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 Swastakowey wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

Swastakowey wrote:... throwing money and time at something you hate is daft to me...

Have you stopped and considered the possibility that a lot of us complaining about the state of the game don't actually hate it?

It's possible to like something while still seeing its flaws. I love the Star Wars prequels. I still cringe at 'I love you because you're not like sand'...

40K, for me, is the same. I enjoy playing the game. But I also see enough of the flaws in it to know that I would enjoy it more if it was more tightly written.

And that's not even touching the difference liking the company producing a product and liking that product...

I have yet to hear the person i said that to say anything remotely positive except that vandettas are great. Other than that all he talks about is how crap the game is. If you talk about apples tasting like feces you dont turn around and eat it, then buy more and keep eating them. I dont know you nor have i seen many of your posts but i was referring to pregriin or however you spell it, people with his attitude might need a new hobby or Councillor.

I hate the company but like the product, he however hates both it seems, just look at his comments and you will see, people like him i was referring to. Luckily he is a minority.

He is a person that have the reason and know how to writte a rule system by himself, know how to manage a multimillionare company, have a degree on universal administrasion and wargames design, and more he has the tastes of the gods, and now have the infinite necessity to share his exalted knowledge about GW on the forum... sarcasm apart, if you dont like the game, dont like the companny, dont like the opinion of the other memebers of the community then what the are you doing here? correct me if i wrong, but thats we called masochist
Since the firts time i saw a warhammer fantasy mini, was love at firt sight, i wanted to build a bretonian army, full of knights, but then discovered 40k and then i knew the hobby was for me, since them i dont think the companny went for better to worse, becuase i am aware, since the begining, that is a expensive hobby. Years back, like 7 or 8 years ago, i wantted so bad a box of space marines, back then, here in my country and more specific in my city, was almost impossible to buy something related to gw, only one store sold them and making the math with inflation and change of the dollar, the price for a single box of tactical space marines, back then, was around $48 on todays dollars (today, around here you can get them on the same price). So i never understand why all the whine on the prices, even more, i considere all the people that live on the usa an europe lucky, becuase there you can buy them like candys, here on mexico, is a rare image to wacht an apocalypse army or game. I have 3 years on the hobby offiacialy and i barely have 2000 points of space wolves and 1500 pts of orks.
So the real question is, is the same GW the internet talk about, that the real GW?

PD: since i begin to writte here my english improve a lot and more importantly, i learn to recognize the whine from the real content and contributions from real dakka usar and real hobby fans

10 to 15 years from now some will claim this edition is the golden age.

 Formosa wrote:
Do any of us try to get together and fix these apparent issues that we also helped become mainstream, no, all we do is whine and complain.

Yeah, I agree.

It's like when I bought my last car. It was a total lemon... broke down all the time, constantly leaked oil all over my garage floor, the rear passenger door wouldn't unlock, and the glove box would fall open every time I hit 60km/hr.

Sure, I could have complained about it... but instead, I did the right thing, and got together with a bunch of other people who had bought the same car, and we tore it apart and built a new car out of the pieces.

Because when you pay good money for something, you damn well should have to fix all of the problems with it yourself. Expecting the company that has all those people who are supposedly trained to do the job properly to give you the product you paid for in proper working condition is just totally unreasonable.

Shame on you all.

 insaniak wrote:

 Formosa wrote:
Do any of us try to get together and fix these apparent issues that we also helped become mainstream, no, all we do is whine and complain.

Yeah, I agree.

It's like when I bought my last car. It was a total lemon... broke down all the time, constantly leaked oil all over my garage floor, the rear passenger door wouldn't unlock, and the glove box would fall open every time I hit 60km/hr.

Sure, I could have complained about it... but instead, I did the right thing, and got together with a bunch of other people who had bought the same car, and we tore it apart and built a new car out of the pieces.

Because when you pay good money for something, you damn well should have to fix all of the problems with it yourself. Expecting the company that has all those people who are supposedly trained to do the job properly to give you the product you paid for in proper working condition is just totally unreasonable.

Shame on you all.

Well, thats becuase you never read it the manual of the car, or never take the time to read about the issues, or about the right way to put the oil or the the right way to drive it, maybe becuase you only bought it for the bright colors of the car, and then you take it a casaul car to make it a racing car, you make a good 50km/h car into a piece of and now you whine about how the company and the people that work there are useless workers, who dont know how to make their job well...

 anyeri wrote:
Well, thats becuase you never read it the manual of the car, or never take the time to read about the issues, or about the right way to put the oil or the the right way to drive it, maybe becuase you only bought it for the bright colors of the car, and then you take it a casaul car to make it a racing car, you make a good 50km/h car into a piece of and now you whine about how the company and the people that work there are useless workers, who dont know how to make their job well...

Ah, see, that's the problem right there... it was when I started reading the manual that I started noticing the problem. And when I turned to online forums to find out if other people were having similar problems, some people tried to tell me that the car is actually perfectly fine, it's just people complaining about the things that are wrong with it that make people think that there are things wrong with it. The cads.

 Formosa wrote:
Do any of us try to get together and fix these apparent issues that we also helped become mainstream, no, all we do is whine and complain.

Well here's the rub- define 'fix'? If I converted 40k so you could use all your models with another system would that count? Or would you dismiss it out of hand?

I started playing at the beginning of 3rd. That lasted until about mid-late 4th when I went off to school, but during that time it seemed like there really was a "40k universe". KilKrazys post slapped me hard with nostalgia in realizing there really was a golden age. The terms Games Day, White Dwarf (not the $8.00 pseudo-pamphlet it is now, the actual MAGAZINE), chapter Approved, the bitz orders/catalogue, Battlefleet Gothic etc, brings back nothing but the fondest of memories. I went to.a Gamesday when I was 15 and it was the coolest, most engaging GW related experience I ever had.

And then I came back in 6th. Unfortunately picking up my old BA right after the Tau dex dropped. Needless to say I've been playing for a few months now and it seems 40k has truly gone cold. Didn't want to accept it at first, but after Escalation there was no hiding it. The love of the game/product is gone. Nearly everything is a moneygrab (some more blatant than others) and it seems the ONLY reason I can and do still love playing has much less to do with the game and more to do with the fact thatI am rreally blessed to be able to play it with a great crew of guys that always agree to houserule out the garbage.

To answer the OPs question, somewhere between. 04 and 13 lol

TL; DR in 03-04 GW seemed akin to a bright eyed gamer with endless possibilities. In '13-14 that gamer has clearly devolved into a money grubbing suit who's only care is for the quarterly returns.

For me the decline happened around the release of the 4th edition Chaos Space Marine codex . Not just because it was a horrible codex from which Chaos has never recovered, but also because it marked the start of a process to dumb down and steamline the game. The fluff was terrible, all of the vast Legion history was removed in exchange for some bland 1 liner descriptions of a bunch of never before mentioned Warbands. The rules suddenly ceased to represent the fluff and it is still impossible to do entirely fluffy Legions. All of the options of the previous codex were torn out and replaced with basically a one build sham of a codex.

Now obviously there have been a ton of books released since then that were far better, however it was not just the Chaos book that changed, that was just the first time I felt like the hobby I knew had been turned on it's head. It may have improved but it's never got back to the level it was before then.

Before that we had global campaigns, 5 games all set in the 40k universe that promoted the release of even more background. White Dwarf was filled with bits of fluff, experimental rules, all kinds of different terrain workshops. A bitz catalogue, Short stories that didn't necessarily break ground but really fleshed out the universe. I particularly remember after Necrons were released there was an Inquisitors report, interogating someone on the War in Heaven. It genuinely felt like this new race had a tense, terrifying introduction into the background with snippets of vague information as opposed to just a summary of their whole history. Don't get me wrong, I liked the newest Necron codex, but I miss the days of Inquistion transmissions and Rogue Trader reports, not child like fantasy stories about How the Angels of Blood with all there blood named toys and characters, bro fisted with the Necrons. It's not just a change of the fluff, it's a change of the delivery that makes it somewhat less than it was. And White Dwarf is just a bit overpriced advert for whatever flavour of the month they are trying to promote.

Don't get me wrong, I love, love, love the HH series. But that is another emerging problem, before 40k was all legend, we had these myths about The Primarchs, the Fall of the Eldar, The rise of the Necrons etc, but it was all second hand information, now everything is explained which takes away some of the mystery but also is proving vastly unmanageable to keep timelines making sense. It's fine that not all 40k books always gel with each other because "There is no canon, everything is canon etc" but in a single series, there should really be a concise time line. Codices have followed this trend, by now every book is filled with stories that make it's faction "THE BEST THING EVER" and the ambiguity is gone.

I know this is all just my opinion, some would probably go back further and say 2nd Ed was the Golden age. But for me, the time I noted was when it felt more like an all encompassing hobby, rather than just some expensive toys that you can play games with.

 Dozer Blades wrote:
10 to 15 years from now some will claim this edition is the golden age.

Yes, lots of people bemoan how times of 5th edition were great, but either they suffer from some selective memory syndrome, or they weren't around for very long during the edition. There was enormous whining about 5th edition, how it's the worst 40k edition ever and how it killed the game and how nobody played it anymore.

or me the decline happened around the release of the 4th edition Chaos Space Marine codex . Not just because it was a horrible codex from which Chaos has never recovered, but also because it marked the start of a process to dumb down and steamline the game. The fluff was terrible, all of the vast Legion history was removed in exchange for some bland 1 liner descriptions of a bunch of never before mentioned Warbands. The rules suddenly ceased to represent the fluff and it is still impossible to do entirely fluffy Legions. All of the options of the previous codex were torn out and replaced with basically a one build sham of a codex.

In fact, this was a big shock for the CSM players. The 3.5 ed codex was absolulely brilliant, maybe the best codex ever. The following codex was exactly the opposite. I think is was mainly influenced by JJ and his former DA codex making things simpler, just boring.

 Alex Kolodotschko wrote:
Roughly around when they started making 'business' decisions and leaving the hobby in second place.
The big one for me was when they stopped bits ordering. Not sure of a year but it seems like a long time ago now.
Since then things have been changed for the worse or removed altogether one by one.
Throughout this process the prices have increased faster than inflation which makes it an even more bitter pill to swallow.

This right here. In the past you could imagine the game was poorly balanced because they weren't really trying, it just wasn't a concern. The main concern was the hobby. But now, the main concern is the business and making money. Now it feels like they are neglecting game balance because they don't think its a good investment, in addition to neglecting the hobby.

 obithius wrote:

 Mywik wrote:
Models were always expensive. The rules were always badly written. The models were always awesome looking. People always loved bitching about gw.

Things started going down when more people got internet.

Models were not always expensive. When I started playing I bought a tactical squad each week with my £5 pocket money. That's equivalent to £8.60 in 2012, the last year data is available for:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/education/Pages/inflation/calculator/flash/default.aspx

A tactical squad is now £25. Nicer models, but a kid can't buy them with pocket money any more. That's when the game went downhill for me.

Also, the scale of the game has increased, such that you need more and more of those models for an "evening's play" game.

(This is where someone often charges in to say that no, the prices are fine if you play one or two very specific armies and somehow get the rulebook for free)

The decline really came about as a result of pulling of anything that wasnt making profits. Sure, they were always consistantly raising prices, but what really heralded the downfall was the pulling of content.

The old army books, codex(es?), white dwarf mags, and the games workshop website used to be packed with hobbying articles, how to paint hundreds of alternate colour schemes, how to make scenery out of junk, tip and tricks, battle reports etc.

Until games workshop decided to turn everything they made that wasnt a miniature into a way of selling miniatures and stopped catering to their older fanbase in favour of hyperaggressive sales tactics.

The golden age was when the fans and the company were on the same page, getting behind the same things, and getting along.

Before the greed, really.

It is a difficult question. - For example, people talk about how awesome Chaos 3.5 was. I remember it more as:

Iron Warriors, Iron Warriors everywhere.

I think it is quite hard to define the peaks because, well, there's never a situation when GW does stuff completely right.

2003 to 2004 was a pretty good year, actually taking part in the Eye of Terror Campaign was great fun (and the disasterous results weren't known until a while afterwards), I mostly played Lord of The Rings then, which had evolved into a mature game, the scenario play gave great challenges and tactics and I was pretty much loving it. - LOTR only really went downhill for me when they released the Rohan Outriders that completely skewed the game.

It's a lot easier to identify the troughs. The really low points of GW. - The release of the Plastic Giant is a pretty famous one. Traditionally, they have slowly rebuilt and become enjoyable again... Traditionally.

The troughs seems to have merged together to become a basin now however. There's just seemed to be such a constant hammer now of things that would be one off dips that have just lumped together into a downward spiral.

I'd argue that this latest thing started with May 2011. It was at that point a load of daft ideas converged.

1) Finecast
2) Huge price hike (Guard boxes halved, massive increase in marine battleforce costs)
3) The huge amount of trade restrictions implemented on independent stores.

Since then, we've had:

Cease and desist the websites. All of them.
The Spots The Space Marine debacle.
The Chapterhouse Case
More trade restrictions on independent stores.
6th edition flyers Rules.
6th Edition Allies Rules.
Dreadfleet
One Man Stores
Hardback > Trade Paperback > Mass Market Paperback
More price rises
The Hobbit failure
Tau Codex and Riptide rules
Wraithknight rules
Games Day with no Games
The Khornemower
Escalation
Supplemental Codices
New Tyranid Codex - replacing a poor codex with a worse one.
Warhammer Visions.


Two or three of them in the past together would have caused some anger, frustration, gnashing of teeth and a bit of internet rage that'd swiftly be forgotten. Now it's just this constant barrage of insanity that I think is just too much for the internet to recover from and forget.

The crazy thing is, GW are doing some things now that could potentially be worth actual, proper praise. The Stronghold expansion, properly written, would have been something I had been waiting for for more than 12 years. I've lost so much interest GW that I've never even looked at the book, nevermind bought it. The new Imperial Knights do genuinely look awesome and GW have actually started doing sales now and proper, actually really good value bundle deals.

But all that good stuff is just hidden and covered under tonnes and tonnes of stupid, mean spirited, hostile insanity. And more just keeps on being shovelled on.

You can probably tell I still want to have passion for GW but, I just don't have the energy to care anymore. There's other companies out there and, even though they do have their faults, they're far more deserving of my time, attention and, most importantly, money, than Games Workshop.

i remember back when the first boxed set of WH40K came out. at the time i felt it pandered to 'kids' and that those of us who had built up collections of lead and RTB01 marines and had made sense of the Rogue Trader rules were being abandoned. i wasn't alone with that feeling. but it was nonsense, i was 15 and an idiot. someone said earlier, and i may paraphrase, that for each person the moment GW started going downhill was shortly after they started playing, and i think that the truth!

I would say the decline of GW has an actual leader in wargaming started when they stopped producing new Specialist Games content. When it all became only about monetizing WFB, W40K, and LotR, that's when it started to go downhill. The loss of their bits service is a good example. A company that consistently tried to sell itself to the shareholders as a maker of the best toy soldiers in the world, who makes collectibles first and games second, but then suddenly starts to remove the collectibles aspect (no bits, no more cool models, etc,) is really telling.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
I would say the decline of GW has an actual leader in wargaming started when they stopped producing new Specialist Games content. When it all became only about monetizing WFB, W40K, and LotR, that's when it started to go downhill. The loss of their bits service is a good example. A company that consistently tried to sell itself to the shareholders as a maker of the best toy soldiers in the world, who makes collectibles first and games second, but then suddenly starts to remove the collectibles aspect (no bits, no more cool models, etc,) is really telling.

I'd consider that more as a plateau actually. All those points you made where good but together they would have stopped GW from growing and maybe caused them to shrink a little, I think the reason that they are now really starting to feel the pressure (to put it mildly) is because of the 'we are the Hobby, we have no competition, ect' mentality the top brass have.

The rise of companies like Privateer Press, Corvus Bellie, Spartan Games, Mantic and all the others putting out both models and games and GWs refusal to acknowledge them as competition are what's killing GW.

The whole 'we are selling to collectors, the rules don't matter' was fine when if you wanted a reasonable chance of a pick up game on any given weekend you HAD to play 40k. Now that you don't people who are not collectors are jumping ship left right and center for games that are, mechanically speaking, much better. And GW, in their infinite wisdom, are continuing to pump out the same or worse rules instead of trying to fix the problem.
Likewise the actual collectors are becoming more and more aware of the other model lines out there which, frankly, can make GW stuff look like toys. (It's anecdotal I know but I enjoy collecting and I only know one person who is purely a collector/painter rather than a gamer and we both had a good laugh at the recent dwarf release while drooling over some infinity models I picked up for no reason other than because they looked cool.)

GW has the production capacity and distribution channels to dominate the market again, but it would require them to accept that they have competition and they won't do that.
You can't win a war you don't know your fighting and GW seem intent on staying the course rather than bringing their considerable weight to bear.

Honestly I think it started to go downhill when they came out with the previous paint range. Now, that might sound weird so hear me out. I've been looking over some old issues of White Dwarf lately, mostly to reminisce of the "good old days". I noticed that the magazine, and the rest of the company, seemed to change around that time. The DIY articles seemed to dry up as did the "So-and-so in the studio has collected an X army, here's how he collected and painted it up" articles and the good battle reports. It became more simplistic, with the old and now new paint range's "paint by numbers" approach replacing it. Terrain articles were all removed in favor of "Buy our new plastic terrain kit".

Of special mention is when the website was changed to be just a catalog and nothing else, and they removed all of the hobbyist articles. I used to like being able to find articles on various paint schemes or better yet articles from somebody on collecting armies, and that seems to have gone largely away.

More than anything else though it's when they came up with the idea that balance isn't something they care about, and when they believed the idea that all 40k games are for narrative purposes and that anything somebody buys should be legally allowed for use in a game, and the constant trying to make the game larger and larger so that it more resembles Epic than 40k.

In a roundabout way I actually blame LOTR. Epic was dropped to make way for it, and also to shoehorn impossibly massive and inconvenient models into 28mm 40K like titans and huge tanks, while simultaneously dropping 2e skirmish style and replacing with oversimplified not-quite-sure-what-type-of-game-I'm-playing 3e style, much of which remains today.

MarsNZ wrote:
In a roundabout way I actually blame LOTR. Epic was dropped to make way for it

Epic's demise had nothing to do with LotR, GW alienated 99% of the existing fanbase with Epic40k, resulting in plummeting sales.

In the days of 2-5th editions, the 40K universe was a hobby experience, fully supported by a company full of employees who were truly fans of their own material and passed that love on.

Now it's just an off-the-shelf product, being kept alive by the fans willingness to spend money.

I have seen it devolve since the old heady days of the Games Workshop Forums.

 Gashrog wrote:

MarsNZ wrote:
In a roundabout way I actually blame LOTR. Epic was dropped to make way for it

Epic's demise had nothing to do with LotR, GW alienated 99% of the existing fanbase with Epic40k, resulting in plummeting sales.

99% is something of an exaggeration. Still, nice that they replaced Epic with such a resoundingly successful game!

GW started going downhill when the top brass decided to stop being a "game" company and instead become a luxury action figure company. Quite simply, the vast majority of their competition has become better than them at games and gaming while they focus on selling plastic action figures. They have lost site of their core value to the market and it shows in almost every thing they do. In fact, they have lost site of what the market even is anymore.

And for their three games they have decided to keep, they don't even know what they want those to be anymore and it clearly shows in the design of those games.

Do I expect it to be fixed? No. Because the other thing they have become is one of the most customer hostile and arrogant companies I have ever seen. I would say they are worse than even EA, who has won worst company two years running because of their customer gouging tactics and inferior quality of their products. GW is following in the same footsteps, but unlike EA, they don't have the massive multi-billion dollar business to soak up this kind of behavior like EA did.

WayneTheGame wrote:
Of special mention is when the website was changed to be just a catalog and nothing else, and they removed all of the hobbyist articles. I used to like being able to find articles on various paint schemes or better yet articles from somebody on collecting armies, and that seems to have gone largely away.

There were some really good articles on the old website. There was one where they showed you how to make your own magnetized display board for your army. I remember a couple where they showed you how to cut up and repose the plastic wraithlord or converting the plastic carnifex. Lots of terrain stuff. My favorite was an article where they painted a Tau piranha with an airbrush, where they not only talked about the airbrush set-up but showed you how to get the paint-chipping effect to make it look worn and the end result looked pretty decent.

It's just sad thinking about everything we lost, all because of GW's unparalleled greed and stupidity.

It all started going downhill when people started talking on forums.

It all started going downhill when people started talking on forums.

Going from the days of the old Games Workshop forums, there can be things said for that theory.

Realistically, things started showing when fans can do more to support the Games Workshops games than corporate can. Epic 40K has basically been erased from GW's history, but right now there is fan support that is more effective and more stringently playtested than when GW sold the game*.

At least as far as Epic: Armageddon goes. I have a giant book I printed out at Office Max that contains army lists for every single race in 40K that could take part in Epic, save for the Tyranids, along with internally embedded FAQ's and the official eratta pasted where it should be.

 Voidwraith wrote:
It all started going downhill when people started talking on forums.

No, this is not the case. In our local gaming group, there is a kind of frustration about GW and its policies, and as a result, there has been a shift to other game systems, mainly to WM/Hordes.

IMO, it started going down hill when GW plc stopped thinking of themselves as part of the wider table top war gaming hobby. (Based on creativity and social interaction.)
And thought of the 'GW hobby' as completely separate,and just 'buying product from GW .'
(Based on short term sales of product on a churn and burn basis.)

Im a Fluff dude…and ill go ahed with the Warhammer 40k game as far as i can.

Yes. GW can make HUGELY bad choices…But i still like the game, and the community which comes together.

And I've not been swayed enough to quit.

All the creativity in the hobby is on the Internet, on forums like this with the blogs and galleries. Creativity from GW has withered over the last 10 years. Increasingly formulaic codices, every one needs a release on a large base, many variants are gone. IG are all Cadians and some old Catachan plastics, despite there being masses of OOP regiments. White Dwarf did nothing in recent years other than displaying the same painted models straight out the box and 'making' plastic kit terrain. What happened to the templates for making vehicles and the wave serpent conversion using a plastic spoon?

I think a lot of the fun started to bleed out if the game with 3rd edition 40k when GW really started to crank up the army size and push model sales, making table tops bloated and streamlining the game so that it became more mass figure removal and less characterful. They also started to let 'specialist games' begin to wane. In fact the invention of 'specialist games' as a term was the first nail in their coffin. Once GW stopped simply making and selling games and started focusing only on their core games while everything else went into a niche interest category it was on the road to the end with their removal from stores and withdrawal of support.

Some people might say it went all down hill once White Dwarf stopped supporting anything other than GW product. Maybe they're right. But once 2nd edition 40k was abandoned the current ethos seemed the destination. It's not as though there was ever a golden age for rules, 2nd edition clearly had issues with overpowered units. But that was 20 years ago and it doesn't seem to have improved. But the GW hobby had more soul back then, they've cut everything back to the bone, axing specialist games, bitz, their back catalogues of miniatures, their forums, all the content of white dwarf. They don't encourage modelling or creativity, they just want to sell fantasy or 40k with formulaic armies, and the table, and the scenery all as pre made kits, with the magazine and website serving only to constantly push these. Most of the old creatives, even Rick Priestly, have been eased out over time to be replaced with those who better fit the corporate approach.

The funny thing is, around the time of 2nd and 3rd edition when core games were smaller and specialist games were supported and the bitz catalogues where open and White Dwarf was full of Chapter Approved and home made scenery, all the things we are told are wasteful and unprofitable, their sales were at their highest and their company grew and grew. But they've chopped all that out and streamline staff to one man stores and axe games and remove distractions from sales in white dwarf, and where has it got them? They hold steady from year to year only though continual cutting of costs.