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Everyone on dakka is trained to hate dakka. It trafics in hate.

Hate is it's medium for communication.

 Glaiceana wrote:
As mostly everyone has explained, its clear why some GW employees wouldn't like this site.
However, I wonder what would happen if GW opened a forum section on their official site? I mean since we have already stated that they don't have a facebook page, maybe its true that they don't want to allow too much interaction with the customers on the internet due to the fact that there will be a lot of hate and demands etc...

GW used to have their own forum.

The moderators were volunteers. They were very good, IMO, though of course they had to follow the company rules, one of which was to lock any thread that mentioned Squats.

There was a pretty low signal to noise ratio partly because lots of the members were very young new recruits. There was good stuff too, and lots of complaining about prices and arguing about the rules, much like here.

But in the end they decided to remove it?

Yes. I don't know why. I suspect it was largely a cost decision.

After ten years of service you become a Ten Year Veteran. At this time you will receive
personalised Games Workshop gifts including an invitation to the exclusive Veteran’s
black tie dinner.

Would be interesting to know if anyone actually gets to ten years. I suppose it might be some of the design staff, although even then that's probably a push. Shop staff (those that haven't been made redundant) have an average life expectancy of 6-12 months. Although it's probably less these days due to the strain the staff will be under.

From the GW handbook:

Games Workshop employees must not become involved in postings or discussions about
the ‘business of Games Workshop’. This includes, but is not limited to, any discussion of our
product prices, release plans, retail, trade and mail order development and location of
stores via Blogs, Instant Messaging, Forums or Social Networking sites.

That seems pretty straight forward to me

 Pacific wrote:

After ten years of service you become a Ten Year Veteran. At this time you will receive
personalised Games Workshop gifts including an invitation to the exclusive Veteran’s
black tie dinner.

Would be interesting to know if anyone actually gets to ten years. I suppose it might be some of the design staff, although even then that's probably a push. Shop staff (those that haven't been made redundant) have an average life expectancy of 6-12 months. Although it's probably less these days due to the strain the staff will be under.

A friend of mine did. He got a leather jacket with an embossed imperial eagle on it and had a big dinner thing at GW HQ.

 swampyturtle wrote:
From the GW handbook:

Games Workshop employees must not become involved in postings or discussions about
the ‘business of Games Workshop’. This includes, but is not limited to, any discussion of our
product prices, release plans, retail, trade and mail order development and location of
stores via Blogs, Instant Messaging, Forums or Social Networking sites.

That seems pretty straight forward to me

You're not even allowed to reference it or refer people to the internet. I nearly got canned for that once.

GW cant handle the internet because we keep track of all their wrong doings, monitor prices and call them out for being gaks when they are being gaks (which is often). GW despise free speech and cross border sales, they eliminated one of them with the new trade agreement and the other they strictly enforce in their stores. Years ago it was a joke to call them gestapo workshop, funny how they get closer to the truth of that with each passing year.

 Grot 6 wrote:

If you dig on the interwebs for the letters G and W, and add in something about employees... and a handbook..... You might find out something pretty interesting.

LOL! This should provide a fair amount of entertainment.

From the first page intro by Tom Kirby:

"Games Workshop is global with businesses on nearly every continent. Where once the
sun never set on the British Empire, now the sun never sets on a Games Workshop store."

"We have no time for cynics, whiners or time-wasters."

"We never forget that the hobbyists who buy our products pay our wages."

Other stuff:

"We also realise that mass-marketing is expensive and far less effective for a niche
business than the power of word of mouth. People’s opinions play a vital role in our
success and we do not only market our products, but also our business itself."

Funny how the word of mouth usually go against them these days.

I am sure that new recruits are enthusiastic. Logically they have to be or they wouldn't join up.

It's the word of mouth of veterans that is fairly cynical about GW.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I am sure that new recruits are enthusiastic. Logically they have to be or they wouldn't join up.

It's the word of mouth of veterans that is fairly cynical about GW.

Except that you'd expect it to be Vets who bring in new players if they are relying on word of mouth wouldn't you?

The handbook is providing much needed entertainment

Some things of note from reading this thread:

I would hate to be a GW employee and have people know I was on Dakka Dakka: you would be bugged to no end.
I think I would go to great lengths to conceal that even without the threat of being canned.

The handbook really highlights the corporate culture: rather than sticking to listing specific behaviors not allowed they also list many "judgment call" labels for people.
I could just see the dismissal paper: "We are sorry to inform you that you meet the criteria for a "whiner" and we have no room in our organization for people of your nature."

It is strange how they define their customers:
They seem to infer they are only those who use "their" miniatures, not any in general (not expanding markets??).
Concern for "value" (to hold something of importance) and quality is rather relative which DOES include price but they state price is not important...!!??
Madness.
$300 for a Khorn Mower despite the insane amount of detail still appears to have little "value" compared to the money.
They really are a business that is very interesting as a study of organizational behavior.

They also seem to be oblivious to what effect Finecast had on their perceived quality. I never complained about GW quality prior to that switch over (a few sculpts here and there were substandard but their QA was top notch).

Are they trained to hate Dakka? of course not.

Does the company have a general culture and attitude that leads to staff hating Dakka Dakka? Almost certainly?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Intresting that they disallow you to speak about the location of stores via the internet. Does this mean you could get sacked for telling somewhere where their nearest GW is?

 jonolikespie wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
I am sure that new recruits are enthusiastic. Logically they have to be or they wouldn't join up.

It's the word of mouth of veterans that is fairly cynical about GW.

Except that you'd expect it to be Vets who bring in new players if they are relying on word of mouth wouldn't you?

That has always been my theory. I don't think GW believe it. That's why I am interested to see what happens in the next five years.

GW have just about reached the bottom of the curve as regards relations with vets. That clearly feeds back into anti-GW feeling and behaviour. You see it all the time on DakkaDakka now, which didn't happen five years ago.

I mean advice about alternative games, modelling supplies and proxy models. Many vets have gone from being enthusiastic promoters of GW games to detractors of GW and keen promoters of alternatives.

If that compromises the recruitment of new players, GW will find themselves in trouble.

 Pacific wrote:

After ten years of service you become a Ten Year Veteran. At this time you will receive
personalised Games Workshop gifts including an invitation to the exclusive Veteran’s
black tie dinner.

Would be interesting to know if anyone actually gets to ten years. I suppose it might be some of the design staff, although even then that's probably a push. Shop staff (those that haven't been made redundant) have an average life expectancy of 6-12 months. Although it's probably less these days due to the strain the staff will be under.

I know a couple of 10 year vets, though they are in Nottingham.

alphaecho wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
So what the feth is HHHobby supposed to mean/stand for, anyway?

GW refer their products as the GW Hobby.

Some people don't like that. It smacks of ignoring the rest of the wargaming hobby.

That leads onto the mickey taking HHHobby...or something.

...and Ninja'd

Yeah, I've been aware of all of that for a really long time, but it doesn't explain the HHHobby term...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Grimtuff wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
So what the feth is HHHobby supposed to mean/stand for, anyway?

It appears to come from the character Simon Quinlank from the show Fist of Fun/This Morning with Richard not Judy (one or both of those)

Thanks, Grim. Hadn't ever seen that before.

It comes from me, actually.

I made up the term a few years ago to mock GW's insistence that they are the wargames hobby.

Simon Quinlank is very amusing, but I hadn't seen that clip.

I wonder if GW knows how to use an NPS system.

I can say with certainty that GW trainers, if the topic comes up, bad mouth Dakka and the internet in general as much as possible. I've said it before and I'll say it again: The problem with GW is they are so internalized culture wise they wouldn't hear a tornado pass over HQ.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I wonder if GW knows how to use an NPS system.

Even if they did, it violates their number one rule of not talking with their customers. GW only talks at their customers.

I've been getting back into the hobby (Like a lot of people I have a 22 year on again off again with 40k) and I find a lot of the stuff on Dakka to be great. I come here for modeling tips, to look at people's paint jobs to get ideas on how I can translate that pro paintjob to my Orks with my 3rd grade skills, so on and so forth.

However, I don't blame GW staff for hating on Dakka, sometimes I accidently wander into some of the more hate filled doom and gloom post and a little part of my soul literally dies because of how anti-GW some people are. I look through Warseer and Bolter and Chainsword (or is it Chainsword and bolter? Screw them, they hate xenos over there) and I don't see nearly as much venom flowing. It's all subjective, haters are everywhere and a lot of times people have a right to be angry with GW or have legitimate gripes (GW has messed up my last two orders.....they did give me a free painboy after one of them though...oh well). I've just never found unfocused internet anger to be all that useful.

The guys who love the hobby and hang out here are a great asset to the community, and I support people's right to vent and cuss GW, because if you are willing to cuss and moan about something, chances are you are passonite about it, I guess I am just not surprised they hate Dakka.

I think dakka is really great at acknowledging solid evidence and not necessarily bending to a particular hive-mindset. Most major complaints people have about GW can be backed up by objective data in some regard or another, it's just the interpretation of cause and effect that I feel gets arguments started.

GW doesn't like dakka talking about price rises because what is GW supposed to say to counter it? Someone cited a little while back that they are under the belief that cost does not affect a customer's decisions, so they only thing they can say to complaints that things cost too much is "deal with it." But they don't want people talking about that, because I think deep-down they realize cost does affect purchasing behaviors, it's just a matter of evaluating the perceived value of their products and setting the price at the upper threshold.

GW doesn't like people talking about rule balance because they don't feel that it is important to the experience of playing their games. But game balance, like cost, does seem to be something that is important to a considerable portion of the customer base, so again what is their response to people who say "we don't like that your games aren't balanced well"..."tough, we like it this way so deal with it" ?

I think it's just natural that the management portion of GW would dislike dakka or any outlet where everything they do is not shown in the best light- it builds up a consensus that affects their business.

I used to know a GW employee a while back who played both GW and other systems. He got tired of people coming in complaining about the same things that people complain about here, because it's repetitive, but more important, he had no control over it. Corportate GW *does* have control over complaints (to a degree).

It reminds me of a story I read about Time Warner cable dicussing how Google could never break into the internet provider business, and one of the reasons was they didn't have system put in place to deal with the vast customer complaints, and all I could think was "there wouldn't be some many complaints if your service wasn't so gakky!"

It might be an anomaly, but I found this place via a GW employee. I got into the hobby just over a year ago after resisting the lure for years. I had the chance to swing by Warhammer World while on a trip and jumped at it. While in the shop there I was mentioning my trepidation with playing straight away, as I was still fuzzy on rules, and I also wanted as many painted models on the table as I could get. The guy there was very helpful, but suggested I hit Dakka for any questions I couldn't answer elsewhere, and for the hobby community. He also gave me free shipping on some FW stuff I wanted but wasn't on hand.

 Accolade wrote:
I think dakka is really great at acknowledging solid evidence and not necessarily bending to a particular hive-mindset.

Snuh? Dakka IS a hivemind.

Dakka conditions its users to hate GW just as much as GW conditions its employees to hate Dakka.

I guess that's been your experience. I feel like dakka has educated me on a lot of goings-on both for Games Workshop as well as a lot of other games/companies. Sure, it's not always positive for GW, but then again I want information to be as objective as possible, and when you take the overall experiences and opinions of people I feel like you build a better consensus. Sure, people will shift to hivemind mentality, but I see a lot of anti-popular opinion crowd running around in threads with a pretty high frequency too.

It's worth considering why it seems dakka rallies against GW sometimes. Are complaints generally consistent? Do they have merit? Do people supply evidence for their opinions? A good example of this evidence-supported arguments is the GW financial thread. I know I looked at the thread and saw it as evidence that GW is moving strongly in a financially negative direction, but some of the opinions by derek I feel are well-supported, and I have since adjusted my opinion. But I'd rather have the back-and-forth arguing than a thread than something that has to be universally fixed to one side.

If one person says Dakka is not a hivemind and another person says that it is a hivemind.... don't you think that's the very definition of it being NOT a hivemind? Like, people have different opinions?

 heartserenade wrote:
If one person says Dakka is not a hivemind and another person says that it is a hivemind.... don't you think that's the very definition of it being NOT a hivemind? Like, people have different opinions?

If you have a different opinion than the approved GW one, then surely you are a part of the hivemind