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purplefood wrote:

CadianCommander wrote:That's the second email he sent. Not the first one.

You, Kanluwen are such a fanboi you will read anything anti-GW as being poor and find some excuse as to why the poster is wrong.

I'm off this thread, there's no point cos noone can make a constructed argument without getting a "yeah? well sayz you and you're wrong!" from yourself.

Be fair, Kan isn't a fanboy.
It's more likely he thinks people are being unrealistic about GW as a company rather than he is a fan boy...
This is mainly because he is a robot and therefore completly devoid of any emotion.

Too true mate*.


Anyone get the reference? Post if you do.

Metal figures fit for only the bin? Erm, never had any yet. I have had a very small amount with flaws which did impact the figure so much it required work to sort or return for a replacement. The latter my FLGS at the time and later the local GW were happy to do.
With what I have read about finecast the effort just to make them suitable to use is too high, and major flaws appearing very often. With so little bitching lately (or maybe I just switch off in the long rants and ignore them) has the situation actually changed?
I really don't remember this problem happening with the switch from lead to the alloy they used. But weirdly the alloy was apparently a lot cheaper than the lead and the price went up then too. Hmmm, if history stays to form expect 6th edition 40k to have people leave is disgust and any good changes outweighed by bad...

To be fair, I've had some mold lines on the metal figures that were horrendous from GW. The first Black Templar model I had was a miscast. The mold was obviously misaligned. I took it back and got a new one.

Howard A Treesong wrote:Kan has been bending over backwards recently. He claimed on another thread that metal figures had as many flaws as finecast. Yeah, sure. How common was it for GW to sell you metal figures fit only for the bin?

Metal models can, and do, get a lot of miscasts. Not as many as resin, due to the nature of the material, but it does happen. Common metal casting issues are mold slip - hell, my Avatars of War vampire countess had mold slip on the alternate head (unfortunately, it was the head I was planning to use).

My first metal model (Hell my first model period) [Necron Lord I bought from the GW website] was a miscast. This was late 3rd-Early 4th.

Metal Miscasts too, I got a replacement. Happy days for all.

CadianCommander: Post the first letter that GW sent you. Prove to us that they did not care about your ideas when you sent an Email not full of insults and polite bird flipping.

Kanluwen wrote:

Vaktathi wrote:

Kanluwen wrote:
Wrong again.
They took their forums down because people were doing nothing but crying about why army X has this and army Y doesn't and how it's unfair and that they should be sued for it, why army Z hasn't had their army book released yet, or complaining about how army X beat their army and everyone who plays army X cheats. In an atmosphere like that, the moderation team (which was all volunteers, mind you) had to constantly be locking threads. Since they couldn't outright ban anyone, they decided the best option was a scorched earth policy and to just get rid of the forums.

A small point here. I don't normally consider myself a rabid GW hater, I do make a lot of complaints and criticicms but in the end I love the game. However, out of every tabletop, video or computer game or game company I can think of, Games Workshop is the only one that felt it had no choice but to shut down its own forums because the users apparently were being big meany heads. What went on there was literally no different from any other internet forum. For just about any other game company closing their forums would be damn near unthinkable. That says something rather pointed.

And a small point here, it wasn't that "people were being big meany heads".

It's that they couldn't adequately moderate web forums given the size of the registered users.

Or they could have just brought on additional moderators, again, GW is the only company I can think of anywhere to have this issue. The GW forums weren't as large as many fan sites are that get on on just a small handful of part time volunteers.

What? What? I was in the shower, got told to come back to the thread. What happe....ooh. Right.

CadianCommander: Post the first letter that GW sent you

Well. I can't. Not because I'm a lying douchebag or don't want to but cos I wasn't kidding or covering for myself when I said a friend sent that. The one I posted was an open letter that he gave me permission to post if I removed his name and email address.

I don't have his permission to post the first one. OH wait. Maybe I do. Gimme a tick to check....nope. Thought I might, worth a try.

I can't ask him cos we're not....on speaking terms even still I'm not posting someone's emails without their permission.

Now I need to put some clothes on before my painting buddies come around. Or that could be really, really embarrassing, especially seeing as I play Cadians and they will burn me for being a Slaanesh-loving witch otherwise.

Kanluwen wrote:The Games Development board was, imo, one of the worst parts of it. While it was nice that the staff posted in there, it also led to a lot of false assumptions by people.

Remember Codex: Pan Fo?

Of course I remember the Pan Fo. I was the one who reviled them to Dakka, after trying to help the guy sort out some of the more ridiculous parts of his 'codex' and getting nowhere.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with the Games Development board. It was posted in the regular 40K boards as a last ditch attempt to get attention after he realised that he didn't know of any other way to contact whichever Games Developer it was that he spoke to at Games Day who told him to 'send it in'...

It was also a one in a million sort of situation.


The Games Development board should have been (and for a short time was) a place for people to discuss the direction the games were going, and to get some feedback from the Games Devs on why things were the way they were.

When the Devs stopped providing that feedback, it slowly spiralled into silliness, as people got more and more strident in an effort to garner some sort of reaction.

They got one... the boards were closed down.

There's also a point where you reach a critical mass where people get upset because one person's thread gets answers and another does not.

There are better solutions to that problem that to lock the door and hide under the bed, though.

The fans will always find something to gripe about with properties they love and the companies running them. It's as inevitable as the tide.

The level of complaints, the variety of them, and the actual number of them count for something, though.

GW has some time ago reached a point where the fans are no longer 'finding something to gripe about'... Every time they turn around, they're stumbling over something else that GW has just left laying around for someone to trip over.

CadianCommander wrote:That's the second email he sent. Not the first one.

You, Kanluwen are such a fanboi you will read anything anti-GW as being poor and find some excuse as to why the poster is wrong.

I'm off this thread, there's no point cos noone can make a constructed argument without getting a "yeah? well sayz you and you're wrong!" from yourself.

An interesting sentiment.

Personally, I agree with Kan's assessment regarding constructive criticism, but would expand it with that most humans are incapable of providing this "constructive criticism". The other day I had a customer tell me that we should stop selling an item based on his sample of one (1) faulty product and the dredge he'd been reading on the internet. Apparently none of the items were functional with Windows 7. My own sample told me that since 2009 this was the seventh product returned (any reason, not this specific reason) out of hundreds sold.

You'd be surprised with what people take for gospel since it fits their own, limited, experience.

@kronk Your "friend" is lucky he got a response. A line by line deconstruction of someone's attempt to explain their business model to you isn't considered constructive, just look at the words. If you want someone to change their ways, and they properly invested in you, give them a way to do so that still benefits them. So either GW doesn't need you or you aren't being constructive enough.

The only problem GW has is how inconsistently it updates parts of its games/modelser I am not going to write them a letter because I don't know why they don't do it, and I don't know how they coudl do it even if it was in their best interests.

-Loki- wrote:

Howard A Treesong wrote:Kan has been bending over backwards recently. He claimed on another thread that metal figures had as many flaws as finecast. Yeah, sure. How common was it for GW to sell you metal figures fit only for the bin?

Metal models can, and do, get a lot of miscasts. Not as many as resin, due to the nature of the material, but it does happen. Common metal casting issues are mold slip - hell, my Avatars of War vampire countess had mold slip on the alternate head (unfortunately, it was the head I was planning to use).

I never said metal doesn't get mistcasts. I've had miscasts. But my overwhelming experience with metal miniatures from a variety of companies is good. The difference is that I don't ever recall stories of people having something almost unrecognisable in metal and that when they returned it to the shop, then went through a rack of figures only to find they were all the same. Some people have had several finecast replacements. It's way worse than resin, the QC is totally up the spout and I've heard that from stockists not just on here.

Vaktathi wrote:Or they could have just brought on additional moderators, again, GW is the only company I can think of anywhere to have this issue.

I guess you haven't been on many "official" forums then. In my experience, all of them suck, be it a forum for company or band or whatever. The whole "official" thing just attracts out worst kind of people, both the haters and fanbois.

Backfire wrote:

Vaktathi wrote:Or they could have just brought on additional moderators, again, GW is the only company I can think of anywhere to have this issue.

I guess you haven't been on many "official" forums then. In my experience, all of them suck, be it a forum for company or band or whatever. The whole "official" thing just attracts out worst kind of people, both the haters and fanbois.

I'm not saying they don't, what I'm saying is that GW is the only organization I've ever seen that felt it had to shut them down as a result.

Well, dunno about that, I do know some organizations which have put their initially free forum behind reigstration fee, to cut down crap posted there.

I don't understand why GW would need a forum, really. Forums are pretty terrible way of customer feedback. Sure, there are good suggestions and ideas sometimes, but at the cost of having to plow through 99% of crap. People who actually work in position of power don't have the time to do that, and generally don't visit forums. Sure, in some places, they might have accounts and occasionally post something, but that's it. They don't engage in discussions, don't read the forums much if at all, and I can fully understand that.

I am a very old gamer, too old in fact. I was there at Games Day in the Royal Horticultural Society hall in London when Rogue Trader was released and have a Rick Priestley signed original one somewhere.

This gives me some temporal perspective.

For my money GW began as a company run by gamers for gamers. When Ansell took over it became more focused on profit first and really cut back to Citadel, then when the current crowd took over it became a pretty ruthless, cash generator.

I find that their general attitude is that their product is incredibly desirable to a certain number of people and they will take an awful lot before they leave the hobby. Recent events have almost made me think they are pushing the boundaries as far as they can go to see when people will seriously drop out.

They seem to be playing brinksmanship and risking everything for a slightly higher profit.

I fail to understand how they have not ben making mega profits for years. Their shops are a drain in terms of rent and overheads but they pay peanuts wages and employ fewer staff than ever. Their profit margins are enormous and yet they still struggle to profit.

They also seem almost paranoid, their approach to customer relations and news releases is totally out of kilter with a modern era of internet viral marketing, etc. They act and look like a monopoly that does not need to look after the customer, like a British utility company not a customer focused organisation.

Just my thoughts. Store staff are usually lovely though!

Well, if anyone was really serious about why GW doesn't have Feedback it's because of threads like this that they don't.

Posters simply gripe about what they don't like and rarely, if ever post about what they do like.

Any visitor who came to GW and perused their forum would most likely be bombarded by a sea of negativity and decide that it wasn't worth their time and effort.

GW, like any other company for the most part, feels that the public will vote with their wallets.

Uhlan wrote:Well, if anyone was really serious about why GW doesn't have Feedback it's because of threads like this that they don't.

Posters simply gripe about what they don't like and rarely, if ever post about what they do like.

Any visitor who came to GW and perused their forum would most likely be bombarded by a sea of negativity and decide that it wasn't worth their time and effort.

GW, like any other company for the most part, feels that the public will vote with their wallets.

There's a lot of truth in this, I would probably not post what I really think on a GW forum!

My honest opinion is that GW has all the facets to be a massively popular company and hugely successful. They will always suffer from the problem that you can't please all the people, especially when people get so passionately involved. That's another problem of the internet, one person can gripe very successfully.

However, in terms of their customer relations (the topic of the thread) it is hard to defend them beyond a certain point. A lot of what they do and how they act is weird in the extreme. Today it is nearly impossible to control what fans are saying/writing but they do so fairly aggressively. I think this is foolish and counter-productive. They should seek to embrace their customers. This is a community with a large number of members who essentially want the same thing. To heavily restrict news of new releases, etc is not helpful either. Rather than genuinely controlling the agenda they leave a void to be filled by endless speculation that ends up leaving some disappointed, confused and frustrated. Why not hold competitions for people to invent new campaigns, get people to vote on aspects of the background, e.g. which characters should/could be killed off, etc, etc.

For what it's worth I would identify the following issues:
- Tone and approach: they are overly aggressive in places, some of their recent pronouncements on internet resellers have been excessively harsh in tone. Work with people don't try to get their backs up. Here they clearly feel they are being ripped off in some way but they can't see the bigger picture (that people in Australia, say, find this approach incredibly annoying and confrontational).
- Live more in the real world. I get the impression of a very introverted company, where head office is a pretty comfortable place, assured of its power. They are trying to dictate everything from the centre: restricting news, denying information to their store staff, etc. They are in danger of getting badly out-of-touch. Forums may not tell them what they want to hear but they will alert them to issues.

They have a vast amount to offer but need to work in the world of today.

The whole Finecast release fiasco is a great example of how they are too introverted. They clearly convinced themselves that Finecast was the best thing since slice bread and would be rapturously received. So convinced were they by this (but presumably without any evidence as they snuck this out without even serious teasers) that they decided it would be a good way to reduce the hit of the annual price rise by combining the two. Did it not occur to them that there is a recession on and people have a lot less to spend? By combining the two in these circumstances they effectively tainted the launch and made it look like they were either using it as cover to sneak in a price rise or worse that they were actually raising the prices for what is without any doubt a cheaper product. By thinking in GW think and not really trialling things or thinking it through they torpedoed their great launch.

Having no effective feedback mechanism is another symptom.

They act like a monopoly, they do not need to interract too much with their customer base because they believe they are in a position where they command the entire market and can dictate what happens. They do not see the need to interact as they feel they do not need to. They give off the feel that the customer is more an inconvenience. Evidence for this exists in such things as they do not offer bulk discounts, never have sales or promotions, etc. This tells you a lot about their feelings on their own position. How many other companies won't negotiate with you if you drop in to spend, say £200 on their products? It seems their sales are stagnant and they see price rises as the way to bulk up profits rather than inducements like bulk discounts, etc. If they asked their customers I fear they would find that at the moment with dwindling disposable income people are having to drop out, the way to counter this would be slimmer margins but greater sales. However, they don't seem to want the feedback, they have a model that they are sticking too. I fear that the rise and rise of Warmachine may really shock them if they are not careful. Feedback would be the key to that.

nomotog wrote:It sounds like GW needs a lesson in community management. When your fans are your biggest haters, something has gone wrong. It seems a little extra odd because I am used to companies having good relations with there customers.

I think the problem is that GW's policy is based on a Pre-internet method.

Before the Internet, there was no real way to complain to a company besides writing a letter and mailing it to them.

With that sort of system, companies could ignore the complaints because most people will forget about the letter they sent and just forget the whole thing. the company could then shred the letter and be done with it.


another problem is that GW doesn't realise it has competition. Without competition, a company can do whatever it wants with prices and GW still thinks they have the market all to themselves.

The problem is that they do and they don't at the same time. Yes, people that want Warhammer can ONLY get it from GW. The issue is that that only works on people who want Warhammer, and not some other game system. Someone who is completely unbiased towards one system over another is going to gravitate towards the cheaper game, which will either be Warmachine or FoW.




I actually think GW needs to bring their Forum back. Battlefront has an excellent Forum for their games that the designers do participate in.

It is a good thing to delete posts/topics that could be detrimental to you(so Hate GW threads are most certaintly good to delete), but you should never delete constructive criticism as it just gives the genuine haters ammo and may make haters out of previous fans.