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Doohicky wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

Yeah that was pretty disappointing. I mean it's not like there's even anything in there about competitive play. I thought it was going to be about using the app to track games the way BCP does to get data and that sort of thing...but it wasn't. It was just "we made this app and we're really excited to have you use it!" with literally nothing more. Totally content-free.

Well there was one thing, that the writing is pretty clearly on the walls that the app will be mandatory for events getting coverage or run by GW.

Quoting for posterity. I accept any and all ridicule if this turns out to be true.

Why do people say gak like this like an AoS App hasn't existed and NOT been mandatory for years.

Admittedly, a lot of large tournaments heavily prefer either the App or warscroll builder for the lists you turn in, but that's mostly to stop people from handing them 20 page battlescribe lists or handwritten lists that are too messy and grease-stained to read.

Vovin wrote:
It is funny how the their own contest highlights the shortcomings of the app. They are asking the user to share their lists on Twitter, but there is no easy and nice way to do this. You can share your list directly to twitter, but all it does is trying to cram serveral hundred of letters into a single tweet. This doesn't work obviously. The app clearly lacks the ability to compress the army list data into an image or a link or even a automatically generated text file. So most contest participants resolve this problem by taking several screenshots of their list. Some users put the raw text into a multiple posts. None of the solution are very appealing. Some poor users aren't even aware of this problem and post only the header of their army list or a single screenshot with the first couple of units out of their 3000+ points list. Maybe they think that GW can somehow read the contents of the army list in their app, so they it is sufficient to only post the name of the list and GW deduces all the details. If one of them is amongst the winners, it will either be a rude awakening, or GW has has to be extra generous to mitigate the fallout.

Unsurprising. What we need is an FAQ for the competition. Should be here in 4 weeks.

5 is more likely and it will be incomplete,

Guys! Guys!

Have you considered, that maybe we should just wAiT aND SeE if this turns out to actually be good or not?

Big think time: maybe it will be good if we just wait until it isn't bad. Eh?

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Guys! Guys!

Have you considered, that maybe we should just wAiT aND SeE if this turns out to actually be good or not?

Big think time: maybe it will be good if we just wait until it isn't bad. Eh?

Bound to be a good thought. there's no contrary exemple to this recently, over time GW allways improved, especially in regards to support for factions, right?

/obvious sarcasm based upon player faction is obvious.

 Lord Damocles wrote:

Have you considered, that maybe we should just wAiT aND SeE if this turns out to actually be good or not?

yes, and if I could join the Beta-Test without the need to subscribe I would do that
but the need to join with a 2 free month were no one knows how long it will take until it is actual good, just no

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Guys! Guys!

Have you considered, that maybe we should just wAiT aND SeE if this turns out to actually be good or not?

Big think time: maybe it will be good if we just wait until it isn't bad. Eh?

Insert overused homily regarding insanity and varying results, but on the upside looks like the conditioning is taking nicely

Damocles wins the thread.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Exactly. All y'all are awful when it comes to voting with your wallets. We already had people here defending this garbage app because "it has future potential". Like, any other app you'd just not buy into until it's a complete product.

As an outspoken "it has potential" member, I've yet to spend a cent on the app, nor wouldn't until it meets my level of quality to justify the price (which is rightly criticized as being high). I doubt anyone here spends money on the app for BF alone, unless it's for access to the 8E lists. Similar to Early Access on steam, some are worth the price, and some are not. GW would go a long way by making the beta version $2USD/mo to build some goodwill while keeping some cash flow.

The doom and gloom here is crazy. A lot of legitimate criticism but so much is just hating for hatings sake. Almost like some of you just need a soapbox to justify yourself. There is plenty of room for improvement, and I'll be the first to admit I have to use BS to cross reference my GW app list, which I find hilarious, but I do like what I see and hopefully with enough fixes, improvements, and content additions, it'll be worth subscribing to. Baring anything else, it must be nearly 100% accurate, and incorporate Crusade and Legends content as options, but I don't see all of that being a requirement to get it out the door and into peoples hands.

My concern is that improvement will be too slow to capture enough subscribers before they cancel the whole project, or that $5/mo IS the beta price and it'll go up from there, which is crazy talk.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Damocles wins the thread.

What, with "It might be good one day so stop talking about how bad it is now"? if you say so, my guy

Poe's Law

I guess those people also spend hundreds of dollar a month on mantic products because they might be in future the best models on the market and they need the money to get there

 Lord Damocles wrote:
Poe's Law

I had a suspicion you were being tongue in cheek with the mIXeD cASe thing

Whelp, left gw my feedback for the app, which boils down to "app looks great and had a lot of potential, shame you've priced it out of usability." I really want this app to succeed, and that boils down to it having a reasonable price

Like I said, the app itself has a ton of potential and looks great, it's just too expensive for what it is. Now that we have Buttscribe to fix up lists for sharing with others, GW really needs to figure out a way to compete. They can't ban knowledge, they need to figure out a legitimate way to compete with Battlescribe. BS has done nothing illegal, and they can't just sue them out of the competition, nor do I really think they want to. If they did, it would be illegal for me to tell you a guardsman is Move 6", bs4+, ws4+, s3, t3, w1, a1, ld6, sv5+ during a game. You can't ban knowledge, and that's all BS is. You can't play without a codex with it, as much as people think you can, so battlescribe doesn't replace the codex.

The people arguing Battlescribe is illegal are essentially arguing it's illegal for me to share the stats of my units with you during a game unless you also own my codex, which is insane.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Whelp, left gw my feedback for the app, which boils down to "app looks great and had a lot of potential, shame you've priced it out of usability." I really want this app to succeed, and that boils down to it having a reasonable price

Like I said, the app itself has a ton of potential and looks great, it's just too expensive for what it is. Now that we have Buttscribe to fix up lists for sharing with others, GW really needs to figure out a way to compete. They can't ban knowledge, they need to figure out a legitimate way to compete with Battlescribe. BS has done nothing illegal, and they can't just sue them out of the competition, nor do I really think they want to. If they did, it would be illegal for me to tell you a guardsman is Move 6", bs4+, ws4+, s3, t3, w1, a1, ld6, sv5+ during a game. You can't ban knowledge, and that's all BS is. You can't play without a codex with it, as much as people think you can, so battlescribe doesn't replace the codex.

The people arguing Battlescribe is illegal are essentially arguing it's illegal for me to share the stats of my units with you during a game unless you also own my codex, which is insane.

Not Online!!! wrote:


to this, basically the market doesn't really play for 40k / GW in many ways, and it is shown in their attitude.
It's also more obvious in the apps case because there is a competitor, battle scribe, that does it better for cheaper.

GW doesn't do competition well

While you're right, all you need to do is see the outcome of the chapterhouse lawsuit to realize that GW probably doesn't have the guts to pull that kind of legal trick again. There's way more companies now that will openly say that they make guard/marine/Ork bits than before the lawsuit. GW thought they had an easy win only to have a vested interest side with chapterhouse and give them a public black eye most new players can't even comprehend.

Even if GW won a hypothetical lawsuit against battlescribe, the public backlash would be insane, and I think they know that. I know I wouldn't buy another GW book ever again if they did, I'd use my old copy of battlescribe out of spite. Heck I'd use a napkin if I had to. That's some Kirby level BS right there.

Necronmaniac05 wrote:
Look if you want to believe that obtaining the rules contents of a book that costs £30 to buy and is absolutely a creative work protected by intellectual property/copyright law for free isn't piracy then obviously nothing i say is going to change your mind.

However the fact is It is no different to downloading a film or whatever from pirate bay or some other bit torrent site.

Rules aren't copyrightable, only the specific wording of the texts.

KillerAngel wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

Exactly. All y'all are awful when it comes to voting with your wallets. We already had people here defending this garbage app because "it has future potential". Like, any other app you'd just not buy into until it's a complete product.

As an outspoken "it has potential" member, I've yet to spend a cent on the app, nor wouldn't until it meets my level of quality to justify the price (which is rightly criticized as being high). I doubt anyone here spends money on the app for BF alone, unless it's for access to the 8E lists. Similar to Early Access on steam, some are worth the price, and some are not. GW would go a long way by making the beta version $2USD/mo to build some goodwill while keeping some cash flow.

The doom and gloom here is crazy. A lot of legitimate criticism but so much is just hating for hatings sake. Almost like some of you just need a soapbox to justify yourself. There is plenty of room for improvement, and I'll be the first to admit I have to use BS to cross reference my GW app list, which I find hilarious, but I do like what I see and hopefully with enough fixes, improvements, and content additions, it'll be worth subscribing to. Baring anything else, it must be nearly 100% accurate, and incorporate Crusade and Legends content as options, but I don't see all of that being a requirement to get it out the door and into peoples hands.

My concern is that improvement will be too slow to capture enough subscribers before they cancel the whole project, or that $5/mo IS the beta price and it'll go up from there, which is crazy talk.

They SHOULD cancel the project and use that funding to get better writers.

ERJAK wrote:

Doohicky wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

Yeah that was pretty disappointing. I mean it's not like there's even anything in there about competitive play. I thought it was going to be about using the app to track games the way BCP does to get data and that sort of thing...but it wasn't. It was just "we made this app and we're really excited to have you use it!" with literally nothing more. Totally content-free.

Well there was one thing, that the writing is pretty clearly on the walls that the app will be mandatory for events getting coverage or run by GW.

Quoting for posterity. I accept any and all ridicule if this turns out to be true.

Why do people say gak like this like an AoS App hasn't existed and NOT been mandatory for years.

Admittedly, a lot of large tournaments heavily prefer either the App or warscroll builder for the lists you turn in, but that's mostly to stop people from handing them 20 page battlescribe lists or handwritten lists that are too messy and grease-stained to read.

AoS is a much smaller playerbase and thus less reciprocal to just rolling with the punches - if they blow it with something AoS it's more likely to harm the health game slash profits. Compare this to 40k which is such a juggernaut they could spit in your face with every purchase and they'd have enough people - be that sheer numbers or amount of whales - thanking them to justify continuing said spitting. AoS' competitive scene isn't nearly as big. It exists sure, but not to the scale of 40k and without the same buzz/clout.

That said if the app is a major success I wouldn't be shocked if we saw something similar for the Azyr app, with a price increase of course.

 LunarSol wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:
"Not the most consumer friendly but great for LGS" seems to be the battlecry these days. At some point LGS are going to have to stop relying on anti-consumer behaviour from companies and actually innovate their dinosaur business model.

And yet... stores that attempt a membership or table fee model get immediately villified as greedy and trying to exploit the community because players expect it to be a free service.

Part of the problem with the "consumer friendly" argument is simply that the only friendly thing for consumers is free. It's just not a practical reality for anyone involved.

I would balk at a membership fee for a store. But a reasonable table fee doesn't strike me as crazy, provided that comes with, like, terrain and such. 5 to 10 dollars as a rental for a table with quality terrain for a game seems fine.

 Dysartes wrote:

 Argive wrote:
How long until they try to sue BS ?

The way things are set up, I don't think they can, unfortunately.

BattleScribe provides a platform, which (I believe) isn't tied inherently to any one system. Without data, it doesn't do much on its own.

The "community" generates data files for different games, and different factions within games, and makes these available as a shared resource. As this is decentralised, and not endorsed by the BS merchants *cough* *cough* GW can't go after the data files to get rid of them.

I'm not 100% certain, but unfortunately I think the only way they can do anything about this would be to buy out BS and close it down - no idea what the cost/benefit on such an action would be, though.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 techsoldaten wrote:
I'm put off by the app because it's directing revenue away from places that are primary points of interaction for people in the hobby. It means the people who put up tables where you play are going to have it even harder going forward because you're spending in the app instead of the store. Aside from diverting revenue away from the businesses who support their products, there's the question of consumer psychology. If you're used to spending in the app, you're going to be less likely to spend in the store for anything else you might need.

So charge for tables. People invest thousands of dollars annually in the hobby, spending a few bucks to stand around in retail space the owner is renting should not be that big a deal. Owners should be looking at scheduling systems, adding some white glove service to make the experience even more exciting for the people who come out.

I think I'm missing something here, techsoldaten - given you need to buy a 9th ed book to get the code to unlock the content in the app, I don't see how it is directing revenue away from a LGS. They can still sell the customer a Codex (or Codex Supplement), after all. And while there's a lot of 8th ed material included as part of the subscription, the value there decreases each time a new book is released.

I do agree with charging for table space, btw - though I think a LGS needs to put a bit of effort in regarding the quality of the tables/terrain provided at the start. If they're planning on adding more stuff over time - say an MDF urban layout for Infinity - and they aren't there yet, but they have a good mix of sci-fi and fantasy terrain to cover 40k and AOS, that's fair enough. One of those things where community updates are useful, if that makes sense.

They can use the same DMCA system that companies and trolls use on places like youtube. Wether or not they have merit is immaterial because the owners of BS aren't about to go into a courtroom to fight a multimillion dollar corporation. Individuals just don't ever really win those situations. Even if you win, you still lose.

 Dysartes wrote:

Jidmah wrote:Or another insane idea: They could also just do an app that is just a good as BS but updated immediately on release, and then watch BS wither and die.

That might also work, but inertia is a thing - and that's before you get the crowd that think they're entitled to get all the rules without paying for them.

I was working on the assumption that Argive's question regarding suing them was as a way to get rid of BS without doing something within the market

Billicus wrote:What's "unfortunate" about GW not being able to shutter Battlescribe? People use it, people like it, and it doubtless sells models by virtue of existing and giving people easy access to the rules.

Because - and say it with me, kids - piracy is not a good thing...

And yes, I acknowledge that the BS platform in and of itself isn't... generating the pirated materials. That would be the so-called "community". But because of the distributed - and I assume anonymous, or near-so - nature of said "community", GW can't go after them.

I own a number of 8th ed books, but if I were to download this BS and the 40k files, and start reading rules and building lists for books I don't own? Then I'm distinctly in the wrong.

As it stands, we have a number of posters on here who think just using BS and a copy of the core rulebook - or even just the rules pamphlet - is a legitimate way to play the game. This is one of the few areas where I'm in favour of the tournament approach, btw, given that most rules packs I've looked at mandate bringing the material you're using in your list to the event with you.

The morality of piracy is linked to the morality of the business practices of the thing being sold.

Necronmaniac05 wrote:

The Newman wrote:

Necronmaniac05 wrote:
Why does someone need a logical counterargument for piracy? You are literally breaking the law. It might be a law you don't like or don't agree with or whatever but still, you are breaking the law thus you are in the wrong.

All those arguements about 'no study suggesting that piracy harms sales' well guess what? Not worth a damn. If you ever get caught plead it to the court and see how far it gets you.

"When the law is sufficiently wrong, disobedience becomes duty."

I knew someone would pull the Robin Hood claim but in this case it doesn't stack up. Intellectual Property law could hardly be said to operate in a tyrannical way that justifies the theft of a creative work. Trying to pass yourself off as such just smacks of desperation.

IP laws are massively fethed up. Disney's lobby to extend copyrights unto the heatdeath of the universe stifles creativity something fierce. And patent laws lead to pharma people in board rooms literally calculating how much money they could make off of death and misery.

 Cybtroll wrote:
GW can't go against Battlescribe for the same reason the recording company can't go against BitTorrent.

Copyright protect contents, and (correctly) doesn't impact on infrastructure that can be used also to infringe copyright.
That's the reason: I am sure that if GW had a legal hook will sue Battlescribe tomorrow first thing in the morning.

The DMCA is actually 100 percent the way they could go against battlescribe. Infrastructure has the duty to make a good faith effort to investigate copyright violations on their platform in a DMCA notice is sent to them.

 tauist wrote:
I think as long as no "creative" works are being reproduced, such as lore and artwork (including photos of painted miniatures), GW doesn't really have a strong enough case to build on against BS. This is also why the codexes are full of such creative content; If they weren't, scanned rips of the dexes would be much more problematic regarding copyright law.

GW isn't too bothered about battlescribe, BS is generating mucho revenue for them!

The actual merits of such cases are not as important as a large company having outsized power to force compliance by virtue of size and the expense of court cases. The reason GW doesn't DMCA battlescribe is either they are too incompetent to, or they don't want to. I lean on the second because, honestly, GW knows where their bread is buttered.

stratigo wrote:
The actual merits of such cases are not as important as a large company having outsized power to force compliance by virtue of size and the expense of court cases. The reason GW doesn't DMCA battlescribe is either they are too incompetent to, or they don't want to. I lean on the second because, honestly, GW knows where their bread is buttered.

There might be another reason: because, unlike the USA, in UK/EU law, the winner of a lawsuit gets their attorneys fees back, effectively as damages, against the party that lost the lawsuit, which makes it far more risky to issue any kind of frivolous lawsuit over here.

 Arbitrator wrote:

ERJAK wrote:

Doohicky wrote:

 Arbitrator wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:

Yeah that was pretty disappointing. I mean it's not like there's even anything in there about competitive play. I thought it was going to be about using the app to track games the way BCP does to get data and that sort of thing...but it wasn't. It was just "we made this app and we're really excited to have you use it!" with literally nothing more. Totally content-free.

Well there was one thing, that the writing is pretty clearly on the walls that the app will be mandatory for events getting coverage or run by GW.

Quoting for posterity. I accept any and all ridicule if this turns out to be true.

Why do people say gak like this like an AoS App hasn't existed and NOT been mandatory for years.

Admittedly, a lot of large tournaments heavily prefer either the App or warscroll builder for the lists you turn in, but that's mostly to stop people from handing them 20 page battlescribe lists or handwritten lists that are too messy and grease-stained to read.

AoS is a much smaller playerbase and thus less reciprocal to just rolling with the punches - if they blow it with something AoS it's more likely to harm the health game slash profits. Compare this to 40k which is such a juggernaut they could spit in your face with every purchase and they'd have enough people - be that sheer numbers or amount of whales - thanking them to justify continuing said spitting. AoS' competitive scene isn't nearly as big. It exists sure, but not to the scale of 40k and without the same buzz/clout.

That said if the app is a major success I wouldn't be shocked if we saw something similar for the Azyr app, with a price increase of course.

You're making a bunch of very broad assumptions that frankly have no backing or merit.

40k does seem nominally to be the larger fanbase but it's pretty much impossible to know for sure how much bigger it is or even what impact that size difference would actually have.

You assume that 40k being larger means that GW can exercise more control over the tournament scene (the only place a mandatory 'use this app' rule would matter) when it could easily be argued that greater turn out (and thus greater revenues) would give TOs enough leverage to maintain their independence and more easily reject GW's support if using the app is something their attendees don't want. You also assume that just because 40k is 'too big to fail' (itself a suspect assumption) that individual tournaments would somehow not be subject to the will of their audience. Tournament players are actually notoriously fickle unless they're part of the larger circuit. Any additional barrier to entry, even a very small one could cut the number of large events a player goes to in a year, cause them to pick one event over another event (i.e. LVO vs Adepticon or Nova) or even just write off large events altogether. (plenty of people don't bother with large events in their own back yards simply due to painting requirements).

You also have to look at the timing, the US is likely not to have anything approaching a real intranational tournament scene again until late summer as is, do they really want to put up obnoxious barriers to entry at a time where the type of large events that function as great free advertising are just starting to recover?

Finally, the App isn't going to be a major success with the feature set it currently has. It offers nothing you can't do for free with battlescribe or your book and an excel spreadsheet. The Azyr App is MASSIVELY superior in basically all ways and still raising the price would kill it instantly as the only thing the subscription actually buys is the army builder, which is already not as good as GW's own FREE warscroll builder program.

I'm not saying it's impossible that GW events or events with heavy GW support start requiring the App, that would be naive. It's always within GW's wheelhouse to do something that ridiculous. What I am saying is that the reasons you've presented so far for why it's inevitable rely on nonsense assumptions, a complete lack of understanding of the tournament community, a complete lack of understanding of the AoS community, lack of knowledge of AoS's app and your own now medically worrying hateboner.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Like I said, the app itself has a ton of potential and looks great, it's just too expensive for what it is. Now that we have Buttscribe to fix up lists for sharing with others, GW really needs to figure out a way to compete. They can't ban knowledge, they need to figure out a legitimate way to compete with Battlescribe. BS has done nothing illegal, and they can't just sue them out of the competition, nor do I really think they want to. If they did, it would be illegal for me to tell you a guardsman is Move 6", bs4+, ws4+, s3, t3, w1, a1, ld6, sv5+ during a game. You can't ban knowledge, and that's all BS is. You can't play without a codex with it, as much as people think you can, so battlescribe doesn't replace the codex.

The "Open Information" aspect of the game - where you're required to tell people things about your army (I'm away from my rulebook, so don't have the specific wording to hand) - covers you there, I would think.

stratigo wrote:

The morality of piracy is linked to the morality of the business practices of the thing being sold.

No. There is NEVER a moral justification for theft. EVER.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

stratigo wrote:

The morality of piracy is linked to the morality of the business practices of the thing being sold.

No. There is NEVER a moral justification for theft. EVER.

Some would say, that a monopoly is also theft.
Some would go further and point to anti trust laws. And others would point out how GW is defacto a monopolist in behaviour and definition.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

stratigo wrote:

The morality of piracy is linked to the morality of the business practices of the thing being sold.

No. There is NEVER a moral justification for theft. EVER.

Good thing piracy isn't theft. Cause you know,if it were theft, it'd be considered that under the law.

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

stratigo wrote:

The morality of piracy is linked to the morality of the business practices of the thing being sold.

No. There is NEVER a moral justification for theft. EVER.

Please read the earlier parts of the thread. Piracy (which battlescribe is not, to be clear) is not theft. Theft requires depriving someone else of their physical property. If piracy was theft, they wouldn't need specific laws to cover it.

It is disappointing to see people wheel out that particular false argument over and over and over.

yukishiro1 wrote:

 Manfred von Drakken wrote:

stratigo wrote:

The morality of piracy is linked to the morality of the business practices of the thing being sold.

No. There is NEVER a moral justification for theft. EVER.

Please read the earlier parts of the thread. Piracy (which battlescribe is not, to be clear) is not theft. Theft requires depriving someone else of their physical property. If piracy was theft, they wouldn't need specific laws to cover it.

It is disappointing to see people wheel out that particular false argument over and over and over.

There's also no moral justification for piracy, either. "I don't like a company of their business practices" is not a valid excuse to pirate. Hating Microsoft is not a free license to pirate Windows, for example.

I could quite easy find a situation that most people would say it is moral to pirate something.

Let's say you have been using software from a company for years and they suddenly changes the deal and increase the price of their product by 100x when they have told the users they wouldn't do something like that. Think software that other companies use to build up their companies. Effectively holding businesses ransom.

I know people who have made something that later got abused by a company using IP laws to the point that they freely pirated their own product and recommended other people to do it as well.

There are fair uses of IP law and their are also draconic uses of it. Pirating games might be hard to justify but it's not like piracy is a black and white subject.

Klickor wrote:
...but it's not like piracy is a black and white subject.

Actually, yes. Yes, it is.