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whitedragon wrote:

Surely not?!?!?! Surely it's because PP loves us!!!!!!! (And a certain other giant mini company doesn't!)
/Sarcasm

Seriously though, mikhaila, if you post truisms like this, the fanboyz have nothing to cling to.

Of course they love us. We give them our monies.

whitedragon wrote:
Surely not?!?!?! Surely it's because PP loves us!!!!!!! (And a certain other giant mini company doesn't!)
/Sarcasm

Seriously though, mikhaila, if you post truisms like this, the fanboyz have nothing to cling to.

I don't know which other giant mini company you're talking about. Surely they all love their customers and do everything they can to make each one happy.

Ohmygod! They nerfed Vlad! Nooooooooo!!!1

Of course they nerfed butcher - he was imba / op

lol.

Usually this is the point where I'd take a dig at GW for not being more open about their releases, let alone thinking about releasing preview Codices with which to gain feedback in an effort to improve the rules.

But I think I won't this time - you guys can enjoy your free rules from a company who cares about its customer base.

Hey HBMC, shouldn't you be digging at GW right about now? I been looking all over for it but can't find it.

Moz wrote:

whitedragon wrote:
Surely not?!?!?! Surely it's because PP loves us!!!!!!! (And a certain other giant mini company doesn't!)
/Sarcasm

Seriously though, mikhaila, if you post truisms like this, the fanboyz have nothing to cling to.

I don't know which other giant mini company you're talking about. Surely they all love their customers and do everything they can to make each one happy.

Rackham?

I am quite found of this update

grizgrin wrote:Hey HBMC, shouldn't you be digging at GW right about now? I been looking all over for it but can't find it.

Not in this thread my friend.

I can blame Jervis if you like? Y'know, for old time's sake.

whitedragon wrote:

Moz wrote:

whitedragon wrote:
Surely not?!?!?! Surely it's because PP loves us!!!!!!! (And a certain other giant mini company doesn't!)
/Sarcasm

Seriously though, mikhaila, if you post truisms like this, the fanboyz have nothing to cling to.

I don't know which other giant mini company you're talking about. Surely they all love their customers and do everything they can to make each one happy.

Rackham?

Wow!

My irony meter just broke.

Unless you mean Rackham's NEW fans?

Because they certainly didn't care about their old fans!

Techboss wrote:Anyone know where a summary is of the general changes. I looked through the Khador stuff and didn't see many changes.

You really need to take a closer look, there are a lot of changes from the MKII Field Test for Khador.

pVlad got nerfed (deservedly), Butcher lost some of the uber spells he had from the Field Test, eIrusk changed, Jack point costs changed, some abilities came back like Beast-09 getting heavy boiler back, hell a lot of stuff changed for the motherland.

mikhaila wrote:They pretty much have to do this, to keep their game going.

People have slowed their buying because they don't know whether they want the models, without knowing what the rules are. Hordes people are wondering who they will play with after people switch to MK2 and they get kicked to the back of the bus for a few months. Retailers have stuff on their racks that will soon be outdated rulebooks, and miniatures with outdated rules cards.

And we have a holiday buying system coming, with the MK2 ruels scheduled for January. Not a good combo.

By putting out the rules online, they solve a lot of these problems and keep sales going, and people buying and painting miniatures, and interested in their games. Good move, and a necessary move.

Part of it might be be cause they appreciate their customers, but certainly some of it is because they are a business, and businesses have to stay profitable.

This, this, a thousand times this!

Still, as a player it's FETHING AWESOME and I get to talk about how great PP is and how gakky GW is. Business reason or not, this clearly shows exactly how much better PP is than GW when it comes to rules development, edition changes, and community involvement. And hey, look, it's actually good business for them too.

The Grog wrote:

greenskin lynn wrote:
batman in warmachine=batman shooting lightning bolts while the batjack stomps something.......

nananananananaanana BATJACK!!

EXALT!


Great move by PP

PP i hate you.

I have to actually buy even more of your cool stuff now. No more putting off those model buys, because i dont own the new rules. Free rules i cant avoid.


Curse them pirates. ARRRRRRRR!!!!!

Alpharius wrote:

whitedragon wrote:

Moz wrote:

whitedragon wrote:
Surely not?!?!?! Surely it's because PP loves us!!!!!!! (And a certain other giant mini company doesn't!)
/Sarcasm

Seriously though, mikhaila, if you post truisms like this, the fanboyz have nothing to cling to.

I don't know which other giant mini company you're talking about. Surely they all love their customers and do everything they can to make each one happy.

Rackham?

Wow!

My irony meter just broke.

Unless you mean Rackham's NEW fans?

Because they certainly didn't care about their old fans!

Just tryin' to keep it real. We all know what mini company we are all talking about. I just think it's unfair to label one company as "the evil empire" and another company as our best buds. In both cases, they are companies concerned with making money. As mikhaila pointed out, it made the most sense for PP to release the rules this way, and can avoid alienating all their players while the rules are updated piecemeal.

So..no PP are not our friends and don't love us any more than any other company does, they just love our money.

(I'm not a PP hater, I just want to keep it real. I like their game, I like other company's games. I don't take it personal when they release stuff that doesn't interest me or that invalidates stuff I got, I just vote with my dollar. It may be a futile gesture, but it's the only one I got.)

whitedragon wrote:
Just tryin' to keep it real. We all know what mini company we are all talking about. I just think it's unfair to label one company as "the evil empire" and another company as our best buds. In both cases, they are companies concerned with making money. As mikhaila pointed out, it made the most sense for PP to release the rules this way, and can avoid alienating all their players while the rules are updated piecemeal.

So..no PP are not our friends and don't love us any more than any other company does, they just love our money.

(I'm not a PP hater, I just want to keep it real. I like their game, I like other company's games. I don't take it personal when they release stuff that doesn't interest me or that invalidates stuff I got, I just vote with my dollar. It may be a futile gesture, but it's the only one I got.)

Yeah, because the "other company" doesn't alienate their players while the rules are updated piecemeal, over as much as 10 years and 2 Editions in some cases. And they don't give playtest rules out for use of the community and open their development team for direct feedback via the internet.

This made business sense for PP, so they did it. They certainly didn't have to do the MK2 field test, giving players a glimpse of what is to come for the game and their armies. GW just announces a new edition or army book/codex with as little headway as possible and with little to no rules information (we need to get that from leaks, or scanned books from someone in their supply chain).

Voodoo Boyz wrote:
Yeah, because the "other company" doesn't alienate their players while the rules are updated piecemeal, over as much as 10 years and 2 Editions in some cases. And they don't give playtest rules out for use of the community and open their development team for direct feedback via the internet.

Actually, the "other" company has been very good about keeping their books compatible throughout the changing editions. Sure you may have to buy a few new figs here or there, but you can't argue that your army had become invalidated because of a new edition, and they completely embrace counts as.

So, Privateer Press is still a business, and this decision made the most business sense for them at this time. It doesn't also mean that "other" companies that don't do the same thing are not making good business decisions or are evil, as some posters are trying to insinuate. It's just business.

It's not a fair comparison anyway to do PP vs GW, as they are in very different life cycles of a company. The majority of people involved with both companies probably wants nothing more than to just make cool games and keep the company afloat.

PP being private, there may even be a chance that the company is being lead by that mindset. We can't know that for sure, but actions like redesigning the entire game (all rules, all models) with the intent of making it a better player experience and then releasing that work for FREE 4 months before the street date seem to indicate more than just trying to hit a bottom line.

What we do know however GW is incorporated and therefore necessarily run by the interests of the investors, which demand growth and higher dividends at any cost: http://investor.games-workshop.com/information_for_investors/default.aspx Top spots at GW are filled not by gamers, artists, or game designers but by suits with histories in marketing, sales and management in clothing and drug-store corporations.

What GW shows is what we can expect the day PP gets bought out by a bottom line chaser (a la Kirby) from within and then the keys turned over to the highest bidder. It's liable to happen eventually to any successful venture, but hopefully (for their customers) it won't happen anytime soon.

Could we expect a full redesign of 40k with every codex updated at the same time? If GW undertook such a project could you then expect them to release it for free under any conditions? To poll the players with a public beta-test of the rules? It just sounds ludicrous because we do know precisely where GW sits on this line. Where PP actually sits is a little up in the air as they're still pretty new on the block. Right now though, their position seems to benefit their gamers a great deal.

Moz wrote:
PP being private, there may even be a chance that the company is being lead by that mindset. We can't know that for sure, but actions like redesigning the entire game (all rules, all models) with the intent of making it a better player experience and then releasing that work for FREE 4 months before the street date seem to indicate more than just trying to hit a bottom line.

I challenge the above assertion. Obviously the company wants the game to be an enjoyable experience because if it's not enjoyable, people don't want to buy it. It's more enjoyable to have all the rules out at once so that your faction is not rendered obsolete/invalid. Such a move is motivated just as much by the desire to stay afloat as a business as it is a perceived act of goodwill among gamers.

The following order of events makes sense to me:

1: MKII Field Test Rules are released to open beta.
2: The value of in-store rulebooks is murdered.
3: A reduction in sales is experienced as books have no gameplay value and model purchases are slowed due to uncertainty in their value.
4: Books aren't being sold anyway so rules are released for free in an attempt to return value to models and to increase buzz about the game,

You can challenge it, but neither of us have any proof for either side of the argument. I said as much in my statement above.

All we know is that PP makes some not smart business moves like engaging in an expensive public beta test and then making a huge goof by planning their big product release for January. So to swallow the pill of their business blunder they instead release the product 4 months early, for free.

So there are two ways of looking at this. Either their objective is the almighty dollar and they are just woefully incompetent at making these big decisions, or they are really just trying to make their games better and things like release dates and beta tests are made for the sake of the games themselves.

So I like to think they are the latter. Having also met the people behind the wheel recently at Gencon, they certainly didn't appear incompetent. They seemed like gamers passionate about their game. That could've been a ruse though certainly. It's possible that the moment I walked off they put their monocles and twisty mustaches back on and returned to counting their money and laughing maniacally.

Moz wrote:You can challenge it, but neither of us have any proof for either side of the argument. I said as much in my statement above.

All we know is that PP makes some not smart business moves like engaging in an expensive public beta test and then making a huge goof by planning their big product release for January. So to swallow the pill of their business blunder they instead release the product 4 months early, for free.

So there are two ways of looking at this. Either their objective is the almighty dollar and they are just woefully incompetent at making these big decisions, or they are really just trying to make their games better and things like release dates and beta tests are made for the sake of the games themselves.

So I like to think they are the latter. Having also met the people behind the wheel recently at Gencon, they certainly didn't appear incompetent. They seemed like gamers passionate about their game. That could've been a ruse though certainly. It's possible that the moment I walked off they put their monocles and twisty mustaches back on and returned to counting their money and laughing maniacally.

I think they are both. The almighty dollar does not have to be mutually exclusive with making people happy. Actually, that's usually what makes people happy, and then turns into dollars. I'm not sure how you can equate the dollar with being woefully incompetent. In GW's case, we know for a fact that they just don't care about the rules as much as the models, and people still happily play their games, so it seems that most people just don't care either. They even say that you can play however you want! How is that evil, disingenious or malicious?

I'm just saying, PP is not your friend anymore than GW isn't your friend. It's just business.

whitedragon wrote:The almighty dollar does not have to be mutually exclusive with making people happy.

That gem took entirely too long to come out.

I don't care why they did it, I'm just glad they did.

I don't really care why they did it, I'm just glad they did. Although I'm sure it makes good business sense, what with reinvigorating Christmas shopping, letting people start building lists and testing them for the next year's events, etc.

whitedragon wrote:
I think they are both. The almighty dollar does not have to be mutually exclusive with making people happy. Actually, that's usually what makes people happy, and then turns into dollars. I'm not sure how you can equate the dollar with being woefully incompetent. In GW's case, we know for a fact that they just don't care about the rules as much as the models, and people still happily play their games, so it seems that most people just don't care either. They even say that you can play however you want! How is that evil, disingenious or malicious?

I'm just saying, PP is not your friend anymore than GW isn't your friend. It's just business.

So your stance is that they are both bad at making business decisions due to incompetence, and primarily focus on making their games better for the players. That doesn't seem to you like a company catering to its customers at the expense of profits? This particular release of MkII may be the necessary move for PP to keep the game going strong in the lull between the beta test and the final release, but a beta test alone indicates more catering to their customers at a cost to the company.

Back on GW, I also don't see anything evil, disengenious or malicious about GW. They're pretty open about not caring what their customers think as long as they keep buying. Which as you point out, they do regardless of GWs perceived lack of care over the game itself. However this also strikes me as the exact opposite of catering to your customers at the cost of profits.

At any rate. Regardless of motivations, the company that focuses on the GAME is my friend because I personally take games pretty seriously and really need a well designed and maintained one to keep my interest. So PP is my friend and lo they get my dollars because of it. GW has a pretty strong fanbase of people who just need new models, a steady release schedule, and a yearly price increase to stay happy - competent game design is not even on the list here and that's fine for them. Those traits necessarily mean that GW is not my friend (and has publicly decreed as much - looking at you Jervis).

Moz wrote:

whitedragon wrote:
I think they are both. The almighty dollar does not have to be mutually exclusive with making people happy. Actually, that's usually what makes people happy, and then turns into dollars. I'm not sure how you can equate the dollar with being woefully incompetent. In GW's case, we know for a fact that they just don't care about the rules as much as the models, and people still happily play their games, so it seems that most people just don't care either. They even say that you can play however you want! How is that evil, disingenious or malicious?

I'm just saying, PP is not your friend anymore than GW isn't your friend. It's just business.

So your stance is that they are both bad at making business decisions due to incompetence, and primarily focus on making their games better for the players. That doesn't seem to you like a company catering to its customers at the expense of profits? This particular release of MkII may be the necessary move for PP to keep the game going strong in the lull between the beta test and the final release, but a beta test alone indicates more catering to their customers at a cost to the company.

Back on GW, I also don't see anything evil, disengenious or malicious about GW. They're pretty open about not caring what their customers think as long as they keep buying. Which as you point out, they do regardless of GWs perceived lack of care over the game itself. However this also strikes me as the exact opposite of catering to your customers at the cost of profits.

At any rate. Regardless of motivations, the company that focuses on the GAME is my friend because I personally take games pretty seriously and really need a well designed and maintained one to keep my interest. So PP is my friend and lo they get my dollars because of it. GW has a pretty strong fanbase of people who just need new models, a steady release schedule, and a yearly price increase to stay happy - competent game design is not even on the list here and that's fine for them. Those traits necessarily mean that GW is not my friend (and has publicly decreed as much - looking at you Jervis).

I don't understand your point about being bad at business decisions. That statement makes no sense to me and I'm not sure what you are trying to say there.

For your second point, you are saying that GW is not catering to their customers, yet people are still buying their product and enjoying it, so I submit that they are doing exactly that and catering to what their customers want.

PP is doing the same, and focusing on their game, which is the selling point for alot of people that play warmachine.

However, this doesn't make PP your friend is what I'm saying. It also doesn't make GW your enemy, and I can't believe that they would let Jervis spout the nonsense that he does, as it is clearly divisive. (Well maybe I can believe it because they are british and look at this differently than we do.)

EDIT:

Anyway, PP is just out to make a game that you'll want to play, because obviously that's good business. If you don't want to play the game, you won't buy it, and there is no more PP.

And a beta test is a step taken by many companies and is not an act of goodwill on the part of the company. It is a valid business decision where you show allow your product or software to be tested "in the field" and can generate buzz as well as show potential flaws that need to be fixed before the final release. (Thereby eliminating alot of patching or rework to fix later on.) A beta test is just a smart thing to do. It's why beta testing even exists.

It does not matter a bit what PP intentions were for supplying this information for Free. All that matters is that I now have a free spiffy version of MKII. If this causes their sales to go up, good for them. I am Happy.

I've never played Warmachine or Hordes, but I downloaded the MkII rules to see what all the hubub is about. All in all, no matter what the reasoning its a pretty cool move where the players are concerned.

I just wish they had a model line I found appealing. Personally I just cant get into the warjacks and while I find many of the Hordes models nice, there isnt a single faction I like as a whole.

Shellfishguy wrote:I've never played Warmachine or Hordes, but I downloaded the MkII rules to see what all the hubub is about. All in all, no matter what the reasoning its a pretty cool move where the players are concerned.

I just wish they had a model line I found appealing. Personally I just cant get into the warjacks and while I find many of the Hordes models nice, there isnt a single faction I like as a whole.

That's pretty much how I feel. While I'm not crazy about the game, I do like the company's policies.

Let me know when you can't charge your own models, or shoot your own models, things like that.

If not for those kind of rules, I might play WM/Hordes.



Clay

They've removed specific spell effects and certain benefits that trigger off of friendly fire, but friendly
fire in general still exists in the game.