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I remember when it was worth a damn. Imperial Guard, Terminators, Harlequins, and Robots all made their first appearances in WD. There were tons of new units for the variety of game systems, and new mission.

All of that is long since died off. White Dwarf should to.

 jonolikespie wrote:

xruslanx wrote:
well, rest in peace. Even during its golden age it wasn't great.

Wierd that there's so many people talking about how great it used to be. I think hindsight plays wonders on peoples minds, other than the occasional short story there was nothing special there

Actually there was an old issue (from like the early 90s I think) posted here a couple of months ago and it was amazing, it was pure content with every other page having rules or fluff.
compared to the old stuff whatever, who cares but golden age stuff, from what I've seen, was amazing.

I read White Dwarf regularly in, iirc ~2000. Other than the primarch short stories (which were awesome simply because pretty much nothing had been written about them before), I think you're exaggerating. Most of the "content" was stuff that any reasonably bright hobbyist could have come up with himself, but in a magazine. That and experimental rules, which you can kinda get for free now anyway (Forgeworld pdfs).

I do remember the battle reports *always* favoured the new army. While the graphics were pretty cool, there was never any sense of tension or tactical nuance - it was more like a narrative played out with miniatures. Which is cool or a rip-off, depends on your view point.

Whoa there x!

We don't know what GW really wants to happen yet!

Unless you're mistakenly thinking WD is really "dead" and not just "different"?

According to Naftka, one of the two new publications, either the weekly or the monthly one, will retain the White Dwarf name.

Looks like the smart thing to do. The WD brand is a valuable asset in terms of goodwill.

Like a TV show that jumped the shark long ago or a rock band that should have retired while all them members still had hair, this was a long time coming and should have been done earlier. The last WD I picked up was the reboot issue and that was it. After that, there wasn't anything worth the price in it. The conversions were nice and Blanchitsu was interesting, but not worth half the price of the magazine.

If they follow the current paint by numbers instructions and no information conversion pieces, I'll be skipping it as well. Frustrating this is that the recent slate of digital releases all could have been put into WD first to make it worth picking up. GW puts material out that would have made WD worthwhile, but for some reason, they refused to put it in. Instead we go another lame column from Jervis trying to create an excuse from this rule screw-up or that imbalance. At least Vetocks columns were amusing.

As for golden age of WD, everyone has a different period. There are people who swear WD has been crap since it became a GW only mag. My favorite period is colored with nostalgia, but 100's to 140's for me. Rules for Hero Quest, Space Crusade, DIY Bane Blade, initial Realms of Chaos and more.

xruslanx wrote:well, rest in peace. Even during its golden age it wasn't great.

Wierd that there's so many people talking about how great it used to be. I think hindsight plays wonders on peoples minds, other than the occasional short story there was nothing special there

xruslanx wrote:

I read White Dwarf regularly in, iirc ~2000. Other than the primarch short stories (which were awesome simply because pretty much nothing had been written about them before), I think you're exaggerating. Most of the "content" was stuff that any reasonably bright hobbyist could have come up with himself, but in a magazine. That and experimental rules, which you can kinda get for free now anyway (Forgeworld pdfs).

I do remember the battle reports *always* favoured the new army. While the graphics were pretty cool, there was never any sense of tension or tactical nuance - it was more like a narrative played out with miniatures. Which is cool or a rip-off, depends on your view point.

So, you read what, 1, maybe 2 years of a thirty-ish year publication's issues and decided that it was always crap? Makes sense...

~Eric

Quite, I suspect most people who get misty eyed about WD are thinking of an era sometime around the time xruslanx was reading Spot and Roger Red Hat.

As far as i am concerned i am looking forward to the new WD releases, more mags to fill my bookshelving.

Great job GW.

A weekly magazine sounds like a weekly flier of some kind.

If this is true, and it's all trash, that will come close to doing in my hobby for the past 25 years. I looked forward to my WD every month. I have been collecting it on and off since the 80's. I would pick and choose which ones back when because there were other game systems in it. I have the original LOTD article for instance, it was cool. I'll agree that it has been lacking at times. Honestly to stop nay saying, I'll just hide and watch what happens. i will say that I have contemplated being done with it after hearing some of the rumors, thinking my favorite hobby may no longer be fun, just seems to be turning into a money trap.
I'll rest assure, that GW calculating new gamers spending X amount of dollars vs the veteran gamer, I do not meet that standard, I've dumped loads into the hobby, gained more players for them over the years as we all probably have, demonstrated the games for nearly 10 years. etc etc. See I'm whining now... time to stop typing.

 Kelly502 wrote:
If this is true, and it's all trash, that will come close to doing in my hobby for the past 25 years. I looked forward to my WD every month. I have been collecting it on and off since the 80's. I would pick and choose which ones back when because there were other game systems in it. I have the original LOTD article for instance, it was cool. I'll agree that it has been lacking at times. Honestly to stop nay saying, I'll just hide and watch what happens. i will say that I have contemplated being done with it after hearing some of the rumors, thinking my favorite hobby may no longer be fun, just seems to be turning into a money trap.
I'll rest assure, that GW calculating new gamers spending X amount of dollars vs the veteran gamer, I do not meet that standard, I've dumped loads into the hobby, gained more players for them over the years as we all probably have, demonstrated the games for nearly 10 years. etc etc. See I'm whining now... time to stop typing.

My sentiments exactly.

xruslanx wrote:
well, rest in peace. Even during its golden age it wasn't great.

Wierd that there's so many people talking about how great it used to be. I think hindsight plays wonders on peoples minds, other than the occasional short story there was nothing special there

No doubt that there is an element of 'rose tinted spectacles' at play, but I think to claim that there hasn't been variations in the quality of content of the magazine is absolutely not true. It also paints an incorrect version of events for younger readers who think that the current version is 'alright' and worthwhile reading - again this is not the case, and the magazine has been an extremely poor comparison to its earlier form for some years now.

I think it's generally accepted that the 'Giant Issue' 316, 2006, was when the magazine started to degenerate into the advertising catalogue that we have known it as since. And by that I don't mean that it just started to feature pics of new products (the magazine has always done that) but that the number and quality of journalistic gaming articles in the magazine, that which formed the core of it, started to drop off. That started to coincide with the rise of the internet as a medium for releasing new materials, leading to less and less of a reason to pick up the magazine.

If I can find the time I might well make a post about what I think was probably the 'golden age' of the magazine, during the Paul 'fat bloke' Sawyer era. The amount of gaming articles, terrain building, features, stories and everything else. It's true that there wasn't the level of cynicism towards GW back in the early days of the forum communities, but I remember the excitement that was expressed towards new WD issues, and discussion that used to go on about the articles that were present in the magazine. It's been a long, long time since that has been the case.

I think it's impossible to ignore the symbolism of finally removing the marque of 'White Dwarf' from Games Workshops releases.. really the two names are synonymous with each other. I can only imagine that sales of it have been drastically poor (especially after the 're-launch') for them to have done away with the name altogether. The magazine has been a shell of its former self for more than half a decade now, but I think for a lot of the people who have been around for a while, it's going to really mark the end of an era and a final cutting off from how the company once was, and what it once represented.

 Pacific wrote:
I think it's impossible to ignore the symbolism of finally removing the marque of 'White Dwarf' from Games Workshops releases.. really the two names are synonymous with each other. I can only imagine that sales of it have been drastically poor (especially after the 're-launch') for them to have done away with the name altogether. The magazine has been a shell of its former self for more than half a decade now, but I think for a lot of the people who have been around for a while, it's going to really mark the end of an era and a final cutting off from how the company once was, and what it once represented.

The sad part is that they never seemed to understand why the magazine was so disliked, or never sought out reasons why it might be failing. I mean I know GW hates the Internet, but a cursory glance at what's popular on the Internet might've told them that 50 pages of "New Releases" isn't what we're looking for.

Back during the Paul Sawyer era, White Dwarf gave you free copies of the in development rules for games like Battlefleet Gothic and Mordheim. It had interesting strategy articles for games like Epic. It had rules, flavour text and conversion ideas for new addons. It had walkthroughs for building terrain.

In other words, it was good.

I am actually quite excited by the prospect of this, and the idea behind revamping their magazine in to two new ones. I have been in this hobby for just under a year, but have never bothered buying a WD. I like the idea of it, but the content just never felt worth the coin.

They also ran contests. Like when the Last Chancers were released, they ran some nice articles and gave away boxed sets of the Last Chancers if you could answer the following question: "Where is Donald Duck?"

 alanmckenzie wrote:

prankster wrote:

 Warboss Hazrat wrote:
Strange thing is, I never got a subscription, until 5 minutes ago, when I realised that if I am going to buy the monthly magazine for whatever inflated price, I might as well get my 12 month subscription in now while it "only" costs £55.

Reading this, and the fact that I was considering doing the same thing (we've been thinking about subscribing anyway) makes me wonder whether this is part of the idea behind the change as well. Hype it for a little while, get people to snap subscribe before the new publication is launched. Makes the numbers look better for Q4 in the likely lull after Christmas.

Also just considering this. What do we think? Bit of a gamble for me, who would never consider a subscription in wd's current format.

It is a bit of a gamble, given what little we know about this at present. Worst case scenario, this is all bull gak and you end up with a 12 month subscription to the mag in it's current incarnation. Which isn't a massively bad thing, sure WD isn't what it was but it's still something to pass a bit of time with. The other possibility is that the new magazine is absolutely dire, though if that is the case I'm sure a conversation with GW's customer service regarding bait and switch and so forth would get you at least something back.

 alanmckenzie wrote:

 pretre wrote:
What's the usual price of a physical WD in pounds?

£5.50


Automatically Appended Next Post:
So, they're still selling 12month subscriptions for £55. £44 if you collect in store. If it really is going to £7.50 per monthly issue, these subscriptions seem like a bit of a deal, no?

Only if it's worth reading and committing to a 12 month subscription without having seen it first. Plenty of folk seem to have been burnt with subscriptions from the last revamp.

 jonolikespie wrote:

xruslanx wrote:
well, rest in peace. Even during its golden age it wasn't great.

Wierd that there's so many people talking about how great it used to be. I think hindsight plays wonders on peoples minds, other than the occasional short story there was nothing special there

Actually there was an old issue (from like the early 90s I think) posted here a couple of months ago and it was amazing, it was pure content with every other page having rules or fluff.
compared to the old stuff whatever, who cares but golden age stuff, from what I've seen, was amazing.

Compared to current ones some of the old editions were great; I remember one came with plans to scratchbuild Ork tanks (as in pages you can photocopy onto card, cut out and glue together), and one came with a few pages of new Space Hulk tiles, rules for a bar brawl fantasy game, and one came with a card stock jousting game. Then there's plenty of them came with actual new content, be it fiction, fluff or rules. There definitely was a golden age though there's debate as to when it actually was. In any case there's no way you can argue that it is better now than it was 5/10/15/20 years ago.

It's not even rose tinted glasses, I've got the jousting issue sitting on my desk at home, and I've looked at some older issues recently and the difference in content is obvious.

I've got White Dwarf magazines from circa 2003 and 2004, when I first started wargaming with LOTR, and a handful from 2012 and 2013.

Theres no doubt about it, on a direct comparison White Dwarf had better quality content 10 years ago than it does today. "Rose tinted spectacles" have nothing to do with it.

 BrookM wrote:
They also ran contests. Like when the Last Chancers were released, they ran some nice articles and gave away boxed sets of the Last Chancers if you could answer the following question: "Where is Donald Duck?"

Never got that joke when I was younger. Dirty Dozen reference isn't it?

I started reading around nr. 127 at that time, rogue trader was turning into the 40k we know and ***** lot's of background, new rules, 'eavy metal, good battle reports and so on. yes it was better then.

I admit that I only subscribed from the mid 90s (Necromunda launch issue) to the mid-2000s, and I definitely felt the quality slipping a few times, but to me the magazine was always quite good as long as you were actually already sold on the company's products. Because then you had things like:

- Free models. Launching a new product line? Give 'em a few plastic (even occasionally metal) models to drum up interest.
- Mini expansions/stand alone games. New tiles for Space Hulk/Warhammer Quest. Little experimental bar-fighting games.
- Scenery/magic items/wargear - anything that could be glued on the back of a cereal packet.
- Scenarios for either the wargames or stand-alone games.
- Painting tutorials - often on really specific topics ("Blood stippling", "Horse dappling").
- Showcases of particularly amazing paint jobs and conversions - either from GW or from fans.
- Competitions - often with a surprising amount of generosity.
- Battle reports that went on for pages and pages, and told you almost nothing about the rules. They may have been more scripted than the average wrestling match, but did a huge job in selling how dramatic a tabletop game could be - Necromunda was a favourite.

It also gave a face (and sometimes even a personality) to the people behind the things I loved - which means that years later, I still follow the careers of people like Mike McVey, Jake Thornton and Rick Priestley with interest.

To me, the thing that killed my interest was removing anything not related to their core wargames, as these were by far the least interesting of their products, and were the hardest to actually get a game going of. And the mag started getting slimmer and slimmer, with more and more ad pages...

 AlexHolker wrote:
Back during the Paul Sawyer era, White Dwarf gave you free copies of the in development rules for games like Battlefleet Gothic and Mordheim. It had interesting strategy articles for games like Epic. It had rules, flavour text and conversion ideas for new addons. It had walkthroughs for building terrain.

In other words, it was good.

Paul Sawyer's time as editor was really the second golden age of WD, after the Rogue Trader/WFB3/Realm of Chaos-rich early issues. (not to mention rules for Blood Bowl, Dark Future, and all of the side games)...

 Grimtuff wrote:

 BrookM wrote:
They also ran contests. Like when the Last Chancers were released, they ran some nice articles and gave away boxed sets of the Last Chancers if you could answer the following question: "Where is Donald Duck?"

Never got that joke when I was younger. Dirty Dozen reference isn't it?

Yeah. They're planning the attack on the mansion and using props to plan out who's going to be where. IIRC the guy represented by a Donald figure is meant to be down at the crossroad with a machine gun.


I stopped reading WD at 310-ish. What was this WD reboot anyway?

Avian wrote:
What was this WD reboot anyway?

I think most of us are still asking that question.

What I can tell is that we suddenly got the first 50 pages dedicated to that month's new releases, and the majority of the magazine became nothing but big (and often badly lit) photographs, and then small bits of text telling us what was in the photographs. Total waste of ink.

Bioptic wrote:
Because then you had things like:

- Free models. Launching a new product line? Give 'em a few plastic (even occasionally metal) models to drum up interest.
- Mini expansions/stand alone games. New tiles for Space Hulk/Warhammer Quest. Little experimental bar-fighting games.
- Scenery/magic items/wargear - anything that could be glued on the back of a cereal packet.
- Scenarios for either the wargames or stand-alone games.
- Painting tutorials - often on really specific topics ("Blood stippling", "Horse dappling").
- Showcases of particularly amazing paint jobs and conversions - either from GW or from fans.
- Competitions - often with a surprising amount of generosity.
- Battle reports that went on for pages and pages, and told you almost nothing about the rules. They may have been more scripted than the average wrestling match, but did a huge job in selling how dramatic a tabletop game could be - Necromunda was a favourite.

And fluff article. The best part imho. There are no more fluff articles anymore, are there ?

Picked up my first WD in '94, the magazine was great then.

That's such a long time ago...

 snurl wrote:

 Kelly502 wrote:
If this is true, and it's all trash, that will come close to doing in my hobby for the past 25 years. I looked forward to my WD every month. I have been collecting it on and off since the 80's. I would pick and choose which ones back when because there were other game systems in it. I have the original LOTD article for instance, it was cool. I'll agree that it has been lacking at times. Honestly to stop nay saying, I'll just hide and watch what happens. i will say that I have contemplated being done with it after hearing some of the rumors, thinking my favorite hobby may no longer be fun, just seems to be turning into a money trap.
I'll rest assure, that GW calculating new gamers spending X amount of dollars vs the veteran gamer, I do not meet that standard, I've dumped loads into the hobby, gained more players for them over the years as we all probably have, demonstrated the games for nearly 10 years. etc etc. See I'm whining now... time to stop typing.

My sentiments exactly.

Yep... That's just about my sentiments to a tee...

Valete,

JohnS

TechMarine1 wrote:
Okay, how do they expect to be able to dedicate an entire magazine to Warhammer?

They're having difficulty filling the magazine with stuff worth reading as is, so how are they going to manage a weekly comic book sized magazine (if it is that)?

The only reason that they have trouble filling the magazine right now is that every article actually worth reading they release as a separate paid download instead. If the painting guides, black library novellas, apocalypse formation sheets and all the other stuff they released every day last month was actually in WD it might be worth buying.

I guess the damp squib relaunch didn't have the effect they were hoping for. More change to WD can't be a bad thing, at worst it won't make it any better (most likely won't make it any better) but the current thing they've got going on is pretty pointless and clearly doesn't have an audience.