Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

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.

Aye. PP has grossly mishandled themes.

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?

 carldooley wrote:

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.

And apparently Dallas has left/is leaving the company now as well.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warmachine/comments/abvk4e/dallas_kemp_has_left_pp/

So Pagani replacement at PP states he thinks most of the people leaving are going to form their own company. Not an unlikely outcome.

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.

I remember when FFG was hiring a few years ago and their designer positions were around $35k-40k at the most.

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.

 D6Damager wrote:

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.

 D6Damager wrote:
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 AOS. Power creep is back on the menu with each new release.

I find this statement hilarious given that the last major tournament was won by the flesh eater courts *before* their battletome update.

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.

 stonehorse wrote:

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!

 stonehorse wrote:

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.

 stonehorse wrote:

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.

 stonehorse wrote:

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.

Seacat gone

"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.

 Kommisar wrote:
Seacat gone

Well... Goddamn. And that's that then.

SeaCat was the iron kingdoms. If he has moved on, well, there's nothing much more left to say, is there?

Genuinely best of luck to him though.

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.

Seacat has seemed very disgruntled with the destruction of the setting in Oblivion. Not really surprised to see him go.