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Tetsugaku wrote:

 1hadhq]
wrote:
Upload your own pictures[/b].
Upload where?

To the system so when you look through your armies you can see the pictures and they'd be displayed in your public lists as well.

The system is on a local HD? A GW server? Source to take the pics and method to upload it there? Could I use a ressource of already existing pics and use them?

Tetsugaku wrote:
How much would you pay for an article of use to you? I think 50p is about the right mark.

I'd have to pay in € if they are still acceptable for GW...
But generally there aren't so many articles of them worth paying for these days, some WD pure advertisements other companies would give you for free, so maybe on the rare occasion 0,1 - 0,5 € per DIN A 4 page?

Tetsugaku wrote:- DLC on consoles done properly is a huge success and sells in it's millions, why would;t it here?

Consoles and DLC is just more digital contant. GW and DLC is digital content additionally to a physical product.
So console-games may include the latter addtion of DLC in their design. GW products would add DLC to something that was complete with a few books, glue and paints. The basic design doesn't change, the price of the main product ( the models and glue, paints ) doesn't change and the price of the publications to field said model isn't going down either. Thus it means more
money for the same basic use of the GW product. DLC may add features to a game. It can't add much to a model.

Tetsugaku wrote:

 1hadhq]
wrote:
One click purchase of all units in a list[/b]. Delivered to your local store (as set in your profile) or delivered to your door.
One click is legal worldwide? Sure it sounds easy but wouldn't this need a few limits?

Why? GW ship worldwide and if you're grown up enough to have a bank card you're grown up enough to be trusted with one surely?

I do remember all these boxes to hit to confirm and the small font etc etc when ordering online, so I doubt this 'one click' thingy is legal worldwide.

Tetsugaku wrote: Free DLC the same way Xbox Live Gold works.

I don't think I have any interest in xbox live, FB or Flickr. Maybe get a bit more independency?
You know : portable. Not tied down to a temporary trend that may or may not cease to exist.

Tetsugaku wrote:
There isn't a snowball in hells chance of them being anything other than GW paint colours and you know it, nor should it be.

Should be? Really? How do you integrate the effects of multiple layers, washes etc? Mix colors?

Tetsugaku wrote:
Well I put all my stuff on Flickr, you never look at GW's group? great source of inspiration.

Ever linked to flickr in a wargaming forum? I assume you didn't.
I may also mention the undisputable superiority of the dakka gallery vs your oh so inspirational GW group.

Tetsugaku wrote:
Fact - GW is cheap, they don;t screw players around and they're a bunch of nice people, in store and in HQ - but they have no knowledge of modern communication methods - makes them look like idiots.

Did he write cheap? Did he?
GW make its staff look like idiots, yes. They go so far to keep releases away from GD's, to put them up on the following monday...
Centred at the customer , you wrote, right?

Tetsugaku wrote:
What would you pay? I was thinking £5, £9, £13.

Can't they use real money? Oh wait...
If they could guarantee up to six releases worth 25€ each, a subscription should be at 120€ per year, so 10€ monthly.

Tetsugaku wrote:
Again What would you pay? Considering the options and features I think £25+ would be a fair price.

Considering I did collect every codex and expansion until 6th for now, and a life cycle of 4 years, sums up to 10x 25 = 250 GBP.
This for something they don't have to print, just copy.

Tetsugaku wrote:What's wrong with a premium service? You don't have to pay if you don;t want to or can't?

Because like I said, GW considers themselves premium in everything. So the whole service of them will be premium, at premium prices...

Tetsugaku wrote:
At first it's side by side with print - in 5 years, most people will be using this - technology, it gets faster, much much faster - how fast will your home internet be in 2018? How big your TV? How fast your laptop?

Home internet? as slow as yet. TV? Can't grow if there is no addtional benefit from greater size. Laptop? Don't have one and thanks to the tech being no longer pushed by competition but just wringing the last bit of speed out of existing tech the question about the speed of mine can't be answered as I am not going to buy gimmicks just because one was clever enough to sell things with a deathcount inbuilt.

Tetsugaku wrote:
Why would it be regional? Nothing GW does now is regional?

Campaign can be regional and were in the past. GW generals / tournys can and will be regional. WD is regional as you could find out from its numbering and diferent size in different countries. Publications are regional, aka translated.

1hadhq wrote:
....some stuff...

I think you have fundamentally misunderstood or I have failed to explain the very basic tenets of this system - it is entirely web based, not an app written on a tablet or phone, not something you download to your PC - to is a cloud based web application available from any machine that accesses the internet - sound cool?

GW is cheap, no doubt about it. Very cheap compared to most hobbies, especially when you look at the # per hour of fun ratio. I also play Airsoft, I promise you that's much , much more expensive.

Tetsugaku wrote:

1hadhq wrote:
....some stuff...

I think you have fundamentally misunderstood or I have failed to explain the very basic tenets of this system - it is entirely web based, not an app written on a tablet or phone, not something you download to your PC - to is a cloud based web application available from any machine that accesses the internet - sound cool?

GW is cheap, no doubt about it. Very cheap compared to most hobbies, especially when you look at the # per hour of fun ratio. I also play Airsoft, I promise you that's much , much more expensive.

There in lies the fundamental flaw with your concept though. If you had everything server based - it would take your average pimple faced 12 year old about 30 minutes to crash the server...especially one which is an HTTP server. With all the consumer goodwill which GW has garnered in the past 10 years or so along with GW's past history of staying behind the technological 8 ball - you will have more down time than uptime on the servers. Servers which can withstand a concerted DoS attack are possible - but they are expensive (even big companies like Amazon are still vulnerable to a concerted effort). GW will likely not be interested in the investment it would take to actually run what you are proposing...and then of course there is the question of whether or not what you are proposing would actually be profitable (most of these schemes never turn a profit).

The other issue of course has to deal with the reliability or lack there of of the internet. It goes down, it goes down often, it goes down everywhere. Sometimes entire regions loose connectivity for hours at a time. Quite often the wireless connections are only slightly faster than dial up.

Regarding the various other issues - it would probably help to do a bit of research there. In the US, 3 of the top 10 broadband providers only offer metered service. The vast majority of wireless broadband providers only offer limited data. Even the ones which provide unlimited data - actually limit your data rates if you go over a certain level of use.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57428419-1/killing-unlimited-data-plans-has-helped-make-u.s-carriers-billions/

If you plan on pitching a global scheme of a digital solution - you need to actually have a handle on the global market conditions as well as the market itself. What portion of the current user base would actually be interested in what you are suggesting. I would guess it would be slightly more than the active user base of a site like Dakkadakka, BoLS or Warseer. They are the ones who are slightly interested in this sort of thing. How much money could you get from them on top of existing sales? How much would the White Dwarf circulation suffer from this? Probably a fair amount.

The cloud based stuff is neat right now - but we did that in the 90s too...it went away then, I don't expect this go around to be much different. All it will take is one breach and a lawsuit to follow it up and you will see the clouds evaporate over night. There are inherent flaws to the concept - only one of which has actually been dealt with (and dealing with that one flaw actually makes the other flaws greater).

Anywho - while I can understand your excitement by the prospect, it is a bit...premature IMO. Most of the things which you bring up aren't really enough to sell the goods, and the things which might be worth while to some (digital codices) you hamstring with a server based concept.

May I be the first to welcome the Bio Agency to the forum....


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tetsugaku wrote:

Sean_OBrien wrote:
Most the people I know are the same way. They don't want their gaming to be more connected, they like it to be unconnected. With the exception of things like tutorials and the like for buildings something, there is very little high tech involved...and personally I would prefer it to stay that way.

You don't think it's going to though do you?

LFG's have got a very, limited life span - they'll be replaced with pure clubs as more and more people use the internet to buy all their modelling stuff and models. Hight streets up and down the western world are dieting a death because people just don;t use them any more. Ecommenrce sales in the UK for example, are increasing 10.5% a YEAR - that's massive. I don;t buy anything in shops any more, not my food, clothes, models, paint, books, video games - it's all electronically ordered..

These suggestions are a way to welcome the inevitable into our gaming lives and retain control of things and if anything make it more social.

Nobody is going to take away your paper codexes just yet, but in a few years time you might find nobody else buys them anyway.

ic, so you are happy to pay the delivery charge on your groceries rather than pop down towards closing time and pick the bargains.

As for LFG, no they won't be replaced by local clubs that is just BIg Society nonsense. Leave aside that the Sean is in America and the gaming scene is very different - in case you haven't noticed the legislation for the rental of council premises in the UK. was changed about two years ago, to effectively force councils to charge market rents for their facilities. Gone are the days in which you could rent space for ten or fifteen pounds a night. Clubs are now looking at upwards of a hundred pounds a session. And as such they are struggling.

And it should also be pointed out that that while wargmaing is one hobby, many people do not see it as such. And there are many clubs that do not welcome GW players into their midst.

Therefore the idea that there is some easy transition between the LFG and your ill fitting trousers is laughable.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Sean_OBrien wrote:The rest of it just sounds like anyone of a dozen marketing pitches which I sat through listening to someone explain how to take advantage of the new economy. Even the obligatory keywords and catch phrases are in place.

Just my observations both as a customer and someone who has been on the receiving end of the sales pitch.

That's because you are.

GW has hired the Bio Agency - http://www.thebioagency.com/#/home - and this is their market research.

Funny that you mention your wife... mine does the same thing... 'do you you want a diet coke?' 'no' 'but if you have one, we get one half price' 'well pay the full price and we'll save some money.'

marielle wrote:
May I be the first to welcome the Bio Agency to the forum....

Sorry to disappoint - have a look at www.thetalldesigner.com however and you'll see little ol' me - no agency in sight.

marielle wrote:
ic, so you are happy to pay the delivery charge on your groceries rather than pop down towards closing time and pick the bargains.

Er, yes? £4 delivery or £2.50 off peak so I can save an HOUR of my time? Hell I'd pay if it cost £10, don't you?

marielle wrote:
As for LFG, no they won't be replaced by local clubs that is just BIg Society nonsense

When gamers stop buying models, all that's left is the social club aspect. Unless you know different?

marielle wrote:
And it should also be pointed out that that while wargmaing is one hobby, many people do not see it as such. And there are many clubs that do not welcome GW players into their midst.

What?I meant gaming clubs? What gaming club would;t welcome gamers?

marielle wrote:
Funny that you mention your wife... mine does the same thing... 'do you you want a diet coke?' 'no' 'but if you have one, we get one half price' 'well pay the full price and we'll save some money.'

Sean_OBrien wrote:There in lies the fundamental flaw with your concept though. If you had everything server based - it would take your average pimple faced 12 year old about 30 minutes to crash the server...especially one which is an HTTP server. With all the consumer goodwill which GW has garnered in the past 10 years or so along with GW's past history of staying behind the technological 8 ball - you will have more down time than uptime on the servers. Servers which can withstand a concerted DoS attack are possible - but they are expensive (even big companies like Amazon are still vulnerable to a concerted effort). GW will likely not be interested in the investment it would take to actually run what you are proposing...and then of course there is the question of whether or not what you are proposing would actually be profitable (most of these schemes never turn a profit).
The other issue of course has to deal with the reliability or lack there of of the internet. It goes down, it goes down often, it goes down everywhere. Sometimes entire regions loose connectivity for hours at a time. Quite often the wireless connections are only slightly faster than dial up.
Regarding the various other issues - it would probably help to do a bit of research there. In the US, 3 of the top 10 broadband providers only offer metered service. The vast majority of wireless broadband providers only offer limited data. Even the ones which provide unlimited data - actually limit your data rates if you go over a certain level of use.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57428419-1/killing-unlimited-data-plans-has-helped-make-u.s-carriers-billions/
If you plan on pitching a global scheme of a digital solution - you need to actually have a handle on the global market conditions as well as the market itself. What portion of the current user base would actually be interested in what you are suggesting. I would guess it would be slightly more than the active user base of a site like Dakkadakka, BoLS or Warseer. They are the ones who are slightly interested in this sort of thing. How much money could you get from them on top of existing sales? How much would the White Dwarf circulation suffer from this? Probably a fair amount.
The cloud based stuff is neat right now - but we did that in the 90s too...it went away then, I don't expect this go around to be much different. All it will take is one breach and a lawsuit to follow it up and you will see the clouds evaporate over night. There are inherent flaws to the concept - only one of which has actually been dealt with (and dealing with that one flaw actually makes the other flaws greater).
Anywho - while I can understand your excitement by the prospect, it is a bit...premature IMO. Most of the things which you bring up aren't really enough to sell the goods, and the things which might be worth while to some (digital codices) you hamstring with a server based concept.

I'm not really sure what your objection is to this concept. Yes, it is internet/server based, and yes, people can lose connection. So what? So is Dakkadakka. So is Google, eBay, Facebook, Flickr, Spotify... millions of services. A DDoS attack is possible against any internet based service, not GW specifically.
Unless your whole post was just sarcasm, in which case, well done, you imitated a GW exec's mindset well.

@OP.
I agree with you on most points, to the extent that I'd begun work on various portions of the system myself. I'd just add that a purely internet-based application still isn't feasible in today's environment - some measure of local caching is needed. In addidion, I've yet to see a truly good HTML-based application which can scale to all the screen sizes and input methods in common use today - much as we don't like it as developers, native applications do tend to offer a much better end-user experience. That being said, those are minor concerns if you can get the rest of the pipeline working.
The major thing that I think wouldn't work is a 'popular/best army list' functionality. Well, it would work fantastically, but I think it would be detrimental to the community. 'Cookie cutter net lists' are bad enough as it is without an 'official' database of them.

Trasvi wrote:I'm not really sure what your objection is to this concept.

it is entirely web based

That is my objection. If you pay for something - that is entirely web based, the infrastructure needs to be there to keep it online. GW would have a hard time providing that infrastructure. DakkaDakka is free - so I am out nothing if it is down. Google and others have the infrastructure and manpower to deal with attacks.

Sean_OBrien wrote:

Trasvi wrote:I'm not really sure what your objection is to this concept.

it is entirely web based

That is my objection. If you pay for something - that is entirely web based, the infrastructure needs to be there to keep it online. GW would have a hard time providing that infrastructure. DakkaDakka is free - so I am out nothing if it is down. Google and others have the infrastructure and manpower to deal with attacks.

People get pissed off at Steam when they can't play their games while the internet is down/spotty, precisely because they have paid to have access to them.

Sean_OBrien wrote:

Trasvi wrote:I'm not really sure what your objection is to this concept.

it is entirely web based

That is my objection. If you pay for something - that is entirely web based, the infrastructure needs to be there to keep it online. GW would have a hard time providing that infrastructure. DakkaDakka is free - so I am out nothing if it is down. Google and others have the infrastructure and manpower to deal with attacks.

You might be quite surprised what you can do with local caching and HTML5 TBH + all these other web services? they do pretty well you know, they're profitable and they get lapped up - GW's bandwidth would be a fraction of what you need for NetFlix.

Sean_OBrien wrote:That is my objection. If you pay for something - that is entirely web based, the infrastructure needs to be there to keep it online. GW would have a hard time providing that infrastructure. DakkaDakka is free - so I am out nothing if it is down. Google and others have the infrastructure and manpower to deal with attacks.

Sorry to disappoint you, but thousands of other services are cloud based and do extremely well. Music, Movie, Photo, games, office suites... they do have occasional downtime, but its a very poor server that has more than 36 hours of unplanned downtime per year. GW wouldn't (or shouldn't) be managing any infrastructure themselves: their service would be small enough that maintaining in-house servers would be a large expense compared to outsourcing this. There are numerous providers including Google, Yahoo, Amazon, IBM, who can provide reliable and scalable hosting. Finally, most of the data being transferred would be small enough that local caching would be a viable solution, providing access to most services when offline.

There's a lot of people that don't live in your world and still like books, pens, and paper.)

Some of what you propose is interesting. Much of it is just what you want to see happen.

If GW ever did it, it would cost so much that i would be incapable of enjoy it.

mikhaila wrote:There's a lot of people that don't live in your world and still like books, pens, and paper.)

Some of what you propose is interesting. Much of it is just what you want to see happen.

Rules sell models, good models sell more models...




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tetsugaku wrote:Er, yes? £4 delivery or £2.50 off peak so I can save an HOUR of my time? Hell I'd pay if it cost £10, don't you?

Nope... because I bother to look at prices... and to actually consider what it is I am paying for. You might like to try it sometime when you have a few minutes to spare...

But then you are confused by the notion of buy one get one half price and actually saving money buy not buying one for half price.

A fool and his money and all that...

I would like to see an official GW forums and our own "page" like the old school myspace that we can trick out.

Kal-El wrote:I would like to see an official GW forums and our own "page" like the old school myspace that we can trick out.

No pages like the old Myspace pages should ever be allowed to exist ever again. People ended up putting up so much random crap that the pages took forever to load even on high speed internet.

Little ways to personalize are fine, but total customization is a nightmare.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Tetsugaku wrote:Er, yes? £4 delivery or £2.50 off peak so I can save an HOUR of my time? Hell I'd pay if it cost £10, don't you?

Nope... because I bother to look at prices... and to actually consider what it is I am paying for. You might like to try it sometime when you have a few minutes to spare...

But then you are confused by the notion of buy one get one half price and actually saving money buy not buying one for half price.

A fool and his money and all that...

Whilst the rescaling of the Boston Globe site does seem very well done, it is still data/content, not an application. Load the site, peruse content, close the site. A lot of what you're talking about is content, and could be handled well in HTML. A lot of it though is application, and whilst it can be done on HTML, my experience is that users respond far better to native applications on various platforms where this is feasible. For example, the Android Design Guidelines show here a difference between iOS, Android and WP7 systems; creating a native application which mirrors the paradigms experienced elsewhere on the system tends to increase user uptake.

As you're a UX designer and seem to have extensive experience in this, I trust that you'll choose sensible choices. I'm wondering though if this for you is simply an intriguing mental exercise, an attempt to gather feedback before making a presentation (if you work for GW or would propose to do this work for them), or gathering feedback before constructing it on your own?

Trasvi wrote:Whilst the rescaling of the Boston Globe site does seem very well done, it is still data/content, not an application. Load the site, peruse content, close the site. A lot of what you're talking about is content, and could be handled well in HTML. A lot of it though is application, and whilst it can be done on HTML, my experience is that users respond far better to native applications on various platforms where this is feasible. For example, the Android Design Guidelines show here a difference between iOS, Android and WP7 systems; creating a native application which mirrors the paradigms experienced elsewhere on the system tends to increase user uptake.

Point taken - there is a lot to be said about native app development - you have access to more features, the DRM is taken care of and you have a more direct way of sellign to the users.

However, native apps have quite a number of drawbacks as well. Multiple code bases - developing for multiple platforms. Built in obsolescence - an app written now may or may not run in a year, let alone 5. Reduced market share - responsive web design will work for pretty much *any* platform that uses HTML, we're talking as far back as Internet Explorer 6 and beyond as well as working on Firefox 16 or whatever is hot this week.

Trasvi wrote:As you're a UX designer and seem to have extensive experience in this, I trust that you'll choose sensible choices. I'm wondering though if this for you is simply an intriguing mental exercise, an attempt to gather feedback before making a presentation (if you work for GW or would propose to do this work for them), or gathering feedback before constructing it on your own?

All three - mainly it's a mental exercise to produce a case study I can refer to as a hypothetical piece of work and use on my portfolio. I also intend to send my conculsions to GW - who knows what they'll do with it, I've approached the digital agency they hired the other day and said "Hello! I'm a fan and a qualified pro - here's some ideas", and lastly I might implement some working pieces of software as proofs of concept - unless you;re in GW with access tot heir IP there wouldn't be much point in doing it.