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I find threads like this oddly reassuring. In a time of tumult, uncertainty and rising chaos, GW's business practices are the rock upon which I can rely.

Imagine a world where GW commits itself to a single definitive edition of rules, one that is thoroughly playtested with excellent balance and where revisions are only done to improve clarity and streamline game play.

Or that GW decided that it would dominate the miniatures market on the basis of quality and affordability, leveraging its lengthy experience and sophisticated techniques to ensure the best possible value for money.

What the heck would we talk about then?

How many threads could we have saying "Wow, did you see the new low price on Space Marines? It's a sweet deal!"

"Yeah, and the sculpts are outstanding!"

The horror. The horror.

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
Because as always there is no middle ground on the interwebs...

The half baked codex creep is on the players for passively accepting the muddle and make do rut GW have taken, along with sheer bloody mindedness regarding digital, if the players stopped buying hard copies that are valid for about a week maybe that would be a wake up call to GW to try to do better the first time, I accept sometimes things will get missed in proofing but its every single book these days, but eternal churn is (tin foil) part of the design, if everything is constantly in motion the flaws are hard to spot, well apart from the bajillon eyes and math capable forces of the interwebs

As for the mini''s thats on GW again, I get the money reasons for not refreshing ranges but you then can't get a grump if players go elsewhere for things (make Court of the Archon purchasable again !)

I think there is some evidence that in the 1990s, GW was actually following both business models I outlined. Certainly their fantasy figures were very affordable, which is how I encountered them. They were a great way to bolster D&D collections for when you wanted the party to fight off a gang of orcs or something like that.

In terms of game development, there was also a sense that GW was actually refining and improving its work. If you look at the early development of 40k from Rogue Trader to the Compendium to what we now call 2nd ed., there is a clear effort to streamline and rationalize the rules.

The same is also true with Fantasy, which originally had the feel of a historicals rules set and later became very explicity 'fantastic' in its scope, hence creating Herohammer.

There is evidence that the shift in GW's strategy was not without internal dissent, and these disputes were breathlessly reported on sites like this. There was also close attention paid to who wrote which book and how it stacked up on the power curve. (IIRC, Gav Thorpe was a lightning rod for criticism.)

I'm under no illusions that GW is going to change and like many observers, my predictions of the company's demise are at least a decade overdue (I thought the end of the LotR bubble would wreck them).

All of which is to say, I wasn't being ironic - I really do find threads like this comforting.

 Overread wrote:


I think late stage Kirby was just showing that not only was Kirby more of a numbers guy than anything else (which to be fair he was an accountant); but that he and his management team were far too isolated and separate from the actual hobby, company and customers. It felt very much like they were the "suits" running the show, but didn't really understand what they were running beyond the numerical breakdown of sales figures. As a result you got a lot of strange choices, baffling ideas, short term focus and basically a whole list of things that were very unpopular with the actual customers; and likely also staff under them. Thing is when that happens at the top it spreads through so it takes ages to weed such thinking out of any firm.

Did GW as a whole suffer losses during his tenure? I know that when people chewed over the annual financials, the descriptors for the US were all euphemisms for "not going well," but I got away from the hobby after that and lost track. I don't think they ever had losses in the core UK/European markets.

The shareholder system can work, but you often have to remember that many of the shareholders are only in it for fast gains and that pandering to their desires will often sink your company because fast profits, high rises and constant increase is often totally unsustainable for most firms. You can chase it, but often as not it will break you in the long run. Which some managers are fine with because they've loaded themselves up on stock and can sell out before the crash (and then pray they don't get caught).

You also have problems when the leadership forgets what the company is supposed to be doing. General Motors famously became a benefits plan with a side business of selling cars. Or you get CEOs who want to make the "brand" about trendy causes rather than return on investment.

I think Kirby's exit was an opportunity for the new leadership to make a clean break (always important in a corporate environment) but there's an institutional expectation that GW experience profit growth through price hikes rather than enlarging the customer base.

Cyel wrote:


When was the last time the Tale of 4 Warlords participants were given a price limit on their monthly additions and they were describing how to creatively make the most out of it?

I remember those articles, and it was all about how yes, you CAN build a decent GW army on a tight budget. Some issues one of the group would hold back for a marquee unit the next.

Then again, that hearkens back to an era where $100 was a good starter army. Cost of entry was low and while the bulk kits weren't things of beauty, they could get you by.

The interesting thing is that by now, GW should have the capital investment to allow them to grossly undercut any would-be competitor outside Chinese slave labor (or is that "labour?).

Anyhow, that was the excuse during the otherwise senseless price increases of the early aughts. It was strange to be able to have unopened blisters of metal marines that cost less than plastic sprues, and I recall apologists saying that once the new machinery was in place, and the procedures nailed down, prices would surely fall.

 Eilif wrote:


I'm not disagreeing entirely, but it is a bit humorous to see nostalgia for white dwarf of the 00s. Folks always look back to "better days". One wonders what it will be like when players look back with fondness to the early 2020s...

Counterpoint: the 1970s. No one looks back on disco and stagflation with nostalgia. No one.

As part of my effort to recreate 2nd edition in its entirety, I've collected many of the WDs of that era and what stands out is the creativity of the company. They were willing to try one-off games and make forays into supporting sub-games within their genres.

There was also a sense that GW's design team actually wanted to perfect their rules. The expectation that the next editions of Fantasy and 40k would be definitive had some basis in fact. Indeed, the way 6th ed. WHFB corrected the excesses of 5th offered a great deal of hope for the future.

No one believes that now. The new editions are part of a product replacement cycle. It's the gaming equivalent of planned obsolescence.

But once, long ago, we thought differently...

ccs wrote:


70's muscle cars....

Which came with the AMC Pacer. British Leyland.

I mean, seriously. I have school photos where the entire class has collars that reach beyond their shoulder blades. It was awful.

Near the end things seemed to improve, but on the whole, not so good. Space 1999...don't get me started.

ccs wrote:


So? The existence of the Pacer has nothing to do with my love of 70s muscle cars.

The emissions controls imposed on the auto industry made them less cool than they are now. That and the gas lines.

What a lot of people are doing is taking the cream of the decade - the happy parts we love and celebrate - and ignoring the absolute horror that they were in real time. Yeah, Star Wars was great, and it stood out because there was so much that was awful. Same with disco - we only play the best of it.

Everything was really, really ugly back then. Who thought green shag carpet was a good idea?

 Eilif wrote:


Of course that's what we're doing. That's what nostalgia is. I'm not sure why you seem surprised by that.

Those pointing out the gems of the era and/or not sharing quite as bleak a recollection of the era as you are neither completely disagreeing nor remotely impressed by you pointing it out repeatedly.

And my point is that I wonder how many people were actually there, because while I like Star Wars, I hated the 70s.

I mean, I love vintage movies from the 1930s, but the Great Depression was, you know, pretty depressing.

Anyway, I think we're as off topic as it is possible to be.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I'll take 70's cinema over the current field any day.

That goes without saying.

 Eilif wrote:

If anyone is interest, here's my thoughts on when I briefly revisited 2nd edition.
https://www.chicagoskirmishwargames.com/blog/2011/11/vintage-warhammer-40k-2nd-edition/
I'm mildly embarassed that what I thought was "a few years ago" is actually over a decade past. Time flies....

I got so lost in 70s anti-nostalgia that I missed this. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa...

Two hours for 750 points is a lot of time, and you can cut that down considerably by eliminating fussy things like eliminating scatter for jump packs, rolling for persistent weapon effects, and so on.

The link is of course in my sig, but basically what 2nd needed was some streamlining. When it came out, the designers weren't sure of it was a game of squads or platoons. As the edition developed, the model count was clearly meant to increase, but fiddly things like rolling for individual models on fire to run around the board slowed things down.

I think there is room for both: if you love the detail of watching plasma balls linger, snuff out or burst, those rules are there.

But if you want to bring more troops on the board, that sort of extra detail is easy to sweep aside. I've also come up with a less dice-intensive way to do close combat that retains the essential elements of the stat lines.

Re-rolling for parries I can live without, but I love hitting vehicles and blowing the turrets off and seeing where they land.

 Dysartes wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:
Two hours for 750 points is a lot of time, and you can cut that down considerably by eliminating fussy things like eliminating scatter for jump packs, rolling for persistent weapon effects, and so on.

If you don't play the full game, it'll take less time than if you play the full game - good to know.

I'm just here to help!

Seriously, is scatter for jump packs really that crucial to the overall design? Is it a core feature of the system that a wide shot with a plasma missile should be monitored each turn for its condition?

Similarly, the re-roll of parries is a spectacularly inefficient way to generate probability shifts. I know of several games where players came up with "hacks" to speech up play simply by using less time-consuming mechanics.

 Eilif wrote:


I think the more pertinent question is how much do you simplify? It's not just scattering jumps and parries, all aspects of 2nd edition are rife with these sorts of extraneous mechanics. Vehicle rules/cards, wargear, Psychic powers, etc....

Trimming out things here and there for preference is fine, but I would suggest that if you want to play 2nd edition you just have to be ok with alot of kooky flavorful rules and time-consuming mechanics. 2nd edition will just never be a streamlined ruleset, so it's best to either embrace that or find another ruleset.

I think there is a clear difference between core concepts of a game and the way in which those concepts are implemented. I played the game "as written" for many years and I liked it. However, when I came back to it, I realized that one could preserve the same feel (and tactics) while speeding up game play by eliminating some of the kludge.

Thus, my streamlined close combat system. Rolling two dice one time is a lot faster than rolling lots of dice and then doing re-rolls. The percentages are same, though because of the fumble mechanic, GW actually makes having high numbers of attack dice a liability, which strikes me as an unintentional design flaw (why should five attacks be statistically better than 10?).

Streamlining physical mechanics is just good game design. I remember years ago a Civil War boardgaming system required lots of dice-rolling and this was done sequentially. Then a player clued them in that you could just roll all the dice at once if they were different colors. Huge time-saver, and the designers included this in updates.

The same is true of jump packs' scatter. The scatter is d3" but they move 4", so unless they are jumping onto a ledge, it doesn't matter.

It is also important to consider that things like jump pack scatter, warhead expansion, etc. are not core rules, but rather rules that apply to specific pieces of gear, which may not appear at all in many games. Coming up with a way to make the wargear/weapons easier to use in no way challenges the integrity of 2nd edition's rules.

tneva82 wrote:
Ah yes the black and white only this and no other attitude. Always useless as usual.

One could direct your comments regarding 9e for gw as well. Once rule written can't change period. 8e army books obviously shouldn't have been updated either.

I took it as more of a purity test - that the "true" 2nd edition can't be modified.

Except that it was, often. The Black Codex yielded to books, the main rules had psykers that were superseded by Dark Millennium, articles in White Dwarf introduced additional changes and unit types, etc. I guess you could say the final form was when 3rd came out and it became obsolete, but it wasn't "finished" so much as "abandoned." There was clearly work still to be done.

For example, are psykers required? Clearly, no. If there are no psykers present, there is no psychic phase. At least around here, most people didn't use them because they didn't add much to the army's effectiveness and they slowed the game down.

I think the strength of 2nd is that it can be played both ways - one can do the fiddly bits and have a near-Necromunda level of detail. Alternatively, one can simplify various tertiary rules mechanics and have the fun of fielding larger forces while reducing playing time. What I think is interesting is how many players hit on the exact same "fixes," which is pretty remarkable given the often fractious debates about 40k rules.

 Eilif wrote:


My contention is that with a game like 2nd Ed 40k you would have to change an awful lot of rules to modify the character of the game. For a player like Commissar T who already enjoys the system, a little tweaking around the edges gives him the game he really enjoys and that's great. For myself -while I'm open to trying it again someday - I currently think the sort of changes listed here would still provide -for me- an unsatisfying experience similar to the one I linked too.

Thanks for the additional clarification.

You are correct in the sense that 2nd stands apart from the later editions in its use of vehicles and most of all, in its emphasis on fire combat over melee. It is a very unforgiving game if you leave troops out in the open. Even terminators have a limited life expectancy advancing over open ground.

Cutting out the clutter allows people who like that type of game to boost army sizes while keeping the playing time reasonably short. Using just two dice for HTH, for example, is huge in terms of speeding up the mechanics of the thing.