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I sent and emal to gw about vassel closing here is there reply

Hello,

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately, we have to defend our IP in all cases or we will lose it. We cannot pick and choose who we allow to violate our IP. We will forward your email along, so the appropriate parties can hear your comments and concerns and, perhaps, work with those making Vassal to license our IP.



Thanks!



John Spencer

Customer Service Specialist

Forgive my uninformedness, but what is Vassal, exactly?

That aside, while I don't agree with IP's and the whole legal aspect of a game's property (It's a game! It's for fun's sake!) I can see where GW is coming from with concern for their IP. You got more than the generic pre-formed message of "Hello sir or ma'am! Seeing how we think you're a Donkey-Cave, we've decided to send you the following automated response instead of treating you like a person with needs and concerns. Enjoy!" that most companies would send.

At least he -said- they'd be up to working something out with Vassal. Though it's likely he meant it in the false-hope kind of way, at least he was civil about it. Overall though, I'd say GW is pretty lenient about their IP rules, so long as you go over the legal jargon with them and jump through the right hoops. As long as things are being done to their rules, they're often fine with it.

Vassal lets you play a top down game of 1 dimensional 40k. It has none of the rules, but it has the models, all the dice (including the scatter dice), templates and everything else you'd need. It is basically like playing a colored version of the rule example models in the BRB. It is a great way to test out armies and/or playing quick games with your friends, but there are LoS issues and what-not.

Though it may be a game to us, and the goal of playing it is to have fun (for us), it's a business to GW, and the goal of producing it is to make money. I don't begrudge them at all for protecting their IP. However, I will get down on them for not producing their own similar software.

Why can't GW produce an army builder? It's obvious they have the ability to produce images of top down models too. Maybe they could combine an army builder and a Vassal-like program of their own, limiting the size of the battles played with it to 1000 pts. or something - marketing it as an army builing/testing tool.

I really think that GW should buy the program, upgrade it and sell it to the public. This game would really be a nice thing to have at times when having real armies are not feasable.

Well, as was stated, they said they're looking at the possibility of working with Vassal. Whether this is true or not, one can't deny that they've become quite interested in it since finding out about it. So an army building/testing program may well be in the works some time soon, though it's not likely that we'll see one before 5th ed is finished all it's upgrades as that would defeat the purpose of releasing it once all the new army lines came out.