities that have all of the problems of your horrible store. The location of a game has nothing to do with how it is played, and abandoning in-store gaming in favor of saying "go play at home" does not help GW at all because moving those former in-store players to another location doesn't change how they play the game.
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Massawyrm wrote: If D&D 4E taught us anything, it is that players aren't drawn to balance.
4th edition D&D taught us no such thing. It didn't sell poorly because it was balanced, it sold poorly because it was different. It completely abandoned 3rd edition and tried to be tabletop WoW, and WOTC's existing customers didn't want to play tabletop WoW.
It's why power creep is an industry wide phenomenon.
It isn't industry-wide. For example, X-Wing has very little, if any, power creep.
When everything is perfectly balanced, players aren't encouraged to buy more product.
That's only true if the product sucks. If the product is appealing then even in a balanced game people will want to try new things. And this is especially true in a fluff-driven game like 40k, where a major part of the game is building your own army to match the stories you want to tell. It doesn't matter if a LRBT and an infantry squad are both equally powerful (relative to their point costs), if you decide you want to add some tanks to your army you're still going to buy the LRBTs.
GW deals with this by making their newer units beefier than their older ones, and making their reissued kits the new hotness.
No they don't. GW often releases new kits with mediocre rules, or even terrible rules. We just remember the overpowered ones a lot more.
When was the last time Dev and Assault squads were A-list units? Oh look, new Dev and Assault Squad kits! SUCK ON MY SKYHAMMER!!!!
So, if power creep is supposed to sell models, why did GW publish the formation as a limited-edition bundle that sold out within a week? You can't (legally) get those rules anymore, so if you missed the initial sale then you have no incentive to buy those kits. If GW really wanted to use power creep to sell assault and devastator squads they would have put the formation in the codex, or at least allowed you to buy it at any time.
Peregrine wrote: A garage is a location for a game, it is not a style of play. Your utopian ideal "garage gamer" has very little to do with reality.
Except that it's my reality, and the reality that several other garage gamers have shown up in this very thread to echo. It's not just a different location, it's a different environment. One with very different social contracts. The same way I don't think you talk to people at your store the way you talk to them on the internet, you don't necessarily play against your closest friends the way you play against a stranger. When you say "Dude, don't bring that list to this store again; it wasn't any fun to play against," how likely is someone you barely know going to take you seriously? Hell, just thinking about saying that to someone will make some folks cringe. But when you say it to your buddy at your house, he's probably going to nod sheepishly, apologize, and bring a different list next time. But the real magic is that usually that doesn't happen. "Don't be a dick," isn't a rule you usually have to enforce in your own home. It's the understood law of the land - unless you and your friends like playing like that. Home metas aren't simply *as diverse* as the store metas you've decided to angrily wave your banner for; they are more diverse. Oldhammer isn't a new thing, it's something people have been doing from their homes since 2nd.
But again, I don't know how many times I have to stress it before you stop pretending I'm saying the opposite: I DON'T THINK GARAGE GAMING IS BETTER THAN STORE GAMING. It's just different. Thinking otherwise tells me you've either rarely done it or that you have a crap group of friends.
4th edition D&D taught us no such thing. It didn't sell poorly because it was balanced, it sold poorly because it was different. It completely abandoned 3rd edition and tried to be tabletop WoW, and WOTC's existing customers didn't want to play tabletop WoW.
As the first guy in the world to compare 4th to WoW and having had in thrown back in my face for 6 years, I can tell you unequivocally that the WoW comparison was about the balanced classes, monsters and items. Otherwise, how the hell was 4e like WoW in any way that wasn't WoW ripping off D&D? 2nd was a huge departure from 1st, 3rd was an even larger departure from 2nd than 4th was from 3rd - I mean 3rd actually changed every mechanic but Vancian spell memorization, while 4th kept most of the d20 system intact. But 4th, the only edition with any modicum of balance, is the one everyone rejected. And they rejected it saying it was too balanced, like a video game.
It isn't industry-wide. For example, X-Wing has very little, if any, power creep.
Yes, let's cite a game from the biggest IP in the world, that is still in its infancy, and still isn't coming close to GWs market share. If FFG can still pull that off 5 years from now, I will be elated. I've got good friends working there. I want them, and the model, to succeed. But right now it's too young to cite as an example. EVERYTHING Star Wars does well early on.
That's only true if the product sucks. If the product is appealing then even in a balanced game people will want to try new things.
Strongly disagree. There are a number of great, very well balanced miniatures games out there that can't keep player interest long enough to build a strong player base without power creep. There's a reason you ran to X-Wing. Even the old bastions of anti-power creep have given in to the market.
So, if power creep is supposed to sell models, why did GW publish the formation as a limited-edition bundle that sold out within a week?
Because they knew we would still play with it. And we are. They won't rerelease them (shame) because that would nullify their EXCLUSIVE! But we're still going to use it. If ITC chooses to ban it, you might see some backlash against it, but I doubt they will. Those guys won't support Pay2Win.
" D&D deals with this by releasing books with increasingly more powerful feats, classes and spells"
Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.
"But 4th, the only edition with any modicum of balance, is the one everyone rejected."
It's because they were lazy and turned everyone into a sorcerer. People aren't drawn to imbalance, but rather variety of choices and meaningful choices.
Martel732 wrote: Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.
Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.
Martel732 wrote: Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.
Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.
It's true for 3.X and Pathfinder. Splat books were mostly lateral choices, not power creep. Mostly whiney GMs who didn't want to learn new rules complained about "power creep". If you can find things more broken than druid or 2H power attack in the splat books, be my guest. Try again indeed.
Martel732 wrote: It's true for 3.X and Pathfinder. Splat books were mostly lateral choices, not power creep. Mostly whiney GMs who didn't want to learn new rules complained about "power creep". If you can find things more broken than druid or 2H power attack in the splat books, be my guest. Try again indeed.
Dear lord, the levels of wrong in that statement are mind boggling. By the end of 3.5 there were feats that allowed players to swap higher level spells for multiple lower level spells or combine lower level spells to get higher ones, feats that shook off dazed and stun (including effects that you put upon yourself), spells that let you cast more than once a turn, races that could effectively fly at lvl 1, and broken prestige classes that dwarfed everything that had come before it - so much so that playing a starting class to completion was hamstringing yourself. 2H power attack and Druid are your go to's? Yikes. So much more in the books more broken than that.
And Pathfinder was power creep from the get go. The entire system was 3.5 on steroids.
I playtested a lot of 3.5 stuff, and by the end the whole thing had just gotten silly.
Martel732 wrote: It's true for 3.X and Pathfinder. Splat books were mostly lateral choices, not power creep. Mostly whiney GMs who didn't want to learn new rules complained about "power creep". If you can find things more broken than druid or 2H power attack in the splat books, be my guest. Try again indeed.
Dear lord, the levels of wrong in that statement are mind boggling. By the end of 3.5 there were feats that allowed players to swap higher level spells for multiple lower level spells or combine lower level spells to get higher ones, feats that shook off dazed and stun (including effects that you put upon yourself), spells that let you cast more than once a turn, races that could effectively fly at lvl 1, and broken prestige classes that dwarfed everything that had come before it - so much so that playing a starting class to completion was hamstringing yourself. 2H power attack and Druid are your go to's? Yikes. So much more in the books more broken than that.
And Pathfinder was power creep from the get go. The entire system was 3.5 on steroids.
I playtested a lot of 3.5 stuff, and by the end the whole thing had just gotten silly.
I respectfully disagree, and stand by my statement.
The idea that 4th failed because it was "balanced" is absurd. It was a boring version of an MMO that was simplified without any meaningful character choices.
Also, I don't think GW's crappy rules "appeal to garage gamers." It just sounds like garage gamers have much lower standards because they just make up whatever they want.
That's not an upside to crappy rules.
@Massawyrm: The key factor that makes "garage gaming" different than at a FLGS is the majority of the time it is gaming with friends.
We already can talk ahead of time and house-rule or play "straight-up" with little difficulty.
I work around meta-game shortcomings by making scenarios to try to level things out a bit: like tournament rules.
FLGS you run into "pick-up" games so you have no idea on power levels being brought to the table since GW has no balance to the point values.
I personally think of garage gaming as a bad thing: it is too insular, you do not meet new people, it does not promote the hobby and get new players.
I do "both" BTW, each has a particular joy for me.
GW thinks it is a premium model company, I make these models now with the intent to play games and not to sit on a shelf to display: I want them seen and used.
They continue with this business model, I see little I would be buying in the future.
MWHistorian wrote: The idea that 4th failed because it was "balanced" is absurd. It was a boring version of an MMO that was simplified without any meaningful character choices.
But that *is* balance and exactly what I'm talking about. A 4e character is going to do roughly the same damage and hit roughly as often taking one set of feats as they do another, thus they weren't "meaningful." The same thing applies to 40k. If a unit is costed perfectly with all of its other counterparts, rating damage output vs survivability (the balance system in place in 4e) along with point variance for speed, your choices are equally meaningless. Plague marines will end up costing only slightly more than CSM because, while they last longer on the board they also have fewer guns for an equal number of points. Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e.
Also, I don't think GW's crappy rules "appeal to garage gamers." It just sounds like garage gamers have much lower standards because they just make up whatever they want.
That's not an upside to crappy rules.
The rules we're talking about aren't crappy. They're narrative. They make terrain matter more than a straight cover save. Some of us like that. We like things like exploding barrels and buildings that provide distinct advantages on the field over other buildings on the field. But they're also the type of thing that creates imbalance in tournament environment. Tournaments rules are best when all things are equal. Ending up on a field where your opponent gets much more useful terrain on his side of the board because he got a lucky die roll gives them the kind of advantage that destroys that balance. The only thing guys like me enjoy making up are our stories. That's why rules like this have been great for us - we've been given reams of options for creating those stories without having to make up our own rules.
Ghazkuul wrote: The area I just moved to has a single gaming store within 30 miles of me and they are currently no longer carrying GW products because of the costs associated with the product. I understand the concept that GW wants to sell everyone from their webstore to make as much profit as possible. But did GW forget that in order to play the game we have to have stores to go to that carry all the amazing terrain and boards and is a gathering place for other players? At the current rate we won't be able to play fairly soon. So in conclusion.....RAGE!
The internet makes it harder for small hobby stores to compete as well its not just GW. With 20-25% off and free shipping offered regularly buy bulk hobby stores from major cities, the average small town/city hobby store just cant make the GW product work for them. My FLGS offeres 20% off everything to members, for a small fee, but also has many other benefits like a key that i can use to play a game at anytime when the store is normally closed. Memeber only nights, and a members meetings that allow for feedback into the how to improve the store, weither it be more tournaments or new games introduce. Too those few on here that bad mouthed ccg's, the store I frequent will tell you that they make more money on MTG in a week than GW products in a month.
I started in the garages since the first store where I lived went belly up, not because of poor customer base, but poor owner investment and buisness practices. Small armies only, not tournament/serious players. What a joke that comment is, we all had large collections of multiple GW armies and regularly went to places for tournaments.
I seriously suggest you start up a garage group ity worth the effort. There are many ways to make cheap and storable terrain and playmats.
4x6 cut lengths of carpeting are cheap and can easily rolled up to store. look for the semi-solid underside carpet its very playable. Green, grey, white, and red are easy carpet colors to find and still show up on glued underside.
1/4" Masonite or MDF board is cheap and a 4x8 board can make alot of small to medium ruins. If made correctly it is easily stored in a storage tote from rubbermaid or the like.
Also, a piece of the masonite/mdf board with bulk trees from railroad scenery is ideal for woodlands. don't glue the trees just place them on the board and remove to store, easy and cheap.
Massawyrm wrote: The rules we're talking about aren't crappy. They're narrative.
Depends on perspective.
They make terrain matter more than a straight cover save. Some of us like that. We like things like exploding barrels and buildings that provide distinct advantages on the field over other buildings on the field. But they're also the type of thing that creates imbalance in tournament environment. Tournaments rules are best when all things are equal. Ending up on a field where your opponent gets much more useful terrain on his side of the board because he got a lucky die roll gives them the kind of advantage that destroys that balance. The only thing guys like me enjoy making up are our stories. That's why rules like this have been great for us - we've been given reams of options for creating those stories without having to make up our own rules.
This is the thing though, it is sold as a "wargame" when really it is a broad strokes 40k "sandbox".
This is why the present form of 40k is likened to a tabletop RPG because you either employ bleeding edge competitiveness (where it works to a degree due to so many variables) or very little.
Let us say when I signed on to play for 40k it was very much a war game, I had no such agreement for it to be what it is now.
The assumption is that anything with a points value would provide some measure of balance, that is a fallacy in 40k.
What you outline is that the game is little more than a narrative where as long as some story unfolds you are happy.
You may have to excuse others when they are somewhat dissatisfied with this "forging the roll your own adventure narrative".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_Your_Own_Adventure
Massawyrm wrote: If D&D 4E taught us anything, it is that players aren't drawn to balance. Rather, they are drawn to imbalance.
*snip*
But then, I'm the guy who still plays D&D 4E every Friday night because I love the balance of the system. But I understand why the gaming industry needs the creep.
I have no idea how you arrived at the former if you actually do the latter. First off, wargames revolve inherently around confrontation whereas RPGs are inherently cooperation based (even the GM's job is to make sure you earn a victory, not simply to stop it at all costs). In the former, balance is key to get a good experience (whether that balance is reflected in a points system or asymetric objectives for unequal forces). In the latter, gross imbalance is bad but the tolerances for what is considered adequetely balanced are alot wider. In an RPG group, if the rogue is a bit OP it's generally ok because the rogue is ON YOUR SIDE, not opposing you one on one in most cases. It only becomes an issue if one guy steals the spotlight with a massively OP class combo and even then it isn't as bad as in a wargame because your side (the party) still wins when he/she does. If a particular army is OP in a wargame, it is an issue because it's generally just you versus just them. If that is the same logic you're using to come at your garage gamers theory, I have to firmly disagree. Also, the common complaint about 4e (among many others) was that it was "balanced" to the point of boredom because that balance was acheived by frequently copy pasting the same abilities to every class with only minor tweaks. The rogue was "balanced" with the fighter because they basically both were constructed using the same abilities and rules with only minor tweaks, not because those powers were different yet still balanced.
In any case, "balance" had nothing to do with the demise of 4e.
warboss wrote: Also, the common complaint about 4e (among many others) was that it was "balanced" to the point of boredom because that balance was acheived by frequently copy pasting the same abilities to every class with only minor tweaks.
In any case, "balance" had nothing to do with the demise of 4e.
This is the third time in this thread that someone has come in saying some iteration of 'It's not the balance, it was the balance."
In your example, the Rogue and Fighter were balanced by the fact that the rogue could do an additional 2d6 damage with combat advantage (with access to a number of abilities facilitating that), but had a lower AC and hit points than the Fighter (who had abilities that drew attacks from monsters) making them play very differently on the table despite their mechanics looking very similar in carefully curated examples. In the early playtest materials for 4th, they included the statistical breakdowns they used for survivability vs damage output, with the scaling all the way up to 30th for the creation of new classes and monsters - materials they ended up omitting from the final product. The entire thing was built elegantly on math that seemed very simple on the surface, but went pretty deep. Each class managed to play differently despite their ultimate damage output/effect on the game being nearly identical in scenarios taking them from full health to zero.
I still play it because I love how it plays on the tabletop, and because I've grown tired of many of the legacy issues that plagued the game from 1st - 3rd. When I want to have some crazy, imbalanced fun, I invite over a few select friends and we blow through a BECME module. But for our weekly game, we go with 4th.
I agree with your notion of what a wargame *should* be, but what I'm talking about isn't some platonic ideal - I'm talking about the very real marketing problems GW is facing and their attempts to solve them. I cited the balance rejection of 4e, and you guys came in to say it wasn't the balance, it's that you didn't like the way they balanced it. And I'm having a devil of a time trying to see the distinction. I don't believe there's some magical balance system that will somehow sell more GW minis. And it's clear that GW doesn't seem to think so either.
As a garage gamer, I find that I don't get to play as many games as I could if I were a dedicated store gamer. My friends and I have families and jobs, and so getting a game in is a rarer occasion than I'd like it to be. Of course, that is one of the primary reasons I became a garage gamer, life doesn't really support me playing at the local stores. That being said, I find that the few games I DO get to play in my garage are far more enjoyable than those in a store. There are a lot of things I don't have to worry about in my garage, such as cheating, min/maxing, store gamers inability to respect personal space and property. I do miss the player and army variety though.
Martel732 wrote: Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.
Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.
3.0 and 3.5 by there baseline stackable traits AND races that were half-whatever making starting characters effectively 4th level had those rules in the core rulebook. They broke themselves from the start. The supplements just made an already broken system even worse I've played D&D for 38 years, since Chainmail, played a couple games of 3.0 and 3.5 and threw the lot in the trash because right from the start the game was broken. Hoped that 3.5 would improve/fix things, but it didn't. 4th edition was balanced, but painfully homogeneous as all the classes in a given role played pretty much exactly the same on the map. That is not balance it is symmetry and symmetry IS boring. It also turned the worlds longest standing roleplaying game into an overglorified table top miniatures wargame. 4th edition also had its stackable BS and required characters to be loaded down with magic items to be successful as they gained levels so monty haul was a required part of the meta to survive at higher levesl. So 4th edition had a lot of problems that drove people away from it. We tried to like 4th edition, but it bored and annoyed us equally quick. People didn't avoid it because it was balanced. They avoided 4th edition D&D because it sucked on many levels unless you played games like 12 year olds regularly do. 5th edition now is much better and what 4th should have been. The classes are relatively balanced in power level, but they are different from each other. Strikers in 4th edition all played basically the same way, while striker-like characters in 5th have very different mechanics from each other as to how they produce their damage and the feel is much different. That makes 5th significantly superior to 3rd through 4th and Pathfinder in my book. Plenty of people HATE pathfinder and D&D 3/3/5 because the balance is such crap.
warboss wrote: Also, the common complaint about 4e (among many others) was that it was "balanced" to the point of boredom because that balance was acheived by frequently copy pasting the same abilities to every class with only minor tweaks.
In any case, "balance" had nothing to do with the demise of 4e.
This is the third time in this thread that someone has come in saying some iteration of 'It's not the balance, it was the balance."
In your example, the Rogue and Fighter were balanced by the fact that the rogue could do an additional 2d6 damage with combat advantage (with access to a number of abilities facilitating that), but had a lower AC and hit points than the Fighter (who had abilities that drew attacks from monsters) making them play very differently on the table despite their mechanics looking very similar in carefully curated examples. In the early playtest materials for 4th, they included the statistical breakdowns they used for survivability vs damage output, with the scaling all the way up to 30th for the creation of new classes and monsters - materials they ended up omitting from the final product. The entire thing was built elegantly on math that seemed very simple on the surface, but went pretty deep. Each class managed to play differently despite their ultimate damage output/effect on the game being nearly identical in scenarios taking them from full health to zero.
I still play it because I love how it plays on the tabletop, and because I've grown tired of many of the legacy issues that plagued the game from 1st - 3rd. When I want to have some crazy, imbalanced fun, I invite over a few select friends and we blow through a BECME module. But for our weekly game, we go with 4th.
I agree with your notion of what a wargame *should* be, but what I'm talking about isn't some platonic ideal - I'm talking about the very real marketing problems GW is facing and their attempts to solve them. I cited the balance rejection of 4e, and you guys came in to say it wasn't the balance, it's that you didn't like the way they balanced it. And I'm having a devil of a time trying to see the distinction. I don't believe there's some magical balance system that will somehow sell more GW minis. And it's clear that GW doesn't seem to think so either.
In case it wasn't obvious, puting the word most of the time in quotes is a signal that I don't believe it is a correct term. I don't think 4e was any more balanced than a game of rock paper scissors where you can ONLY pick rock. The balance that I'm referring to is when you make a series of DIFFERENT rules somehow worth the same overall in a game. YMMV. In any case, it is in the end an opinion. Despite it being the shortest D&D edition in recent memory (didn't play OD&D or 1st edition... just 2 years until essentials came out and essentials lasted even less before 5e public trials were announced), some folks liked it and that's fine. My point was two fold.. you can't just copy paste an (incorrect) assumption about an RPG over to a completely different style of game (wargame).
I do agree that GW has a very real marketing problem but like with WOTC's D&D 4e, I don't think their approach towards it is optimal nor successful compared to alternatives. Gamebalance isn't "magical" but rather a difficult goal you strive towards. It has never perfectly existing in 40k but at least before the modern era of 40k and GW (6e/7e) it still felt like they were striving towards it and generally getting better (with the obvious occasional exception). Nowadays, it feels like they're just throwing everything on the wall without thought or plan and just seeing what sticks/sells without regard to the mess it is making.
"Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e. "
Starcraft called to let you know that you can have very different units and still have balance in a game.
The issue is this: a carrier in Starcraft is not that expensive resource-wise it is TEMPORALLY expensive. This mechanic doesn't exist in 40K. In 40K, Eldar or whomever can just plunk their badass unit down on the table turn 1. If Protoss could somehow start with a carrier, a lot of units would be rendered useless, just like in 40K.
I'm glad that some garage groups are having fun, but rendering any unit useless detracts from any game, imo.
I think that some of the experiences of "garage" games makes sense, given some of the info GW had let slip in the past about their customer base. I know at one point, it was assumed that that many kits were bought and simply collected, never even taken out of the box. Another big chunk were built and painted, but rarely, if ever, played.
Basically, GW makes it money off of a combination of kids entering the hobby and buying starter sets, and guys with garages and basements full of GW models that will never see a tabletop. That's not inconsistent with what I've seen. Every group has the guy with multiple major armies. I know I want to keep buying/building 40k even as I have little interest in the game as a game.
But that *is* balance and exactly what I'm talking about. A 4e character is going to do roughly the same damage and hit roughly as often taking one set of feats as they do another, thus they weren't "meaningful." The same thing applies to 40k. If a unit is costed perfectly with all of its other counterparts, rating damage output vs survivability (the balance system in place in 4e) along with point variance for speed, your choices are equally meaningless. Plague marines will end up costing only slightly more than CSM because, while they last longer on the board they also have fewer guns for an equal number of points. Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e.
Sorry, but smart point costs based on combat effectiveness, just like pretty much every other miniatures game out there uses other than 40k does not make a "boring" game. In Flames of war the game is well balanced, but playing a British Irish guards tank company is hardly the same as playing a soviet tankovy force. Both are armored armies, but both play radically differently based on the rules for their overall nation. Balance doesn't mean homogeneous everything is exactly the same. You need to stop equating balance with symmetry. Symmetry is what sucks and symmetry is what 4th edition D&D had in spades. Every striker played exactly the same way. Every defender was a defender was a defender. BORING, but again that is not balance, but symmetry. Yes symmetry is balanced, but it is boring. Balance can happen just fine without symmetry.
You seem to think that people only play SM or CSM solely because of the stats. If that were the case NO ONE would play chaos space marines ever. They just suck compared to all the cool new toys being released. I play the armies I play because of the stories and the fluff behind them, because I like the modeling projects and the way the armies look on the table. X points of Space marines will not look the same as X points of eldar, nor will they play the same way on the table either. A 1000 point IG army should still vastly out number and outgun a 1000 point space marine army, and both will play totally differently. You need to stop believing that balance will make it pointless to play different armies,because that is not true. Real balance in the game would mean armies would be many and varied again because there would be no top tier and bottom tier armies with a bunch of OK stuff in the middle. It would also mean that armies of certain factions will no longer never have certain units in them anymore because there will no longer be sucky overpriced units in a codex either. Suddenly not everyone is playing plague marines because other marine builds also are viable and start appearing again with some regularity. Balance would only make things better overall. It improves the game, improves the variety and improves the meta as well. No need to spam one unit when you can fill your army with a variety of units and still get the job done because the other armies are balanced too. It also means you would no longer need to have your own group of regular players because there would be less silly power imbalances between armies.
If the folks making X-Wing made a new custom fighter for the game that was as fast as the A-wing and had all the weapons of a B-wing it would have a cost that would be higher than either of them. Meanwhile in a GW game they would make such a beast and then make it cost less than either making the originals completely pointless to use when you could just buy up a bunch of cheaper and more powerful unit. This kind of crap is what is killing 40k and making the all the armies just look more and more the same all the time.
Massawyrm wrote: Except that it's my reality, and the reality that several other garage gamers have shown up in this very thread to echo.
That's nice. It's also not universal. When I played in the "garage" it was no different than how I played in stores. The problem here is that you keep assuming that your group of friends defines "garage gaming" and if you just get rid of the in-store gaming everyone will play and buy like you.
Otherwise, how the hell was 4e like WoW in any way that wasn't WoW ripping off D&D?
Because it was all about a standardized party with standardized class roles (healer, DPS, control) with minimal customization fighting against standardized opponents in grid-based miniatures combat. Non-combat options were removed almost entirely, variant classes that diverged from the healer/DPS/control roles were removed, etc.
Yes, let's cite a game from the biggest IP in the world, that is still in its infancy, and still isn't coming close to GWs market share. If FFG can still pull that off 5 years from now, I will be elated. I've got good friends working there. I want them, and the model, to succeed. But right now it's too young to cite as an example. EVERYTHING Star Wars does well early on.
X-Wing is hardly "still in its infancy". It's a very popular game with an established history of new content releases. If anything X-Wing is nearing the end of its life because it's running out of interesting ships in the source material. And the reason I mentioned it is because it's the game I actually play and have experience with. I'm sure other games succeed despite (or even because of) good balance, but I don't have personal experience with those games.
Because they knew we would still play with it. And we are. They won't rerelease them (shame) because that would nullify their EXCLUSIVE! But we're still going to use it. If ITC chooses to ban it, you might see some backlash against it, but I doubt they will. Those guys won't support Pay2Win.
Are you seriously arguing that GW endorses piracy of their rules?
I don't think Massawyrm understood my point and to be fair I'm not sure I articulated it all that well. Anyway there are a few things I'm trying to say. One is that I think it is a bad idea to focus on one group of gamers to the exclusion of another especially if GW can with reasonable effectiveness target both.
A second point closely tied to this is that I think it is probably much easier to keep the garage gamers Massawrym is describing happy than the store gamers. Now perhaps GW is saying fine, lets just take the easy route, ignore the people that are hard to please and just do what we want since the garage gamers are going to be happy with whatever and they are all we need. If that is GW's thinking, it is foolish as suggested by declining sales numbers.
Third, reasonably balanced rules should appeal to everyone, and going back to my second point if there are garage gamers who somehow don't like the current ruleset they are most able to house rule to their liking so really are the ones least in need of pleasing with the current ruleset.
I played from 3d edition after trial assault rules to first few months of 5th edition. During that time there was a wide variety of unique rules available through white dwarf and various rules supplements, but the core game was limited. I liked that far more than what we have now and I think it covered most of the things that Massawyrm is talking about liking about the current ruleset. (I think there were plenty of unique terrain rules in things like city fight and perhaps others, but don't know that for sure as I didn't play those things). I don't know why garage gamers need fliers or superheavies to be incorporated in the core rules when if your group wants to play those there were rules available to play them. Putting that stuff in the core rules impacts the store gamer far more than the garage gamer because now they are more or less forced to put up with that stuff even if they don't like it.
My experience with store gaming was very different than the bad light that has been cast here. I was able to show up with the list I wanted to play and be competitive throughout the time I played. I played Eldar and Dark Eldar and actively avoided the things that people thought were cheesy about the army, so I avoided starcannon and wraithlord spam in 3rd, and didn't have tons of "unkillable" skimmers in 4th. I wasn't forced by the meta to play stuff I didn't want to. There was tremendous variety of opponents and armies. There were plenty of decent people to play against. I got to know many of them fairly well and wasn't forced to bring the fully optimized uber tournament list every game to not get rolled. Admittedly we didn't stray far from the core rules often, (though I remember one dude playing some version of space marines from a white dwarf page or something with special ammunition for their bolters and I was fine with him doing that as I just wanted to play) but the garage gamers weren't limited from doing so at the time so as far as I can tell the game was well set up for both groups.
Right now it seems like GW is trying to force people to play a certain way and buy certain models. Garage gamers can just ignore that pressure and continue to play how they want, i.e. ignore what GW wants from them. Store gamers on the other hand will have more difficulty ignoring GW as developing a convention outside the core rules is much more difficult in that envirionment.
So basically what it seems like to me is that, contrary to Massawyrm's assertions, GW is actually targeting the store gamer with its current policies and actively driving many of them away. The garage gamer is fine with what GW is doing, but not because GW is targeting them or trying to make them happy, but because they can ignore the stuff GW is doing that they don't like much more easily than the store gamer while still benefitting from the changes they do like. That would be the same though if GW was doing a better job making the store players happy.
Automatically Appended Next Post: One final comment. I am not commenting on GW's policies regarding what they have done with its stores or how it is interacting with unafilliated stores that sell its product. My focus is more on its rules writing.
Having been a GW fanatic for 25 years I can say that GWs storefronts come & go with the economy. When there rolling in cash they open a lot of stores. When the economys hurting they close up everything. This retraction has been greater than any before, but I think thats in reaction to the greatest economic set back since The Great Depression.
I believe that the storefronts will be back, but thier real money makers are the garage groups. Ive always found the lgs scene less then welcoming. If the red shirts werent on the look out the newbs could end up playing against the TFG.
As for the OP, look on craigs list or Facebook. Theres some closeted gamer looking for another player. Some poor sob that thinks theres no other gamers in town. Just hope he ain't 13 years old or some neck bearded grognard. Good luck
The cultural norm in Canada is to use the garage for "storage" little gaming can happen there.
That leaves the basement that is typically unfinished and colder than Alaska all season.
Since the rules suck for pick-up games (too much power variation for same points) garage play is pretty much it.
GW corporate feels we are all collectors and quietly tool away at our models and put them on display in our basement.
GW codex / game writers think we should run fluffy games and it is just a sandbox for playing out all those cool fictional events.
Some of us like to look at it as a social event to go out and play and that is rather problematic.
This has been from my own perspective the most controversial times I have experienced for gaming (since second edition!) for rules problems, power levels / balance vastly varied, just plain old game play happiness is rather subdued. Publication release and models have been incredible for speed but are poorly supported by the rules.
Ah well, I have stopped buying models for a bit and see what I can do with what I have.
Why do people so often confuse balance with everything being the same. Balance means you can take a variety of options or armys and have them as viable play styles not that everything plays the same.
Starcraft is mostly balanced for example but the three races play differently.
Or look at a fighter vs a thief in an RPG. A fighter will beat the thief in a straight fight but if the theif sneaks up on the fighter he should be able to beat the fighter. That's balanced but two radically different play styles.
Hell I would say a lack of balance cuts meaningful choices and homogonises stuff more than balance does. Because without balance you are reduced to a limited number of viable choices and lots of choices that are next to useless.
Purifier wrote: I know how much space it takes up. Please see the comment where you quoted me saying that I have a setup. Understand me when I'm saying that it's more space than a lot of us have to spare. Out of the 4 of us main guys in my gaming group, 2 of us can store it. One with quite a lot of difficulty. The other two simply don't have the room to store three table tops.
I just don't understand this. Are your apartments the size of closets? Or are you just confusing "I don't have any space" with "I don't want to get creative with my storage arrangements"?
Speaking only about the UK houses and flats in the UK are considerably smaller than a their american counterparts.
Judging by the last few places I lived
Where I am I could fit a table if I packed it away between sessions
Last place I wouldn't have been able to
Place before that I wouldn't have been able to
Place before that I had a very big living room and could have had a table set up permanently.
the several places before that would have had no room for a table
Talizvar wrote: The cultural norm in Canada is to use the garage for "storage" little gaming can happen there.
That leaves the basement that is typically unfinished and colder than Alaska all season.
Pffffft... you must not be from Vancouver
Just to point out the obvious, even in Toronto you can turn a heater on in the winter The scary part is air conditioning the parts of the house OTHER than the basement during the summer. I am spending more on air conditioning than GW this month LOL.
For us, btw, I would die of heat playing in the garage in June-August!
Martel732 wrote: Except they don't. Some of the most broken stuff is in the core rule book. Try again.
Which edition are you talking about? Certainly not 1st-3.5. 4th had rigid balance and they expanded solely through additional classes and delayed completion of previous classes. And 5th isn't a year old yet. So, you know, try again.
druid, wizard, cleric
3 of the most broken classes in 3.5
try again, 3.5 and d20 in general is one of the easiest to break and least interesting gaming systems ever devised. that's sort of what happens when you have 100+ sourcebooks, no internal balance team, OGL, and you're primarily interested in the rules for hitting people. that kind of simplification works when you're dealing with armies, not individual characters imo
i vastly prefer systems like the new world of darkness when it comes to pen and paper games
MWHistorian wrote: The idea that 4th failed because it was "balanced" is absurd. It was a boring version of an MMO that was simplified without any meaningful character choices.
But that *is* balance and exactly what I'm talking about. A 4e character is going to do roughly the same damage and hit roughly as often taking one set of feats as they do another, thus they weren't "meaningful." The same thing applies to 40k. If a unit is costed perfectly with all of its other counterparts, rating damage output vs survivability (the balance system in place in 4e) along with point variance for speed, your choices are equally meaningless. Plague marines will end up costing only slightly more than CSM because, while they last longer on the board they also have fewer guns for an equal number of points. Who cares if you're playing SM or CSM if all their points lead to the armies being effectively same? In a system like that, things only look different and have marginally different abilities. Just like the character classes in 4e.
Also, I don't think GW's crappy rules "appeal to garage gamers." It just sounds like garage gamers have much lower standards because they just make up whatever they want.
That's not an upside to crappy rules.
The rules we're talking about aren't crappy. They're narrative. They make terrain matter more than a straight cover save. Some of us like that. We like things like exploding barrels and buildings that provide distinct advantages on the field over other buildings on the field. But they're also the type of thing that creates imbalance in tournament environment. Tournaments rules are best when all things are equal. Ending up on a field where your opponent gets much more useful terrain on his side of the board because he got a lucky die roll gives them the kind of advantage that destroys that balance. The only thing guys like me enjoy making up are our stories. That's why rules like this have been great for us - we've been given reams of options for creating those stories without having to make up our own rules.
OH, I get it. You just have no clue what we're talking about when we say "balance." You see, balance doesn't equal "same. Two armies can play very differently and still be balance. Your idea that balance = sameness/boringness is wrong.
Evidence you ask? Almost every other game out there does balance far better than GW. Pick one. Go ahead. Yup, that's better balanced.
"But they're not perfect!" You say?
Irrelevant. We're not asking for perfect balance. "Close enough" is down right good enough.
Imbalance doesn't make a good game. It just means player A has a better chance of winning.
A balanced game can be just as narrative and I say, more so than an imbalanced one. If your army of super High Altitude Coast Guard guys are supposed to be the best, but get stomped without pity by a much less optimized army of space feiries just because the SF's have better everything, that cuts into the suspension of disbelief.
ClassicCarraway wrote: As a garage gamer, I find that I don't get to play as many games as I could if I were a dedicated store gamer. My friends and I have families and jobs, and so getting a game in is a rarer occasion than I'd like it to be. Of course, that is one of the primary reasons I became a garage gamer, life doesn't really support me playing at the local stores. That being said, I find that the few games I DO get to play in my garage are far more enjoyable than those in a store. There are a lot of things I don't have to worry about in my garage, such as cheating, min/maxing, store gamers inability to respect personal space and property. I do miss the player and army variety though.
i agree with you that life sometimes dosen't give you that free evening every night to slip over to the local store to play. We have one local store that has a 40k night..but its a very small crowd and basically the same feel as if playing at home(homemade terrain made out of pink foam ETC) the turn off for me was the 4-6 40k players get sent and packed into a basement like cattle with 20-30 other nerds playing various other games, which becomes a struggle for space and often times breathing air that dosen't smell like armpit and cheetohs. Theres also this odd occurence also where it seems like each little group kind of forms a gang and puts down other nerds that play a different game...which further increases the struggle for space, and augments the need to watch your pieces so jabba dosen't come over and trample your case of figs instead of focus on fun and the game. On the flip side there is a nice GW store about an hour away, fantastic store the owner is real cool and often times plays a mentor to the newer players while keeping a nice variety of stock. His tables are really nice and detailed, with fair rental prices..but the killer for me atleast is the drive and i don't want to show up and pay to rent a table and get steam rolled by some kid that devotes 100% of his time to writing the powerhouse list when i like to play the figs i like...also factor is that the majority of my figs are not table top quality(painted) because frankly i don't have alot of time to just sit and paint, which is not an issue when i play at home with close friends. I'm not against going to a store and playing by any means, i'd like to meet fellow 40k players but as adults who all work full time careers and have serious relationships/houses ETC its more convenient to just say "hey tuesday you want to get a game in?" have a few beers, laugh and enjoy the game.
On a side note i don't understand the direction this thread is going. Its like its turning into red vs blue...hello people we all play the same game theres more then one way to skin a cat. Some play at home..some play at stores..some do both. In the end we all play the same damn game and live different lives that dictate how or where we play..but its still the same game.
For me, it's been steadily been going downhill ever since the advent of 6th edition. Within a year, my FLGS closed down (it was about 3 miles away from where I lived) leaving the next 3 closest LGS's at 20 miles north which had next to no 40k players, ~40 miles south which had a pleasant 40k gaming group but 80 miles round trip just didn't feel all that worth it, and a GW store roughly 35 miles west but returning home required a 50-60 mile endeavor that would more often than not land you in some seriously miserable traffic. So for a while, those who had played at the FLGS that had closed shortly after 6th edition gathered up for weekly meets at one person's house and despite everything, for a couple years that group grew in size significantly. And I sort of developed a genuine liking for 6th edition. Then 7th edition dropped, the player whose house we'd meet up at dropped 40k altogether, the rest of us tried to keep it going but with no one else's house being a suitable location for everyone, it eventually dwindled from a group of ~35 to 10 to finally 6. And we held at 6 for a little while til the end of last summer when I moved to the other side of the country and two others went off to join the Marines.
Now, I live perhaps just 15 miles away from a GW store but I realm don't feel like picking up the game again. And right now it's not even that I'm in a new place and know no one, I get along fine at the GW store with everyone else the few times I've gone in to rebuild my armies which were lost in the move. It's more that 7th edition hadn't been that fun for me since its release and has only seemed to have grown worse. Now when I kick back and want to do some sort of "wargaming," I think first of the likes of C&C 3, Tiberian Sun, Red Alert 2, Generals, or hell, even World of Tanks/Warships.
I still enjoy reading 40k and HH fluff. Still peek at codices every now and then, but the tabletop game grows more and more distant everyday for me.
And as an update to the story, The local store no longer carries anything related to GW, has sold off all of its terrain and boards and no longer allows GW players to play in the store as all space is reserved for Magic the gathering.
So, GW has lost its only store in the area. The only store as far as I know between Miami and Homestead is now the GW store in Northern Miami, roughly 1 hour away from those of us who play in Homestead.
Purifier wrote: This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement.
Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
You don't really need that much space. A 6x4 table can be built in sections and stored against the wall in a closet and takes up very little space. Then when you want to play you can put it on top of your kitchen table. For terrain storage you just need a small bookshelf, which probably takes up less space than models/paint/etc. It's not an awesome dedicated gaming space, but most people should be able to play 40k at home if they really want to.
You are both right, but I'd like to pipe in:
I lived in america for a year on the east coast. It seemed to me that urban and "countryside" style residents both would use the same game store. So even if many guys lived with their mom, at their sisters house or in some small apartment, there would usually be some guys who had a access to a basement or a big garage, and could host games for their friends. In Sweden, Poland and other countries, you either live in an urban environment in tiny apartments or in the countryside with big houses (but no gaming groups).
Purifier wrote: This is actually something I've been thinking about lately too. It seems like everyone in the 'muricas has this awesome gaming basement. Here in Sweden, everyone lives in a small apartment. Me and my friends have a gaming table that we've made out of three IKEA tables. This allows us to store it, but whoever has it has to store those three table tops and all the scenery. It is a problem. We don't really have that kind of storage, so we're making concessions to store it.
You don't really need that much space. A 6x4 table can be built in sections and stored against the wall in a closet and takes up very little space. Then when you want to play you can put it on top of your kitchen table. For terrain storage you just need a small bookshelf, which probably takes up less space than models/paint/etc. It's not an awesome dedicated gaming space, but most people should be able to play 40k at home if they really want to.
You are both right, but I'd like to pipe in: I lived in america for a year on the east coast. It seemed to me that urban and "countryside" style residents both would use the same game store. So even if many guys lived with their mom, at their sisters house or in some small apartment, there would usually be some guys who had a access to a basement or a big garage, and could host games for their friends. In Sweden, Poland and other countries, you either live in an urban environment in tiny apartments or in the countryside with big houses (but no gaming groups).
Yeah, I laughed when he started about closets and kitchen tables. Only large houses have those. The appartment I grew up in for example was just a kitchen (no room for table, let alone game board), a bathroom, a small common room and two tiny bedrooms. The entire appartment would probably fit into the average American bedroom. And that was actually one of the better appartments in the city. Storage really is an issue in many countries, and if you live in a small house and don't have a flgs to play at and store tables etc. you are out of luck. Your only hope then is a friend with a large house. But in any case, a flgs is still extremely important for playing 40k or other wargames. Not only for the space, but also because playing with friends all the time against the same armies gets stale after a while. New armies to play against keeps things fresh.
In my experience, when the last store in the area closes down, that is also the end for 40k in that area. Sure, people will still try and organise things, but in the end it dies down because there are no new players and finding place and getting together require much more effort.
Why is getting a debit card so hard?
Because there is a good chance they will never see the money back, as a lot of young people go to UK or Norway and are gone.
They usually go back to Poland from norway with a lot of credit they never bother paying back too. So someone has a lot of norwegian credit cards in Warzawa and Gdynia.
Ghazkuul wrote: And as an update to the story, The local store no longer carries anything related to GW, has sold off all of its terrain and boards and no longer allows GW players to play in the store as all space is reserved for Magic the gathering.
So, GW has lost its only store in the area. The only store as far as I know between Miami and Homestead is now the GW store in Northern Miami, roughly 1 hour away from those of us who play in Homestead.
Good work GW.
I get what you're trying to say. GW is driving stores to not sell their products, and that's bad.
However... I live in Belgium and the closest store that I know of is also 1 hour away and I make that trip weekly (and I'd do more if I had the time). It's always been that way for me and I've never complained about it. Wargaming just isn't as big here and even if FLGS sell GW, they don't offer space to play (and even if they do, you just get a table without terrain). If I want to play, I'll have to either make a one hour trip to the GW or a 30 minute trip to the closest friend that plays 40K which we rarely do because neither of us has got any terrain.
In fact, I was amazed that the GW store lets you play there for free on fully prepared tables when I first started playing.
In short, I get that it's annoying that you have to travel further and possibly get to know new people in order to keep playing 40K again, but I don't think it's worth making such a fuzz about. It's what people would call a "mild inconvenience".
In fact, I was amazed that the GW store lets you play there for free on fully prepared tables when I first started playing.
Envy your GW then. We have one in the whole country. It has 3 tables, which is kind of a cool. But you have the option they give you are, either to play a demo games if your first time, play a small game if there is no one that wants to play a demo game, play a different demo game. If you have a 1500pts army bought in store or outside of the store, they never let you play.
This probably varies with countries, but all houses I have lived in so far have had those.
Define has. Does our kitchen have a table? yes. Can max two people sit at it, by which the block access tot he fridge ? yes too.
Ghazkuul wrote: And as an update to the story, The local store no longer carries anything related to GW, has sold off all of its terrain and boards and no longer allows GW players to play in the store as all space is reserved for Magic the gathering.
So, GW has lost its only store in the area. The only store as far as I know between Miami and Homestead is now the GW store in Northern Miami, roughly 1 hour away from those of us who play in Homestead.
Good work GW.
I get what you're trying to say. GW is driving stores to not sell their products, and that's bad.
However... I live in Belgium and the closest store that I know of is also 1 hour away and I make that trip weekly (and I'd do more if I had the time). It's always been that way for me and I've never complained about it. Wargaming just isn't as big here and even if FLGS sell GW, they don't offer space to play (and even if they do, you just get a table without terrain). If I want to play, I'll have to either make a one hour trip to the GW or a 30 minute trip to the closest friend that plays 40K which we rarely do because neither of us has got any terrain.
In fact, I was amazed that the GW store lets you play there for free on fully prepared tables when I first started playing.
In short, I get that it's annoying that you have to travel further and possibly get to know new people in order to keep playing 40K again, but I don't think it's worth making such a fuzz about. It's what people would call a "mild inconvenience".
It is beyond a mild inconvenience when you factor in the costs of getting their. Between my house and that store their are about 5-10 Tolls depending on your route so its going to cost you $10-15 to even go to the store before you factor in anything. On top of that if theirs traffic (and in miami there is always traffic) that 1 hour trip just turned into 2-3 hours. I understand its hard for you guys in other countries but think about how much nicer it would be if GW pulled their collective heads out of their anal orifices.
I just started getting into 40K and live in Homestead, FL as well. I was bummed when I went to Sunshine to pick up some minis and found it devoid of anything GW. Now, if only us Homestead dwellers had a place to play locally. Looks there is enough of us to get some gaming done.
My basement is entirely finished and almost entirely dedicated to wargaming for me & my buddies.
