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Wayniac wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Our GW store only has two tables. I reserve a saturday for campaign day. And then we all meet and some of us go to another place to do our battle.

This part confused me, so you have like a standing saturday for a campaign day at your GW, and then like your let's say 8 people meet up there, and then split up so some people stay at the GW store to play, and some people go somewhere else (another store, somebody's house, etc.)?

We get as many people as we can at the store and the overflow has to go to someone's house or another store yes. In warmer months we set up tables outside. They have had a 30 player 40k ITC weekender there before. I provide a couple of tables. But in the winter months thats not doable so I'll take some people to my place since i have a nice home table and there are many local game stores that they'll go to as well.

Hmm never considered having a campaign group split among different stores to participate. Interesting idea.

Have had to do that for years and years, even before GW store became my primary store. The other stores would always boot us for card events so had to be flexible.

THe idea is meet up at a central location, go over the event and then let them go off and do their thing!

 auticus wrote:
Have had to do that for years and years, even before GW store became my primary store. The other stores would always boot us for card events so had to be flexible.

THe idea is meet up at a central location, go over the event and then let them go off and do their thing!

Thats because card games are the bread and butter of hobby/gaming stores, they are what make the most money.

I'm not disputing that. But because of that I had to adapt a way to be able to run events knowing that any event that I had put on the calendar could be wiped for a magic or pokemon tournament without notice.

 auticus wrote:
I'm not disputing that. But because of that I had to adapt a way to be able to run events knowing that any event that I had put on the calendar could be wiped for a magic or pokemon tournament without notice.

True, but that would happen with any event not just AoS, but all be it, AoS gets it even harder because its such a niche game in so many areas. It has a very small, but dedicated, following. 40k probably does not suffer that problem as much because 40k is a lot more popular.

Oh no, I've had this problem since the late 90s. It didnt' matter what game, the card games always had priority.

We changed stores in 2003 because our 40k playoffs were cancelled the day of for a pokemon tournament. Back then I didn't have any contingency plans.

That's just stores being gakky. You don't alienate a community like that. Too many games though rely 100% on a store for a place to play, so are at the whims of the store, instead of the store being encouraged to court communities and gaming groups to patronize their store.

Yeah, that would have marked my last day using that particular store.

While I agree at the same time, that store is a business and as much as we don't want to admit it, AoS is struggling to stay aloat in a lot of areas. So as a business if you are gonna have to choose between a handful of people that don't make up a lot of the profit of your business vs a group who is your primary income, well you take the latter. That said I don't know the store, and the size but I imagine it could accommodate loosing one or 2 tables.

Again this is from a purple objective business persepctive. That said I do agree over writing things you already reserved is gakky if it was reserved in writing.

It's picking up pretty well at my local store. Me and two of my friends are getting back into it, and there's a handful of other people getting into it. Before recently though there were maybe four or five people playing it regularly, including an adepticon player.

 Stus67 wrote:
It's picking up pretty well at my local store. Me and two of my friends are getting back into it, and there's a handful of other people getting into it. Before recently though there were maybe four or five people playing it regularly, including an adepticon player.

Are you guys playing at a store in the B-more area?

Shadespire is picking up. AOS itself is basically dead around me.

Dead. My FLGS' WHFB community is the sort that hopped straight over to KoW when the reboot happened.

 nels1031 wrote:

 Stus67 wrote:
It's picking up pretty well at my local store. Me and two of my friends are getting back into it, and there's a handful of other people getting into it. Before recently though there were maybe four or five people playing it regularly, including an adepticon player.

Are you guys playing at a store in the B-more area?

Games n' Stuff in Glenn Burnie

Alive and well in my neck of the woods. Just played in a big regularly occuring tournament. And we’re meeting up again in May. Counting people who play in it but couldn’t make it, and the people they know, there’s upwards of 100 serious AoS players in Ireland at least. And remember that Ireland is tiny.

Well, what's large or small will depend on the measurement and comparison used.

Best I can tell (haven't had a lot of time to stop by my local shop lately), AoS has picked up quite a bit. 40K is still by far the game of choice, but AoS is played a good bit.

SG

Doing very well in my area. There are different cliques and comic shops around, and I think as more people get scared off by many of those cliques being hardcore seal-clubbing 40k players, they gravitate to an INCREDIBLY friendly AoS group. They play weekly at two different shops and take over the tables. Real passionate group with lots of painted miniatures all encouraging each other to build and paint.

If anything, I'd say 40k in my area is shrinking while AoS is growing fast.

pretty much still extinct, hoping the fishelves may spark some interest.

The adepticon turnout for AOS was pretty solid.

At the local GW AoS seems to be doing ok but is still far and away second fiddle to 40k. Maybe one in every 3 people who show up looking for pickup games are bringing AoS though between the two tables it's usually two 40k games or one 40k game and one AoS one.

The hobby table has roughly the same ratio, you can be guaranteed to see one person working on 40k but more and more recently you see at least one person there working on AoS

It's generally pretty busy at this store.

This ratio gets shaken up when the store runs leagues. You always had at least one AoS game going on in store during the last couple of leagues but interest drops off afterwards (in my case, I just felt exhausted after it was done) and they're basically running one for both games right now.

Beyond that, the only other FLGS I frequent is near my work, I stop by during my lunch break sometimes and if there's a game going on in the back room it's roughly an even toss up whether it'll be 40k, AoS, or Magic. Less often there's also X-Wing, more often than any of that there's someone in the front playing bloodbowl, sometimes with the owner, or else painting. I don't know how it looks after hours these days but they schedule an X-Wing night, a magic night, etc every week.

Generally speaking I don't think AoS is in big trouble, if it is its certainly not something GW can't pivot to fix relatively easily. More surprising to me I'd that Shadespire took off so well, and Bloodbowl, which was kept alive with leagues run by that independent hobby store, is actually seeing a bit of a revival, they're even playing it in the GW store again.

I have found that Aos suffers from a real problem in that no one is an "AoS player." By that I mean, I have not met anyone who comes off as "oh yeah I play AoS and I have a 40k army or a bolt action army" they are all, "I play 40k and I have an AoS army.". AoS in my area is that game everyone has, but no one really plays it unless someone activly seeks out a game. It's sorta the back burner game. It's really weird.

Finally managed to make it to my FLGS last week on 40k night and just kind of polled the room on what everyone thought of AoS. The responses ranged from "I could bring my old (insert WHFB army here) if you want to play. I've been wanting to try it out" to "New stuff looks really cool, but I can't afford to start a new army right now". When I asked the same question a year ago, the most common response was some form of "I'm just too mad about them destroying the Old World!" I'm still one of the few people who actually plays AoS, but it seems like in my area, interest is growing.

I agree it's growing but it's a massive slow grow. Funny enough old armies I find are way more popular then new stuff

Opposite here. The old armies have been mostly discarded and the players playing are 95% using the new stuff.

It is definitely a slow grow thing, but the AOS population here is now greater than Kings of War and at Adepticon that was definitely the case, so I think in a couple more years we'll be back at the levels of players that we were at when WHFB finished.

with even our local GW not supporting it much, AoS will likely be locally extinct. There are some folks still bringing legacy armies, but the focus on order has not helped, at all and the complete lack of interest in "campaigns" hurts. Bloodbowl does very well, as long as its at GW, otherwise Guildball completely overshadows it.Put a good amount of effort into having an overlord force ready for the "portents" and sat alone with no other players way too many times :( I roll heavy with the arkanaughts but dont use any of the ships, the boys in purple will be all over you like a spider monkey though

 thekingofkings wrote:
with even our local GW not supporting it much, AoS will likely be locally extinct. There are some folks still bringing legacy armies, but the focus on order has not helped, at all and the complete lack of interest in "campaigns" hurts. Bloodbowl does very well, as long as its at GW, otherwise Guildball completely overshadows it.Put a good amount of effort into having an overlord force ready for the "portents" and sat alone with no other players way too many times :( I roll heavy with the arkanaughts but dont use any of the ships, the boys in purple will be all over you like a spider monkey though

This, along with end times, is honestly the biggest crime GW has committed in its fantasy range, is the massive lack of support for anything other then order. You can only fight storm cast with storm cast for so long before you get tired lol

I also think a lot of it has to do with rule sets, AoS needs some work in the rules department badly because even at 2000 points, games never go beyond turn 3, as either one side gets tabled, or the other is so far ahead in points there is no way to catch up, or the other team can not physically win, which is possible in some games that require x amount of models in a unit to stand on an objective.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
This, along with end times, is honestly the biggest crime GW has committed in its fantasy range, is the massive lack of support for anything other then order. You can only fight storm cast with storm cast for so long before you get tired lol

I also think a lot of it has to do with rule sets, AoS needs some work in the rules department badly because even at 2000 points, games never go beyond turn 3, as either one side gets tabled, or the other is so far ahead in points there is no way to catch up, or the other team can not physically win, which is possible in some games that require x amount of models in a unit to stand on an objective.

You’re absolutely right. I’ve come to dislike the rolling for initiative for example. That’s actually cost me a couple of games, because the double turn can be devastating a lot of the time. I’d prefer a roll for first turn, with the army who deployed first getting +1 to the result.

 Future War Cultist wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:
This, along with end times, is honestly the biggest crime GW has committed in its fantasy range, is the massive lack of support for anything other then order. You can only fight storm cast with storm cast for so long before you get tired lol

I also think a lot of it has to do with rule sets, AoS needs some work in the rules department badly because even at 2000 points, games never go beyond turn 3, as either one side gets tabled, or the other is so far ahead in points there is no way to catch up, or the other team can not physically win, which is possible in some games that require x amount of models in a unit to stand on an objective.

You’re absolutely right. I’ve come to dislike the rolling for initiative for example. That’s actually cost me a couple of games, because the double turn can be devastating a lot of the time. I’d prefer a roll for first turn, with the army who deployed first getting +1 to the result.

Oh yeah, the initiative is a horrible HORRIBLE rule, its gotten to the point were we house rule, that you dont roll of initiative on turns one and two. just because for example as a tzeentzch player if i go second and get a double turn, its almost a garunteed win for me at that point. Because by then they have already gotten in range of me and i have deleted at least a fourth if not more of their army with out mine being touched because i dont move in the first turn.