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Have a quick read of this. Ok, aside from a bunch of pretty pictures of very green scenery, what do you notice?

Here's a Hint:

Everything in that article is made from GW products.

Now, I understand that GW likes to advertise their own products and we accept that and we move on, fine, but what happened to their grand scenery articles where they taught you how to build interesting terrain pieces? When did an article on making scenery go from "How to make trees" to "How to combine the Ruin kit with the Tree kit". I mean, he's made flagstones not out of plasticard like everyone else would, but another Official Games Workshop Product, the Warhammer movement trays.

When looking through the Planet Strike book I noted that one picture had some of GW's old scratch-built bunkers in the background. My immediate thought was "So long, farewell - ain't ever going to see you guys again now that there's an Official Games Workshop Product to fill your spot". Even the RoB board seems to have become the default surface they play their games on. I remember an issue of White Dwarf from the mid-90's where they went into detail about this great set of crashed shuttle terrain that they had made with bits from all sorts of sources, including an old toy SW shuttle that they had cut in half with a chainsaw!!! Why do I get the feeling that, were that article to be done now, they'd use only Official Games Workshop Products to make it? So rather than a shuttle, it would be a Thunderhawk, rather than a strachbuilt escape pod, it would be a modified Drop Pod built into an Official Games Workshop Moonscape crater?

So, again, I ask, does anyone have a problem with this? Have GW terrain articles really gone from being articles about making terrain to articles about building only Official Games Workshop Products?

I noticed this with some of the great ones like the pit fighting arena and such
i still got the old How To Make Terrian book they put out

That's the way it goes. Having played since 2nd ed. I've definatley noticed the trend, like the majority of us.

Some times you eat the bar, some times the bar eats you.

Hmm, I guess that is what fans sites are for. The GW site is for sales.

I understand your plight, HMBC, but look at it like this:

If you were running a business that sold models, and were doing a series of articles that gave you the option of either pushing your own product or selling someone else's, which would you choose? Is it shady and an obvious attempt to sell over-priced plasticard? Feth yes, it is. But that's the point. Those of us who either know what we're looking for or know how to readily substitute materials will do so, and those who don't will quickly catch on... GW stuff isn't exactly the cheapest stuff on the market, but if someone makes the mistake of actually buying a ton of GW movement trays instead of just buying sheet styrene, that's their own problem.

As for the ruins issue, yes, you can make your own out of foamcore and plasticard, but unless you put a lot of time and energy into the project, you're going to have a lot of difficulty matching the level of detail found in cast pieces, be they GW plastics, Armorcast resins, or otherwise, and that has been the case for a long while.

A lot of these articles are more for the reader to take inspiration from, rather than for a step-by-step guide telling someone what to build and how to build it for their tables... If GW can use that to sucker someone into putting a bit more styrene into their order, then so be it. More power to them. It's not exactly "right", but that's capitalism. It doesn't have to be moral, it just has to be smart.

It makes my brain hurt the same as when I try to explain to somebody new to wargaming that you can buy primer, files and pva glue from a hardware store.

I have a friend whose son is 13 and started wargaming with LotR. My friend does not wargame, but is enjoying building terrain with her son. I had to let them know it's ok to go the hardware store and get a small can of Hunter Green to paint the styrofoam hills they made. They were about to go buy 20 bottles of Snot Green. The local Red Shirts told them it wouldn't be a problem to order that many.

Thankfully the local GW store is gone now.

I just looked on through the hobby articles...

What the feth is a wash brush? Seriously. I think normal brushes work just fine...

Valhallan42nd wrote:What the feth is a wash brush? Seriously.

What is it? The very definition of why "marketing" + "idiots" = "sales".

Do they make a foundation brush?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Good lord they have a Stippling Brush!
It's custom cut!
If only I would have tought to take a crappy old brush and cut off the tip.

I remember reading through the 3rd ed rulebook and seeing all these amazing boards set up. There were defense networks of trenches, craters and barbed wire. There were cities made of plasticard and foamcore, with an armored column rolling through the rubble. An Ork city made entirely of aquarium bits and styrofoam.

I share your pain. As cool as a lot of this new stuff is, the old scratch built warzones (Anyone remember Ork's Drift? Oi!) are going to be missed.

There's scary talk about the North American GT having all the tables built out of the RoB table, instead of the chipboard ones. I guess those will be easier to ship to Las Vegas.

The wash brush actually holds alot of wash without it running. It's not like a regular brush. I'm sure there is a cheaper alternative.

A good Redshirt would have told the kid and his father to go to Lowe's. That's Great Customer Service, which is what GW is supposed to be about.

this is why i keep all my old WDs from the 90s and didn't buy any from 2001 on.

DrunkenSamurai wrote:Hmm, I guess that is what fans sites are for. The GW site is for sales.

QFT. Thank god for that

The days of Nigel Stillman are over.

That's kind of tragic, some of those old pieces were very cool. However in the past GW built all it's own terrain to avoid showing products by other companies. Pre made scenery is nothing new.

BrookM wrote:The days of Nigel Stillman are over.

And the days of Games Workshop: The Weyland-Yutani management model, are in full swing.


"We manufacture those by the way..." Burke, Company Rep. Aliens

Not overly.

'Tis merely the shepherds ministering to the flock (or perhaps the jackals preying upon it).

I've not used the GW site as a source of modelling inspiration since the demise of Black Gobbo.

It would bother me more if I thought that GW was "the Hobby," but I've long since moved on.

Like others here, I rarely use the GW site as a source of inspiration.

White Dwarf began to move away from a general games mag and towards being an in-house catalogue in the late 80s. This is merely the final culmination of the trend. You can't really blame GW, because there it makes commercial sense.

As others pointed out, lots of this kind of info is freely available on websites and blogs.

Wait whats a White Dwarf? Is that the advertising catalog they leave out at the stores, the one they change every month?

I don't have a problem with it, I'm just surprised it took them that long to really get into the full swing of running their business like a business

It's only for the fanatics. When I visited Nottingham some years ago I took a model of my Great Unclean one to show people, one staff member was visiting from abroad and was painting stuff and I had a chat. He asked me about the colours and I pointed out that the base coat and others were not GW paints and he assured me with "Well you use whatever is best, I'm not a fanatic..." Which told me a LOT, because among GW staff there are fanatics. They only use GW spray paint, GW colours, files, clippers and glue. They don't touch anything not endorsed by the mighty workshop. It's everywhere in their magazines and books, more than ever. All manufactures in all things always claim that their products are best painted with their own paints, Tamyia do it with their own colour range, and so do Revell. Gw just seem to take it that bit further, because even Tamyia work with other people kits in their own magazine, they don't pretend that they wider hobby does not exist.

I'm suprised GW haven't started buying in plastic card and selling it themselves for several quid a sheet actually. Don't want people going to other model shops to get their supplies, they might find out that clippers and the like are not £6 in the rest of the world.

Or that pink insulation foam they use to make stuff from. Why go to a building supplies wholesaler and get it cheap when you can buy our "Slannesh pink battle foam!"

I've always been a fan of the conversion galleries and the like in the Codices as well, but those appear to be gone too. I suppose it's the question of growing the business or growing the hobby. GW's opted to move more strongly to the business side. Their prerogative really, them being a business and all. Still unfortunate though.

Howard A Treesong wrote:I'm suprised GW haven't started buying in plastic card and selling it themselves for several quid a sheet actually. Don't want people going to other model shops to get their supplies, they might find out that clippers and the like are not £6 in the rest of the world.

Or that pink insulation foam they use to make stuff from. Why go to a building supplies wholesaler and get it cheap when you can buy our "Slannesh pink battle foam!"

Hush! That´s the surprise in the coming black box deal
Slannesh pink battle foam, the only foam sponsored by the Gods of Chaos, available for preorder next month. 50$/m2

M.

Don't say that too loud Treesong. Let's face it, they've just started marketing, 'water pots'.

Wouldn't surprise me if they tried to market a red piece of bubblewrap labelled 'Stress Sheet'.

New Games Workshop Hobby Pack. It contains:

Pink Foam.
4 Sheets of Plasticard.
6 Sheets of really thin plasticard.
2 Sheets of really thick plasticard.
1 Water Bowl + Slider (to help with water-slide transfers - water sold separately)
1 Base Brush (for painting bases)
1 Marine Shoulder Pad Brush (for painting Marine Shoulder Pads)
1 Horse Brush (for painting horses)

All for 400% the price you'd normally get it.

H.B.M.C. wrote:
Now, I understand that GW likes to advertise their own products and we accept that and we move on, fine, but what happened to their grand scenery articles where they taught you how to build interesting terrain pieces? When did an article on making scenery go from "How to make trees" to "How to combine the Ruin kit with the Tree kit". I mean, he's made flagstones not out of plasticard like everyone else would, but another Official Games Workshop Product, the Warhammer movement trays.

When looking through the Planet Strike book I noted that one picture had some of GW's old scratch-built bunkers in the background. My immediate thought was "So long, farewell - ain't ever going to see you guys again now that there's an Official Games Workshop Product to fill your spot". Even the RoB board seems to have become the default surface they play their games on. I remember an issue of White Dwarf from the mid-90's where they went into detail about this great set of crashed shuttle terrain that they had made with bits from all sorts of sources, including an old toy SW shuttle that they had cut in half with a chainsaw!!! Why do I get the feeling that, were that article to be done now, they'd use only Official Games Workshop Products to make it? So rather than a shuttle, it would be a Thunderhawk, rather than a strachbuilt escape pod, it would be a modified Drop Pod built into an Official Games Workshop Moonscape crater?

So, again, I ask, does anyone have a problem with this? Have GW terrain articles really gone from being articles about making terrain to articles about building only Official Games Workshop Products?

What happened to thr grand senery articles? They didnt make any money for GW, thats what happened.

Its the sad long decline of GW, to their current business model. I remember articles after articles of scratch built models-one in particular in the back of citadel journal that took almost 100 parts and used car parts.

Those days of awesome terrain and model articles are long dead HBMC. The target audience for those type of terrain and model articles arent the target audience anymore. GW has shifted to a younger crowd, who doesnt have the patience for building that stuff from sratch.

Frazzled wrote:Wait whats a White Dwarf? Is that the advertising catalog they leave out at the stores, the one they change every month?

Sure is, but it costs $12 Aus to take it home. I remember them printing decent monthly catalouges (not WD) during the brief time I played during 2005. Still have the one from that time too, seems more durable than the new codexs
I return to the game to see that they've both been merged and the decent materials that the WD was made out of is replaced by a cheaper looking and feeling paper. The price also increased, not surprising though

Nothing like a 3-4 year break to really highlight the slight changes that are always happening, unfortunate as they are.

I like their terrain pieces, but that plastic hill is a bear to play on. I could live without
them promoting more of their hills for gaming.

I entirely sympathize with you, HBMC. I'm relatively new to the actual playing of GW games, but their marketing almost turned me off of the entire system; LotR, WHFB, 40K, the works. Fortunately, the internet is a fabulous world full of other people who hate GW and post their own stuff.

Howard A Treesong wrote:All manufactures in all things always claim that their products are best painted with their own paints, Tamyia do it with their own colour range, and so do Revell. Gw just seem to take it that bit further, because even Tamyia work with other people kits in their own magazine, they don't pretend that they wider hobby does not exist.

QFT. The sad, sad, unfortunate truth.

There are two intentional "translational errors" tat truly infuriate me with there company:
-changing the term "tabletop wargaming" from "playing a military simulation with counters on a tabletop map" to "playing miniature games with GW-endorsed products"
AND
-changing the questions "What models do you make?" and "Wat are your hobbies?" from "Do you paint planes? trains? automobiles? tanks? soldiers? etc?" to "Which of our games do you play and with which armies?"

I see and understand how these came about, but it makes me despise the company. I enjoy the miniatures and will buy them from other stores, but I adamantly refuse to ever set foot in a GW again. Ever.

On a side note, I was at a local hobby store and saw the "GW Skull White" spraycan and decided to shell out the money just once to convince myself that it wasn't worth it. I've already decided that I like my other sprays better, but my dad just about had a conniption when he found out I had bought one of their non-mini products. Guess he thought I was going to become one of te GW fanatics, but I've met enough of them to keep me out of that dark, sketchy alley.