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Troll1 wrote:
I understand your reluctance to support the eye but it's a shame to see it close which it surly will if it dosnt get support

They should have thought of that when they were not answering the phone and trying to sell me stuff they didn't have.

If EotS goes down it will be because they have lost the trust of the wargaming public.

I will not support any Maelstrom spinoff until I get the money I spent back (or the models I ordered). Even if I do (it's subject to a claim as we speak), I'd still not order anything from EotS themselves until something is done for the many, many people Maelstrom screwed in their final days.

Never would I support maelstrom or their new company again. To many burnt bridges. They were great a few years back, but recent events have left a sour taste in my mouth. I didnt lose much money (only a few paints were purchased and never received) - but that is enough generally in my book to never shop again.

But reading through this thread, it is amazing to see the terrible experiences most had. This is all the customer review most people need.

Troll1 wrote:
So you think been self centered isnt a bad thing your perents should be so proud

As for bigger rivals taking over smaller ones true that's life
My point is 53 pages of seeing people winging over a few lost pounds
where I've not seen one post of how this effects the people that relied on them for a income

And yes the fault lies with the people in charge both at maelstrom and wayland to who this hobby is nothing but money
As for bad troll whatever

Some people lost hundreds of pounds. That's more than I'd be willing to spend on the hobby over a couple months. Please go back to your cave, troll.

Troll1 wrote:
I love seeing the comments on here
I'm sorry for the people that got stung by maelstroms demise
But I don't see anyone thinking about the people that worked for mg
Since wayland games brought the debt that caused all this
Adam lad in shop gone
Warehouse down to two staff
Bar staff down by two
Events team of 1
By my reasoning that's about between 8 and 12 out of work this side of Xmas

You may of noticed I've not mentioned Gary Moore
Who had to leave. Maelstrom because of been a sex pest to the young female members of staff
And been a bully to the young lads who worked there .

This is the main reason in my opinion most of you have suffered
1 whilst Gary ran events at mg they never made a profit
Which slowly began to build a debt

2 Gary advice was the cause of the battlefront And gw

3 strange Gary left mg then appeared at wayland and somehow they get wind of robs debt
I wonder
4 then wayland buy the debt. Before rob could pay it off and put boot in Hoping to get eye of the storm

I can understand people been unhappy about losing there money hopefully you can get it back from bank or paypal

But the long term effect of this has on the uk gaming scene could be more than just a e stores demise
especially as wayland games haven't made there intentioned clear
Are they planning to take over or close

Worst possible effect
Possibly the best events location in uk will close or get took over by wayland
If this happens
Back to the days of holding events in sports halls or similar places
Competition for places at other gaming centers will become higher
If wg get it prices may rise

Best hope is some of us take a chance on eots buy tickets for events
Try a order or two using safe method of payment

Some info from either rob at maelstrom or a spokesmen for wayland would be nice

Did anyone else read this in beat poet spoken verse style?

Bossk_Hogg wrote:Did anyone else read this in beat poet spoken verse style?

I did! I dunno, it just kinda lends itself to that.

I'm surprised by the number of people responding to a new user posting solely inflammatory comments on this thread who goes by the name of 'Troll1.' Is this a hiding in plain sight type of thing?

 htj wrote:


I'm surprised by the number of people responding to a new user posting solely inflammatory comments on this thread who goes by the name of 'Troll1.' Is this a hiding in plain sight type of thing?

I was going to post "Obvious Troll is Obvious" after his first post, but I thought 'nahh, surely people we figure it out.' Guess not.

 Dawnbringer wrote:

 htj wrote:


I'm surprised by the number of people responding to a new user posting solely inflammatory comments on this thread who goes by the name of 'Troll1.' Is this a hiding in plain sight type of thing?

I was going to post "Obvious Troll is Obvious" after his first post, but I thought 'nahh, surely people we figure it out.' Guess not.

I already said that haha

I just figured it was somebody who worked for Maelstrom at some point in the past, and hates Wayland. It's either that, or he's definitely a troll. I'm sure the MODs will get sick of him eventually and sack him.

Well if it came over that I hate wayland I sorry I've never had any dealings with them
I know a lot of the staff who work/ worked at mg Ive seen what they've gone though these last few months many have lost a lot more then any one customer
It would be nice if at some point all the dirty little secrets came out
I would of liked to see rob lane explain himself and his action and why he's done the things he's done

Also I would of liked to hear something from wayland to explain there plans for the eots

Yeah sucks for the staff, also sucks for the people out over £100K because of someone's shadiness.

 notprop wrote:

 SoulDrinker wrote:
Wayland are the one's who bought the big debt so in theory they should be able to let us have a timescale for any court dates / appointment of administrators. I'm just wondering how long we have to wait before anything real happens.......

You have a year or so to wait before an administration is fully resolved, though there might be so correspondence between now and then to creditors and debtors.

When that time is up you will find that the administrator will take their not inconsiderable fee followed by the HMRC then the big debts (Simple/WG @ £100k out of £500k so there are other biggies - GW?) finally the customers will get their turn to divvy up the last pot. The last pot will probably be £0. Also looking at the way the assets have been transferred out there probably wont be much/anything for the bigger debts.

The best and most sensible recourse is through a credit card provider (it's why we pay the fees!) and/or PayPal.

HMRC are no longer preferential creditors they will get the same pennies in the pound as everyone else. Every other debt will be settled at the same rate as well, except for of course the administrators.

Why are HRMC no longer potential creditors? Have they decided no tax was owed?

Herzlos wrote:
Why are HRMC no longer potential creditors? Have they decided no tax was owed?

They are potential, but they are not preferential. They get no special treatment and will get the same pennies on the dollar as all other creditors.

My bad. I thought HRMC always came first though?

Herzlos wrote:
My bad. I thought HRMC always came first though?

You're right but out of date....They were automatically a prefered creditor up to 2003 when the law changed

now they are (usually) in the same position as other unsecured creditors

(which is a good thing as there is less insentive for them to trigger insolvency in a company that might trade their way out of trouble, but has a large outstanding tax bill)

Tim Fisher (Mierce Minatures) ex- MG gave an insight on the view within Maelstrom over at the Beatmen Forum, The Herdstone - in response to a comment from one of our locals.

I've reproduced his response over on my blog (url in sig) if you want to read the whole thing - very long.

Upshot is/was that Mierce and Rob Lane have acted with no malice.

Not sure I'm drinking that kool-aid but it is interesting to get a counter-viewpoint.

plc

PLC

all well and good repeating and posting an interview with someone but no one has asked them any hard questions.

Obviously I am an interested party. But claiming the transaction was all above board I think is something we will leave for the Administrators to investigate especially as oh a day before it went through the assets for the miniatures range were specifically valued at over £130k. So either the value was underplayed in the transaction or the accounts were false.

We have so much negative information and evidence of odd activities that we will demand are investigated that when the administrators report is issued it will be very interesting.

As discussed in N&R earlier today I'd be quite interested to read what the administrators have to say on that sale as well.
However, if they had that line valued at £130k they were using it as a trick to make the company look more solvent. Sorry, but the BL/BL line was not anywhere near that valuable and anyone buying it at anywhere near that price would have been deeply out of pocket on it even years later, with all the luck in the world on sales and development. it's a nice line, but £130k is just way too much.

This is a worrying bit.

"GW will soon be bringing in a new addition to their T&Cs. Retailers will be limited to selling £75k of GW product a year. By comparison that's roughly the amount MG would order from GW in two weeks. Yup, two weeks and GW was roughly 50-55% of MGs turnover."

It sounds like just the right amount of pants on head stupidity from GW to sound true.

 Compel wrote:
This is a worrying bit.

"GW will soon be bringing in a new addition to their T&Cs. Retailers will be limited to selling £75k of GW product a year. By comparison that's roughly the amount MG would order from GW in two weeks. Yup, two weeks and GW was roughly 50-55% of MGs turnover."

It sounds like just the right amount of pants on head stupidity from GW to sound true.

I wouldn't worry. I think this came from an ill informed misunderstanding of GW's current terms to claim that processing orders over £75,000 can take longer to deliver than smaller orders to an indy.

It is very difficult to limit sales volumes in the EU, by difficult I mean not going to happen whilst GW are also competing with those they supply.

They would be within their rights to do so if they chose to only sell into retail, not distribution from now on, I believe. Otherwise, they'd be having a ball with the EC indeed
The US might be a different story - but there they basically depend on 3rd party distributors for the majority of sales, I believe.
In short: EU: not bloody likely, US: not bloody likely

 Compel wrote:
This is a worrying bit.

"GW will soon be bringing in a new addition to their T&Cs. Retailers will be limited to selling £75k of GW product a year. By comparison that's roughly the amount MG would order from GW in two weeks. Yup, two weeks and GW was roughly 50-55% of MGs turnover."

It sounds like just the right amount of pants on head stupidity from GW to sound true.

As others have said I don’t buy this – sounds to me like someone has misunderstood something GW have said. Besides anything else I’m reasonably sure that it would be against EU freedom of trade laws, though not being a legal expert I’m prepared to admit I may be wrong on that.

What I think may be more likely is that they have said something like for a year we can only garantee £75k of product a week/month, which could well just be a desire to ensure even small retailers get stock and may be an attempt to increase the quality of finecast – afterall less stock selling means they can take more time over quality production. No idea if that is true, but sounds much more likely than GW simply deciding to stop selling things to their biggest customers.



Automatically Appended Next Post:
A couple of other points that I find interesting in the article.

I don’t know the company structure of either MG or Mierce but from what is said it sounds like, even though they are separate entities, Rob Lane is still the chief of both. Obviously if no money was invested from MG into Mierce then there is nothing wrong with that, but if cash was funnelled from MG to Mierce in the build up to the problems then that is underhand, I’m not saying it was but I’ve seen it happen before.

GW cutting off international sales will have hit MG hard – this was a given, it reads like the guy is saying Rob Lane is a victim of GW in this, but that just isn’t the case. Any business is just that, a business, if Rob Lane wasn’t prepared to cut costs to fit in with his lost business then he shouldn’t have been in business in the first place. It’s unfortunate, but if he was still paying 20 staff but only processing half the orders then he was a bad business manager – what did the staff do all day?

Mierce have been shipping orders out of their own pocket, something they do not have to do. I’m not aware of anyone complaining directly about Mierce but if they are then this is unfair. The only possible thing that could be complained about here is the possibility of cash being transferred to the company from MG, and again at the moment there is no evidence that that happened.

However the biggest thing he is wrong about is his defence of Rob Lane, he claims he didn’t rip anyone off and was just trying to get his business back in order – that the debt was being repaid. What he fails to mention is that he was taking orders he knew he could not fulfil, that the debt was being repaid from the money customers gave him that should have been being used to purchase the goods they ordered from the suppliers. Maybe Rob Lane didn’t do this maliciously, maybe it was an honest attempt to get himself out of some serious trouble that went badly wrong – but the fact is, whether it was malicious or not, he did rip a lot of people off as he charged them for items and didn't even bother to order the items from the supplier.

Is it proven that a former Maelstrom employee is a sex pest / bully? If not is it wise to leave those posts up?

Stranger83 wrote:

What I think may be more likely is that they have said something like for a year we can only garantee £75k of product a week/month, which could well just be a desire to ensure even small retailers get stock and may be an attempt to increase the quality of finecast – afterall less stock selling means they can take more time over quality production. No idea if that is true, but sounds much more likely than GW simply deciding to stop selling things to their biggest customers.

More likely I would guess that large orders are sloower because the constraints of the warehouse meen that they neet to be handled in a diffrent way. Possibly moving from boxing to palatisation, which given that GWs mostly set up to serve there own shops who all have box diliverys, may take time to do.

That statement is very interesting the first half is more convincing than anything malestrom has out. The second half however smacks of skewed perspective presenting a MG that was eating itself from the inside as compassionate rather than mismanaged, MG didn't die due to a short term liquidity problem it died due to massive debt.

We Mierce guys always wanted to be separate from MG as we wanted to be independent of any retailer

Finally, many months before MG went belly up we paid an amount to MG for the range that was valued by an independent, professional valuer.

Mierce's future remains very much under Rob's stewardship

And Rob struggles to pay his mortgage every month and feed his missus and kids like the rest of us. There's no throne of gold that he's cackling atop

Something doesn't sound right in here but I have no more lunch time to pick something out. Rob bought or was part of a group that bought Mierce despite having a large staff massivley lowered income (200k debt on Mg at years end) and no "throne of gold". Whoever gave him credit must have balls of steel if not tungsten.

That is an interesting perspective from one side of the coin, shame it doesn't cover how they (MG) were never going to clear their debts, why they were taking people's cash even though they know they couldn't get stock anymore, why it was necessary to split off the two profitable companies from the debtor company (MG) and why a greater amount (from the 10's of thousands allegedly paid for Mierce) was never used to clear some of the debts.

To me it all sounds like there may be a bit of cut and pasting going on on the old accounts! It's obviously a shameless attempt to wriggle out from under the collapse of Maelstrom. Makes sense if the new companies are to survive but it's quite offensive to those of us who have lost out.

And it doesn't cover at all the lies about the warehouse move... how many months was that supposedly going on?

rigeld2 wrote:
And it doesn't cover at all the lies about the warehouse move... how many months was that supposedly going on?

It has been going on for to long.

Anyway, my bank and Paypal can't help me anymore.
Let's hope we get our miniatures or money sometime :(

I received parts of my order I made with Maelstrom during the warehouse-move sales (I only ordered Darklands items). So they appear to honour some part at least. Now I am hoping that I will get the rest of the order, too.