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They will never get rid of formations because they're the ultimate key to selling models that would never sell otherwise. Oh that vyper sucks compared to literally everything else in your codex and you're never going to waste your time and money to buy and paint one? Guess what? Now that model is mandatory if you want to effectively spam scat bikes and wks. You have a fire prism? Now you need 3 for the formation bonus. Oh crap, everyone already has as many rhinos/drop pods as they'll ever need but we want to sell more. Guess what? Now they're FREE! GO BUY MORE!

Whatever the lowest selling kits for a particular army are, GW will make them mandatory in the next super formation or encourage spamming the hell out of them.

 Byte wrote:
Are they not selling enough models? Isn't that the priority?

Sales of models dropped by 15% last year according to their financials, so they must not be selling a whole lot of extra models. If 3 people quit for every 1 guy that buys 12 rhinos, GW didn't gain anything. They probably took a net loss because the 3 guys that quit started spending money with GW's competitors and then each told 10 other people not to start 40k because it's a horrible, unbalanced mess.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

GW can fix the game, but they need to identify what is wrong with it and address various different ideas about what it should be -- competitive or casual -- tight or sprawling --- skirmish or mass battle. They need ideally to square these various circles in order not to drive away a significant chunk of players who lean towards one or other end of the spectrum.

I thin this can be done by reorganising the rules into a small level skirmish game, a medium size competitive game, and a big battle game, which share a common core of rules that is expanded by optional add-on books.

This is the biggest problem, IMO. In their never ending quest to SELL MORE MODELS! they have completely lost sight of what they even want the game to be. A points system, true line of sight and the mission structures make it a competitive game. The gaping holes in the rules and randomness everywhere make it more of a casual game. Things like challenges and wound allocation make it a skirmish game. The amount of models needed to play and combat resolution make it a mass battle game. They've tried to do everything at once with this ruleset and just ended up doing it all poorly. There are better beer and pretzel games out there. There are better skirmish games, narrative games, pick up games, etc. You can say what you want about the balance in WMH, X wing, Infinity, etc, but how many of those companies have said "We don't care about the quality of the rules, if you do, you're playing our game wrong"? As far as I can remember, GW is the only company in the history of TTWG to basically tell their customers they don't give a feth about tight, balanced rules.