So rather late, but after PP decided to remove most of the faction specific sections and general chatter from their own forums I'm wondering where everyone went too after that. Are there any active and big warmachine/hordes communities online without having to delve into the monster that is Facebook? Or has it all sort of fizzled and its down to lurking in general gamer sites and chatting in places like here on Dakka?
I wonder if there has been an uptick in player retention or new player recruitment since the removal of the PP forums? I can't imagine why they would euthanize a community except to further these goals.
Bloviator wrote: I wonder if there has been an uptick in player retention or new player recruitment since the removal of the PP forums? I can't imagine why they would euthanize a community except to further these goals.
It seemed to largely be a result of the Magic judge lawsuit and the resulting panic over community volunteer programs.
Yeah, it was a bit of an odd move. And I understand why they did it, but it still didn't make growing the community easier. Having a Press Ganger or two around made made it easy to get new players introduced to the game, and to find events.
Lormahordes is nice, but it still feels pretty dead there besides a few diehards.
Bloviator wrote: I wonder if there has been an uptick in player retention or new player recruitment since the removal of the PP forums? I can't imagine why they would euthanize a community except to further these goals.
It seemed to largely be a result of the Magic judge lawsuit and the resulting panic over community volunteer programs.
I understood the motivations for the removal of Press Gangers, even if it was damaging to the community as a whole. Even with an active friend group, however, I'm not sure I would have stuck around playing Warmachine if those forums weren't there.
Warmachine already has huge barriers to entry. Large model count. The need for two armies. The fact that most people don't want to take the time to play battlebox games with newbies. The fact that those who do will usually put said newbies through the same school of hard knocks we all went through. The fact that the Star Wars IP now has multiple competitive game lines sitting on the shelves next to these weird football player robots. You need a PG around to gin up the human factor, someone who can cultivate a welcoming atmosphere in a group of categorically awkward and competitive people.
EDIT: forums also provide a place to go to see what other people are up to. Facebook discussions are lackluster and I, for one, don't participate in discussions in groups that aren't private. I'm not ashamed of my hobby, but it's not something I need the whole wide world to know, either.
It's doing well in my area do to the dedicated organizers. But considering you cannot sell your stuff for barely dimes on the dollar, the omens aren't good.
Bartertown in the PP area is all Selling: PP W: every other game system under the sun.
I'm not a business man, but I wish PP would of stopped the warmachine bloat years ago and started another really cool, unique minis game that required painting to sell along side it.
Not saying it is dead in my area, but I can say it is a lot quieter. Die hard PP players are now seen playing games of X-wing and 40k.
The new edition plus the removal of press gangers seemed to be a "one- two punch" that they where not able to recover from..
Not sure if x-wing will follow this path but it seems less people where upset with the current PP rules release than what I am hearing from x-wing 2.0.
I'm not a business man, but I wish PP would of stopped the warmachine bloat years ago and started another really cool, unique minis game that required painting to sell along side it.
I've been unable to sell the last of my retribution. Ebay auctions ended at no bids at a dollar for $200 retail worth of miniatures. I posted in local facebook group for the game offering them for $40. No takers. Lowered price to $20. Got offered $10 if I dropped them off.
**** that.
I don't know what happened but it seems like all the people who bought in during GW's decline have all left and are now clearing their old collections.
Was it Star Wars Legion? Did Legion finally get people looking at their miniatures on the shelves and get them thinking they could sell that for stormtrooper money?
Shipping from Canada makes that pointless. Everything would end up at full retail if purchased individually.
In the end I just gave them to some local D&D dungeon masters. At least they seemed excited at having some strange miniatures for a unique encounter, so I know they'll see play and be well loved.
frozenwastes wrote: I've been unable to sell the last of my retribution. Ebay auctions ended at no bids at a dollar for $200 retail worth of miniatures. I posted in local facebook group for the game offering them for $40. No takers. Lowered price to $20. Got offered $10 if I dropped them off.
**** that.
I don't know what happened but it seems like all the people who bought in during GW's decline have all left and are now clearing their old collections.
Was it Star Wars Legion? Did Legion finally get people looking at their miniatures on the shelves and get them thinking they could sell that for stormtrooper money?
This right here regarding not being able to sell stuff. I could not sell SEALED protectorate locallly or on ebay at next to nothing.
Members can mock my thought that privateer bloated this game to hell, but the barrier of entry is overwhelming. I've seen people buy a battle box then go on forums asking the usual, "how to
expand" question, look at 100 unit to choose from, buy a few, get told they "suck now get this intead" and then put it in their closet of shame forever.
I really don't think it's just Legion man. But the star wars game are one of many that PP didn't seem to prepare for. I think it is a combination of GW being more accessible now, and so many wonderful game systems available, including Bolt Action and others specific
to cool genres that have lower starting costs.
I love Warmahordes, but I simply cannot keep up anymore.
I think you're on to something there. The stuff I had for retribution was not the type of stuff the common game wisdom says is the best. It was just a bit of this and that from the initial retribution release.
I guess when Privateer grew and warmachine spread, GW was giving away their market share. Now that GW isn't doing that and other people in the market like Warlord with their Bolt Action and the endless barrage of kickstarter wargame-board game hybrids, Star Wars X-Wing and Legion, the explosion of 28mm historical plastics, and on and on and it's just a different environment than the one that allowed Warmachine to flourish in the first place.
The only reason I mentioned Legion was there seems to be a flood of stuff for sale, but I guess it's just as likely to be 40k or anything else that's making people look into their closet of shame and want to clear their warmachine stuff out.
frozenwastes wrote: I think you're on to something there. The stuff I had for retribution was not the type of stuff the common game wisdom says is the best. It was just a bit of this and that from the initial retribution release.
I guess when Privateer grew and warmachine spread, GW was giving away their market share. Now that GW isn't doing that and other people in the market like Warlord with their Bolt Action and the endless barrage of kickstarter wargame-board game hybrids, Star Wars X-Wing and Legion, the explosion of 28mm historical plastics, and on and on and it's just a different environment than the one that allowed Warmachine to flourish in the first place.
The only reason I mentioned Legion was there seems to be a flood of stuff for sale, but I guess it's just as likely to be 40k or anything else that's making people look into their closet of shame and want to clear their warmachine stuff out.
FFG will run legion into the ground I'm sure. But yes, I agree with your observations. Personally, I hope Privateer Press survives this. I really do.
I do think PP's biggest challenge is just that a lot of their groundbreaking features like game balance and rules clarity aren't nearly as novel as they used to be. In the wake of MK2, pretty much every game not made by GW (and even GW is finally getting with the times) has taken PP's approach towards consistent wording and mechanical timing resolutions. If I want to play a game I feel could support a tournament, there are a lot more options than there used to be.
Locally our biggest problem is just that no one has picked up the PG torch. I had to cut back after my daughter was born and wasn't able to run nearly as many events, but unfortunately no one else was willing to take my place. Prepping for local tournaments has been a major driving factor for the game for a while and without them I see a lot less time spent on casual play.
It's a shame because in many ways the game is way closer to what I wanted when I first started than its ever been. That said, I haven't played nearly as much as I used to. In part, its because I've been playing for years and newer shines are new and shiny. Also though, its hard to ignore just how hard it is to paint PP stuff. Smaller games make painting really rewarding and let you put in a little more effort on each model to good effect. When I come around to painting PP stuff these days it feels daunting.
I don't know how to fix any of this, but if there's a problem, I think its entirely a matter of the game asking a lot of its players in a time when players have endless options to do other things.
LunarSol wrote: I do think PP's biggest challenge is just that a lot of their groundbreaking features like game balance and rules clarity aren't nearly as novel as they used to be. In the wake of MK2, pretty much every game not made by GW (and even GW is finally getting with the times) has taken PP's approach towards consistent wording and mechanical timing resolutions. If I want to play a game I feel could support a tournament, there are a lot more options than there used to be.
Locally our biggest problem is just that no one has picked up the PG torch. I had to cut back after my daughter was born and wasn't able to run nearly as many events, but unfortunately no one else was willing to take my place. Prepping for local tournaments has been a major driving factor for the game for a while and without them I see a lot less time spent on casual play.
It's a shame because in many ways the game is way closer to what I wanted when I first started than its ever been. That said, I haven't played nearly as much as I used to. In part, its because I've been playing for years and newer shines are new and shiny. Also though, its hard to ignore just how hard it is to paint PP stuff. Smaller games make painting really rewarding and let you put in a little more effort on each model to good effect. When I come around to painting PP stuff these days it feels daunting.
I don't know how to fix any of this, but if there's a problem, I think its entirely a matter of the game asking a lot of its players in a time when players have endless options to do other things.
truth and it is such a tournament driven game. The two local press gangers kept going strong after the program was eliminated, which is why we have about 12 players here.
I spend most of my time trolling around on facebook, mostly
because my friends who chat the game are on facebook and we
have our separate group chat we can go to to discuss topics that
go the rounds on the facebook groups.
WM is still going in my area, but has definitely waned. I attribute this mostly to the press gang being disbanded as well as the forum closure. I'm on the loremahordes forum but it isn't nearly as active as the old PP forum was.
I understand disbanding the PG even though I see the wholesale abandonment as a mistake. Without people to pick up the torch, WM/H communities have started to centralize around those who are still active in promoting the game. There are communities that are doing well, but from my experience travelling and playing games those communities are on the decline and their membership is still a touch lower than it was prior to the aforementioned potential causes.
Some will argue that the edition change caused people to leave, and it is true that an edition change almost always sees some leave a hobby. In my experience, it has been more of the ethos that the only lists are theme lists that has become mk3 that has disenfranchised more people. It is far too much of a boon to get 15-20 points of free models to play in a theme that playing a less restrictive list is still not enough of an edge to compete. Now you have to weigh buying 2-3 of a specific unit if you want to play in a theme as well as some support elements.
The game seems largely unapproachable from the perspective of the average new player. In general, WM has been one of the more approachable minis games, but this dynamic is really hurting the ability to recruit new players for the long term.
heckler wrote: WM is still going in my area, but has definitely waned. I attribute this mostly to the press gang being disbanded as well as the forum closure. I'm on the loremahordes forum but it isn't nearly as active as the old PP forum was.
I understand disbanding the PG even though I see the wholesale abandonment as a mistake. Without people to pick up the torch, WM/H communities have started to centralize around those who are still active in promoting the game. There are communities that are doing well, but from my experience travelling and playing games those communities are on the decline and their membership is still a touch lower than it was prior to the aforementioned potential causes.
Some will argue that the edition change caused people to leave, and it is true that an edition change almost always sees some leave a hobby. In my experience, it has been more of the ethos that the only lists are theme lists that has become mk3 that has disenfranchised more people. It is far too much of a boon to get 15-20 points of free models to play in a theme that playing a less restrictive list is still not enough of an edge to compete. Now you have to weigh buying 2-3 of a specific unit if you want to play in a theme as well as some support elements.
The game seems largely unapproachable from the perspective of the average new player. In general, WM has been one of the more approachable minis games, but this dynamic is really hurting the ability to recruit new players for the long term.
Yes, the themed lists in Age of Sigmar are called, Warscroll Battalions I believe. GW quickly patched this up by having them cost some points (but still cool abilities). PP should consider IMO.
The thing is, themes are intended to be the way the game is played at a competitive level now. It's how PP has chosen to break up their factions into more manageable chunks to design and balance around. Free build lists are essentially paying the ally tax people so desperately clamor for, and its very much an intended design.
I don't think people have caught on to the idea that the factions advertised are actually around now 3-5 sub factions similar to the way Mercenaries worked in MK2. I personally think its great and has done wonders for the game's appearance and sense of playstyle, but the conversation around the game definitely hasn't caught up.
One of our PG's has gone crazy over Guild Ball and taken most of the WM players with him. Other PG has had IRL stuff to do so we haven't had much organised and the local club scene has dried up.
For me the big turn offs are themes, price and model quality.
The models are a pain to clean up, and the detail is poor compared to e.g. GW. Looking at the releases GW have put out over the last year PP really seem to be dragging.
A couple of the new Legion releases for example seemed quite bland.
The costs per box seem high. I think I have been spoilt because I picked up a lot of my WM stuff second hand.
Then we have themes...which I never used in MK2. However the pressure to use them seems even greater now.
I liked taking a wide mix of units so buying multiples of the same unit that are expensive and a PITA to assemble doesn't thrill me.
Realising that each faction is now a bunch of mini-factions prompted me to sell off all bar two armies and then focus on one or two themes within those.
Realising that each faction is now a bunch of mini-factions prompted me to sell off all bar two armies and then focus on one or two themes within those.
That's oddly one of the things I've most enjoyed about MK3. Cutting a bunch of factions and really focusing on a couple that really caught my attention in first place.
It's weird to see people so against themes. Personally, it fixes one of my major problems with WMH. During Mk2, I found it very difficult to be able to play the models I wanted to play. If I took model A, it was borderline worthless unless I also took model B. I played WMH because of the big robots, but Cryx and Khador were both almost entirely dependent on infantry - I wanted big robots, but I found myself looking at buying multiple boxes of doom reavers and winter guards (neither of which I wanted). With Cryx, there was only one warcaster who apparently had a chance with a jack-heavy army (Mortenebra or something) and even then, it seemed more like a glitch in the matrix rather than a valid army building strategy. Some people enjoy building armies from whatever models are most effective, but I can't get passionate about models I don't love and I don't want to feel overly limited in what I can choose to play. If nothing else, it appears that themes open up the possibility of focusing on groups of related models that I like.
I'm actually buying the Man-O-War theme box coming out (mostly to paint - love the Man-O-War designs), and I might actually try playing again. My complaints against WMH are legion, and themes don't fix most of them, but I can't say that a Man-O-War based army doesn't make me waver.
For the record, most of my WMH complaints are community issues. PP has expensive, mediocre quality models, but WMH's worst enemy is the players. My worst miniature game experience EVER was with WMH, with someone who put together a net list that was almost entirely proxied (this Menoth jack is a Retribution solo, this cavalry model is a jack), unpainted and largely unassembled, that tabled me on the second turn through an absurd combo that just kept going - and it was probably my 6th game of WMH ever. I saw a thread over at Lormahordes about keeping new players interested and it was 11 pages of arguing about why veteran players should dumb down how they play for new players rather than just having them learn through constant, overwhelming, and oppressive failure, and all I could think was, yeah, that's WMH for you.
Sqor that's the same issue Magic the Gathering has and that has even more insane combos to the point where some are totally unbeatable - you basically win or lose based on the draw of the opponents deck. And yet Magic is utterly huge and seems to retain its population well. Granted a much lower buy-in-cost helps and the game can trickle feed better (even though in the long run you can pay way more than a miniatures game if you are keeping up with the current meta and you don't only buy select cards on ebay).
As for themes I think one aspect might be if the army a person plays has a theme for their desires. Eg Legion apparently hasn't got a "pure beasts" style theme (or at least near pure beasts) which is what drew many to that faction. So a Legion player might feel that the themes are bad because they are not covering a key interest. Meanwhile another player might be perfectly happy because the themes are covering what they want
As for themes I think one aspect might be if the army a person plays has a theme for their desires. Eg Legion apparently hasn't got a "pure beasts" style theme (or at least near pure beasts) which is what drew many to that faction. So a Legion player might feel that the themes are bad because they are not covering a key interest. Meanwhile another player might be perfectly happy because the themes are covering what they want
FWIW, Oracles of Annihilation has been Legion's Warbeast theme for over a year now.
Overread wrote: Sqor that's the same issue Magic the Gathering has and that has even more insane combos to the point where some are totally unbeatable - you basically win or lose based on the draw of the opponents deck. And yet Magic is utterly huge and seems to retain its population well. Granted a much lower buy-in-cost helps and the game can trickle feed better (even though in the long run you can pay way more than a miniatures game if you are keeping up with the current meta and you don't only buy select cards on ebay).
I don't understand. Are you trying to defend this behavior? Or trying to say it shouldn't be a problem because a bigger game gets away with it?
Magic is the #1 tournament game out there by a wide, wide margin that is relatively cheap and easy for new players to get into and play - especially if they just play casually with their friends (like the boys at my children's school). Warmachine is not the #1 game by a wide, wide margin and is expensive as crap and extremely time consuming to get into (not to mention a wicked learning curve). There's no such thing as a casual WMH player. If a Magic player doesn't survive the Spartan trials, there's fifty more waiting to replace them. If the community drives away a WMH player, they've lost a rare player with the time, money, and capability to play WMH.
For a population to remain healthy, new players must come in at a rate equal to or greater than the rate in which they lose old players. WMH has a very slow trickle of new players and older players have been leaving. The community is shrinking. It doesn't matter where everybody went, only why nobody is waiting in line to be let in.
LunarSol wrote: The thing is, themes are intended to be the way the game is played at a competitive level now. It's how PP has chosen to break up their factions into more manageable chunks to design and balance around. Free build lists are essentially paying the ally tax people so desperately clamor for, and its very much an intended design.
I don't think people have caught on to the idea that the factions advertised are actually around now 3-5 sub factions similar to the way Mercenaries worked in MK2. I personally think its great and has done wonders for the game's appearance and sense of playstyle, but the conversation around the game definitely hasn't caught up.
I love the mini faction within faction approach, I got my Kaya beast list, Wurmwood bucket of infantry list and working on Rock list (and the Chikken Likken list that shall not be played)
Sqorgar I'm saying that MTG manages to achieve a high recruitment and retention rate despite having even worse power level variation. Ergo that Warmachine and Hordes might be doing something else wrong other than game balance in order to be resulting in a loss of players at both ends. I'd say the panic scrapping of the PG scheme coupled with them nuking their own forums really hasn't helped PP retain a good community connection.
GW can get away without a local group of officially supported fans because GW has its own stores and staff; nearly any other miniatures game that I see which does well tends to have its own group of supported fans who help introduce new players and such. The whole MTG court case that I think sparked PP dropping their own scheme was a worry for them, but at the same time I think they do need to bring that back in some form.
I'm not defending vast power differences and indeed its one big gripe I have with MGT in that a casual and competitive player are almost impossible to put together since the competitive deck might well win nearly every time unless its user gets a really bad draw of cards. However I'm saying that if a game with a vastly bigger power level curve can survive then Warmachine/Hordes has to be doing more than just its balance to be losing players.
I will say, the community has always been really bad about playing anything other than tournament games. I'm not saying the problem is in the lack of narrative content by that, but just that much of the time you'll see players unwilling to even play 50 point games against someone who doesn't own a full 75 point army. I used to think that was primarily the fault of the game's need for scenarios and the steamroller packet just not scaling well (because it doesn't) but the community has so thoroughly rejected even official variants to Masters that I've come around to the idea that its a deeper issue than something that can be solved simply by PP providing support for smaller point games.
I sort of concur with Lunar, I also think the 1.21 gigawatt explosion of other options in recent years has taken its toll, prior to that it was largely the Geedubs or PP but now there a massive range of other choices
Overread wrote: Sqorgar I'm saying that MTG manages to achieve a high recruitment and retention rate despite having even worse power level variation. Ergo that Warmachine and Hordes might be doing something else wrong other than game balance in order to be resulting in a loss of players at both ends. I'd say the panic scrapping of the PG scheme coupled with them nuking their own forums really hasn't helped PP retain a good community connection.
I admit that losing the forums and PGs were probably did a lot of immediate harm, but I think people are greatly overestimating their value. These are tasks the community is easily capable of compensating for, if they wanted to. I'm not sure they were a universal good either, as the forums were kind of a poor place for new players and at least my local PG was one of the people who wouldn't play new players because he was only interested in running the tournament scenario at full points.
From what my brother-in-law has said (he's played since first edition), mk3 was only sort of damaging, but for his group, the launch of 40k 8th edition is what made the biggest impact. He said the majority of players in the WMH group were lapsed 40k players, and once GW started being kind of awesome again (and PP making lots of bad decisions), they hopped ship back. He also said that X-Wing was big competition for players and that the 2nd edition could potentially drag a few lapsed X-Wing players away.
GW can get away without a local group of officially supported fans because GW has its own stores and staff; nearly any other miniatures game that I see which does well tends to have its own group of supported fans who help introduce new players and such. The whole MTG court case that I think sparked PP dropping their own scheme was a worry for them, but at the same time I think they do need to bring that back in some form.
In the US, in many places, Warhammer stores are kind of hard to come by. My nearest one is about 5 hours away by car. But I walked into a 40k tournament in progress once and there must've been 50 people participating (I honestly didn't know there were more than 10 miniature gamers in town). The only thing that even remotely counts as support around here is a Facebook group.
I'm not defending vast power differences and indeed its one big gripe I have with MGT in that a casual and competitive player are almost impossible to put together since the competitive deck might well win nearly every time unless its user gets a really bad draw of cards. However I'm saying that if a game with a vastly bigger power level curve can survive then Warmachine/Hordes has to be doing more than just its balance to be losing players.
It's definitely a culmination of things. I think most potential WMH players are lost before they even get their first battle box (or shortly after attempting to assemble one - ugh).
You know what a typical WMH game looks like? A flat green table with a couple flat circles and rectangles on it, some brass rings, and some or most of the figures unpainted (only occasionally primed). It looks like a geometry exam. What potential player is going to see that and think, wow! How do I get me some of that?
Meanwhile, I've seen pure grey armies of 40k go after each other, but the board had 3D terrain, and the grey armies had a wide variety of profiles, from giant mechs to tanks to hordes of infantry to giant centerpiece models. Even unpainted, 40k still looks impressive. I tried to find a YouTube video to demonstrate this, but for the life of me, I couldn't find a single one with unpainted models. The local 40k tournament I stumbled into had some amazing, AMAZING tables too that really blew me away. WMH players have no interest in the pageantry of miniature games. How do you sell a game experience that looks like a math test to new players?
Let's say that they do pick up a battle box. Maybe they watched one of the good YouTube battle reports, or maybe PP did a decent job of selling the pageantry of the game. Heck, let's say they even get through assembling a battle box without thinking, "gee, this is some terrible quality bs right here". They show up for a game and the first thing they are told is "you are going to lose a lot before you can think about winning". Almost nobody will play their battle box sized game and they are told exactly how to build their 75 pt army before they bother to come back. So they go buy a few hundred dollars worth of models, assemble them, email PP for replacement parts because their models are missing bits, finish assembling them, and come back to the table with their new army - and problem get curb stomped in the most brutal way possible, getting assassinated on the second turn while still referencing the rulebook on how to allocate focus points.
The WMH community is outright hostile to new players and they blame the game. It is too complex, too top heavy, too challenging to master. It isn't the game.
I definitely think the PP community needs to get over their obsession with 2D terrain. I get how we got here. Legion in MK2 was able to really abuse large terrain and give an overwhelming advantage to an already powerful faction. Terrain mitigation was ubiquitous enough on already powerful models that most of it didn't matter except to make things that struggled already even worse. There's also just a lot of physical model issues at stake, with PP's stuff mocking the base borders but being very reliant on precise positioning near walls and buildings. The explosion of the tournament scene really killed table quality though, as it became all to easy to conveniently set up 40-50 tables with a couple hundred mousepads that fit in a shoebox.
It's bad though. I think WMH games look great with models on the table, as its still in my mind the only large scale game that drives to the middle and produces an impressive looking scrum, but walking through convention halls before players arrive looking at tables is pretty horrifying. MK3 demands better looking tables, but players are still hesitant to even put a tree on their forest template to put a little life in things.
I think MK3 supports the best looking games of any edition of Warmachine though. Mitigation is much less common and more evenly spread and the scenarios are significantly more designed towards heavy terrain. Themes really up the cohesion of armies and the added battlegroup requirements (and ability to run them) give a good mix of size and scale across the battlefield. The tournament crowd definitely isn't rushing to show off the game's potential though. Hopefully we'll see that change as affordable prepainted terrain becomes more common. I really hope we see an end to absolutely abysmal WMH tables soon.
LunarSol wrote: I will say, the community has always been really bad about playing anything other than tournament games. I'm not saying the problem is in the lack of narrative content by that, but just that much of the time you'll see players unwilling to even play 50 point games against someone who doesn't own a full 75 point army. I used to think that was primarily the fault of the game's need for scenarios and the steamroller packet just not scaling well (because it doesn't) but the community has so thoroughly rejected even official variants to Masters that I've come around to the idea that its a deeper issue than something that can be solved simply by PP providing support for smaller point games.
This... so much........ is what totally destroyed my local community who had to travel an hour away to get games in at the end. Not everyone in the world wants to play 75 point steamrollers. Sadly that's all people seem to care to for. A group of people actually made fun of my crew mid game for playing a 35 point game. That happened to sadly be the final straw for most of my group which has never recovered which really sucks
Vakruz wrote: This... so much........ is what totally destroyed my local community who had to travel an hour away to get games in at the end. Not everyone in the world wants to play 75 point steamrollers. Sadly that's all people seem to care to for. A group of people actually made fun of my crew mid game for playing a 35 point game. That happened to sadly be the final straw for most of my group which has never recovered which really sucks
I know someone with a very similar story. It is eerily common with WMH. The WMH community should be listening to these sorts of stories, but they don't. Or if they do, they come up with excuses (but Magic does it!) rather than address it.
Sqorgar wrote: It's weird to see people so against themes. .
The biggest problem with themes for me is that I have to buy and clean up multiple units of the same expensive, second rate infantry models. That got old very quickly. At least I had been cleaning up different PITA PVC units.
I think so much of it has to do with the quality of PP minis. I have to admit they are so far behind GW. Very little customization, still using metal, few extra bits, 2 or 3 identical poses in a box, cruddy resin, etc.
If they made plastic kits like those GW kits, it would go a long way.
The Kharadons, Daughters of Khaine and Deepkin releases all made us want to buy those armies or at least some units. The box GW games are a great value.
Throw in new competitors such as X-Wing, Imperial Assault and Infiniti (which really isn’t new but dynamic minis) and PP has a smaller base given we all have limited resources.
Whilst a lot of the mini's are at best functional a shift towards overbusy rank and file a la GW wouldn't be a step forward, mono-pose jacks and beasts is a minor issue but GW Dreads and lots of monsters are equally fairly static
I'm putting together a Cygnar battlebox right now, and holy crap are these models terrible. They don't fit together without some serious work, there's mould lines going through details (and in the most impossible to clean places), and large pegs to cut off, wedged between rivets. A lot of the detail is extremely soft and the plastic is inconsistently mixed (you can see swirls of color in it and remnants of bubbles). After cleaning it and priming the Khador one, it does look a lot better, but it is still far, far, far, far, far.... far behind the quality of every other miniature game I've seen recently. GW's plastic miniatures are without equals, but even stuff from CMON or FFG is leagues ahead of this. You know those bags of little green toy soldiers you can get for a dollar? They are better.
In all fairness, I heard the battlebox models are the absolute worst and it does get better with metal/resin, and when I pick up the Man-O-War theme box (which I'm considering not getting now), I'll see for sure. But holy crap, Warmachine doesn't just have bad models. It has literally the worst models. It's like they were an after thought. A miniatures game where nobody, not even the creators, actually care about the miniatures.
The battlebox minis are some of the worst examples of their resin. Some of their more recent has some pretty nicely detailed metal/resin minis. A lot of the older factions all have really awful looking models that have been around from 2007 or before. It's worth noting that any of the models they have produced that are made of the same style of plastic as the GW minis look incredible! They assemble so easily and look great too. The mold lines are also very minimal. I believe the Cygnar Stormclad resculpt is one of these models.
I'll definitely check out that Stormclad. Looks like Khador has a few plastic models as well - but only a few. In fact, it doesn't look like PP have released any in 2018 at all. The Crucible Guard seems to be getting one. But that still takes us through August with only a single sprue-based model released total. Doesn't make me think that PP is moving towards that sort of future.
Looks like the Man-O-War box is all resin/metal, and I'm seriously reconsidering my pre-order. The Man-O-Wars were my second favorite models in Warmachine back in the metal days (with the Spriggan being number one), but I haven't seen them in non-metal yet. As enticing as an all Man-O-War army is to me, I really do feel very concerned about model quality.
All of the Man O War unit models are the old, crummy plastic, fyi. It's some of the better results they got out of the material, but just be warned Shocktroopers, Demo Corp, and Bombardiers are all made out of the stuff.
The big thing to be aware of is that PP's range has models that run most of its 15 year history at this point and at times that shows. Knowing when a kit was made can really help understand its quality. A quick primer on the history of their materials:
2003-2009: Metal. Their metals have always been pretty good, though newer stuff is generally nicer. While initially everything was metal, beyond 2009 they scaled it back so that metal was mostly reserved for single figure sculpts; Warcaster, Solos, Attachments and the like. These models are pretty good across the range.
2010-2016(?): Restic plastic. Unfortunately, PP bought in to the Restic promises as a way to keep their hulky, top heavy designs and move to plastic as metal went out of fashion. Some of the later kits are.... okay... sorta, but this is the stuff where you'll find the garbage models. Unfortunately, they launched this line with the baseline jacks for battleboxes, and those first Restic molds (while somewhat improved) are still the basis for the current battleboxes and why they suck so very very bad. Sadly, a LOT of 10 man units were redone in this stuff, and PP has just in the last year or two perfected replacements, so I think it will be a good 5 years before we see them phased out.
2015-Present: Sprue plastic. They've done a little bit of this over the last few years, but it's not their preferred material. In general, their sculpts are just too busy to work with the undercut limitations here without losing the oversized look that dominates the line. They had a pretty massive failure last year trying to do an organic in the stuff and have mostly decided to stick to machines in the stuff. Expect it to only get used for Warjacks, Colossals, and Battle Engines.
Present: Resin with metal bits. They seem to have finally found their footing again with Resin. They've been slowing improving it since 2011, but in the last 2-3 years they seem to have gotten it to where they can make the kind of big detail laden models that worked for them in metal. Pretty much everything not made out of Sprue plastic is resin these days and I've been generally quite happy with the quality of the models again. I think they've still got a lot of problems with the model line to work out, but a lot of the kits I'm unhappy with lately have more to do with the 2013 release date than anything I hope.
That was really helpful. I'm disappointed that the Man-O-Wars are the crappy sort of models (I love my metal ones), but I'm willing to give the sprue and resin/metal models a chance before writing WMH off (again). I assume updated Man-O-War models are not planned for the near future?
PP hasn't announced any resculpts of the existing restic line; they've just sort of quietly stopped making new stuff in it (I think Grymkin was the last of it). I suspect they'll do so eventually, but they also probably need to recoup some of the cost on those molds that were supposed to last forever, so I'm not expecting an immediate change.
I would be sad if PP went under. I liked their setting, but even in the early days when it came out, it was clear that the game was going to be combotastic so I stopped collecting. That impression has stayed with me and has me wondering if 8th ed 40K is really diving into this direction.
I'd be shocked if they went under considering that Warmachine is still the second name to GW and Warhammer. Granted the market is FAR more messy today and a lot of the smaller companies have to fight to hold their corner; but the market is also much broader and there's a chance to survive.
The biggest risk I see is that Warmachine is continuing to expand their armies instead of resculpting; GW has for years kept many of their armies quite small and done resculpts which have often generated new sales and release hype, whilst not actually broadening the army size itself.
I don't think PP is in any danger of going under, but they are definitely mishandling their game in several big, obvious ways. Their corner of the market would be smaller anyway, now that 40k is once again a force to be reckoned with, but I feel like it is even smaller than that because of the model quality, expense, their community and online policies, and the way they've let the fans define the game (and the new player experience). Paying $80 to get all the (free) model rules in War Room is six kinds of bs too.
If I was PP, I'd focus first on improving the model quality. Apparently, they've been doing that, but the crap models still make up the majority of core units for each faction. Then, I'd do something about the community. WMH players are downright abusive to new players and can not be trusted to introduce new players to the game without frustrating them or scaring them off, and their inability to play anything outside of tournament scenarios limits the pool of players who could be interested in WMH to a very specific, deliberate group of people.
Sqorgar wrote: Paying $80 to get all the (free) model rules in War Room is six kinds of bs too.
FWIW, I'd drop this again in a heartbeat if GW offered it for 40k.
40k doesn't have free rules though. War Room was already annoying when the rules weren't free, but they are free now and it feels especially egregious. Especially since they are constantly updating the cards such that digitally is the only place you can get up to date rules, they've made it so that their premiere digital distribution platform is offensively expensive. And they print the card PDFs with half the rules upside down, so you can't even get basic free rules in a clean and readable way. How hard would it have been to add a checkmark to flip the card backs when building a PDF?
Do they even include cards anymore? Will my Man-O-War theme box preorder require me to make my own cards or buy the rules in War Room?
I have a fully painted everblight army. It takes me 35 mins to get to the closest store and about 2 hours to play a 35-point game and I do one game a week and I just can't take another game of getting my face pushed into the dirt (and before anyone says it, NO, I don't want to play Lylyth3 or Throne of Everblight.).
Not that I have much reason to buy anything now, it's been months since I TALKED or SEEN another warmahordes player. Today I went and looked at the new Khador Man-o-War Tanker solo stats, and, well I think maybe time to look for another game.
Well finally my local store has had an uptick of Warmachine players. Enough for me to start two new armies.
Thankfully, both Khador and Cryx have had almost every single model I wanted made in metal at one point in time. So that made building my armies with quality models far easier.
Parts of our local 40k crowd seems to be getting pretty fed up with the 8th edition (myself included), and have begun branching out into Infinity and Warmachine.
- and problem get curb stomped in the most brutal way possible, getting assassinated on the second turn while still referencing the rulebook on how to allocate focus points.
The WMH community is outright hostile to new players and they blame the game. It is too complex, too top heavy, too challenging to master. It isn't the game.
The issue with WMH isn't that it's a hard game - for a lot of people that was a huge plus - that it took hard earned skill to be good at the game, and the steep learning curve was a draw. When you earned your wings and started getting wins, its was because you'd earned them, and not just bought the top-build-of-the-moment, as is often the case in 40ks tournament scene.
That said, there is a difference between playing hard, and playing relatively hard, especially against someone who is new to the game, who wants to learn and who can't yet fully read the game. In other words, dropping a Haley 3 power build against the latter is a dick move. You don't need to hold their hands, but you dont need to come down like a ton of bricks like a tourney try hard - at the level of playin the new guy, that's seal clubbing and I still basically just a giant middle finger of 'feth off, you're not welcome here'. You are partly correct when you blame the community. But partly wrong also. It's not necessarily the community. It's the community that is left playing the game.
That said, I do agree with you for a large part. The game now is too complex, too top heavy and too challenging to master. When I got into it at the end of mk1/start of mk2, it was a far more manageable game. Now, seven or eight years later, the game has bloated to a level where unless you played all this time and stayed abreast of all the changes, you're overwhelmed. And each new release just makes it harder. The final nail in the coffin was hearing pp was planning a new faction every year from now on. That was me - out. And it guts me to say that - I loved the game. But I only played occasionally for a few years due to life stuff, and each time I wanted to get back in, the hurdle just seemed higher and higher. Now, it's just not worth bothering with. The amount of time it would take in terms of game time to get up to date with the game is simply not worth it for me. I'm seriously of the opinion that pp needs to gut the game out, kill off half the casters, purge a lot of the units and jacks, and even remove a few factions and then you might have a game that is manageable again.
I generally agree with a lot of the sentiment here. WMH is on a decline. Hmm, no. I don't think that's correct. It was a kingdom, it grew to empire, the empire fell and now it's a rump state. I think it's fairest to say WMH has retreated and retrenched, and is now played by the most hardcore followers of the last few years. The moderates have fallen away over time. I think WMH exists in a kind of bubble at this point where what happens to It and it's players is almost separate to the rest of the hobby - it has become it's very own ecosystem. I see the small rump of hardcore maintain the support. But few moderates. Few casuals. Very very little new blood. And sadly,I see pp prefer to placate the rump than seek to draw in new blood. I mean you see it here. Look at WMH traffic. Tiny. Look at 'what do I need to start' posts? Very few. Five or six years ago, you couldn't move for the sheer amount of them.
There was a time when pp could do no wrong. Everything gw did, they didn't. They offered a competitive game to people that wanted a competitive game - they came along with the right game at the right time and took off. But these days, they make a lot of the same decisions/mistakes gw did. I had no issue with them killing their forums - they were terrible, nothing but group think and ego and very little in the way of creativity. Pressgangers getting ditched was a shame. What made their gsmes great was the organised play and the excellent grass roots support. Without that, the game has withered in every meta bar the most hardcore. I though that the shift to mk3 was flawed. I didn't like the new points - I thought the less granular system was far superior. I thought a lot of the changes were cosmetic, and changed things rather than improved them - it seems reposition and tough was handed out to everything as a band aid. Then there was the skorne debacle at launch. For me, it was getting rid of the yearly expansion books. And seemingly the rpg material. I loved the ongoing story. Now I have to go to their books which whilst there are some stellar titles, there's a lot of chaff to wade through (anything with Stryker and Haley especially!). Now there is the shift to no quarter prime. Which here in the U.K, is almost impossible to source. It's harder and harder to maintain a grip on the hobby. And the game balance, for all the changes, isn't better. Pp have shifted to a codex-in-all-but-name approach with themes. What were factions are basically model ranges now. The real factions are the themes, and a handful dominate over everything else.
Model quality I can't comment on. I've never had any issues with anything I bought, or missing parts.price however is a thing. Some of the unit things prices are nothing short of extortionate - the legion ogre-centaur unit as one example. I cannot justify paying that unless they were cast in solidly gold.
In terms of resale value - it's the same here's. You cannot give it away. I recently put my retribution army and a good chunk of my circle up for sale. For months, no interest (and apparently, retribution have meagre themes...). A friend has now offered to buy the rest when he gets the cash together for a reasonable price, but the difficulty in moving stuff stunned me. 3 years ago, me and the wife moved to our own flat and I decided to get rid of a bunch of my superfluous stuff. It ran out the door, didn't matter what it was. All WMH odds and ends, gone. No issues going from that to this seriously suggest serious problems in the market in terms of player interest.
It's sad. It really is. There's no one thing that has caused this, but really, just an accumulation of a lot of gripes and minor issues.
I still put the brunt of the blame on the community. WMH is not a bad game, but it is played in a bad way, and the people left playing it like it that way. Mk3 actually addressed a lot of issues I had with the game (no terrain, unclear 3D gameplay rules, toeing terrain, warjacks not useful, limited variety in army building), but I saw that a lot of people are still trying to play it like Mk2, with all the worst habits still the standard.
On a different note, I picked up a Stormclad with the nice sprues and put it together. The model is significantly better than the crap plastic they were using, but still several steps below GW's models. It most reminded me of putting together the Shadows of Brimstone miniatures. Things didn't quite fit together that well, there were about twice as many pieces as necessary, and there was a little bit of awkwardness to assembling it. All said though, the model came out fine, with good detail, and looks like it will be a lot of fun to paint. If this were the standard of quality (and price, it was $26 on Amazon) for all WMH figures, I'd be pretty satisfied. Haven't seen a resin model in person yet.
I keep going back and forth on cancelling my Man-O-War theme box preorder. I feel like it is really expensive for what it is and not that great a deal. Moreover, though I'd love to paint those models, I just don't see myself playing WMH anymore due to the expectations of the other players. In my experience. WMH players are very kind people (not WAAC at all), but take the game very seriously in all the ways that I don't, and I'm not sure that there's a middle ground where we can play an enjoyable game together.
I will say, one of the reasons that the game is often hard to play with players is just that its kind of a burden to carry around a lot of excess stuff. I often simply don't have battlebox contents and playing lower point games isn't as simple as cutting stuff from your list to make it. I still think that for the most part the entrenched need to understand that beating Timmy doesn't require much in the way of optimization, but its still awkward to cut down to lower points for a lot of what players have on hand.
Sqorgar wrote: How do you sell a game experience that looks like a math test to new players?
Let's say that they do pick up a battle box. Maybe they watched one of the good YouTube battle reports, or maybe PP did a decent job of selling the pageantry of the game. Heck, let's say they even get through assembling a battle box without thinking, "gee, this is some terrible quality bs right here". They show up for a game and the first thing they are told is "you are going to lose a lot before you can think about winning". Almost nobody will play their battle box sized game and they are told exactly how to build their 75 pt army before they bother to come back. So they go buy a few hundred dollars worth of models, assemble them, email PP for replacement parts because their models are missing bits, finish assembling them, and come back to the table with their new army - and problem get curb stomped in the most brutal way possible, getting assassinated on the second turn while still referencing the rulebook on how to allocate focus points.
The WMH community is outright hostile to new players and they blame the game. It is too complex, too top heavy, too challenging to master. It isn't the game.
Actually, it *is* the game.
As I understand it, WMH currently requires high memorization and listbuilding, with a relatively low luck factor in-game. That particular combination guarantees that newbies don't stand a sliver of chance against experienced players. They won't have good lists, they won't know the game, and they won't have random luck to turn things around.
Contrast with GW, where luck is a very huge factor in their current games - luck that allows a newbie to outright win in certain cases, almost regardless of what they actually brought to the table. And when they don't win, the swinginess of things ensures something amazing happens for them on the tabletop. That high level of lucky creates things that brings newbies back to the table for more!
Fortnite does something similar, where the drops and guns are much more random than something like PUBG.
As I understand it, WMH currently requires high memorization and listbuilding, with a relatively low luck factor in-game. That particular combination guarantees that newbies don't stand a sliver of chance against experienced players. They won't have good lists, they won't know the game, and they won't have random luck to turn things around.
Contrast with GW, where luck is a very huge factor in their current games - luck that allows a newbie to outright win in certain cases, almost regardless of what they actually brought to the table. And when they don't win, the swinginess of things ensures something amazing happens for them on the tabletop. That high level of lucky creates things that brings newbies back to the table for more!
There is a high luck factor to WMH too. It may actually be worse than 40k, since you rarely roll more than 2 or 3 D6s, meaning that each action you take can be very swingy.
The thing about WMH is that there are VERY powerful combos that you can pull off. They can be difficult to trigger, but once they go off, you've won the game. But the combos tend to have hard counters that can stop or even reverse a combo. This makes the game all about knowing the synergies between units, what to set up, and what to counter. The game takes a long time to learn because you pretty much have to know your opponent's army better than he does. The luck comes into play with whether you can trigger a combo, but the effect and nature of the combos are perfectly predictable.
One of the reason why new players have such a difficult time with the game is because the general playerbase builds around tournament rules, and thus their armies are built around triggering these devastating combos. I've had several games where I lost before the first turn, and the game was basically just watching my opponent go through the motions of curb stomping me. And even if you can convince them to try their non-tournament army, they'll end up trying out a different combo-based army that they read about on the internet. Because triggering those combos is the money shot. Moving miniatures around is just the foreplay.
But the thing is, a lot of those combos are conditional on playing a very specific way. At lower point values, there are fewer combos with different effectiveness. If you use a lot of terrain and 3D environments, that changes things. If you play a different scenario besides the Steamroller one, things change yet again. And because of this, WMH players WON'T PLAY IT. They claim that the game isn't balanced playing another way, but that's not it at all. Without the money shot, the game is worthless to them. So they've built the game entirely around getting to that money shot as efficiently and effectively as possible.
WMH is actually a pretty broad game with a lot of possibilities (which the No Quarter magazines often promote but which never see play). But the typical WMH player is just using it as the quickest way to get their rocks off. WMH is the Flesh Light of miniature gaming.
(This is a gross simplification, by try not to think it when you see WMH players discuss the game)
I sorely doubt that WMH has anything like Maelstrom, where the game can simply hand you a winning VP advantage simply for being in your own DZ.
WMH is about building and memorizing combos, and who can set up to "go off" first and best. Now, if you're going to claim that WMH can randomly give someone the win based on the luck of a handful of card draws, then I'd agree that WMH has more luck. Otherwise, no.
LunarSol wrote: 2015-Present: Sprue plastic. They've done a little bit of this over the last few years, but it's not their preferred material. In general, their sculpts are just too busy to work with the undercut limitations here without losing the oversized look that dominates the line. They had a pretty massive failure last year trying to do an organic in the stuff and have mostly decided to stick to machines in the stuff. Expect it to only get used for Warjacks, Colossals, and Battle Engines.
I'm curious. What models were made in sprue plastic that were organic? I wasn't following the game last year so I'm not sure which models were made in sprue plastic then. I remember them saying they didn't want to switch to sprue plastic for the organic stuff.
I began Warmachine with some friends in 2002, before the game was released - there was Kreoss and Stryker's starter sets, and I've still got the original rules booklet somewhere (all arc nodes had the feedback rule that now only applies to faulty ones, and Kreoss and Stryker shared five out of six spells). In the beginning, it took of like gangbusters - I bought two or three of each warjack, had them all painted up, it looked great. I started slipping when the infantry came out, but that's not the game's fault (my Deliverers are still unpainted, fifteen years later). The scenarios in the rulebook were nicely varied, then the Escalation and Apotheosis came out and we started the Sul campaign in No Quarter. Fun times.
Then the tournament scene picked up locally, and that killed my interest. All of a sudden all anyone would play was "500 points, 1 'caster, 'caster kill wins" tournament practise games. Perhaps it's just me, but being told "I'll play you because I need to practise for a tournament" is a little disrespectful. I went along to some tournaments - there were usually half a dozen of my mates there, and the organisers and most of the other attendees were decent folk. But I found the table setups rather underwhelming, and I'm not cut out for cramming four games into a day. I'd rather play one or two leisurely games with some banter, than four rushed games.
I carried on collecting the miniatures and books, because I found the setting fun - I played a couple of campaigns of the D20 3.5 IKRPG - but then Mk 2 came along, and it all froze for 18 months while the rules were revamped. Even the RPG froze. By the time it picked up again, I'd simply moved on to other things ; Infinity, I think. Going by the tournament players who attended my club at the time, they did too - Malifaux picked up significantly for a couple of years and seemed to become the local tournament game of choice, although it seems to have dropped back now, too.
I thought I'd get back in with Mk 3. I picked up the new Protectorate starter box, we had plans for a campaign where we all generated a journeyman-level 'caster using the RPG rules and would progress to full Warcasters, but that didn't take off, sadly. Now, it seems to me like the background material is fragmented into the novels. I can see that the setting has moved on from where it was with Mk 2 (the last big event I remember is the death of the Harbinger of Menoth), and I don't know where to look to pick up the threads again.
I think that focussing on the competitive tournament play aspect might have been part of the problem. It's fine while it lasts, but most players are only interested in the competition. As soon as you stumble - like the problems with Skorne in Mk 3 - then people start looking at something else that is perceived to be better balanced. X-Wing, Malifaux, Guildball, MTG, whatever. There's no attachment like there is with 40k, where the appeal is the setting, so there's a decent core of people who are into the game for the miniatures or the story rather than just winning a coin or a medal.
LunarSol wrote: 2015-Present: Sprue plastic. They've done a little bit of this over the last few years, but it's not their preferred material. In general, their sculpts are just too busy to work with the undercut limitations here without losing the oversized look that dominates the line. They had a pretty massive failure last year trying to do an organic in the stuff and have mostly decided to stick to machines in the stuff. Expect it to only get used for Warjacks, Colossals, and Battle Engines.
I'm curious. What models were made in sprue plastic that were organic? I wasn't following the game last year so I'm not sure which models were made in sprue plastic then. I remember them saying they didn't want to switch to sprue plastic for the organic stuff.
The Desert Hydra Gargantuan for Skorne. It ended up as something of a nightmare scenario. Too many tiny parts in the places that actually look good and poor detail in the parts that weren't made out of a ton of tiny parts.
malfred wrote: The Storm Raptor turned out well in sprue plastic.
It did, but its a very different kind of model than the rest of PP's super muscular top heavy aesthetic. It's that hulking, muscular style that doesn't work super well in sprue plastic. GW is really the only company I know of that has the engineering and experience to do anything close in the stuff, and even then a lot of that comes down to their ability to design models to hide the limitations extremely well.
Automatically Appended Next Post: On the subject of the game itself:
It's overall a very low variance game. Dice are generally only reserved for the combat engine and actions you take are generally more likely to result in a success than similar games. It's generally pretty easy to make anything with a high volume succeed on better than 50% odds per attack, which is pretty staggeringly high compared to most systems. Low volume actions can generally be boosted to ensure a high probability of success. The one area the dice are generally not well bounded is in damage, which is where dice spikes and modifiers can sometimes swing the game and why a lot of players liked MK2's emphasis on single wound models where this didn't really matter (and why MK3 has significantly fewer damage modifiers overall).
As to why players get stuck in tournament style games; a lot of it has to do with the appeal of the game itself. It's a fairly balanced game (in the sense that it has a relatively large pool of competitive options) of fairly large impact effects. Warcasters have a huge impact on the game and if you ever try the game without one, you'll probably find the underlying system pretty mediocre. This really only works in a relatively stable environment though, as the extreme effects Warcasters can have on the game make it very easy for one to break. A lot of the reason Steamroller works is simply because its been broken and fixed so many times there's not many gaps left to exploit.
Ultimately, the reason long time players shy away from non-tournament games is simply because they've been burned by attempts to shake up the environment too many times. We've all played those special league scenarios and quickly found that caster that has some spell or feat that tears it apart. They always sound fun in theory, but the resulting experience is disappointing and reinforces the desire to stick with Steamroller, which generally remains quite variable simply because it supports a fairly large variety of armies.
AndrewGPaul wrote:
I thought I'd get back in with Mk 3. I picked up the new Protectorate starter box, we had plans for a campaign where we all generated a journeyman-level 'caster using the RPG rules and would progress to full Warcasters, but that didn't take off, sadly. Now, it seems to me like the background material is fragmented into the novels. I can see that the setting has moved on from where it was with Mk 2 (the last big event I remember is the death of the Harbinger of Menoth), and I don't know where to look to pick up the threads again.
I'm pretty sure the Harbinger dying was actually an event in Mk1 of Warmachine. If you want to see what's happened since then I'd read all of the Mk1 and Mk 2 fluff books. It's on their online store if I recall correctly in PDF form. Before moving onto anything from Mk 3 I'd read the novella Wrath of the Dragonfather and then read the novel 'The Blood of Kings' after. I didn't think Blood of Kings was that good, but it does finish up a plot thread from Mk 2. Wrath of the Dragonfather was a really fun read and honestly I'd recommend it to anyone.
LunarSol wrote: 2015-Present: Sprue plastic. They've done a little bit of this over the last few years, but it's not their preferred material. In general, their sculpts are just too busy to work with the undercut limitations here without losing the oversized look that dominates the line. They had a pretty massive failure last year trying to do an organic in the stuff and have mostly decided to stick to machines in the stuff. Expect it to only get used for Warjacks, Colossals, and Battle Engines.
I'm curious. What models were made in sprue plastic that were organic? I wasn't following the game last year so I'm not sure which models were made in sprue plastic then. I remember them saying they didn't want to switch to sprue plastic for the organic stuff.
The Desert Hydra Gargantuan for Skorne. It ended up as something of a nightmare scenario. Too many tiny parts in the places that actually look good and poor detail in the parts that weren't made out of a ton of tiny parts.
Oh that's right. I forgot that the Desert Hydra was all plastic! I've seen it in person and it didn't look awful. I think I understand what you are complaining about with the model but overall I thought it lived up to what it was.
LunarSol wrote:
It's overall a very low variance game. Dice are generally only reserved for the combat engine and actions you take are generally more likely to result in a success than similar games. It's generally pretty easy to make anything with a high volume succeed on better than 50% odds per attack, which is pretty staggeringly high compared to most systems. Low volume actions can generally be boosted to ensure a high probability of success. The one area the dice are generally not well bounded is in damage, which is where dice spikes and modifiers can sometimes swing the game and why a lot of players liked MK2's emphasis on single wound models where this didn't really matter (and why MK3 has significantly fewer damage modifiers overall).
Ultimately, the reason long time players shy away from non-tournament games is simply because they've been burned by attempts to shake up the environment too many times. We've all played those special league scenarios and quickly found that caster that has some spell or feat that tears it apart. They always sound fun in theory, but the resulting experience is disappointing and reinforces the desire to stick with Steamroller, which generally remains quite variable simply because it supports a fairly large variety of armies.
I don't know if I agree that a lot of people really liked how Infantry were immune to these damage spikes. I know a lot of people that got into the Warmachine side because they wanted to play big stompy robots and instead got a game filled with infantry everywhere. A lot of people complained about the forums and facebook groups that there was too much infantry in fact. I think that's why Mk.3 figured out a way to encourage taking jacks and I think this has been a good thing.
I've definitely felt that burn before. I had a guy play Terminus against me in a league scenario where I had to escort this really wimpy model into place and that spot was in his deployment zone. It made winning his caster impossible and he was constantly doing recursion mechanics to block me off. What's funny is that he's actually a 40k player and is a 'casual' yet he felt like stomping me on what he knew was an imbalanced scenario. All of the people I've played against that were 'competitive' Warmachine players have never once done this to me even at a casual league night. I'm not saying all 40k players are terrible people, but I'm using this scenario to bring to light that 40k players and Warmachine players can both be bad and I think everyone has had bad experiences regardless of the game you've played. Warmachine Steamroller scenarios are pretty well balanced and overall are a really fun game experience. Some of my best gaming experiences have been with Warmachine and honestly I hope they can get back up into shape to kick FFG out. FFG writes good rules but has terrible balancing.
Red Comet wrote: I know a lot of people that got into the Warmachine side because they wanted to play big stompy robots and instead got a game filled with infantry everywhere.
That would be me. I got in with the starter boxes, and thought it was a robot battle game. I bought more, and painted them up. Then I did a tournament thing, and found out nobody took Jacks... I stopped right there and found something else to play.
Same here.. I played Kaldor/Cryx a years before the new edition and wanted to use figures that I thought looked cool..
A bunch of big stompy robots.. and all I got when I played them is my army being curb stomped...
Plus most players seemed to always play over competitively.. no fun when your army is on the ropes on the second turn..
and your opponent is bragging you should have taken a better list... I have never mind losing, it's always been only
a game to me. Others seemed that winning the game will make their life better in some strange way..
Don't get me wrong, I have played 40k for decades all games have people you should just pass on playing, just seemed
warmachine brought out the worse.. not sure why.. that's why I purged all my stuff and moved on to other games.
Genoside07 wrote: Same here.. I played Kaldor/Cryx a years before the new edition and wanted to use figures that I thought looked cool..
A bunch of big stompy robots.. and all I got when I played them is my army being curb stomped...
Plus most players seemed to always play over competitively.. no fun when your army is on the ropes on the second turn..
and your opponent is bragging you should have taken a better list... I have never mind losing, it's always been only
a game to me. Others seemed that winning the game will make their life better in some strange way..
Don't get me wrong, I have played 40k for decades all games have people you should just pass on playing, just seemed
warmachine brought out the worse.. not sure why.. that's why I purged all my stuff and moved on to other games.
I have been pretty spoiled, all of the Warmachine groups I have been a part of have been amazing. The "hardcore" players were more than happy to tone down their lists against new players, and just about everybody did their best to help you learn. They would say what they were doing, why they did it, and steps to avoid what they did in future games.
I have had far more bad experiences with 40k players than Warmachine players, it seems my experience is the odd one out though.
Red Comet wrote: I didn't think Blood of Kings was that good, but it does finish up a plot thread from Mk 2.
Ugh. I'm not going to read crappy books just for the "facts". That's why I gave up on the Horus Heresy novels and I just look stuff up on Lexicanum if I feel the need to know.
Red Comet wrote: I know a lot of people that got into the Warmachine side because they wanted to play big stompy robots and instead got a game filled with infantry everywhere.
Indeed. I played for a year before there was any whiff of Infantry, and I wasn't particularly keen on them showing up and spoiling everything. The actual miniatures were also much more variable in scale and size than the 'jacks too, which didn't help.
Sqorgar wrote:
I still put the brunt of the blame on the community. WMH is not a bad game, but it is played in a bad way, and the people left playing it like it that way. Mk3 actually addressed a lot of issues I had with the game (no terrain, unclear 3D gameplay rules, toeing terrain, warjacks not useful, limited variety in army building), but I saw that a lot of people are still trying to play it like Mk2, with all the worst habits still the standard.
I want to say I think you’re right, but for the wrong reasons. That said, you put the brunt of the blame on the community and say its played in a ‘bad’ way. How much of that though is that its actually played in an objectively ‘bad’ way, and how much of it is that its just played in a way that you’re simply not interested in? You’re obviously more of a narrative player than a pick-up-gamer (and that is in no way a bad thing).
And I say this with respect, but I think while your data is generally correct, your interpretation of the results is off. I’ve pointed this out to you before, but will say it again – what you ascribe to the WMH is misleading. On the surface level, you are correct, but if you dig a bit deeper, what you ascribe as a WMH community thing is less of that and more of a general gamer culture thing, more specifically – pick-up-game culture. WMH is heavily focused on this, but being honest, you will see this same thing manifest itself in any and every table top game that is played in this way, whether 40k, AOS, Infinity etc. You’re American, arent you? You’ll find this is particular prevalent on your side of the pond where pick-up-games are kind of like a religion and the only ‘proper’ way of playing, and while pick-up-games and the pragmatism-at-all-costs and minimum-investment-in-game-and-community-building attitude it helps fosters exist to a large extent here as well, by dint of store culture, the European garage and club scene is a bit stronger and it’s a bit less prevalent there.
I think the take home message you should take is it’s not so much how the stores play WMH that you dislike, its how the stores play. It would be easier to get what you want by introducing WMH to narrative focused players than my trying to introduce narrative play to PUG focused players.
Sqorgar wrote:
On a different note, I picked up a Stormclad with the nice sprues and put it together. The model is significantly better than the crap plastic they were using, but still several steps below GW's models. It most reminded me of putting together the Shadows of Brimstone miniatures. Things didn't quite fit together that well, there were about twice as many pieces as necessary, and there was a little bit of awkwardness to assembling it. All said though, the model came out fine, with good detail, and looks like it will be a lot of fun to paint. If this were the standard of quality (and price, it was $26 on Amazon) for all WMH figures, I'd be pretty satisfied. Haven't seen a resin model in person yet
My Khador Conquest was ‘ok’ at best. No issues, except when I drilled it, I found the plastic on 1 side was thicker than the other. That was the worst. That said, the more recent purchases I’ve made – rager, ruin, grolar, behemoth resculpt – absolutely perfect. No dramas or issus at all.
JohnHwangDD wrote:
Actually, it *is* the game.
As I understand it, WMH currently requires high memorization and listbuilding, with a relatively low luck factor in-game. That particular combination guarantees that newbies don't stand a sliver of chance against experienced players. They won't have good lists, they won't know the game, and they won't have random luck to turn things around.
Pretty much this. The burden of knowledge to play this game is huge. Being able to ‘read’ the game, and see the board positioning 1-2 turns in advance helps hugely, and is definitely something earned only through experience, where newer wont have this, and the ‘power list’ cant crutch for them.
Sqorgar wrote:
There is a high luck factor to WMH too. It may actually be worse than 40k, since you rarely roll more than 2 or 3 D6s, meaning that each action you take can be very swingy.
Not really. 2D6 and 3D6 dice rolls are pretty predictable. Though dice can spike, there is a ‘bellcurve’ in terms of obtained results that makes it fairly reliable.
Sqorgar wrote:
One of the reason why new players have such a difficult time with the game is because the general playerbase builds around tournament rules, and thus their armies are built around triggering these devastating combos. I've had several games where I lost before the first turn, and the game was basically just watching my opponent go through the motions of curb stomping me. And even if you can convince them to try their non-tournament army, they'll end up trying out a different combo-based army that they read about on the internet. Because triggering those combos is the money shot. Moving miniatures around is just the foreplay.
I disagree. For a lot of people, the fact that the game is built to be as tournament capable is a draw. ‘tournament’ isn’t why people have a difficult time. People have a difficult time these days because of the burden of knowledge required to play well. Or in your examples above, recognising what is clearly a 'silver bullet' match up and instead taking the other list. New players won’t have that, and won’t be able to read a game or ‘see’ the board in 2 or three turns. The burden of knowledge is an issue as its only getting bigger. More factions, bigger factions etc. Unless you kept up all this time through Mk1 to mk3, you will struggle to get started.
Personally, I'd love to see a 'legends' format where only the mk1 stuff (with current rules) was rostered.
Sqorgar wrote:
But the thing is, a lot of those combos are conditional on playing a very specific way. At lower point values, there are fewer combos with different effectiveness. If you use a lot of terrain and 3D environments, that changes things. If you play a different scenario besides the Steamroller one, things change yet again. And because of this, WMH players WON'T PLAY IT. They claim that the game isn't balanced playing another way, but that's not it at all. Without the money shot, the game is worthless to them. So they've built the game entirely around getting to that money shot as efficiently and effectively as possible.
They're not necessarily wrong. Steamroller is a big part of the package and smaller games are very prone to hard counters if you're not careful.
Again, this isn’t a WMH thing. It’s a pick-up-game-culture thing, and you’ll see it across the board in pretty much every table top game.
Sqorgar wrote:
WMH is actually a pretty broad game with a lot of possibilities (which the No Quarter magazines often promote but which never see play). But the typical WMH player is just using it as the quickest way to get their rocks off. WMH is the Flesh Light of miniature gaming.
(This is a gross simplification, by try not to think it when you see WMH players discuss the game)
I generally agree - pp has given a lot of interesting scenarios and campaigns over the years. Escalationwas a particular highlight.
That said, Its not thatwhst you've said is a simplification, its just that its only true on a shallow view – again, its more of a commentary about pick-up-play-focused communities, as what you say can be applied to a lot of games, and it echoes what a lot of posters here say about a lot of games. I think you're letting your own subjective views (which are not wrong by the way) cloud your perspective here in ascribing it to the WMH community - the issue is bigger than that.
Deadnight wrote: I want to say I think you’re right, but for the wrong reasons. That said, you put the brunt of the blame on the community and say its played in a ‘bad’ way. How much of that though is that its actually played in an objectively ‘bad’ way, and how much of it is that its just played in a way that you’re simply not interested in?
It depends on how you define bad. The gameplay itself can be not bad, but the effects it has on the community, new players, future development, and the general health of the game can be bad. I would say that the way the WMH community engages with WMH will ensure that there won't be a WMH to engage with in the next couple years.
You’re obviously more of a narrative player than a pick-up-gamer (and that is in no way a bad thing).
I'm actually not either. I'd say I'm a type of gamer that I haven't yet seen identified and labeled by the miniature gaming community. I'm not bragging about being a snowflake, just that the only time I've seen a game actually attempt to meet my needs as a gamer was AoS pre-General's Handbook - and we all remember how well that approach was seen. I don't care about narrative gaming any more than I care about any other specific way to play the game. I just like variety, and I like to be able to experience all the interlocking systems of a game put through a bunch of test cases. When someone would say something like, "What's to prevent someone from bringing 3 Nagashes to the table?", I'd think, "that sounds awesome! We should try that, see what happens!".
On the surface level, you are correct, but if you dig a bit deeper, what you ascribe as a WMH community thing is less of that and more of a general gamer culture thing, more specifically – pick-up-game culture. WMH is heavily focused on this, but being honest, you will see this same thing manifest itself in any and every table top game that is played in this way, whether 40k, AOS, Infinity etc.
There's certainly truth to that, but I've seen the way people talk about other games and it just isn't the same as WMH. I mean, if you go read threads on Lormahordes and then go read threads for Star Wars Legion or Infinity or AoS, and you'll see that WMH players just approach the concept of playing miniature games in a fundamentally different way than everybody else. There may be more overlap with 40k and X-Wing, but largely when talking about tournament play. For WMH, pick up game culture is tournament game culture. Period. Even with 40k and X-Wing, you see other discussions about different ways of playing.
Not really. 2D6 and 3D6 dice rolls are pretty predictable. Though dice can spike, there is a ‘bellcurve’ in terms of obtained results that makes it fairly reliable.
The Bell Curve will generally only appear after hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls. The law of large numbers says that as the number of attempts increases, the closer to the results will come to the average. So flipping 5 coins, you are more likely to get 100% heads than if you flipped 500 coins (which should approach 50% heads). This is because randomness is not evenly distributed.
WMH has relatively fewer dice rolls, but a majority of them are pass/fail (like to hit rolls - either you succeed or fail, no partial credit). This means that a spike of good or bad rolling will make a very large impact on the game. That's why boosting is so important in the game, and may actually be more important than the actual roll chances to overall strategy. So WMH is a game that is more susceptible to rolling spikes by nature, but includes a mechanism by which to overrule using in game resources, making it less random overall.
They're not necessarily wrong. Steamroller is a big part of the package and smaller games are very prone to hard counters if you're not careful.
Can you give me an example of when this happens? I mean, I guess some of the recursive armies have advantages (the rate of regeneration is greater than the rate of attrition), but that is easy enough to fight by just not allowing recursive armies at low point values. Aren't themes already generally disallowed at less than 50 pts?
That said, Its not thatwhst you've said is a simplification, its just that its only true on a shallow view – again, its more of a commentary about pick-up-play-focused communities, as what you say can be applied to a lot of games, and it echoes what a lot of posters here say about a lot of games. I think you're letting your own subjective views (which are not wrong by the way) cloud your perspective here in ascribing it to the WMH community - the issue is bigger than that.
I think it is tournament culture, not pick up game culture - though I will concede that there is a lot of overlap in certain game communities. It's just that I think it is obvious that tournament culture is a niche part of the hobby that doesn't represent the needs or wishes of MOST players, and in fact, I think a lot of people would agree that the tournament mindset is doing actual harm to the hobby. The problem with WMH isn't that the tournament mindset represents the majority mindset, it's that it represents the only mindset.
Red Comet wrote: I don't know if I agree that a lot of people really liked how Infantry were immune to these damage spikes. I know a lot of people that got into the Warmachine side because they wanted to play big stompy robots and instead got a game filled with infantry everywhere. A lot of people complained about the forums and facebook groups that there was too much infantry in fact. I think that's why Mk.3 figured out a way to encourage taking jacks and I think this has been a good thing.
Haven't caught up on all the replies, but I just wanted to reply to this quick. I completely agree that when people get into the game they want to play the big stompy robots and in the past the realization that they needed to be dropped in favor of infantry is a huge disappointment. It's one of the reasons that I think Mk3 is the first time the game feels like it should and is an unquestionably superior experience in my opinion.
When I say people liked the infantry game better, I'm talking more from a competitive gameplay perspective and more of a subconscious perspective as well. Competitive players had grown accustomed to the style of poker chip style attrition that hordes of 1 wound models creates, so when things shifted to things with larger health pools more prone to damage spikes, there was a lot of initial rejection of the edition. I'm not saying people liked infantry better; just that they felt the game was more balanced when they were playing a version that had essentially removed the damage roll from the game.
That's a symptom of my problem with the game - it became more and more game-like, and less of a simulation of small-unit warfare in the Iron Kingdoms. Morale was the first casualty (not that PP are alone there; Age of Sigmar and 8th edition 40k reduced its effects, and Infinity and Malifaux never really bothered at all), and any attempt at "fog of war" went away. It's all about who can carry out their tactics first, with much less of a thought about adapting those tactics to the unknown.
It depends on how you define bad. The gameplay itself can be not bad, but the effects it has on the community, new players, future development, and the general health of the game can be bad. I would say that the way the WMH community engages with WMH will ensure that there won't be a WMH to engage with in the next couple years.
Sadly, I think you are correct. We’re already starting to see it – WMH quite simply isn’t relevant any more.
I'm actually not either. I'd say I'm a type of gamer that I haven't yet seen identified and labeled by the miniature gaming community. I'm not bragging about being a snowflake, just that the only time I've seen a game actually attempt to meet my needs as a gamer was AoS pre-General's Handbook - and we all remember how well that approach was seen. I don't care about narrative gaming any more than I care about any other specific way to play the game. I just like variety, and I like to be able to experience all the interlocking systems of a game put through a bunch of test cases. When someone would say something like, "What's to prevent someone from bringing 3 Nagashes to the table?", I'd think, "that sounds awesome! We should try that, see what happens!".
Like I said – narrative gamer. Interested in ‘interesting’ games and a focus on the DIY/creative approach. The ‘lego’ of wargames. Build it however you want. You’d fit in well with my group – we never really do ‘book scenarios’ and usually do our own homebrews etc.
There's certainly truth to that, but I've seen the way people talk about other games and it just isn't the same as WMH. I mean, if you go read threads on Lormahordes and then go read threads for Star Wars Legion or Infinity or AoS, and you'll see that WMH players just approach the concept of playing miniature games in a fundamentally different way than everybody else. There may be more overlap with 40k and X-Wing, but largely when talking about tournament play. For WMH, pick up game culture is tournament game culture. Period. Even with 40k and X-Wing, you see other discussions about different ways of playing.
Well, to be fair, you might see ‘discussion’ but what you’ll also see is pushback that anything that isn’t list-building-for-advantage/following the exact rules/PUG friendly is having badwrongfun and playing the game wrong. The term ‘masochist’ and ‘virtue signalling’ gets chucked in as well for added skorne (WMH pun!). With 40k, AOS, Xwing, Infinity, or whatever game you care to mention, for the most part, tournament play is the standard that PUG play seeks to emulate. Remember as well, with the other games, Infinity has ITS, which is its steamroller and you will get a lot of pushback against not playing that way. Legion is a very young/small game with a new community, so it makes sense for it to be in the middle of its creative phase (You had the same with WMH back in the day too.). We will see if it lasts. The second it becomes ‘the game that gets played’, expect all that to be sacrificed on the altar to make it pragmatic at all costs. And while you saw (past tense) it with AOS, what you see now is a pushback against the style of play it originally sought to encourage, and folks not budging beyond the GHB.
The Bell Curve will generally only appear after hundreds, if not thousands, of rolls. The law of large numbers says that as the number of attempts increases, the closer to the results will come to the average. So flipping 5 coins, you are more likely to get 100% heads than if you flipped 500 coins (which should approach 50% heads). This is because randomness is not evenly distributed.
And yet, in terms of %s, you have a 71% change of rolling a 5-9 on a 2D6 system, for example. Spikes aside, while you cant predict what you ‘will’ get, you can play the percentages.
WMH has relatively fewer dice rolls, but a majority of them are pass/fail (like to hit rolls - either you succeed or fail, no partial credit). This means that a spike of good or bad rolling will make a very large impact on the game. That's why boosting is so important in the game, and may actually be more important than the actual roll chances to overall strategy. So WMH is a game that is more susceptible to rolling spikes by nature, but includes a mechanism by which to overrule using in game resources, making it less random overall.
Can you give me an example of when this happens? I mean, I guess some of the recursive armies have advantages (the rate of regeneration is greater than the rate of attrition), but that is easy enough to fight by just not allowing recursive armies at low point values. Aren't themes already generally disallowed at less than 50 pts?
Anything that skews. Recursion, as you say, is a thing – in Mk2, Goreshade 1 at 15points was seriously nuts, for example. But beyond that, armour skew, or high DEF skew can cause serious problems for lists that aren’t directly built to counter it. And at smaller game sizes you have far less space to work with to deal with things.
If you just flat out ‘ban’ stuff though, that’s problematic in itself. Its not necessarily a solution.
I think it is tournament culture, not pick up game culture - though I will concede that there is a lot of overlap in certain game communities. It's just that I think it is obvious that tournament culture is a niche part of the hobby that doesn't represent the needs or wishes of MOST players, and in fact, I think a lot of people would agree that the tournament mindset is doing actual harm to the hobby. The problem with WMH isn't that the tournament mindset represents the majority mindset, it's that it represents the only mindset.
There is overlap in a lot of communities, and it's magnified greatly by the internet. I will agree with you in that tournament play, and ‘serious tournament play’ is a minority of the hobby. Its volume online is quite loud, however and out of proportion to its size. That said, tournament play has become the standard, and even if folks don’t go to tournaments, emulating that ‘type’ of game is what most pick-up-play seeks to do, and where it leads to. Here’s the thing though – the tournament midset isn’t a bad thing. It is not badwrongfun if it’s what you’re into. But yes, I’ll agree with you that an over-focus on ‘one way’ of playing is ultimately unhealthy and toxic for the game. That said, it wasn’t a problem that Privateer Press focused on tournaments and a tournament focused game as a selling point. For Mk2, remember it was that focus was what sold WMH and made it the success that it was. It was the game people wanted to play since GW dropped the ball so badly during the Kirby years. Having what amounted to the premier tournament focused game was a badge of honour, and in ways, there is still nothing wrong with it. The issues WMH face are elsewhere and in way, are a consequence of its success. The ever increasing bloat that is a coinsequence of the ‘wave’ nature of the ttg release/profit model– the huge hurdle that is the burden of knowledge in the game that makes it so unfriendly to new players. Questionable quality control. Hit and miss model design when their competitors are knocking it out of the park regularly. Essentially, building a game for tournaments isn't necessarily an issue - WMH' core problems are structural and systemic, and and for the most part, outside of the scope of the actual tabletop. Unfortunately, that's where they manifest the worst. And its not that there aren’t other ways of playing the game – PP regularly push other avenues, that we are both familiar with. But the gaming culture out there, for the most part, is hostile to this. Like I said earlier, that is a gamer culture thing, and if it wasn't happening,in WMH, it would be elsewhere
In Infinity's defense, ITS has a lot of missions that are very much the kind of things that narrative scenarios try to accomplish but rarely receive the polish necessary to achieve. It probably has the best narrative play in tournaments of anything I play at the moment. Batman might be slightly better, but that game has other issues.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and on Legion; its definitely a game with a lot of growing to know where it ends up. There's just not very many playstyles at the moment, competitively valid or otherwise. The scenario setup is interesting because it creates a certain amount of narrative on its own, but nothing game changing yet. I'll be curious to see what the upcoming terrain pack adds to the game.
I sort of resurfaced after putting my minis back together. They got broken and chipped in transit, and I was so upset I stopped playing for like 6 years. And now when I look back into the game it seems like PP detonated the community. So weird, they had so much goodwill before, and now they seem to have exactly followed the GW trajectory!
Deadnight wrote: Like I said – narrative gamer. Interested in ‘interesting’ games and a focus on the DIY/creative approach. The ‘lego’ of wargames. Build it however you want. You’d fit in well with my group – we never really do ‘book scenarios’ and usually do our own homebrews etc.
Ehh.... The way I see narrative gamer is someone who uses the toolbox available to create the kind of experience they want to see. I'm not really that way. When I build LEGOs, I follow the instructions. I want to see how they designed the structure, not build one of my own. I'm more mechanically curious. I don't care what I play, so long as there is some mechanic novelty to the experience that piques my interest. I became a programmer, not because I liked programming, but because I wanted to know what made video games tick. Of course, then I wanted to know what made programming tick... Boy, the stories I can tell you about things ticking...
Well, to be fair, you might see ‘discussion’ but what you’ll also see is pushback that anything that isn’t list-building-for-advantage/following the exact rules/PUG friendly is having badwrongfun and playing the game wrong. The term ‘masochist’ and ‘virtue signalling’ gets chucked in as well for added skorne (WMH pun!). With 40k, AOS, Xwing, Infinity, or whatever game you care to mention, for the most part, tournament play is the standard that PUG play seeks to emulate. Remember as well, with the other games, Infinity has ITS, which is its steamroller and you will get a lot of pushback against not playing that way. Legion is a very young/small game with a new community, so it makes sense for it to be in the middle of its creative phase (You had the same with WMH back in the day too.). We will see if it lasts. The second it becomes ‘the game that gets played’, expect all that to be sacrificed on the altar to make it pragmatic at all costs. And while you saw (past tense) it with AOS, what you see now is a pushback against the style of play it originally sought to encourage, and folks not budging beyond the GHB.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on exactly who (or what) is to blame for this attitude. Regardless, there is a very deliberate, damaging, and overbearing attitude that is commonplace in the miniature games community that, I think, everyone agrees is the worst part of it (Games Workshop, no longer #1 at ruining the hobby).
I disagree with Infinity and ITS though. I think CB does a good job of mixing up the ITS missions each season, focusing on different parts of the game to great effect (and much complaining, which CB largely ignores). Heck, they pretty much just cut a faction in half. The ITS missions are also quite varied and I think most Infinity players would and do play other systems. I've seen the 20x20 system and YAMS, for example, and CB has released official scenarios through the Dire Foes boxes and Campaign Paradiso. I think that of all the game systems out there, Infinity is where you are most likely to find a variety of game experiences that the players enjoy. It's one of the reasons that Infinity is one of my preferred games.
There is overlap in a lot of communities, and it's magnified greatly by the internet. I will agree with you in that tournament play, and ‘serious tournament play’ is a minority of the hobby. Its volume online is quite loud, however and out of proportion to its size. That said, tournament play has become the standard, and even if folks don’t go to tournaments, emulating that ‘type’ of game is what most pick-up-play seeks to do, and where it leads to.
See, I don't think that's it. When AoS first launched, there were tournaments with goals like bring four warscrolls and a hero, but nobody wanted to play those kinds of games. For one, they weren't officially sanctioned, but as we see with Warmachine, there are many officially sanctioned scenarios and variants that nobody cares about. There's something VERY specific about points and the scenarios that get played which defines what becomes standard. If a game, like AoS, doesn't even have those options, it pisses people off because they don't know what to do. So, it's a tournament mindset, but I don't think it actually has anything to do with the tournaments.
That said, it wasn’t a problem that Privateer Press focused on tournaments and a tournament focused game as a selling point. For Mk2, remember it was that focus was what sold WMH and made it the success that it was. It was the game people wanted to play since GW dropped the ball so badly during the Kirby years. Having what amounted to the premier tournament focused game was a badge of honour, and in ways, there is still nothing wrong with it.
And we see how loyal those kinds of players truly are. First sign of trouble or something better, they jump ship, leaving behind an empty husk of a game because they actively prevented new blood from coming in.
The issues WMH face are elsewhere and in way, are a consequence of its success. The ever increasing bloat that is a coinsequence of the ‘wave’ nature of the ttg release/profit model– the huge hurdle that is the burden of knowledge in the game that makes it so unfriendly to new players.
That's easy enough to fix by limiting what new players will encounter. PP has offered similar solutions to this, such as Journeyman Leagues, Company of Iron, and even playing with Heavy Metal (or whatever the Jacks-only one is called). Unfortunately, when I was new Mk2 player, I rarely fought the same faction twice (and it was 90% proxied, which made it impossible for me to follow).
Here's how WMH can get new players:
1) NO PROXIES. Seriously, WMH is difficult enough to follow without "counts as" being your primary troop choice. Buying the complete War Room card set doesn't mean you have all the toys - especially with new players.
2) Make the game look nice. No half painted armies on flat paper cutout terrain. Make something that people will look at and go, "that looks cool". If you can't attract new players, you can't keep new players. Miniature games innately look cool as feth, and you have to go out of your way to make it look as bad as the typical WMH game.
3) Play new players with a limited subset of available units. Always play them with the same ones until they know your army as well as theirs. Don't change your army every game. I'd argue that everybody should carry a painted battlebox set with them (possibly two), specifically for playing interested new players.
4) Ramp up the game size slowly. A new player should play at least 7-8 battlebox games before thinking about any higher. With different scenarios and mixing up who they are fighting with, battlebox games can get a lot of mileage for a new player before they become too easy or simple. Whatever imbalances there are between battleboxes will be secondary to the imbalances created by one player not actually knowing how to play yet, so don't use that as an excuse.
5) Let the new player win. Seriously, the number one thing you can do to make sure a player comes back next week is to let them win this week. If this means helping them with their strategies or purposefully playing a weaker game, then do that. It isn't all about you, so don't be selfish in how you play. You don't teach a man to fish by tying meat to his ankles and forcing him to swim in shark infested waters.
Every single one of those 5 points is completely at odds with the tournament mindset. This whole Spartan "either they make it back from the mountain or they die alone, because that's how I did it" philosophy towards new players is as dangerous to the future of the game as it is stupid. These are all things that I've seen suggested (and agreed with) that I've seen the WMH community outright reject.
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LunarSol wrote: Oh, and on Legion; its definitely a game with a lot of growing to know where it ends up. There's just not very many playstyles at the moment, competitively valid or otherwise. The scenario setup is interesting because it creates a certain amount of narrative on its own, but nothing game changing yet. I'll be curious to see what the upcoming terrain pack adds to the game.
I really like Legion's scenario system (and Runewars, which is similar). By making varied scenarios part of the core gameplay, it should have the effect of keeping armies from being too specialized. The problem with it is that they are packaging scenarios with other products, similar to Imperial Assault, such that players may not have access to all of them. I think in Runewars tournaments, you actually choose which scenario cards you bring with you and it is chosen from the pool that both players contribute to, but I think that undermines the coolness of randomize scenario generation when you can limit it.
Genoside07 wrote: Same here.. I played Kaldor/Cryx a years before the new edition and wanted to use figures that I thought looked cool..
A bunch of big stompy robots.. and all I got when I played them is my army being curb stomped...
Plus most players seemed to always play over competitively.. no fun when your army is on the ropes on the second turn..
and your opponent is bragging you should have taken a better list... I have never mind losing, it's always been only
a game to me. Others seemed that winning the game will make their life better in some strange way..
Don't get me wrong, I have played 40k for decades all games have people you should just pass on playing, just seemed
warmachine brought out the worse.. not sure why.. that's why I purged all my stuff and moved on to other games.
I have been pretty spoiled, all of the Warmachine groups I have been a part of have been amazing. The "hardcore" players were more than happy to tone down their lists against new players, and just about everybody did their best to help you learn. They would say what they were doing, why they did it, and steps to avoid what they did in future games.
I have had far more bad experiences with 40k players than Warmachine players, it seems my experience is the odd one out though.
You aren't alone in this. Most of my bad experiences with Wargaming have been with 40k players being giant man children about their miniatures game. I learned to avoid those people when playing 40k or pretty much any other game. I've also had the experience of having really nice competitive players in the community. Even through all of Mk. 2 no one was particularly toxic.
This is going to sound weird but tabletop gaming has this issue of bad people who just stomp on others with no real warning. Most of my experience with it has been in trading card games. Some people in here left a game simply because of bad experiences at locals yet it seems like every TCG community I've ever seen sort of thrives on these negative interactions between players. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who's ever experienced this with TCGs.
AndrewGPaul wrote:
Red Comet wrote: I didn't think Blood of Kings was that good, but it does finish up a plot thread from Mk 2.
Ugh. I'm not going to read crappy books just for the "facts". That's why I gave up on the Horus Heresy novels and I just look stuff up on Lexicanum if I feel the need to know.
Red Comet wrote: I know a lot of people that got into the Warmachine side because they wanted to play big stompy robots and instead got a game filled with infantry everywhere.
Indeed. I played for a year before there was any whiff of Infantry, and I wasn't particularly keen on them showing up and spoiling everything. The actual miniatures were also much more variable in scale and size than the 'jacks too, which didn't help.
Oh I agree that there are better things to read. If a wikia for it exists that would be the best way to find out about what happens. The events are more interesting in a broad sense than in a micro scale.
Good thing infantry are now all mostly on the same scale.
LunarSol wrote:
Haven't caught up on all the replies, but I just wanted to reply to this quick. I completely agree that when people get into the game they want to play the big stompy robots and in the past the realization that they needed to be dropped in favor of infantry is a huge disappointment. It's one of the reasons that I think Mk3 is the first time the game feels like it should and is an unquestionably superior experience in my opinion.
When I say people liked the infantry game better, I'm talking more from a competitive gameplay perspective and more of a subconscious perspective as well. Competitive players had grown accustomed to the style of poker chip style attrition that hordes of 1 wound models creates, so when things shifted to things with larger health pools more prone to damage spikes, there was a lot of initial rejection of the edition. I'm not saying people liked infantry better; just that they felt the game was more balanced when they were playing a version that had essentially removed the damage roll from the game.
Is that really the case though? Legion of Everblight was pretty strong throughout all of Mk. 2 and commonly used lists that consisted of only Warbeasts and support solos. Those lists were highly competitive and very frequently topped Master's tournaments. I really think the problem with Warjacks was the amount of attacks you could get out of them and the fact that they needed multiple focus to actually be efficient at generating multiple attacks and less so that single wound infantry removed the damage roll from the game. Halfway through Mk. 2 Miserable Meat Mountain was a thing where you had high ARM models with 8 boxes each.
Da Boss wrote:I sort of resurfaced after putting my minis back together. They got broken and chipped in transit, and I was so upset I stopped playing for like 6 years. And now when I look back into the game it seems like PP detonated the community. So weird, they had so much goodwill before, and now they seem to have exactly followed the GW trajectory!
How have they wrecked the community? They ask the community for feedback on new models every couple of months. I really do understand why they got rid of the press ganger program though after the ruling in that Magic The Gathering judge's case. PP shouldn't come out and say 'Hey we are implementing these changes because of a court case' since someone might now jump in and try to sue them. That'd lead to the downfall of PP since they are so small. I do think that destroying the faction forums was a bad idea though because now all of the negativity that we see in a facebook is not monitored closely so it creates awful echo chambers with people who don't actually play the game.
That is what it seems like to me. A few years ago this subforum was thriving and my local store had a thriving WM/H scene, it was the biggest game. With Mk3, they literally put all their stock on sale for half price and cleared it because the entire community dropped the game. I got curious and went looking online and everywhere seemed dead. That is my perception. I don't really know what happened.
Da Boss wrote: That is what it seems like to me. A few years ago this subforum was thriving and my local store had a thriving WM/H scene, it was the biggest game. With Mk3, they literally put all their stock on sale for half price and cleared it because the entire community dropped the game. I got curious and went looking online and everywhere seemed dead. That is my perception. I don't really know what happened.
This seems to be the same here locally also.. Didn't help any that they disbanded the Press Gangers almost the same time as the new edition. There have always been a few great guys that
were the standard bearers of the game, but once you had to play someone else outside of these few.. you were asking for pain..
The other thing was it seemed all the ex GW players with the battered wife syndrome returned to 40k after they started to actually to communicate again with the community.
I always loved the Khador Devastator model, always thought of it as a walking wall.. Never played out like that ever... That was a problem that I encountered, I bought most figures because
they looked super cool, rarely researched online to see if the unit was any good.. only to find out the good rules where for the bad looking models. And never thought as Warmachine as a trading card game style but you are right the rolling combos did get old quick.. "Its Tuesday and I am wearing a silly hat so I get to reroll all my misses"
Red Comet wrote: Is that really the case though? Legion of Everblight was pretty strong throughout all of Mk. 2 and commonly used lists that consisted of only Warbeasts and support solos. Those lists were highly competitive and very frequently topped Master's tournaments. I really think the problem with Warjacks was the amount of attacks you could get out of them and the fact that they needed multiple focus to actually be efficient at generating multiple attacks and less so that single wound infantry removed the damage roll from the game. Halfway through Mk. 2 Miserable Meat Mountain was a thing where you had high ARM models with 8 boxes each.
Certainly the attack volume of Hordes helped a lot to make their heavies viable. Part of Legion's success though was simply that they had a few models with insane infantry clearing potential. The Strider solo could reliably clear nearly half a unit on its own for a fraction of the points. Ravagores limited charge lanes while also always giving the army an assassination out when things when strong due to the extremely limited ways to protect a caster against them. Tenacity also made it very easy to put a beast in a range where infantry couldn't kill it; particularly the high defense flyers who incidentally had one of the best toolkits for heavy vs infantry in the game. Of all the factions, they had the best ability to not take damage rolls on their heavies for that weakness to matter.
On the other side, MMM is actually where you can see the damage roll break the other way. Around ARM 21, you hit a point where things are only doing a point or two of damage without spiking. Bump it above 21 and you see a lot of things failing to damage, even with a charge. When you start hitting dice-7 range the game hits a scary point where a model is suitably durable against a volume of attack, but given just a little more ARM is basically immortal and, equally problematic, if they're stripped of just a little bit of ARM, find their durability cut in half. Colossals sitting around this point made this flaw really noticeable, and a big improvement in the model rules for MK3 is the limited ability to put mulitiple abilities that affect ARM either direction in a single list by making things like +ARM animi self only and reducing the number of debuffs in the game to limit the ability to stack them.
Genoside07 wrote: Same here.. I played Kaldor/Cryx a years before the new edition and wanted to use figures that I thought looked cool..
A bunch of big stompy robots.. and all I got when I played them is my army being curb stomped...
Plus most players seemed to always play over competitively.. no fun when your army is on the ropes on the second turn..
and your opponent is bragging you should have taken a better list... I have never mind losing, it's always been only
a game to me. Others seemed that winning the game will make their life better in some strange way..
Don't get me wrong, I have played 40k for decades all games have people you should just pass on playing, just seemed
warmachine brought out the worse.. not sure why.. that's why I purged all my stuff and moved on to other games.
I have been pretty spoiled, all of the Warmachine groups I have been a part of have been amazing. The "hardcore" players were more than happy to tone down their lists against new players, and just about everybody did their best to help you learn. They would say what they were doing, why they did it, and steps to avoid what they did in future games.
I have had far more bad experiences with 40k players than Warmachine players, it seems my experience is the odd one out though.
You aren't alone in this. Most of my bad experiences with Wargaming have been with 40k players being giant man children about their miniatures game. I learned to avoid those people when playing 40k or pretty much any other game. I've also had the experience of having really nice competitive players in the community. Even through all of Mk. 2 no one was particularly toxic.
This is going to sound weird but tabletop gaming has this issue of bad people who just stomp on others with no real warning. Most of my experience with it has been in trading card games. Some people in here left a game simply because of bad experiences at locals yet it seems like every TCG community I've ever seen sort of thrives on these negative interactions between players. I'm not sure if I'm the only one who's ever experienced this with TCGs.
Shoot, I am mentoring our new players, although I am new to Mk.III, I have been playing since Mk.I. We printed off our cards to make it easier to pass information back and forth between each other, and it allows me to read their other cards for models they haven't used yet to think of ways they have missed when using them.
I can understand that some other communities may not have had this type of love and care put into guiding the new players, but it makes such a huge difference. Just yesterday, one of our new guys and I got in three games of Warmachine. We were smiling and laughing the whole entire time. The 40k guys at the next table looked miserable the whole way through their game. Arguing and complaining how OP the other models in an army are.
1) NO PROXIES. Seriously, WMH is difficult enough to follow without "counts as" being your primary troop choice. Buying the complete War Room card set doesn't mean you have all the toys - especially with new players.
2) Make the game look nice. No half painted armies on flat paper cutout terrain. Make something that people will look at and go, "that looks cool". If you can't attract new players, you can't keep new players. Miniature games innately look cool as feth, and you have to go out of your way to make it look as bad as the typical WMH game.
3) Play new players with a limited subset of available units. Always play them with the same ones until they know your army as well as theirs. Don't change your army every game. I'd argue that everybody should carry a painted battlebox set with them (possibly two), specifically for playing interested new players.
4) Ramp up the game size slowly. A new player should play at least 7-8 battlebox games before thinking about any higher. With different scenarios and mixing up who they are fighting with, battlebox games can get a lot of mileage for a new player before they become too easy or simple. Whatever imbalances there are between battleboxes will be secondary to the imbalances created by one player not actually knowing how to play yet, so don't use that as an excuse.
5) Let the new player win. Seriously, the number one thing you can do to make sure a player comes back next week is to let them win this week. If this means helping them with their strategies or purposefully playing a weaker game, then do that. It isn't all about you, so don't be selfish in how you play. You don't teach a man to fish by tying meat to his ankles and forcing him to swim in shark infested waters.
Every single one of those 5 points is completely at odds with the tournament mindset. This whole Spartan "either they make it back from the mountain or they die alone, because that's how I did it" philosophy towards new players is as dangerous to the future of the game as it is stupid. These are all things that I've seen suggested (and agreed with) that I've seen the WMH community outright reject.
This. Very good points.
1. I do not mind if somebody proxies a new Warcaster before they buy it, as long as they make sure their opponent is okay with it. However, I don't want to face whole armies of "counts as" models.
2. Yes, so much yes. Although I paint miserably slow, there is progress on my army every week, whether it be basing or painting. 2d terrain is also boring as all heck. One of the guys who recently came to our store loves using flat terrain... And surprise, surprise... When people walked past the game tables in between rounds of MTG, we were the only table they didn't stop by. I have begun making a slew of cheap, but effective terrain for our Warmachine group to make it more visually appealing. Things like trenches and objective zones are fine as 2d terrain, but in a casual environment, I see no reason for everything to be 2d.
3. Very good point, and one I have been pushing onto our newer players. I have them play at least 5 games with a single Warcaster before swapping, and my army I am using against them NEVER changes unless it has to for a new point level. I try to throw as little new stuff at them as possible, to keep those "gotcha" moments where they forget about the new unit/solo's rules. I also make sure to warn them of what my models can do, to help them make good decisions.
4. I agree and disagree on this one. I have been starting our new players off at 15 points. So, Battle Box, and maybe a unit or a few solos. I want them to get a proper feel for the game, and be able to cover a few more types of models, and how they work in demo games. Battle Box games are also boring for most people who are interested in the game, and when I worked at a gaming store, I got more people to buy into the game with 15 point demo games versus Battle Box. We have been ramping up our games slowly. A slew of games at 15 points, a bunch at 25 points, and we just stepped it up to 35 points. It also depends on how quickly that player is picking up on the game. I will have some guys advance in points more quickly than others. I generally only throw objectives into the mix once they have hit 50 points (or in Mk.II, 35 points).
5. One thing I learned when working at a game store... NEVER win a demo game. There is nothing more discouraging than just noob stomping. It isn't good for the community, and sends a bad message. However, after the demo game, I do not play my absolute hardest, but still work to provide a challenge for the new player, and do not hand them wins. I do make sure to guide them the game, and tell them what I am doing and why, and talk during and after the game to explain what happened in the game. If a player is going to make an obviously bad decision, I make sure to let them know. I also see nothing wrong with allowing them a few "mulligans" in a game, by taking back a movement, or changing who gets a spell. I don't want them to he stuck with every bad decision they make, and I want them to see how things can work out if they did something a slightly different way.
My war on 2d terrain:
It is still in the intital stages of being built, and is unpainted, but it already makes the games look way better.
The building is just two cheap children's wood log cabin model kits stacked to make them a suitable size. Still working on making the "hinges" for the door, and gluing pebbles to the wood chimney to make it a stone chinmey. Also need to cut the cardboard packaging they came with to make roof shingles, and fill in the gap between the logs and base with hot glue before basing it.... And than start the second building.
I haven't taken a picture of these three wall templates since I have finished basing them, but three of the six are now built.
Also building three forest templates from plasticard and some cheap trees from Hobby Lobby.
But, for less than $40 and a bit of time, we are going to have a pretty sweet table setup once it is all painted. Mixing in more 3d terrain into our games has already started to attract a larger group of people who check out what we are having so much fun playing.
NH Gunsmith wrote: 4. I agree and disagree on this one. I have been starting our new players off at 15 points. So, Battle Box, and maybe a unit or a few solos. I want them to get a proper feel for the game, and be able to cover a few more types of models, and how they work in demo games. Battle Box games are also boring for most people who are interested in the game, and when I worked at a gaming store, I got more people to buy into the game with 15 point demo games versus Battle Box. We have been ramping up our games slowly. A slew of games at 15 points, a bunch at 25 points, and we just stepped it up to 35 points. It also depends on how quickly that player is picking up on the game. I will have some guys advance in points more quickly than others. I generally only throw objectives into the mix once they have hit 50 points (or in Mk.II, 35 points).
The reason I recommend Battle Box games is because infantry add another layer of complexity to the game - they move different, they act different, they have different functions. Battle Box games are just jacks and casters, and I think that is complicated enough that you'd want to have several games to get the basics of damage boxes, power attacks, allocating focus, casting spells, activating, assassination, and all that before you add in things like orders, unit cohesion, field promotion, combined attacks, and more icons to remember.
Units don't add a lot of extra mental overhead, but it does add up to overwhelming. It's definitely something that I think can wait until someone can play a Battle Box game beginning to end without having to look up any rules. Another thing is that units slow down the game a lot, as you have to measure and move 6-10 models around and do 6-10 attacks with them. With 4 models per side, the turns are much quicker, and the new player gets to their turn much faster (which is how you keep their interest).
(Side rant: I'll be honest, I don't even know why miniature games have horde armies. Nobody wants to move 40+ models around and nobody wants to sit around while somebody else moves 40+ models around. It's like the least fun thing that has ever existed. It's like they made boredom a game mechanic. And nobody wants to paint 40+ models either.)
(Side rant 2: I also blame units for my wife quitting the game back during mk1. She was fine painting jacks and casters, but when she had to paint a bunch of identical knights exemplar, she pretty much gave up on the game - and this was back when units were sold in minimum unit sizes. Units are just less fun to paint and, I think, a turn off for new painters. I still hate painting units - I've been on the same 20 Bloodreavers from Age of Sigmar's starter box for three years.)
As for Battle Box games being boring, I think this largely comes from playing a simple scenario on a barren field. One thing you can do is put little objective tokens around the playing field. Models pick them up when they run over them. It's great for new players who are still learning to eyeball distances and measure movement. Or you could have an objective like getting your warcaster into the opposite deployment zone, each player secretly select one enemy unit to defeat, or even have the jacks inert until the warcaster touches them to activate them (you can even make this your goal, with the newbie having access to their units from the start). Also, use walls and terrain to make it difficult to fight in the middle mosh pit.
Warmachine is one of the most complicated miniatures games around, and between warcasters and warjacks, you are looking at about two dozen different unique rules specific to those two model types. If you can't make a Battle Box game fun with that much stuff going on, I have to wonder: why is all that gak in the game if it doesn't make the game fun?
NH Gunsmith wrote: 4. I agree and disagree on this one. I have been starting our new players off at 15 points. So, Battle Box, and maybe a unit or a few solos. I want them to get a proper feel for the game, and be able to cover a few more types of models, and how they work in demo games. Battle Box games are also boring for most people who are interested in the game, and when I worked at a gaming store, I got more people to buy into the game with 15 point demo games versus Battle Box. We have been ramping up our games slowly. A slew of games at 15 points, a bunch at 25 points, and we just stepped it up to 35 points. It also depends on how quickly that player is picking up on the game. I will have some guys advance in points more quickly than others. I generally only throw objectives into the mix once they have hit 50 points (or in Mk.II, 35 points).
The reason I recommend Battle Box games is because infantry add another layer of complexity to the game - they move different, they act different, they have different functions. Battle Box games are just jacks and casters, and I think that is complicated enough that you'd want to have several games to get the basics of damage boxes, power attacks, allocating focus, casting spells, activating, assassination, and all that before you add in things like orders, unit cohesion, field promotion, combined attacks, and more icons to remember.
Units don't add a lot of extra mental overhead, but it does add up to overwhelming. It's definitely something that I think can wait until someone can play a Battle Box game beginning to end without having to look up any rules. Another thing is that units slow down the game a lot, as you have to measure and move 6-10 models around and do 6-10 attacks with them. With 4 models per side, the turns are much quicker, and the new player gets to their turn much faster (which is how you keep their interest).
(Side rant: I'll be honest, I don't even know why miniature games have horde armies. Nobody wants to move 40+ models around and nobody wants to sit around while somebody else moves 40+ models around. It's like the least fun thing that has ever existed. It's like they made boredom a game mechanic. And nobody wants to paint 40+ models either.)
(Side rant 2: I also blame units for my wife quitting the game back during mk1. She was fine painting jacks and casters, but when she had to paint a bunch of identical knights exemplar, she pretty much gave up on the game - and this was back when units were sold in minimum unit sizes. Units are just less fun to paint and, I think, a turn off for new painters. I still hate painting units - I've been on the same 20 Bloodreavers from Age of Sigmar's starter box for three years.)
As for Battle Box games being boring, I think this largely comes from playing a simple scenario on a barren field. One thing you can do is put little objective tokens around the playing field. Models pick them up when they run over them. It's great for new players who are still learning to eyeball distances and measure movement. Or you could have an objective like getting your warcaster into the opposite deployment zone, each player secretly select one enemy unit to defeat, or even have the jacks inert until the warcaster touches them to activate them (you can even make this your goal, with the newbie having access to their units from the start). Also, use walls and terrain to make it difficult to fight in the middle mosh pit.
Warmachine is one of the most complicated miniatures games around, and between warcasters and warjacks, you are looking at about two dozen different unique rules specific to those two model types. If you can't make a Battle Box game fun with that much stuff going on, I have to wonder: why is all that gak in the game if it doesn't make the game fun?
Hah. No I get what you are saying, but the joy on a new player's face when their big stompy robots are just smashing infantry is great.
At 15 points, there really isn't much added. And it shows them just how different, and brutal Warjacks are versus things like 40k Dreadnoughts. It also shows them how durable they are versus small arms as well.
With how long it can end up taking for a Warjack to kill another Warjack without much support, it gives the new player something to throw shots at while the Warjacks close in.
JohnHwangDD wrote: Warmachine was never really a wargame - it was always more of a card game with miniatures.
Wargames can be card games, as well as board games, miniatures games or computer games. The mechanism wasn't my point, but rather what the game was trying to represent. 1st edition Warmachine was already pretty "gamey" but 2nd and 3rd editions were even moreso. Removing almost all morale effects (apparently "killing" models is cool, but "frightening them off" isn't?), reducing uncertainty, that sort of thing.
Good thing infantry are now all mostly on the same scale.
Have they re-done Protectorate Temple Flameguard, Zealots and Deliverers, then? The metal ones are all significantly bigger and bulkier than the Knights Exemplar, despite the latter being in full plate armour.
Warmachine is one of the most complicated miniatures games around, and between warcasters and warjacks, you are looking at about two dozen different unique rules specific to those two model types. If you can't make a Battle Box game fun with that much stuff going on, I have to wonder: why is all that gak in the game if it doesn't make the game fun?
I rather disagree on the level of complication. Sure it's more complicated than 40K 8th Edition and Age of Sigmar, but there are plenty of other games that are equally or more complicated than that. It doesn't even touch the complication of Battletech, which doesn't even come close to Starfleet Battles.
I rather disagree on the level of complication. Sure it's more complicated than 40K 8th Edition and Age of Sigmar, but there are plenty of other games that are equally or more complicated than that. It doesn't even touch the complication of Battletech, which doesn't even come close to Starfleet Battles.
Well, I did say "one of the most complicated", and I think it still qualifies. I would even say "over complicated", as I feel it has a lot of complexity that doesn't really add to game - and maybe even takes away from the game experience. Honestly, I expect WMH mk4 to be considerably streamlined and simplified like AoS or 40k 8th, and it would probably be one of the smartest decisions PP ever made.
I've decided to cancel my Man-O-War theme box. I've really been on the fence this whole time, going back and forth, but I don't think mk3 goes far enough in transforming WMH into something I want to play. It fixes a few of the issues, but the community is still the number one strike against the game. I know PP is trying, but I just see the playerbase dwindling further due to its self-defeating habits.
Plus, I dropped by the WMH group today (after I had already cancelled the order) and saw people playing on a flat field with two rectangles and circle, with two large masses of units that were primed black but unpainted. Formless blobs on an empty field. My wife pointed to a group of Knight Exemplars and said, "I think I had some of those. They were the last ones I painted," and was told, oh, but in this game they count as dwarves. I thought, "yup".
Anyway, since I've decided not to pick up the game again, I'll bow out of this discussion. It's one thing to complain about a game you are playing (or thinking about playing), but it's another to gak on someone else's parade.
I rather disagree on the level of complication. Sure it's more complicated than 40K 8th Edition and Age of Sigmar, but there are plenty of other games that are equally or more complicated than that. It doesn't even touch the complication of Battletech, which doesn't even come close to Starfleet Battles.
Well, I did say "one of the most complicated", and I think it still qualifies. I would even say "over complicated", as I feel it has a lot of complexity that doesn't really add to game - and maybe even takes away from the game experience. Honestly, I expect WMH mk4 to be considerably streamlined and simplified like AoS or 40k 8th, and it would probably be one of the smartest decisions PP ever made.
I still disagree. I would classify it as middle of the road in terms of complication, but that may be because I have a broader view of games to compare it against. The only space it is more complicated than X-Wing, 40K, and AoS, is in damage for the Warjacks and Warbeasts. X-Wing's movement system can actually be more complicated to plan and play. Honestly, I find WarmaHordes less complicated, over all, than Infinity. The base processes are quite simple and not difficult, and they tie everything in to the system. If you keep that system in mind and the order of things, then it is easy to parse the rules.
Now, some people feel that remembering all the rules makes the game complicated. I disagree because they are still tied in to the processes at one point, rather than GW's sticking their rules in place without proper indications of interaction. In addition, the scope of the special rules is not a level of complication.
WMHDs might be complex for a "mainstream" game, but it's fairly middle of the road when you take games like Starfleet battles or some of the more obscure historical games into account.
As far as terrain is concerned, the drive towards 2D terrain in WMHDs has and is being driven by a few factors, but mainly it all boils down to model placement/how models interact with the terrain. The biggest factor in this is probably hills (really anything that a model can be placed on that rises above the plane of the table surface) - model placement in WMHDs requires precision, and hills are not generally conducive to this within the framework of the existing rules (this is why one of the few elements of 3D terrain one might see on a WMHDs table are obstacles that models cannot be placed on, such as wall templates, and relatively flat terrain features such as forests with movable trees ala battlefield in a box). You can't exactly be precise with model placement if 3/4 of your base is hanging off the edge of a cliff causing it to tip over, or your top-heavy warjack keeps tipping over because it's on a sloped hill. These issues could pretty easily be solved with maybe a half page of rules governing model/terrain interactions in these situations (and in the process open up new design space for models/units to take greater advantage of these rules interactions), but the designers don't seem to see it as an issue that needs addressing.
chaos0xomega wrote: WMHDs might be complex for a "mainstream" game, but it's fairly middle of the road when you take games like Starfleet battles or some of the more obscure historical games into account.
That's not really a good argument. Especially when SFB is a dead game, along with the pre-Flames historical crowd; no coincidence that the player base for both games is rapidly approaching average mortality.
WMH should be compared with the other miniatures battle games currently on the market. My sense is that the best selling games are less complex than before (AoS, 40k, X-wing) while the more complex games (Infinity, Heavy Gear, Flames, WMH) are lagging.
Da Boss wrote:That is what it seems like to me. A few years ago this subforum was thriving and my local store had a thriving WM/H scene, it was the biggest game. With Mk3, they literally put all their stock on sale for half price and cleared it because the entire community dropped the game. I got curious and went looking online and everywhere seemed dead. That is my perception. I don't really know what happened.
A lot of the changes in the initial release of Mk. 3 were pretty bad. The guy who was the lead on Mk.3 also was a jerk to the community as a whole which was IMO strike 1. Then they had a period of about 6 to 8 months where a ton of really unbalanced lists came out, and I think this is a huge one so strike 2. People also left the game in droves because the game balance changed and a lot of what made a faction unique was suddenly gone. It felt like having the rug swept out from under you in some cases making for strike 3. I think PP realized this and now has a sense of direction for where Mk 3 wants to go. At the beginning of Mk. 3 they were also silent on how theme lists would work, but now they are at the forefront of how Warmachine is played. Some people don't like Theme Lists at all because they think it's not fun and doesn't encourage diversity so for a lot of people that's strike 4. My 2 cents is that theme lists are good because they limit the scope of each faction to an extent. It helps solve model bloat, by not invalidating your models, but by making it so not all theme lists have access to everything.
LunarSol wrote:Certainly the attack volume of Hordes helped a lot to make their heavies viable. Part of Legion's success though was simply that they had a few models with insane infantry clearing potential. The Strider solo could reliably clear nearly half a unit on its own for a fraction of the points. Ravagores limited charge lanes while also always giving the army an assassination out when things when strong due to the extremely limited ways to protect a caster against them. Tenacity also made it very easy to put a beast in a range where infantry couldn't kill it; particularly the high defense flyers who incidentally had one of the best toolkits for heavy vs infantry in the game. Of all the factions, they had the best ability to not take damage rolls on their heavies for that weakness to matter.
On the other side, MMM is actually where you can see the damage roll break the other way. Around ARM 21, you hit a point where things are only doing a point or two of damage without spiking. Bump it above 21 and you see a lot of things failing to damage, even with a charge. When you start hitting dice-7 range the game hits a scary point where a model is suitably durable against a volume of attack, but given just a little more ARM is basically immortal and, equally problematic, if they're stripped of just a little bit of ARM, find their durability cut in half. Colossals sitting around this point made this flaw really noticeable, and a big improvement in the model rules for MK3 is the limited ability to put mulitiple abilities that affect ARM either direction in a single list by making things like +ARM animi self only and reducing the number of debuffs in the game to limit the ability to stack them.
I just used Legion of Everblight as an example, but look at Skorne, Trollbloods, Minions, and Circle in Mk. 2. They all used beasts in multiples and not just as Fury batteries. They were active components of your army and even with the huge infantry clearing potential that Legion had, beasts in general just had much higher damage output than a jack did on a more consistent basis because they required no Fury resources from a caster. In fact you didn't really pay the cost of using Fury until after they were committed to where you needed them because you paid the cost after the action rather than before the action. Even then sometimes you'd send in a Warbeast have it destroy stuff your opponent had committed and then never cared that it was full on Fury because it did its job. It would then Frenzy usually to your advantage or if your opponent took it out then that is Fury you don't have to even consider next turn.
Jacks required Focus from your caster and Focus was essential to keeping your caster alive in Mk. 2. Every Focus point spent was a point of armor you lost. Infantry on the other hand don't have to spend focus to run or charge. All they need is a solo/unit attachment to make them better and a spell from their caster. Jacks need Focus which the caster was already hungry for AND a spell. That's a huge burden on the caster's focus. If removing the dice roll of the armor roll was really the driving factor then why in Mk. 3 was it changed that having a jack in your control range has it gain one focus point in the control phase in Mk. 3? I feel like that's good evidence that Warjacks in general were lacking in Mk. 2 and needed buff. Not to mention now in Mk. 3 most Warjacks are cheaper than an equivalent Warbeast.
NH Gunsmith wrote:Shoot, I am mentoring our new players, although I am new to Mk.III, I have been playing since Mk.I. We printed off our cards to make it easier to pass information back and forth between each other, and it allows me to read their other cards for models they haven't used yet to think of ways they have missed when using them.
I can understand that some other communities may not have had this type of love and care put into guiding the new players, but it makes such a huge difference. Just yesterday, one of our new guys and I got in three games of Warmachine. We were smiling and laughing the whole entire time. The 40k guys at the next table looked miserable the whole way through their game. Arguing and complaining how OP the other models in an army are.
That's great! This is exactly the kind of mentoring new players need in any miniature's or tabletop game. I wish you all the best of luck with your players. Sounds like you have a great community that is thriving.
chaos0xomega wrote: WMHDs might be complex for a "mainstream" game, but it's fairly middle of the road when you take games like Starfleet battles or some of the more obscure historical games into account.
That's not really a good argument. Especially when SFB is a dead game, along with the pre-Flames historical crowd; no coincidence that the player base for both games is rapidly approaching average mortality.
WMH should be compared with the other miniatures battle games currently on the market. My sense is that the best selling games are less complex than before (AoS, 40k, X-wing) while the more complex games (Infinity, Heavy Gear, Flames, WMH) are lagging.
The real irony in those statements is that WHFB was probably the most complex of those games listed, and 40K wasn't that far behind (especially when it came to rule interpretations). It's only when GW decided to throw the baby out with the bath in FB, that AoS could be classified as a simple game. 40K kept getting more and more complex with every book released (and I'm including all the codices and campaign books) until they did a total reformat last year.
I wouldn't say that X-Wing is uncomplicated, but that's probably because I think their maneuver system is clunky and their army build system is far more complicated than WMH.
PP has been caught rather flat-footed in this regard with their major competitor going from "Historical With Dragons" level of complexity to almost "Green Army Guys" level of complexity. Then the up-and-comer hits with a simple to apply (if complicated to plan) system right behind them supported by one of the biggest nerd franchises in the culture. While Mk 3 did simplify some of the mechanics somewhat (bye bye half of the purpose of Command), the more complicated actions and damage that a Jack/Beast did were still around.
To be fair, it's not the first time that GW hit the reset button for 40k or WFB. 40k3 was all-new simplification from the bloat that 2E became, and WFB6 was an massive cleanup from WFB5.
JohnHwangDD wrote: To be fair, it's not the first time that GW hit the reset button for 40k or WFB. 40k3 was all-new simplification from the bloat that 2E became, and WFB6 was an massive cleanup from WFB5.
Yes and no. I don't think anyone foresaw the vast changes between WFB 8 and AoS as it was nothing like the changes Fantasy saw between 5th and 6th. Both were still largely Historical games, Fantasy-style, when getting down to brass tacks, just some of the emphasis on model groups changed (if what I have heard is accurate). AoS feels more like a quick skirmish game more than the Rank and File game its predecessors enjoyed.
40K 7th and 8th was semi-predictable only because it happened with the Fantasy side of things. And there were more than a few people who were looking forward to 40K changing after 7th's Formation Bloat.
And seriously, I don't know how you could reduce WMH down to AoS/40K level without seriously harming the overall presentation of the game and losing out on a lot of fun things, like Throwing. There was already a fit when the Errata changed it so you can't Throw Friendly models, could you imagine the backlash if you couldn't Throw Enemy models any more?
JohnHwangDD wrote: 40k 3E was unprecedented and had massive backlash from the 2E crowd.
If AoS had square bases, people would have loved it. One page on formations, and it would have been fine
Another option is to make movement trays (because lets face it everyone used them) with a series of round slots on them to slip models into. In theory GW could still do that, however the poses of some of the newer models might not work in trying to fit them together in a tight formation as before.
JohnHwangDD wrote: 40k 3E was unprecedented and had massive backlash from the 2E crowd.
The fact that the change was unprecedented is not the point, it is the change in the level of complexity between Editions which is the point that is being made. When going to Mk 3, PP roughly did the same amount of complexity change as 40K did from 6th to 7th, when people were getting 8th Edition from 40K and X-Wing was really hitting its stride to become #1.
JohnHwangDD wrote: If AoS had square bases, people would have loved it. One page on formations, and it would have been fine
You can still run AoS on square bases if you want. Bases are there to make sure the models don't fall down. Most of the complaints I saw were the dumbing down of the game and the loss of Rank & File (the latter being the reason to use square bases, admittedly). The level of complexity went from a 9 down to 3. Model facing no longer mattered. You didn't have to wheel a unit in order to turn it. Templates? What are those? Strength and Toughness completely dropped all together. Those were just some of the cases of simplifying of the game's rules. They went from over 200 pages of rules down to 4. That only went up a little with the introduction of the General's Hand Book, and that was more about army creation than actually playing the game itself.
chaos0xomega wrote: WMHDs might be complex for a "mainstream" game, but it's fairly middle of the road when you take games like Starfleet battles or some of the more obscure historical games into account.
That's not really a good argument. Especially when SFB is a dead game, along with the pre-Flames historical crowd; no coincidence that the player base for both games is rapidly approaching average mortality.
WMH should be compared with the other miniatures battle games currently on the market. My sense is that the best selling games are less complex than before (AoS, 40k, X-wing) while the more complex games (Infinity, Heavy Gear, Flames, WMH) are lagging.
Err, there are still plenty of complex historical games (By Fire and Sword, anyone?) in print and more are coming out. And despite some of the older games being "dead" they still have active player bases. Attempting to shift goalposts will get you nowhere.
I was very active in MK2, but dropped off at the tail end when Bradigus spam list ruled and ADR massively increased the rate of changes.
The reasons I can never see myself starting to play warmachine again, even though I have a huge painted Khador army are:
1: You cannot play casual warmachine. If you don´t know about the combos, you will lose to them. With so insanely many different units being able to interact to build new combos, you need to really study to be able to play at an even footing. With kids, a house and full time job, my gaming time is already limited, I can´t spend tons of time on getting an overview of the bloated mess of units in this game.
2: Warmachine is the most "gamey" war game I have ever played. Millimeter precision, 2D terrain, combos, caster kill, the scenarios, the multi-list format... there is just a lot of little bits here and there that adds up to it not really feeling like you are playing a battle, but just an advanced version of chess. I think this is also why it often seems that there is more proxy in warmachine, because the miniatures don´t really matter, they are just markers for your card.
3: Too many updates. Aiming for balance is fine, but if you only play once a month, then keeping up with constant rules updates is hell. Moving away from physical cards was a mistake in my opinion. With those, it was at least possible to skim your opponents rules during the game. Having to resort to an app is much less efficient unless warroom has changed massively. Kings of war has yearly updates, and that is plenty. Gives time to actually playtest changes as well.
4: The balance was an initial draw, but after the giant cock-ups they do time and time again (Bradigus MK2, Skorne failure, wild overreacting nerfs etc), it is very clear that the balance is not really that good. It is just good compared to 40k, which is not really a big achievement. Balancing around theme forces, forcing players to buy tons of the same unit to be competitive is a failure as well.
I'm in your boat, I think, but with the right group, I wouldn't give up on Warmachine. Apart from anything else, it's got a very unique visual style and setting - there's plenty of scope for some interesting terrain if that's your thing. Perhaps Company of Iron? I've been watching the GMG videos on YouTube, and I'm very tempted.
Is there any sort of community for MK1 players like there are Oldhammer players? Some of the most fun I've ever had was playing WM MK1. Granted, my group played pretty casually so that may have been part of the appeal.
WMH is completely dead at my LGS. They sold the last of their stock off earlier this year, which is crazy because the shop carried WMH since MK1 and had a huge community up until the release of MK3.
We just had a tourney here in Aus which had 60ish players, and could have easily had more if that had been the goal of it. It was great fun, everyone laughed, I think it just comes down to community in the end rather than anything else
With GW just announcing record profits, it clearly shows where everyone went.
I agree with the previous comments that Warmachine is not a friendly game for new players or causal gamers.
With Special Combinations that can way lay the game isn't good when you are just trying to understand the basic rules.
The other thing I wish they would have handled better was some way of keeping the press gangers. I feel the
reasoning was something to do with the WoTC judge employment lawsuit. but I think they could have done something
to avoid what was happening while keeping a strong group of local loyal supporters.
Well, there was big news locally...the store that was the major carrier of WMH stuff and place to play has decided to drop the line from the store. The reasons have mostly been covered already, the edition change, balancing, end of press gangers/forums, etc. led to serious declines in the local player base.
It seems like it was just a very bad convergence of events that lead to this for Privateer. They stumbled, right as GW was having a surge with their somewhat friendlier evil corporate empire, and the new edition of 40K. Now my closest store is down to mostly 40K and X-Wing/Legion, with a few Sigmar players. Warmahordes gave it a run locally, and had a few good years, but nothing has been able to surpass or outlast GW. WMH, Mantic, Flames of War, and others have all tried. But the groups all died out eventually.
pretty much its all by locality. Here Warmahordes is as strong as ever and GW has shown no signs of life outside their own store. Our FLGS has around 80 solid players and there has never been a time when I have gone in and not seen at least 3 games going. Star Wars Legion is picking up steam and so is guild ball, but no 40k and no AoS (except me and 2 buddies)
thekingofkings wrote: pretty much its all by locality. Here Warmahordes is as strong as ever and GW has shown no signs of life outside their own store. Our FLGS has around 80 solid players and there has never been a time when I have gone in and not seen at least 3 games going. Star Wars Legion is picking up steam and so is guild ball, but no 40k and no AoS (except me and 2 buddies)
I have to echo this. It really depends on the store and really depends on the location. In the same city we have 3 to 4 stores. 2 of those stores used to have a crowd, but with the newest store opening up recently all of the players went there. New store now has 16 new players. Also about 1.5 hours away is another store where some big names play and there scene is huge too. I don't think the game is dying. I just feel like it's in flux.
lormahordes, reddit, and twitter. I think only neckbeards and a couple young people outliers forum anymore.
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Genoside07 wrote: With GW just announcing record profits, it clearly shows where everyone went.
I agree with the previous comments that Warmachine is not a friendly game for new players or causal gamers.
With Special Combinations that can way lay the game isn't good when you are just trying to understand the basic rules.
The other thing I wish they would have handled better was some way of keeping the press gangers. I feel the
reasoning was something to do with the WoTC judge employment lawsuit. but I think they could have done something
to avoid what was happening while keeping a strong group of local loyal supporters.
While there has been some decline, 40k players tend to exaggerate. Some communities are strong (have even grown) since the edition change and some have evaporated. Part of this is because there are 40k AND WMH players and right now 8th is exciting (though this starting fade too as rules bloat becomes a thing) and so they are playing 40k. This is common with players who play more than 1 system. I do the same thing, sometimes I am all about one system and then one day it is the other, and it is not hard to do because I already own armies for those systems.
PP still hosted another LnL, someone won the Iron Gauntlet and the streaming footage showed a full house. So....exaggeration.
Between PP getting back the license from Universal for Monsterpocalypse (they already contracted the rights out to Warner Bros. to produce a big studio Monsterpocalypse movie, I haven't seen anything large studio movie deals for 40k or AoS) AND with them creating a stronger professional relationship with FFG (they are licensed to produce minis for the Legend of the Five rings) I don't see PP or Warmachine going anywhere.
If merchandising and the movie goes well prepare for an Iron Kingdoms show/movie in the future.
LunarSol wrote: Orlando posted this in the other version of this thread:
Warmachine position from Spring 18 to Spring 2012: 3,3,5,3,4,4,4,3,4,3,2,3,2
Hordes position from Spring 18 to Spring 2012: -,-,-,5,-,-,5,-,5,5,5,5,4
So Hordes hasn't consistently appeared on the list since like Spring 2014
I like the evidence-based outlook. Here's some web traffic links. The graph trends are interesting, please copy-paste into browser, hotlinks don't work on a first post here:
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/games-workshop.com
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/privateerpress.com
www.alexa.com/siteinfo/privateerpressforums.com
For me, destroying their own general discussion boards and faction forums was an illogical further self-insult (on top of having little plan to address the disbanded Press Gang, inconsistent fluff releases, etc.). It certainly drove me away by draining their overall traffic - and thus paint-hobby subforum activity - to a trickle. In fact, no single online venue has regained that level of centralized activity. Facebook is NOT an option for me, given that I use it for work purposes that don't jive with my hobbying. Plus I hate it, lol. I've been posting hobby blogs on lormahordes, and a little on Reddit and here, but I feel like part of a diaspora. For Chrissake, they had us *in the store*, so to speak. Any salesman knows that's going to increase the chance of a sale.
I hope Will Shick or whomever is responsible for this apparent mismanagement wises up. I want Warmachine to bounce back. I love the aesthetic and the world they've created!
For me, it was a multitude of things. I wasn't happy when they killed their boards. I was really unhappy after Third Ed dropped and they went to balance using theme forces (I totally understand the thought behind it and it makes sense). I just missed the list building and combos and finding unique and fun armies to play that were competitive. At the end of the day, I just realized it just wasn't fun for me anymore.
I still love the community and the folks in it. I just have no desire to play the game in its current state.
I really dislike the requirement to play theme lists. If you don't play a theme and your opponent does it puts you at a severe disadvantage. I also dislike not having the cards in the box with the models. I'm at a point where I both want to play but I can't bear to play, if that makes any sense.
Spent Sunday at Essen Spiel, the big german board games fair. I saw a fair few different German game shops had stands there and noticed that pretty much everywhere was selling PP stuff at a steep discount, clearing stock.
GW stuff by comparison had a big presence, even if I do not care for what was on offer.
Da Boss wrote: Spent Sunday at Essen Spiel, the big german board games fair. I saw a fair few different German game shops had stands there and noticed that pretty much everywhere was selling PP stuff at a steep discount, clearing stock.
GW stuff by comparison had a big presence, even if I do not care for what was on offer.
but isn't that a general show tendency, especially on the last day, as gamers are always up for grabbing a bargain or 12, plus saves packing and lugging stuff back to the shop
And whilst the recent rise of GW is impressive I suspect WMH/40K player overlap is minimal so the slid of the game is factors other than GW
It was noticeable that Privateer Press stuff was more discounted, advertised as having steeper discounts and generally just piled into 50% off bins. GW stuff had maybe 10% off on the last day, and other companies were similar. PP had steeper discounts. Matches my experience in my local shop - all PP has been 50% off for about a year and they are not restocking the stuff they sell. I did well out of it, finished off my minions, but it doesn't look good for the game over here.
yep one of my local(ish) stores dumped all their WMH stuff at 50% around Mk3 launch due to lack of local interest, picked up the odd thing but had a fairly chronic MTG and X-Wing habit at the time (im better now)
Brotherjanus wrote: I really dislike the requirement to play theme lists. If you don't play a theme and your opponent does it puts you at a severe disadvantage. I also dislike not having the cards in the box with the models. I'm at a point where I both want to play but I can't bear to play, if that makes any sense.
It is a problem that they've been having. PP has taken a bad veer towards trying to make theme lists a 'mandatory' thing, I think in some misguided attempt to give more diversity within each faction. While that is itself not a problem, the problem is that they're as bad as ever at balancing the theme lists such that some factions have hilariously strong and others have hilariously bad themes.
The problem is they've just gone the route of "take X amount of points, get X amount of free points" as the main draw to the best theme forces, with the effect that it has made certain themes unbalanced. Usually because they give too many or too few free points, or give a free effect that is strong enough to where you don't even have to take anything that is really thematic to get a benefit(like how the Winterguard theme force used to give Advance Move to ALL jacks, no Winterguard necessary)
I love the idea of theme forces, but I think PP just can't do them properly. They use them as a bad excuse for why they won't fix certain models, resulting in some models which would never be taken outside the theme force(and usually won't even be taken in the theme either because something else is still probably better).
I would like for PP to completely get rid of theme forces for a while and focus on balancing the game without theme forces. Make everything as close to playable as possible, buff the hurting models and nerf the egregiously over powered stuff. And then and ONLY then should they come out with themes, which should be limited to small benefits for following restricted model types.
Alternately, they could make a Generic theme force which every faction could use so that if your faction's theme forces sucked, or didn't want to follow any of the restrictions, you could still get some small bonuses. I'd go with something like this,
Generic Army Force:
Composition Rules: An army made with this list can include any friendly faction models, as well as any Mercenary or Minion models that work for your faction.
Benefit 1: Choose one of the following benefits.
-For every full 25 points of friendly faction Warjacks, Warbeasts, Structures, or Battle Engines in this army, you may add one friendly faction Solo or Command Attachment to the army free of cost. Free models do not count towards the point value when calculating this bonus.
-For every full 20 points of friendly faction warrior models/units in this army, you can add one small or medium based Solo or Command Attachment to the army free of cost. Free models do not count towards the point value when calculating this bonus.
Benefit 2: Once per game, when casting a spell, each friendly faction Warcaster/warlock in your army may reduce the COST of a spell by 1.
Benefit 3: Choose one of the following benefits.
-Before deployment, choose one friendly faction Warjack or Warbeast in your army. The chosen model may gain 1 of the following: +1 Mat or +1 Rat
-Before deployment, choose one friendly faction warrior model/unit in your army. The chosen model/unit may gain 1 of the following: +1 Mat or +1 Rat
Da Boss wrote: Spent Sunday at Essen Spiel, the big german board games fair. I saw a fair few different German game shops had stands there and noticed that pretty much everywhere was selling PP stuff at a steep discount, clearing stock.
GW stuff by comparison had a big presence, even if I do not care for what was on offer.
but isn't that a general show tendency, especially on the last day, as gamers are always up for grabbing a bargain or 12, plus saves packing and lugging stuff back to the shop
And whilst the recent rise of GW is impressive I suspect WMH/40K player overlap is minimal so the slid of the game is factors other than GW
Eh. Stateside (which I'd argue is PPs primary market), PP essentially built themselves on the back of disaffected/disenchanted GW customers. My general experience is that PP burnt some of that goodwill off with each edition. (The really Hardcore locals I played with during 1st edition threw in the towel for 2nd, mostly on the back of playtest experiences, amusingly enough). 3rd had a similar effect locally on 2nd edition players, including myself this time. Problem is, 2nd was able to pick up newly born anti-GW players when it happened to replace those it lost from the transition from 1st, while 3rd didn't have that pool, GW was in a good place again (at least as far as sales)
Sampling the 5 local stores in a ~40 mile radius, GW climbed back up (from a point where several stores were prepared to ditch GW entirely after the launch AoS), and PP has effectively withered. The store that used to have a heavy crowd on regular nights and weekends has effectively replaced those time slots with Magic (evening) and Pokemon and kids D&D slots (weekend), but still has warhammer on their calendars. A couple stores have closed their doors, but others have opened up, and don't bother to stock PP, but have a wall of GW.
PP had bigger issues with retailers in that they have massive sku bloat. It would be insane for any store to try and carry the entire product line (or even most of it).
This is also the issue they are having with balance. As they are reluctant to squat any model ever released they are forced to keep adding to the line of models (to keep revenue coming). It creates a massive inventory to try and keep up with and I couldn't even begin to imagine how hard it would be to balance all of that.
The good idea to balance armies through theme lists was a decent idea in theory. Sadly it's not worked out that well in practice. Then they doubled down on the stupid and decided to have the CID. Another good idea in theory, but when you are playtesting individual models in a CID environment you have to be able to balance it in theme so that's another crap-show.
I honestly have no idea how PP plans to dig themselves out of this hole.
SKU bloat really isn't an issue. GW has more SKU bloat than anybody else and that was never a problem. FLGS's just need to carry the basics for the most popular factions, the rest can be special ordered.
Grey Templar wrote: SKU bloat really isn't an issue. GW has more SKU bloat than anybody else and that was never a problem. FLGS's just need to carry the basics for the most popular factions, the rest can be special ordered.
Well, GW has far more factions, but also doubles and triples up more units in a box than PP does. Currently for WMH that only applies to one or two heavy 'jack/beast sets, one or two units, and the Colossals for each faction. Having 1 sku produce 3 units and provide bits for others allows for a huge expansion of product listing, which GW has used mercilessly.
Brotherjanus wrote: I really dislike the requirement to play theme lists. If you don't play a theme and your opponent does it puts you at a severe disadvantage. I also dislike not having the cards in the box with the models. I'm at a point where I both want to play but I can't bear to play, if that makes any sense.
Makes perfect sense, but i use the models now mostly for rpg purposes (love IKRPG) and CoI where i dont need much.
They definitely need to consolidate some boxes. A Winter Guard box with rifles and standard infantry, Wolves/Reeves of Oroboros, tons of things are mostly the same model with arm/head swaps as is.
Turnip Jedi wrote: some SKU merging might help but hopefully done better than the Reeves/Wolves shambles, which may be the worst PP models I've ever purchased
All the restic stuff is bad. Unfortunately they ordered a LOT of it before MK2 even started back when it was the promised replacement for metal. I'm sure they're not really happy about it, but nobody wants to replace plastic molds on a whim. Unfortunately, they replaced a lot of their stuff while they scrambled to find an alternative. Eventually it all needs resin resculpts, but I have no clue how long that will take.
Turnip Jedi wrote: some SKU merging might help but hopefully done better than the Reeves/Wolves shambles, which may be the worst PP models I've ever purchased
All the restic stuff is bad. Unfortunately they ordered a LOT of it before MK2 even started back when it was the promised replacement for metal. I'm sure they're not really happy about it, but nobody wants to replace plastic molds on a whim. Unfortunately, they replaced a lot of their stuff while they scrambled to find an alternative. Eventually it all needs resin resculpts, but I have no clue how long that will take.
It's certain a lesson learned, part of me tinfoils the theory there's a part of the player base that regards mini as mere playing pieces and the sub board game quality is fine as the only paint they'll see is base arcs
My meta used to be 20 strong, and dominated the local shops in syracuse. We had a couple of press gangers move away, then they killed the PG's and dropped 3rd all while killing the forums. This meant people swapping to Star wars and infinity and returning to GW. Now one of the local shops doesn't carry it at all anymore, and the other shop I haven't been in but I'm pretty sure doesn't either because there was plenty of overlap. We used to send half a dozen people to Gen-con to play and now no one really even plays at home. Its sad.
It's all self inflicted by PP.
Killing the PG program and their forums signaled the Deathknell.
Then they rushed out 3rd edition and it only compounded the problem.
Now they are in a not so good position with only the most dedicated still purchasing and playing.
It's entirely their own fault, thinking they could pretty much nuke their community and support and still remain solvent. They've made some.pretty stupid moves as far as companies go and it's not at all surprising that communities are drying up all over the place.
With the gaming options available, it's no wonder they're having such a hard time. They seemed to think they were an unstoppable juggernaut and could do no wrong. Their string of bad decisions is now costing them their livelihoods. They were overconfident to the point of being completely blind as to what was happening in the gaming landscape, and made too many bad decisions.
I hope they can recover because I love their paint.
PP can recover they just need to realise it and invest in it and be brave enough to reverse choices that they made in the recent past. What's more shocking is that they made almost exactly the same mistakes GW made which sparked GW's steady downfall!
Overread wrote: PP can recover they just need to realise it and invest in it and be brave enough to reverse choices that they made in the recent past. What's more shocking is that they made almost exactly the same mistakes GW made which sparked GW's steady downfall!
I agree with this; Hate to see a company like them falling apart.
But don't follow PP too close but has the upper management changed?
This happen way to often that you have good people working there but the top guy driving force is focused downward.
There was War Machine Weekend this past weekend and it seemed to go ok;
again not been involved in a long while so don't know if the numbers are up or down..
It's core is doing ok the problem is that they've shed a lot of the fringe areas; and the shutdown of the PG system has dried up the game in many areas; which hasn't helped with recruitment. Basically if they don't change their tune they'll end up relying on an ever dwindling advanced core market without a proper influx of new players.
They seriously need to do what GW is doing right now - outreach programs, a new PG type system, school outreach, pushing out books and other media (their name is big enough that indie developers in computer games could pick it up) etc... Ergo they need to almost stop investing in models for a few months and invest heavily in marketing and rebuilding their community connections.
I think they panicked when the Magic the Gathering Judges went against Wizards of the Coast and PP reacted in a bad way. Wizards has survived that event and chances are the PG group wouldn't have risen up in nearly the same way (Like it or not Magic generates way more in profits and the competitive scene is full of advertising revenue and such - whilst wargames are darn lucky if they can get a handful of stalls at an event and a free £100 boxed set prize from a store)
Overread wrote: PP can recover they just need to realise it and invest in it and be brave enough to reverse choices that they made in the recent past. What's more shocking is that they made almost exactly the same mistakes GW made which sparked GW's steady downfall!
I agree with this; Hate to see a company like them falling apart.
But don't follow PP too close but has the upper management changed?
This happen way to often that you have good people working there but the top guy driving force is focused downward.
A couple people left (like the guy who basically ran the mark 2 playtest), but Matt Wilson and company are still at the top AFAIK.
Mind you, Matt and company are pretty much the stereotype of creative types that don't always grasp the business end of things.
Were the "deep discounts" that people are seeing on the Sku codes that have been discontinued in the stores? That is what they have been putting into their Mystery boxes. My LGS that has been around since the mid 80's discounted all the discontinued sku codes to clear the shelf of them. It was a necessary step as the number of sku codes in stores were too unwieldy for the stores to maintain. The is something that GW has been doing for years. My guess is that the further away we get from this, prices won't be as discounted and the stock in stores will be normalized.
Azeroth wrote: Were the "deep discounts" that people are seeing on the Sku codes that have been discontinued in the stores? That is what they have been putting into their Mystery boxes. My LGS that has been around since the mid 80's discounted all the discontinued sku codes to clear the shelf of them. It was a necessary step as the number of sku codes in stores were too unwieldy for the stores to maintain. The is something that GW has been doing for years. My guess is that the further away we get from this, prices won't be as discounted and the stock in stores will be normalized.
For at least one of the LGS that I know of that put up deep discounts on Warmachine/Hordes, it was across the board; not just on older, discontinued SKUs. And they weren't able to move a lot of it, even at that price (50% off). Haven't checked in with them for a while to see what the current situation is.
Azeroth wrote: Were the "deep discounts" that people are seeing on the Sku codes that have been discontinued in the stores? That is what they have been putting into their Mystery boxes. My LGS that has been around since the mid 80's discounted all the discontinued sku codes to clear the shelf of them. It was a necessary step as the number of sku codes in stores were too unwieldy for the stores to maintain. The is something that GW has been doing for years. My guess is that the further away we get from this, prices won't be as discounted and the stock in stores will be normalized.
I think it was more to shift stale stock to create shelf space, certainly my local didnt restock any WMH once stuff on hand sold or was banished to the cupboard of unsellable things
One FLGS in my area put it all up at 40% off - now it is gone, but I don't think it was sold. Probably off to e-bay. I will say though that I can't seem to find the models I want at really rock bottom prices. I don't want them for the game mind you, just because I like them.
My honest feeling is killing the Press Ganger program was their biggest problem..
They should have really gotten good legal advice, instead of looking at wizards of the coast and just dropping it like a hot potato.
I knew a few PG, most were great people and had nice forces, they did not stop gaming, just didn't have
an insensitive to keep playing it since the market place is full of other great things to steal their attention.
Don't feel a hard reset like AoS would help either.. GW is still trying to recover from that and will never
admit how really bad it was.
The problem was Warmachine grew up with the PG system. Most game clubs were used to their PG organising and running events, setting things up and the PG had a vested interest and encouragement to keep recruiting new people.
When PP dropped the system they destroyed their best and most powerful recruitment and retention system - esp for people at the casual end of the game.
It cut all those people loose and left them to wander into other games and try out other things.
They need their PG system back. They don't have the money that GW does to invest into marketing in the same way; heck their IP isn't even half as strong to attract major game developers in the same way that 40K and Warhammer have.
PP needs to market themselves better, they need outreach and they need to realise that as they don't have their own highstreet shops they need to bring back the PG system in some form to help grow the local scene once more. Otherwise they are competing with others and if GW is pushing hard (Which are they are) then 3rd party stores are more likely to push warhammer over PP products and have no loyalties (save their own interests) to push PP products over others.
So if a 3rd party store sees their Warmachine game failing and their Warhammer growing they are going to drop one stock and invest in the other - in fact PP vanishing is possibly not bad for a3rd party store because it means less to stock, less to shelve and they've still got wargamers buying wargames.
Also it wasn't just that they dropped the PG; they also dumped their forums and community interaction. They dealt a huge and rather insulting blow to possibly their most keen and enthusiastic members and fans.
PP doesn't need an AoS situation as the lore and models (save for questionable plastic material choice) aren't the issue - the issue is their outreach and recruitment and retention of players.
I agree that they panicked when the Wizards situation came up, but they also didn't realise that Wizards weren't going to dump their judges system. Wizards realises that its critical to keeping their game going; otherwise Yugio or another card game can easily push and muscle in if there's a loss of local vested interest in keeping MTG the only big game.
I get why they dropped their PG program. They probably did get legal advise telling them they were vulnerable and while most PGs wouldn't have even thought to sue the company, it would only take one disgruntled PG to get the company in hot water. They should have replaced it with something though.
The website makes no sense to me. For a company that ported their entire rule set to App form, killing the social online interaction just is really confusing. I have no idea where to go for a discussion that has more than a handful of posts a day. At first i thought that they might be thinking of building it into their App, but that hasn't happened. I feel like they have no connection to their customers right now. They just put out product and we are expected to buy it. They have such a huge potential with their base but it seem like they are just pissing it away.
Yep dropping the PG scheme seemed a little knee-jerk, I'm sure getting some legal advice and concocting some kind of waiver for PG's to sign, yep they might have lost some, but some is a lot less than all
Azeroth wrote: I feel like they have no connection to their customers right now. They just put out product and we are expected to buy it.
They do a lot with YouTube, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter these days. There's actually a ton of personal (often times a little too personal....) interaction with the players on those platforms. More and more it seems that's where the discussion for most game systems is going; even if that discussion seems substantially worse. To that end, I get moving away from the forums, but I do think they're really neglecting their webpage. It is one of the few that hasn't transitioned into a pure store front, but its definitely not getting the attention it needs either.
Back when they were hot there was a local game web page that was the central location for all gaming in the area but a majority was warmachine.
Then all the mass changes and the owner decided to kill it and move everything to social media.. The new group is slow growing and did have a lot
of activity at first but now there is just a few posts a month.. rarely any kind of meet up..
On the other hand the X-wing group took a big hit after the new edition but still very active.. just looking at those changes means something is going
on in the community that needs attention.
I am an ex warmahine player, the reason I got out and sold my stuff was the local group was dying. Every time I looked for new players I was met
with WAAC players that would curb stomp me without blinking. (No just friendly games) Then GW got their act back together and was releasing
some really nice figures again.
If they brought back Press Gangers buy giving them pre release stuff and or a free subscription to their loot crate as payment. With the understanding
they are fully volunteering; I think that would really help to have a standard bearer that would welcome new and causal players instead of finding the
random player and hope he is not a
XWing has the bonus that its Starwars - that franchise is near invulnerable! It's lasted and lasted like almost nothing else in the geek world - heck even in the film world its lasted longer than almost anything else without a remake.
It's had dips over the years, but its never fully gone away at all.
If they brought back Press Gangers buy giving them pre release stuff and or a free subscription to their loot crate as payment. With the understanding
they are fully volunteering; I think that would really help to have a standard bearer that would welcome new and causal players instead of finding the
random player and hope he is not a
That is the problem with what Wizards ran into and the reason the PG were killed off. Legally, you can't "pay" PGs if they are volunteering. You can't "pay" people with product and not have them classified as an employee (which then leads to payroll taxes and such). This is the dilemma. You also aren't going to get the PG support if they were total volunteers and weren't given anything. It doesn't matter if they "sign" something. Companies can't skirt wage laws. PP would have to actually pay people and at the very least hire them as contractors. But that has its own legal requirements.
Honestly volunteers don't need much. A newsletter, some preview info, a community website to exchange ideas and info with each other and a store discount.
They could also bundle it like a PG passes the test to get approved and then pays an annual fee for the privilege of being a PG. A nominal fee that gets them a discount (which would easily cover the fee with a few purchases) etc...
Im sure there are ways to have a working volunteer system with benefits that can bring the PG structure back into play.
PP needs it, without it there's just no local pressure to keep their game going above all others on the market. When you've got a PG in the area they have a vested interest in keeping the game going. When you've no PG then one week everyone might decide to try out Infinity.
You can bet that if GW didn't have their own stores they'd have a similar system in place!
Overread wrote: Honestly volunteers don't need much. A newsletter, some preview info, a community website to exchange ideas and info with each other and a store discount.
It isn't a matter of what they "need," but what the law is. And in Washington state at least (where both WotC and PP are located), you simply cannot volunteer for a for-profit company. "Volunteer" work can only be done for non-profits. Which means they have to do some kind of compensation for whatever you do, and it must be reported to the IRS.
Now, that doesn't mean you have to make them full-time employees. You can make them independent contractors with 1099 forms. And you don't have to pay them in cash, it can be products, but the value of those products have to be reported.
Can you allow people to work as unpaid volunteers?
Some employers have asked if they can utilize volunteers in their business. This question can especially pop up when a business is in a start-up mode, and has limited funds.
It can be tempting to entice volunteers with the promise of later payment or stock options down the road after the business takes off. Sometimes a job seeker will even suggest to a business that they work as a volunteer, in the hope that they’ll gain some valuable job experience, or that the work they do as a volunteer will ultimately convince the company to hire them.
While it may be tempting to get free labor, it is against the law for a for-profit business to utilize volunteers! You must at least pay your employees minimum wage. If you allow an individual to work directly or indirectly on behalf of your business, or permit them to do any work for your business, they are your employee, and you must pay them for the hours they work.
Then the question is, are they actually working for the company?
A lot of Youtubers and Twitchers get paid through Youtube and Twitch to do content for someone they are not being paid by, such as all the WoW streamers.
People aren't "volunteering" for YouTube, Twitch, etc. If anything, that's closer to Uber and Lyft, where people get money for doing a service that's brokered by the company (which does take its cut). Nowhere on YouTube's TOS does it imply you're "volunteering" for them.
Valander wrote: People aren't "volunteering" for YouTube, Twitch, etc. If anything, that's closer to Uber and Lyft, where people get money for doing a service that's brokered by the company (which does take its cut). Nowhere on YouTube's TOS does it imply you're "volunteering" for them.
If you're an advertising partner on YT, then you are not a volunteer at all. Everything you make from advertising is reported to the proper tax agencies, and you are required to claim it.
Not once was I asked to report my 'income' for being a PG, nor was the value of it recorded.
But it's flat out wrong to say I volunteer for YT, when my advertising earnings are reported to the CRA.
Valander wrote: People aren't "volunteering" for YouTube, Twitch, etc. If anything, that's closer to Uber and Lyft, where people get money for doing a service that's brokered by the company (which does take its cut). Nowhere on YouTube's TOS does it imply you're "volunteering" for them.
But they aren't being paid by Activision Blizzard to stream World of Warcraft or Bethesda to stream Fallout, etc. You are looking at the wrong person for the example in question. A better example might be Ubereats or Grubhub, but only if you volunteered to take the food over and then reported it to Ubereats/Grubhub/etc after you picked it up and delivered it.
Even then, a lot of people voluntarily create the YouTube content first then post it hoping to be paid for it without any initial expectation (though there is hope) of monetary compensation. Sometimes someone reports it and it gets demonitized. That makes work that was volunteer at the time of creation was then left unpaid.
Valander wrote: People aren't "volunteering" for YouTube, Twitch, etc. If anything, that's closer to Uber and Lyft, where people get money for doing a service that's brokered by the company (which does take its cut). Nowhere on YouTube's TOS does it imply you're "volunteering" for them.
If you're an advertising partner on YT, then you are not a volunteer at all. Everything you make from advertising is reported to the proper tax agencies, and you are required to claim it.
Not once was I asked to report my 'income' for being a PG, nor was the value of it recorded.
But it's flat out wrong to say I volunteer for YT, when my advertising earnings are reported to the CRA.
Right, I know you're not volunteering for YT. That's my point. If anything, it's more of an independent contractor or partner type relationship.
There are ways that PP could have dealt with the PG program, but for whatever reason they decided not to. I don't have any insight on that since, well, I'm not an insider.
From what Ive heard, the PG program wasn’t dropped because of the Wizards thing, that was a coincidence. The program had simply gotten too big and unwieldy for them and was eating too many staff hours and they were still constantly behind on it.
AduroT wrote: From what Ive heard, the PG program wasn’t dropped because of the Wizards thing, that was a coincidence. The program had simply gotten too big and unwieldy for them and was eating too many staff hours and they were still constantly behind on it.
If that was the issue then they really shouldn't have dropped without bringing something else in to replace it - even if in part. I can well understand a small team getting overwhelmed with an international system; but to drop the ball and not replace it within a few months is worrisome.
Considering that they've also dropped their physical magazine and started doing these big stock clearance deals and also things like minicrate I wonder if the finances at PP are in a bad spot right now. Maybe they invested too much in the wrong direction or have built up mounting debt. A fair few of their recent polices and ideas do seem to be lining up to maximise profits heavily and reduce held stock and other elements.
They are still going strong, but heck companies can fold in a moment without warning (Spartan Games was part way through shipping their successful kickstarter and running another one that was doing, well but not blazingly well, when they suddenly upped and closed doors)
I do worry about their future. They’ve been pushing hard to try and cut out distributors and have stores buy direct. They’ve been selling more direct themselves when they used to pledge only thru FLGSes. There seems a constant shortage of product with MonPoc, new release day for two of the factions and the local shop only got one of each, leaving half a dozenish unfulfilled preorders to add to the existing waitlist for the starter boxes that never come in. PP has also had a couple/few of their staff leave at once here recently, which one report I heard had at least one of them leaving because they didn’t get a raise after a couple years working there.
I hope they Don’t go away, if for no other reason than I’m really enjoying MonPoc mkII so far and want more of that, but really I wouldn’t be surprised if they suddenly “pulled a Spartan”.
I hope they recover and get stronger, I think they compete well and provide a counterproduct to GW. Offering a generally higher grade of rules and also a competing brand. That does us good in the market because it keeps GW on their toes somewhat.
Sadly most of the other games on the market have their niches but are often very niche. Even some that make outstanding mdoels are still trapped in a niche; whilst many are kickstarter wonders - they release a vast bloat of models onto the market; but fizzle out and lack the resources and market power to actually make it into mainstream and survive.
From what I understand, things are going strong. Monsterpocalypse has been selling well, and that's part of the reason for the big batch sales, they needed the warehouse space.
Whatever the behind the scenes reasons were behind dropping PG, their official ones were associated with the Wizards case, I thought.
As for the mag, the periodical print medium has been largely falling behind for some time, though I am rather surprised they didn't go with a pure digital subscription model for it.
AduroT wrote: I don’t recall them ever Giving an official reason for dropping the PG program.
Yeah, I don't recall an official statement either way, either. Which, honestly, I think hurt them that much more. I do know a few former PGs that said they really didn't get much notice about it, either, and not a lot of explanation beyond "it's time to end this program" kinda thing.
Monpoc seems to be moving, at least to stores. My regular store has a bunch on the shelf. But that's all I've seen: it sitting on the shelf. I haven't seen anyone playing it, and I haven't really noticed any major changes in the stock on the shelves. Granted, completely anecdotal, but just an observation.
There was the "official" letter that was sent out to the PG's that was of course then put on the internet for all to see. However, it was full of platitudes and thanks for your time kinda stuff.
Just as another data point, the store in Dublin seems to be clearing out it's stock. They were an early adopter of the game, and where I was first introduced to it back in Mk1, and had a very healthy scene going on for years. I got all my original minis from them.
Went back there this christmas and was poking around looking to see if they had any stuff, and they seem to be down to two shelves of boxes which it does not look like they are restocking. The clam pack stuff seems to be completely gone. Dungeons and Dragons minis and more GW stuff is in the space WM-H used to have, which was pretty much an entire wall.
The shop I visit when I am in Northern Germany was in a similar situation - obviously running down stock with no restock. When I spoke to the guys running the shops, they said it was a combination of the range requiring way too much space to stock and playerbase disatisfaction leading to lower purchases.
Looks to me like all those folks predicting the death of GW for so long might see what they expected to play out actually happen to Privateer Press. At least here in Europe it does not seem to be going very well.
A close friend plays on the ETC team for WM-H and he says the game is great as a tournament game still, but acknowledges that the current meta is not very new person friendly.
Yeah.. simple economics .. a product not selling will soon loose shelf space.. Same reason a burger place might not sale salads.. If it doesn't sale why keep it around.
Also agree that with the press gangers gone there is a less chance meeting someone that want to show you the ropes.. or at least take it easy until you get your footing..
One of the other things is.. I am a very neutral miniature collector.. If I see something I really like, don't matter for what game or company, I will buy it. In the recent year
PP hasn't released anything that made me say.. that is a really nice figure, I need to go buy it..
My problem is recently a lot of their "oh cool" models have been minicrates!
I think PP has lost their way a bit, I just hope they find their way back! They did so much good in pushing for more serious rules and such that I'd hate for it all to just vanish. Plus they were and still could be the most major competitor for GW and GW needs that - they need someone else (or several) to share the market.
I will say I do Super love Monsterpocalypse and that game seems to be doing well. Had our first tournament here today with eight players participate and a few adopters to the game I know who weren’t able to make it due to scheduling conflicts.
They are still going strong, but heck companies can fold in a moment without warning (Spartan Games was part way through shipping their successful kickstarter and running another one that was doing, well but not blazingly well, when they suddenly upped and closed doors)
While any company could fold at any time without knowing their financial situation, Spartan Games and PP are way different cases. Spartan did not support their game at all. All they did was release new product and constantly make drastic changes to their garbage rules. They didn't even run tournaments at the large cons. They also constantly released completely new game systems and then all but forgot the previous ones they had released. PP has been around for 15 years and they survived the large recession, I'd be very surprised they'd fold anytime soon considering the economy is doing well.
still think they need a pay some attention, as whilst the cross-over between GW / PP is minimal there is still the risk of bleeding players to the 'only game in town' effect as even a good game is next to worthless if you can't play it relatively locally
The way I see it the big key to remaining viable is having a high chance of local games.
With Games workshop games you can pretty much assure yourself that most clubs will have a 40K scene and will likely have an AoS and might well have one or more specialist games. That doesn't mean everyone plays all those games every week ,but that within the group you've got gamers who cater to all and you can organise and setup games or even events.
GW helps reinforce this by having their own stores which guarantee playing their own games - there is variation, but in a general sense walk into a GW store you can play a GW game
Privateer Press helped ensure this via their pressganger system; it meant that there was one person who has a vested interest and drive and support in running local games of Warmachine/Hordes. Remove that and there is no one on the front line promoting it. This leaves it in a risky position as even casual collectors/players can be turned away because they'd have to do the PG "job" without any of the support nor even community to back them up at large or as a single organised effort.
You can see in many many other game systems how spotty they are in support at the local level. At the extreme you've got the 15mm and similar scale games which are almost totally reliant on a tiny markets of super keen people (at least that is my impression for fantasy/scifi ranges).
PP needs to realise this otherwise they run the risk that they'll retain a tournament scene here and there; but by and large will start to bleed gamers and, most importantly, they won't be recruiting new ones to replace those they bleed. At best htey will slip back like the others, where it becomes increasingly spotty as to where you can get a game, which discourages people from collecting and getting started.
From the Ex Press Gangers I talked to the plan was the stores to take over the job of promoting the game. I think this was a bad idea because Shop employees have a million other things to do and
why should their give PP game more attention than the others to help PP sales. I'm not sure how GW keeps it foot hold even when they where doing everything possible to run off their player
base a few years back. But I agree that finding a local game is very important. It adds visibility to the game and people know if I come here to the store on a certain day I can find people that
I can play with.
Other thing I noticed there is a exodus going on. Many trade sites is most PP stuff is going cheap or trading for another game.. They are bleeding players, rarely I see a new player posting in forum asking for advice.
The PP local Facebook group is usually dead quiet and half the posts are people trying to trade off or sale their stuff. I see this in local game shops, PP was a contender just a few years ago, but most shops have
cut their loses and moved on to something else to take the shelf space.
I also got rid of my armies and stopped playing, so I am part of the problem. But the local scene I found isn't very welcoming plus overly competitive and I don't care for the current rule set. Something changed...
If they fixed both, I am not sure I would come back, with a steep hill to climb of collecting an army again
They are also priced similar to GW so it comes down to theme and I just lost care for the look PP are doing.
I think PP just rocked the boat too much all at once.
Dropping their forums (ok not all of it but a vast amount of it)
Dropping the PG system
Releasing MK3 which was a bit of a mess in terms of "we'll do new cards every year" to "no more cards!" etc..
Plus MK3 has been focused aorund theme armies too much in my view, so whilst themes are stronger you're basically tied into using specific themes so army building has become far more simplistic and limited.
I think PP just did all that all at once and it was too much. You're always going to lose people iwth an edition change; or change in policy - doing it all at once I think just led to a big scaleback and has resulted in less sales and thus more stores considering dropping them. PP is no longer the only rival to GW, they are one of many which means they've got to up their game and complete otherwise they'll get left behind.
I don't mind theme armies, I think PP just did them wrong. The theme lists allow you to take too much of a variety of stuff and still get the bonus models/points. For instance in Cygnar, instead of fielding 20 points of any storm knight models, they should have said something along the lines of if you field 3 units of stormblades, the unit attachment increases its field allowance and costs 0 points. While at 3 units attachments costs 15 points, fielding 3 units of stormblades is going to limit you in other areas. You could apply this to most other armies.
Themes were all over the place in terms of balance in Mk2. Most were meh. Many were terrible. And some were very strong.
Making themes no longer caster specific was a step in the right direction, the problem is PP doubled down on making themes THE way to play the game without fixing their balance problems. They have outright stated that they want most if not all games to be played in a theme. The issue is themes are still a mix of Good/Bad/Ugly. And they're being lazy with game balance as a result. Because they want everything to be played in theme, they have no interest in fixing stuff that is broken because "we'll just fix it with a theme!". Except they've shown they often can't fix stuff with a theme. The theme just makes the good stuff great, meaning nothing changes for the stuff that is bad.
In a sense, themes were better in mk2. Not everybody played in a theme, only with specific casters.
I think offering too many free models with so little limitation was part of the problem. The old Themes worked because they were so restrictive to even attempt to get any free models. They were also on levels which allowed one to build up to certain points as one chose.
Playing a theme makes me feel like I am playing an army someone else designed. I liked playing quirky forces made of minis I liked, and what I really liked about PP games was you could reasonably do that and compete if you knew what all your minis did very well.
I ran trolls without a Krielstone for example and with a bit of an oddball collection of units,and I was still able to compete in local tournaments and have a damn good time.
Now I am forced to play a certain way, often requiring a ridiculous outlay in terms of money duplicating expensive infantry units with multiple boxes, or suffer a massive penalty I just will not be able to come back from.
The thing it reminds me of the most is 8th edition fantasy, where everyone needed to run these absolutely bloated armies with gigantic units or go home. The cost was just too much.
It is a real shame, I had a lot of fun with the game and was looking to get back into it after repairing all my models.
Aye and the problem is that the heavy reliance on large themes means that players are really being shut down in terms of newbies taking up the game.
I fully expected larger games to become a thing as the game got more and more gamers with extensive collections; but now it seems that PP is trying to milk that market too much and rely on them wanting to buy multiple infantry models of the same rather than having a varied force - which was always one of the big charms to Warmachine - being able to have and encouraged to take large diversities of units.
Overread wrote: I think PP just rocked the boat too much all at once.
Dropping their forums (ok not all of it but a vast amount of it)
Dropping the PG system
Releasing MK3 which was a bit of a mess in terms of "we'll do new cards every year" to "no more cards!" etc..
Plus MK3 has been focused aorund theme armies too much in my view, so whilst themes are stronger you're basically tied into using specific themes so army building has become far more simplistic and limited.
I think PP just did all that all at once and it was too much. You're always going to lose people iwth an edition change; or change in policy - doing it all at once I think just led to a big scaleback and has resulted in less sales and thus more stores considering dropping them. PP is no longer the only rival to GW, they are one of many which means they've got to up their game and complete otherwise they'll get left behind.
We had something like this happen in my local area: On the same day, during the same news bulletin, it was announced that the military was going to be starting wargames in the area, and our Walmart (a very busy one) was shutting down to fix a "Bathroom Leak". Thus every conspiracy theorist concluded that the government crackdown was finally gonna happen.
There's a few more things though.
*1. They goofed on their formulas and an army that was near the bottom of the original 8/9 armies (Skorne) got hit with the nerf bat and fell to dead last with zero chance of recovery.
*2. That army's group was very vocal, because as they figured, they got worse.
3. The community at large took this to mean that all the rumors of "We playtested the heck outta Mk3" were lies. **Mk3 was also not a great system on release.
***4. Something (or some people) at PP probably broke down, figured the "toxic fanbase" caused all the issues with Mk3 and decided to neuter the forums. Most old info threads? Gone. Army Communities? Gone. Annoying disclaimer you have to sign to post or look? Now Present.
****5. They wanted to do the CID/Playtest Cycle. Part of that involved wanting to avoid the lemmings/overreaction that the forums usually created.
6. They dropped PG because of the lawsuit Magic Judges filed against WotC. They had no better option.
7. GW was back on the upstroke with 40K 8th being easier to play and changing a few armies.
*8. They released the January Skorne Update, which was a fix to the previous Skorne issues. But since they killed the forums, the celebration they would have received was muted.
* - This is the first thing I'll get asked about for sources, the proof is in the number of Top 3 finishes of WMH events after Mk3 arrives. Until the January Update, Skorne doesn't place in the Top 3 in any event, when everything else places at least once or twice.
** - Entirely subjective opinion, but I will challenge that it wasn't 'Great'. 'Okay' or 'Good' would be more reasonable terms.
*** - My take on the actual actions. The next stars cover more/less the official response
**** - http://privateerpress.com/community/privateer-insider/insider-3-3-2017
Don't forget killing the books, with all the fiction snippets, art and the collected rules for the releases for that 'year or so'. That hacked off a lot of people.
One of the things that put me off Mark3 immediately was how much of a mess the rulebook was. More tiny little icons (huzzah, for some of the new ones, the tiny icon has an arrow pointing diagonally rather than vertically or horizontally!) and the layout and rules were just a complete collective failure by the writers, editors and graphic designers.
This includes the problems with woods (toeing into the woods makes you visible, not being in the woods on the other side makes you invisible) and absolute layout nonsense with really bizarre decisions like the rules for being thrown are a full 10 pages (and a separate chapter) before the rules for throwing. That's just a baffling decision.
They should obviously be together in the same chapter: 'combat,' not 'gameplay,' even under the weirdly loose way they broke things down for those chapters. Notably combat actions aren't defined in the combat chapter, and are instead squeezed into Game Rules before the 2.5 pages of illustrations attempting to demonstrate the mess of LOS rules, most notably by breaking up the actual explanation for LOS. (Followed by yet another illustration)
Voss wrote: This includes the problems with woods (toeing into the woods makes you visible, not being in the woods on the other side makes you invisible) and absolute layout nonsense with really bizarre decisions like the rules for being thrown are a full 10 pages (and a separate chapter) before the rules for throwing. That's just a baffling decision.
They should obviously be together in the same chapter: 'combat,' not 'gameplay,' even under the weirdly loose way they broke things down for those chapters. Notably combat actions aren't defined in the combat chapter, and are instead squeezed into Game Rules before the 2.5 pages of illustrations attempting to demonstrate the mess of LOS rules, most notably by breaking up the actual explanation for LOS. (Followed by yet another illustration)
This sort of thing is actually one of my peeves. For instance, how to channel spells like Jackhammer? Both channeler and target need to be in the Control Range AND in LoS?
Voss wrote: This includes the problems with woods (toeing into the woods makes you visible, not being in the woods on the other side makes you invisible) and absolute layout nonsense with really bizarre decisions like the rules for being thrown are a full 10 pages (and a separate chapter) before the rules for throwing. That's just a baffling decision.
They should obviously be together in the same chapter: 'combat,' not 'gameplay,' even under the weirdly loose way they broke things down for those chapters. Notably combat actions aren't defined in the combat chapter, and are instead squeezed into Game Rules before the 2.5 pages of illustrations attempting to demonstrate the mess of LOS rules, most notably by breaking up the actual explanation for LOS. (Followed by yet another illustration)
This sort of thing is actually one of my peeves. For instance, how to channel spells like Jackhammer? Both channeler and target need to be in the Control Range AND in LoS?
And the fact that the massive rulebook failed to include the wall template. The only way to get that was to buy a starter box....
Back OT, they really did a number on themselves with how many bullets that they put into their foot all at once.
I have zero desire to play again, due to the rules being a bloated mess, no books, no cards, and the monthly CID.
It's far too much digital upkeep for a physical game, and I honestly think it's currently their biggest detriment.
I'd have to look up the current version of jackhammer (I suspect the answer is yes), but that's honestly more a side-effect of all the rules text on cards- a lot of those rules can't be answered in the rulebook, especially for card rules that didn't exist at the time.
The 'throw' issue gets to me because I played a lot of Mk 1 and 2, from Escalation (the first expansion onwards). Throw and slam have to be the most common break-out-the-book rules reference for the entire system, or at least in the top three. So dividing up the stages of the throw (and slam) rules into separate parts of the book requires some impressive Idiot Ball antics. I can't even imagine a logical train of thought that yields that result.
And the writing itself just yammers on forever. It's relatively comprehensive, but 'move double speed, but don't take actions' shouldn't require multiple paragraphs, nor charging a full page with multiple illustrates and a pop-out box.
I really don't want to parse text blocks as a part of hobby/social entertainment time.
I'm pretty fond of themes, mostly because its given PP a way to really support some of their great model themes and makes the game look a lot better, IMO. It feels like there's vastly more variety in practice now, even if there's far less in theory. Definitely not a smooth transition, but I find myself focusing more on factions I really like rather than feeling the need to hop around like I used to.
AduroT wrote: And apparently Dallas has left/is leaving the company now as well.
He has.
Also from Reddit
Hello.
I'm the Jeff that is being discussed in this thread. I'm the new Playtest Coordinator that is replacing Pagani. I officially start on the 7th.
I've actually been with the company for two years, I was one of the original candidates for Pagani's position, and they offered to bring me on part-time and work around my existing work schedule at Mox (if you're not familiar with Mox Boarding House, look it up). I was essentially a behind-the-scenes member of the dev team, but because my Big Boy job was with Mox, I wasn't particularly "public."
If you don't know me, well, I do many things. I've organized the Lock & Load Preshow, a bunch of WMW and IG Qualifiers, and other stuff.
After Pagani left, PP offered me his role full-time, I left Mox back in November. I will be doing a lot of the things he did.
Anyways, I don't actually have much to comment on this about. I don't actually know the motivations of the individuals who have left the company, they have kept those pretty close to their chest. However, and believe me, this is not me making some grand statement, this is just, at best, an educated guess. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the various people who have left collaborate on their own project. Many of them are veterans of the industry, and after launching Mk3, and now MonPoc, etc, they may have decided those were good capstones to their career at PP, and have decided to move off and make their own game or something. Again, I'm just speculating like all of you.
Anyways, since I saw my name being thrown around in here, I just wanted to pop in and say hello. I'm sure you'll all see me soon enough, probably on some stream next week or something.
Yeah with many stores clearing out PP inventory; I am sure they are feeling it upstream. But both those guys where around for some time as I understand.
There could be something going on behind the scenes but due to non disclosure agreements many of us will never know. Just odd, but wish them the best.
Over the holiday I had a chance to talk to old buddies that I used to play with before I moved. Most answers why they stopped playing is the same as this forum.
Examples where.. Don't like the new rules and/or Warmachine doesn't do it for me now and moved back to 40k. etc..
PP needs to do something now before it gets any worse, but mass amounts of known employees leaving is helping the mater.
Miniatures are a bit like computer games in that its a very closed working market the higher you go. Ergo once you get to a point of high experience if you leave a company you've got a very limited skill set that kind of requires you to go and find another gaming company to work for or to found your own.
IF PP is having staff leave then it might well be some are going to make their own company with their own ideas. Perhaps they've seen all those rich fast grow kickstarers and want to try that out.
Another aspect is that because of the troubles at PP we are paying more attention to staff coming and going and that the staff leaving now isn't a sign of rats fleeing the slowly sinking ship; but just the normal turnover of staff. It might even be partly PP trimming their team down and removing staff who wound up in very specialist niches that weren't actually needed on the full payroll to function etc.... So it could be all sorts of things.
It's also worth noting that a lot of game designer jobs don't pay particularly well. I know a few people who have looked into the job postings and balked when they saw what it paid (and that's before Seattle cost of living considerations). A lot of these guys are getting old enough to really consider the future, their families, etc and probably just need to leave the dream job at the bowling alley behind.
Just give it time. It's not worth selling your stuff...so don't.
GW is now ruining the balance that was had at the beginning of 8th edition 40k and AOS. Power creep is back on the menu with each new release. Won't take long before these same players get disgusted with balance and look for something else or return to Warmachine/Hordes.
Honestly, I think if PP just dropped their CID process, released a new edition, dropped out theme forces for tournament play a lot of folks might dust off their collections and return to the game.
Honestly, I think if PP just dropped their CID process, released a new edition, dropped out theme forces for tournament play a lot of folks might dust off their collections and return to the game.
IMO its the CiD process, love it or loathe it that has kept WM/H as balanced as it is compared to GW. Don't get me wrong, its not a perfect system and I think that PP actually does less testing internally now and sometimes pushes stuff out before they should because "the community will fix it in CiD". But it stops rapid power creep.
There is no need for a new edition when you have iterative development. However I could see PP releasing a new edition to draw a line under the lingering bad press that came after the Mk3 launch and help to re-launch the game in peoples minds. But with CiD, new mini factions etc I would not expect to see a Mk4 any time soon.
I got into Warmachine and Hordes way back in MK1. Absolutely loved the system and found the game fresh and different to what was on offer back in the day (mid 00's I think).
What put me off was the constant expansions for each of the factions. The line between the unique play styles was not just blurred, but lost. It also got silly, the game was initially about a Warcaster/Warlock their Warmachines/Warbeasts, and the occasional unit and solo. Die to the rampant power creep Warmachines and Warbeasts were left as just heavy paperweights.
I really wished that they had used their creative resources to not expand on the factions, but add more factions from the extensive world they created and kept the focus of the game on smaller forces. When I saw that Winterguard now have a rifle unit it just seems that the company ran out of new ideas.
I doubt the game will ever be able to tap I to that niche it did back when it was new. I still have a very strong urge to buy all the faction battle boxes, as to me that is where Warmachine and Hordes shine. The focus/fury aspect was and remains such a great idea.
Around MK2, people in my old gaming club (Leeds, UK) stopped playing. Before then 40k had died off, and PP were ruling the club. I think the fatigue set in around the release of MK2.
stonehorse wrote: I got into Warmachine and Hordes way back in MK1. Absolutely loved the system and found the game fresh and different to what was on offer back in the day (mid 00's I think).
Heh, I still remember the feeling of awe and joy I got from playing my first demo at a convention in Dublin, about ten years ago. WMH felt so ‘right’ as a game.
What put me off was the constant expansions for each of the factions. The line between the unique play styles was not just blurred, but lost. It also got silly, the game was initially about a Warcaster/Warlock their Warmachines/Warbeasts, and the occasional unit and solo. Die to the rampant power creep Warmachines and Warbeasts were left as just heavy paperweights.
Hmm, I disagree. Warbeasts in particular were never ‘heavy paperweights’. The hordes/fury game system was always a more fully developed system than warjacks/focus and this was reflected in the game – warbeasts carried a huge amount of weight and did an awful lot of ‘heavy lifting’, and hordes forces were more typically ‘warlock, warbeasts and ocassional units or solos’. The issues were with focus and warjacks and I would argue it was less due to ‘rampant power creep’ and far more to do with poor game design - In mk1, jacks were extremely expensive, extremely poorly statted, focus was too poor and inefficient a resource to ‘fuel’ them, and frankly it just wasn’t worth fielding them, and mk2 only somewhat rectified this. To be fair, ‘poor game design’ is far too cruel a barb to throw, but it’s clear it took ten or fifteen years of game design to both see where the limitations of the system were and how this could be overcome. In fact, I would argue it took until the release of the Convergence of Cyriss faction to see the first truly brilliantly integrated focus/warcaster/’jack’ system that could adequately compare to fury/warbeasts. Take that, and go back in time to the start of Mk1 and you have something epic!
I really wished that they had used their creative resources to not expand on the factions, but add more factions from the extensive world they created and kept the focus of the game on smaller forces. When I saw that Winterguard now have a rifle unit it just seems that the company ran out of new ideas.
Hmm, again, I would disagree to an extent. Khador were always a faction with a significant ranged element. What they lacked was (and is) ‘gun-tech’ (magic and spells to boost ranged abilities, like Cygnar has in spades). But they’ve always had a solid, if ‘raw’, ranged ability. Heck, they matched Cygnar for range from the battle box days, and it was Khador that had a sniper unit. Winter Guard Riflemen were a solid unit, and still within keeping with the winter guard aesthetics and themes of a slowly modernising army. And at RAT5, they can still be seen as ‘conscripted farmhands’ who might have just been given that rifle because they had some experience with them back home on the farm. That said, I will agree with you that there came a point where the line was crossed at a certain point of expanding the factions. For me it was later down that road – specifically, the cygnaran ‘trencher long gunners’. Long gunners and trenchers had always been thematically separated, and I felt it was a very lazy new unit. What’s next, Iron Fang Kommandos, Winter Guard Pikemen? Man ‘o’ War guardsmen?
I would also disagree that they should have added more factions to the world than expanded the factions, though I respect your position on this. For me, it was the opposite. The final ‘nail in the coffin’ for me was PPs announcement of ‘one new faction every year’. Immoren is only so big after all. I thought the game size was perfect with the introduction of Retribution. Convergence were fair. Since then, nothing has really grabbed me with the new stuff.
I doubt the game will ever be able to tap I to that niche it did back when it was new. I still have a very strong urge to buy all the faction battle boxes, as to me that is where Warmachine and Hordes shine. The focus/fury aspect was and remains such a great idea.
I agree. I think the stars and planets aligned for PP when they had their growth. I think it would be extremely difficult to recreate those conditions. And for what its worth, focus and fury are still immense fun. Have you heard about the apparently upcoming ‘Warmachine 5k’ game? Rumours are thin on the ground but its apparently small forces, ‘warcaster’ based, with customiseable ‘warjacks’. Don’t know much else but I will give it a look when there is more info.
Around MK2, people in my old gaming club (Leeds, UK) stopped playing. Before then 40k had died off, and PP were ruling the club. I think the fatigue set in around the release of MK2.
Here in the north, it was around the tail end of Mk2 that I saw a big drop off in ‘new blood’ and people,playing.There is a core of people who still play, but they’re so spread out that for me, its just not worth it. As you say though, it was fatigue, and maybe more than a bit of burnout.
Since some of the conversation upthread was wondering where Pagani would end up, I think it's worth noting that he is one of the lead designers on the new Marvel: Crisis Protocol game, put out by Asmodee. He must have gotten that job pretty quickly, seeing as he left PP in January and has a full game product announcement in August of the same year.
"The question has come up enough that I've decided I should confirm that I am no longer working at Privateer Press. I decided after completing the most recent major release (Oblivion) that the time had come for a change. With No Quarter magazine discontinued and a slowdown on other fiction projects, the timing seemed right. This was an amicable departure motivated by a desire to recharge my creative batteries by writing about new worlds. I wish the company and those that remain nothing but future success.
I was with the company since its earliest days, so this was a tough decision. Working there was an amazing experience and absolutely defining to my creative career. I was privileged to work with countless tremendously talented individuals, many of whom have become lasting friends. I will always remain grateful for the opportunities I had and am proud of the work we accomplished, through two iterations of the Iron Kingdoms RPG, three editions of the HORDES and WARMACHINE miniature games, countless short stories and multiple novels, including one of my own. I had the chance to help invent and define innumerable memorable characters. Collaborating closely with so many fantastic artists, designers, editors, and other writers, both inside and outside the company, was a pleasure and a constant education.
Time marches on, and I've decided I must take a risk and venture into unexplored waters. I expect I may get the chance to tell a few as-yet untold tales in the Iron Kingdoms in due time. But in the meanwhile, there are other ideas clamoring for my attention."
Oryza Sativa wrote: Since some of the conversation upthread was wondering where Pagani would end up, I think it's worth noting that he is one of the lead designers on the new Marvel: Crisis Protocol game, put out by Asmodee. He must have gotten that job pretty quickly, seeing as he left PP in January and has a full game product announcement in August of the same year.
Not just Pagani but Schick and other devs. Some of the sculpts are PP mainstays as well. They almost certainly had the job lined up before they left.
It's likely the main reason Pagani left, he probably got headhunted.
That said, it's this crew that got WM to where it is now, for good and bad. So people leaving who aren't burdened by the same baggage is likely to be a good thing as this point.
LunarSol wrote: Seacat has seemed very disgruntled with the destruction of the setting in Oblivion. Not really surprised to see him go.
He also mentioned that one of the reasons is the loss of No Quarter, where a lot of mini-fluff outside the books was presented. That part is all on us, the consumers, since we didn't engage with it enough for them to justify in keeping it active.
Voss wrote: No, that's on them, for not making a publication worth buying.
Would that be the same group that complained about a lack of narrative game support, almost all of which was in No Quarter? Or the same group that complained about the lack of Company of Iron support, also found in No Quarter? Or are you talking about the Extremerollers which only lift their head for a separate PP document when it is Champions?
I went along to some tournaments - there were usually half a dozen of my mates there, and the organisers and most of the other attendees were decent folk. But I found the table setups rather underwhelming, and I'm not cut out for cramming four games into a day. I'd rather play one or two leisurely games with some banter, than four rushed games.
