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Since I think I was taking a break from the hobby at the point that the eye of terror campaign was held, could
some of you older gamers please enlighten me as to what happened during that campaign, I am
aware that the Cadian gate pretty much fell to the dark forces, and that games workshop has pretty much frozen the
timeline just before it falls(see 6th edition rule book time line).

But apart from this and apparently a green kroosade that ork players held against
the Imperium during the campaign I actually know very little, I get the feeling that
a lot of what went on got swept under a rug somewhere.

Any light shed on the matter would be greatly appreciated

Cheers
Skarnir

See:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/574326.page

and Psienesis's summary

Psienesis wrote:
The Pylons were destroyed, the Eye of Terror was wide open, with Chaos fleets flying out of it every which way. The tactical value of Cadia was gone, so what happens on Cadia after that point is, frankly, irrelevant.

Also, from the reports the IoM did not control the space immediately around Cadia, it controlled the in-system space. Whether they had the power to take on the Chaos Fleet around Cadia, when a bunch of other Chaos Fleets were busy doing their thing in the rest of the Imperium is something we'll never know.

In the end, Team Disorder played a much better, much smarter game than Team Order (especially the Imperial armies) and figured out how to win much faster. As a result, they won.

Here's how it went:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/392010.page

And the official word:
http://redelf.narod.ru/w40k/eyeofterror/death_by_thousand_cuts.html

My recollection is that while Chaos held the ground strongly on Cadia itself, the Imperium controlled the space-ways.

IIRC there was a lot of false reports and ballot-box stuffing, so a lot of the “results” were a little fuzzy. Evil won, but as you say, everything kinda got swept under the rug and ignored.

To be honest, I forget a lot of the details.

No one side stuffed more ballot-boxes than the other, if even this happened at all (and I find the anecdotal reports of it happening fairly suspect), so in the end balances itself out. Moreso, reading the synopsis linked to above, you can see that if there was ballot-stuffing going on, it did not matter, as that was not what was winning sectors for people.

Put bluntly, Team Order could not get their gak together and got wtfspanked by Team Disorder for a pretty lengthy time, and by the time Team Order did get its gak together, they had already lost half the galaxy.

GW realized Chaos had achieved a victory and quickly swept the whole thing under the rug, can't be having the Imperium look bad

The campaign ran for eight weeks, in which more than 40,000 players registered to submit over a quarter of a million games results to the campaign website. The conclusion of the campaign resulted in a minor victory for Chaos. The line was held in many places but on the strategic level the Disorder players were considered to have consistently out-fought and out-maneuvered their opponents, and held over half of Cadia itself. The Forces of Chaos made slow but somewhat steady progress on many fronts, yet could not claim a decisive victory, especially when a "backstage" plan to gain a foothold in the Eldar Webway system turned into a complete and total failure. In addition, Abaddon suffered severe losses to his fleet in the Crusade, which allowed the forces of Order to bottle up the Chaotics on Cadia itself, preventing them from launching a full invasion of the Imperium.

Tau Empire grew in size by 33% (Eye of Terror for the Tau was the 3rd sphere exspansion, as the tau are nowhere near the EOT)

thats it

While it would have been good to see those changes come to the fluff. It's a bit too much of a pivotal battle to have played out in terms of the impact on the setting.

I think most people realise that Cadia is doomed.

No, Chaos is not stuck on Cadia they are running amuck in Segmentum Obscuras. The results became convoluted when a group of butthurt Imperial Players published a differant ending on Warhammer 40K Wikia.

And don't forget eldar players beating chaos players 5/3 in Their special warzone and getting Eldrad killed and Ahriman buffed for their efforts. The BS of that decision is why Eldrad has been retconned back into the land of the living.

The 3.5 chaos dex was like Whoa broken too

 Silverthorne wrote:
And don't forget eldar players beating chaos players 5/3 in Their special warzone and getting Eldrad killed and Ahriman buffed for their efforts. The BS of that decision is why Eldrad has been retconned back into the land of the living.

The 3.5 chaos dex was like Whoa broken too

Yeah killing off Eldrad was stupid, made even moreso by the decision to bring him back, pretty much cemented the "Setting not a Story" mantra in one fell swoop, and Chaos has paid for 3.5 in basically every edition they've had since.

The BS of that decision is why Eldrad has been retconned back into the land of the living.

Well, not quite.

The reason he's back is because none of the events of the EoT campaign actually went into 6th ed. The game's setting is now at the beginning of the 13th Black Crusade, rather than at its end, so nothing that happened during it matters.

 Psienesis wrote:

The BS of that decision is why Eldrad has been retconned back into the land of the living.

Well, not quite.

The reason he's back is because none of the events of the EoT campaign actually went into 6th ed. The game's setting is now at the beginning of the 13th Black Crusade, rather than at its end, so nothing that happened during it matters.

The third phase expansion of the Tau from the EoT campaign seems to be cannon.

Which was already under way at the outset. It's not like the Tau were like "Holy sh*t! There's a huge-ass war on! Quick, Martha, grab the kids! We're colonizing Tahiti!"

2x210 wrote:
GW realized Chaos had achieved a victory and quickly swept the whole thing under the rug, can't be having the Imperium look bad

There's the truth of it. Chaos was pounding hell outta the bad guys when they won...er nothing.

At least my mighty Zinc Warriors danced on many a marine helmet. Zinc Within! Zinc Without!

 Frazzled wrote:

2x210 wrote:
GW realized Chaos had achieved a victory and quickly swept the whole thing under the rug, can't be having the Imperium look bad

There's the truth of it. Chaos was pounding hell outta the bad guys when they won...er nothing.

At least my mighty Zinc Warriors danced on many a marine helmet. Zinc Within! Zinc Without!

Heh, take a lot of supplements do they?

 Flinty wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:

2x210 wrote:
GW realized Chaos had achieved a victory and quickly swept the whole thing under the rug, can't be having the Imperium look bad

There's the truth of it. Chaos was pounding hell outta the bad guys when they won...er nothing.

At least my mighty Zinc Warriors danced on many a marine helmet. Zinc Within! Zinc Without!

Heh, take a lot of supplements do they?

Oh the the Puns Yeah the forces of Disorder Turned the Forces of Order into chunky Salsa and GW rectoned it

Despite the angst and relative "rose tinted glasses effect", does anyone else look back on this with fondness and think, for GW, another version of it, would be a great way to re-engage the community?

Or am I drunk?

Binary will dictate:1 or 0

Well, yes and no.

It is a good way to engage with people currently playing, but if you're going to write the next edition of your product on its results, you need to be prepared for things to not go the way you anticipate, and have the intestinal fortitude to accept those results and go forward with them.

Otherwise, it makes you appear to be either a) a liar or b) spineless and weak.

If the EoT had gone differently, for example, the Tau might have gotten their asses kicked across space. What if, for sake of argument, 50000 battle-reports were Tau vs Imperium, with 45000 of them being crushing victories for the Imperium?

Would that have changed the way Codex: Tau ended up being written for 6th ed? In the end, probably not, in all honesty, but it still would make people question why GW even said that EOT would affect the direction of the setting in the first place.

 Psienesis wrote:

If the EoT had gone differently, for example, the Tau might have gotten their asses kicked across space. What if, for sake of argument, 50000 battle-reports were Tau vs Imperium, with 45000 of them being crushing victories for the Imperium?

Would that have changed the way Codex: Tau ended up being written for 6th ed? In the end, probably not, in all honesty, but it still would make people question why GW even said that EOT would affect the direction of the setting in the first place.

If hypothetically those results had happened, it could easily have been written that instead of expanding, the Tau Empire would have stalled or even shrunk in size. Shocked by the sudden increase in resistance and the scale of defeats suffered, the Ethereals press the Earth Caste for new improved weaponry to turn the tide. The Water Caste may double their spin and propaganda or clamp down on information to shore up the Greater Good ideology. Those Tau exposed to these defeats either start questioning the Ethereal leadership, perhaps defect to Farsight, or bend to their tasks with renewed determination that their efforts will be sufficient to overcome any temporary setback.

It was quite clear from the beginning that the Tau would not be wiped out as a faction, but such hypothetical results could have easily been incorporated to show a shock to their youthful ideology and the resulting disillusionment or the stubbornness in the face of 40K reality. It was equally clear from the beginning that the Imperium would not collapse even if Chaos hypothetically swept all warzones (which they did not), just that things would look even grimmer. So the apologist claims by some that no change could occur at the risk of collapsing the Imperim are overblown.

The thing with such campaigns, just as with any individual game, is that there should be no "anticipated result", no "right path". If one side loses, so be it, incorporate that into the subsequent writing. Anything else is rigging the results. GW's inability to follow through on their promises of change (which were made in writing in WD) was very disappointing considering how many good stories and future story hooks came out of that campaign's results.

The reason he's back is because none of the events of the EoT campaign actually went into 6th ed. The game's setting is now at the beginning of the 13th Black Crusade, rather than at its end, so nothing that happened during it matters.

So what their doing a redo?

the problem with the EOT campaign was it was too... ambitious, IMHO. GW literally set up a terriably important campaign, literally "do or die" for the IoM, and then basicly rolled dice.

Thing is those do or die moments are great for story writing, but the thing is, when you're literally gambling your game setting on the outcome you're doing it wrong. because when you tell a story like that you proably want to have some control over the ending. better events would be planetary or sector wide campaigns. that are signfcigent. and will be mentioned, along with the results in plenty of future books. but that aren't going to bork your setting and it's critical narritive if the outcome goes a certin way.

It was absolutely tremendous fun, one of my best 40k memories. A few highlights, although this is getting on a bit now so memory is a bit fuzzy
- My over-riding memory is that while the FOD (forces of disorder) seemed to be fairly organised, to an extent, the FOO (Forces of Order) seemed to be a room full of people shouting all over the top of each other. Most hilarious thing of this was when you had two different groups who had given themselves the same acronym (I can't remember what, something massively pompous-sounding) and both were trying to give conflicting orders.
- There was talk afterwards that the FOD had deliberately sent spies to disrupt and mislead the FOO players, although to be honest it was that disorganised from what I remember that it couldn't have made much difference. If it was true though I think massively cool!
- What difference did all of this make? It was to do with application of victories. In certain areas you had to have a ridiculous amount of wins to make any difference to percentage control. A FOD group called 'The Triad' apparently worked out the maths that GW was using and started to direct FOD players on that basis. FOO continued to pump wins into the Cadian core system to no effect.
- I seem to remember only the Eldar players didn't seem like a pack of howling animals on the FOO side, successfully directing their forces to make a difference.

Saddest thing was how a few 'characters' on the FOO side continued to maintain they had got a draw, but I think most who played FOO (including me!) knew that this patently wasn't the case. Think the only advantage the FOO had was in space control, but a lot of the world control fell to FOD. TBH I'm not surprised that GW didn't advance the storyline and destroy Cadia, even then the game universe had solidified and there was no way that they were going to stop sculpting and selling one of their most popular ranges!

And now, people going onto the Wiki page to change it? Wow.. seriously that is so sad, you want to ask them if they have ever kissed a girl..!

 Ratius wrote:
Despite the angst and relative "rose tinted glasses effect", does anyone else look back on this with fondness and think, for GW, another version of it, would be a great way to re-engage the community?

That was from a different age, different people running the company and a different GW. Sadly, there is about as much chance of something like this happening again as there would be of me becoming Pope! Which is a terrible shame, I think most people who took part in it remember it very fondly.

Please refresh your memories at the following:

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/574326.page

http://web.archive.org/web/20031015103118/http://hipcat.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/index.htm

The former is my unedited recap of the campaign results as taken from GW WD. The latter is the archived day by day site run during the campaign with day to day tracking of the results as they occurred during the campaign.