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 jah-joshua wrote:


so should i boycott GW because the management are jerks, or should i continue to support a product that i am passionate about???
what is the solution here???

like i keep saying, if i had the power to make GW management change, i would...
since i have no power, except to vote with my wallet, i continue to purchase products i like, and not purchase products i don't like...

Keep buying what you want to buy. I'll be doing the same.

 jah-joshua wrote:
@TheAuldGrump: what the heck is a "gimcracky" miniature???

Sorry, archaic North American colloquialism.

Gimcrack is excessive detail that does not add to the appearance or value of a place or object. (An example would be too much gingerbread on a Victorian house.) And that extra detail may obscure shoddy workmanship. *EDIT* Merriam-Webster definition

GW has been adding detail in amounts that actively detract from the appearance of their models.

Not always - their High Elves, for example, have a nice level of detail - adding things like button loops and buttons does not hurt the model. (I do not love all of their High Elf models - but the ones that I painted on commission were very nice indeed - and the customer skipped the eagle with a trailer hitch....)

Adding gobs, and gobs of skulls, on the other hand... does not help the model.

In my opinion it is lazy craftsmanship they are using the ease of adding detail via computer design and 3d printing, in a ham handed cut-n-paste fashion.

There is an art to knowing when to stop adding detail - this is like a kid adding stickers to a notebook so that they clash with each other.

The Auld Grump

@ auld: I think space marines centurions are a good example of "gimcrack"

 Accolade wrote:
@ auld: I think space marines centurions are a good example of "gimcrack"

It is possible that is one of the examples that I was thinking of, yes....

I think that a turning point for me, though, was looking at the latest Vampire Counts models a few years ago... and realizing that I didn't want any of them. (Though I will admit, the job Tin Racer did of turning the Mortis Engine into a merry-go-round made me smile.)

The Auld Grump - I didn't even buy Dark Vengeance - and I had a Dark Angels army since first edition.

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

Gimcrack is excessive detail that does not add to the appearance or value of a place or object.

Thanks, that is a damn useful word that spot on describes a lot of what I don't like about sci-fi designs that rely on high /repetitive detail to make up for poor or mundane form and other aesthetics. Gimcrack...memorising now

Is there a distinction between gimcrack and greeble?

 Azreal13 wrote:
Is there a distinction between gimcrack and greeble?

Skulls per square inch coefficient™.

 Talizvar wrote:
I like meeting new players, "pick-up" games are proving difficult with their present rule-set.

On that note (and in an attempt to get some positive stuff in this thread) where in Canada are you? I'm in Burlington, Ontario. I'd love to meet for a pick-up game at some point in the future. I'm still pretty green on this edition, but I've been in the game since 4th.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Is there a distinction between gimcrack and greeble?

If I remember properly, Greeble was a term coined by a properties master for a film company - and means 'stuff added to a model that it looks like it does something (even though it doesn't)'.

So, similar. The difference is that gimcrack doesn't look like it does anything.

The Auld Grump

Haven't bought a model in around a year. Sold ~75% of all of my 40k in the last two years, down to one army. I've also been selling all of my good friend's, one of the guys who got me into 40k, remaining armies. Plus all of his remaining Fantasy. Not to mention the formerly strong local 40k community is virtually extinct, I can only think of one new player in the last two years, he chose CSM, and is so frustrated he no longer plays. Where we'd have 6-9 games on a 40k night there may be 1.

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:

 Talizvar wrote:
It can boil down to "why reward bad behavior?".

if you can separate the raw product from those who provide it in your mind you may feel better.

When seeing bad behavior of an artist or company it is a mixed feeling giving money to someone / something you ethically do not agree with.

At some point you draw the line when the product is not worth enough to you to fund someone's bad lifestyle.

I can understand this point but - and however much some dislike this - you have to put it in context with other large companies. GW is about average. I buy rather little GW, but I pay a lot for Apple stuff to use for work, I pay a lot of money to energy companies, I probably contribute huge amounts to Google and they are all far less ethical than GW.

GW have a patronising moron for a chairman and hike prices far too quickly. But they don't have high incidence of worker suicides and profit from regimes with poor human rights.

This is very true, in the grand scheme of things GW are an ethical company.

With the wealth info available these days, shining a light onto the murkier areas of business practice, I think a lot of people are more consientious. I don't buy McDonalds for instance, after reading about practises in their toy production facilities, or try not to buy from Amazon (it's difficult!) because of the tax business. I try to buy Nokia phones (again difficult! ) after reading about the way Samsung and Apple obtain materials for their phones from the Congo. You certainly don't read any stories about workers being burned alive because their overseers had locked the fire exits.

So, in this vein, I think if GW were honestly producing a game I was interested in playing, the bad treatment of fans, lack of social media etc. and other things are really more of an 'annoyance' than something that would out and out stop you buying from them, as posted in the examples above. I will still buy a miniature if I see a nice one I want to paint, and can appreciate them when painted and modelled well by others.

I do think though that the 'corporate bigwigs', 'money men/sales team' or however you want to call them, are interfering with what the core of artists and creatives are trying to do, and I think generally have made the company excessively conservative compared to how they used to be. The name 'Games Workshop' did really apply at one time, and the company were head and shoulders above the competition in terms of games, rules, miniatures. Now, really that name has become something of an ironic reminder of what used to be.

So while I agree to an extent with what Jah-Joshua and other guys have said here, while you might be happy with the current state of affairs, it's too hard to not imagine what they could be doing if they were more effectively managed and the creative guys were allowed greater freedoms. The industry has grown in breadth, people are still buying GW models, but they're also buying a lot of other stuff too.

I agree with a lot of what Hive Fleet Oblivion and Pacific have said in terms of GW's corporate citizenship.

Their chairman is a douche, but the job of a chairman or CEO of a large company is to maximize share profits, not to make players happy.

From a governance and corporate citizenry perspective, I'm just as happy to pay a company a relatively high price for product if I can afford it, if it means that this allows them to keep production "ethical" (eg no child labour, no suicide workers, no slave labour, no working in unsafe/toxic environments, etc), and even more if primary manufacture can be in a first-world country. GW doesn't horde its cash in other countries to avoid paying taxes, it doesn't mistreat its workers (to the degree that other companies that take stuff offshore to a large degree do, anyhow), pays its workers wages that are competitive in the nations it operates in, and so on.

How much more would I pay for that? In other things (like cell phones and PCs) probably a maximum of double. After that, I would say, the manufacturer needs to find efficiencies somewhere to be competitive. In miniatures, maybe a little more, because at the end of the day, as I like to say, fifty bucks is only fifty bucks. Whether I get one miniature more or less hardly matters. It's not like making a $1,000+ purchase for a tablet or cell phone, and I'm not stuck with it for a couple of years.

Like you, Pacific, I buy Nokia phones (now Microsoft), avoid Apple products, use Bing instead of Google (as the lesser of two evils), and buy Samsung only for their TVs... because they are so damn good, lol.

When push comes to shove, I'll buy the product I want, sadly. But I think this is so for most people.

The moral ethics of a company like GW are certainly something I notice, but they don't generally influence my purchasing habits of their goods that much: for example, I thought the Spots the Space Marine thing was an incredible douchey move that I have no problem calling them out for, but it's not something that was so negative that I'd stop purchasing from them (ie. the way many clothing manufacturers operate). I realize I'd be hypocritical for freaking out against GW for this (in the scale of things) relatively minor upset.

What I DO take issue with is the way they treat their game. I tend to come at it from the perspective of the customer, and I strongly feel that GW is giving us an increasingly poor value for the cost of purchasing/playing the game.

The bombardment of codexes and rule cycles is one of the most egregious issues, as it represents the single biggest attempt to "gouge" customers. This comes through (a) not actually improving the rule sets as they come out, but instead just mixing up the game and maintaining the swinging imbalances; (b) continuing to shorten the rules cycles, thereby exacerbating the issues even more; and (c) effectively using the rules as a vehicle to sell miniatures, via constant game point inflation and a wildly swinging meta.

These to me are much better reasons for having issue with what GW is doing. There is so little concern over selling a game now, and instead it's all about taking the maximum amount of money from the customer without doing anything to bump up the experience.

 jah-joshua wrote:

so should i boycott GW because the management are jerks, or should i continue to support a product that i am passionate about???

That's up to you.

the lady who wrote Spots could have easily named it Spots the Space Soldier, which is a nice bit of alliteration anyway...

She could have. Instead, she chose to use a different name, that used a term that is not, despite their claims to the contrary, the property of Games Workshop.

Authors shouldn't have to censor themselves out of a fear that some company that they've quite possibly never even heard of will claim ownership of generic terms that are commonly used in a given genre.

CrashGordon94 wrote:

jah-joshua wrote:
essentially, i agree with you, but i don't blame GW for trying to protect their IP...

You really should, there's no reason for that sort of crap.

easy, Tiger...
a company should be able to protect their IP, and GW has over 30 years behind their investment in Space Marines...
whether they have a real right to the name is up to a court to decide, not me...
if some new lawyer at GW HQ was trying to make his bones by going after Spots, or if Kirby was in a mood, i don't know...
i highly doubt that Jes, Darren, and a the rest of the designers got together and decided Spots must be crushed...

at the end of the day, the attention brought by the FAILED attempt to squash Spots brought more attention to the author, and her biggest royalty checks ever...
Spots is still a Space Marine, and still available on Amazon...

if you really think that GW should not try to protect what they perceive to be their IP, that is your choice...
telling me that i should blame them, is stepping over the line...
when people try to pass off one of my painted minis as their work, it is infuriating, and i have to protect my hard work...
i've also been accused of trying to pass off Ali McVey's work as my own on the 'Eavy Metal Facebook page by some random guy, even though i painted for PP for a few years, and all the minis i showed off were my own work, so i have been on both sides of the equation...

GW management's bungled attempts at protecting their perceived IP make them look like some bad parody of a thug in a Pink Panther movie...
i think that they were right to go after Chapterhouse, with models that he was selling like the female Striking Scorpion...
they stepped way over the line on the amount of things they tried to claim as theirs, and got slapped down on a lot of it...
it hurt GW's image, as did Spots, and cost them a boatload of money...
maybe it taught a lesson to the higher-ups, as they seem a lot less litigious since those two cases...
is it worth me getting worked up over???
not in my opinion...
if you are going to produce a product for sale, when you know that a company has already been producing their own product under the same name for over 30 years, or are selling a sculpt based on a unit that GW's designers clearly did invent (ie Chapterhouse's female Striking Scorpion), you have to expect a bit of backlash from the company (GW) that perceives that as "their" product...

cheers
jah



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 insaniak wrote:

 jah-joshua wrote:

so should i boycott GW because the management are jerks, or should i continue to support a product that i am passionate about???

That's up to you.

the lady who wrote Spots could have easily named it Spots the Space Soldier, which is a nice bit of alliteration anyway...

She could have. Instead, she chose to use a different name, that used a term that is not, despite their claims to the contrary, the property of Games Workshop.

Authors shouldn't have to censor themselves out of a fear that some company that they've quite possibly never even heard of will claim ownership of generic terms that are commonly used in a given genre.

as i said in the previous reply to CrashGordon, people seem to overlook the fact that GW lost on their claim, and the author of Spots cashed in...
as i also said earlier, a simple Google search of the term Space Marine by the author would have brought up heaps of pics of the main image of what a Space Marine is in the eyes of the world...
hint, it is a GW product...

i agree with you, "Authors shouldn't have to censor themselves out of a fear that some company that they've quite possibly never even heard of will claim ownership of generic terms that are commonly used in a given genre."
turns out they don't, huh???
yes, GW management made a dumb move, was smacked down, and it hurt their reputation...
that is on them...
it is not going to make me dislike the work that the designers do, just make me lose respect for the beancounters running the show...

cheers
jah

A Google result doesn't show what a Space Marine looks like "in the eyes of the world."

What an absolutely daft thing to try and argue!

Seriously, give me anything to Google, and in a few seconds I'll know what it looks like.

I don't need to have heard of the thing before that point, I don't need to be aware it exists, and that's exactly what a Space Marine is "in the eyes of the world" - a thing completely unheard of.

Except that unlike say, an obscure medical instrument or some outdated piece of medieval farming equipment, the term "Space Marine" is so generic that any half intelligent person can probably surmise what it is simply from the name, and I bet, if asked to draw one, sight unseen, a good percentage of people with no prior knowledge would draw something with at least some elements that could be ported straight onto GW's version.

^No they SHOULDN'T "protect their IP" that way, nobody should. Ever. That's not an opinion, it's a simple moral fact.

And you don't have to stop supporting 40k or the models or anything, but don't stand up for GW pulling that lawsuit crap.

Correct me if I'm wrong: The last I heard about Spots the vanguard Veteran with Power Sword was that Amazon immediatly pulled the book when GW lodged their dispute, and the author stated that she hadn't the funds to fight them over it...so it's remained off of Amazon's shelves.So damage done.

In any case I hope GW's execs realised they were being over the top and won't be repeating such ridiculous stunts, it's beneath them. Time will tell I suppose...

CrashGordon94 wrote:
^No they SHOULDN'T "protect their IP" that way, nobody should. Ever. That's not an opinion, it's a simple moral fact.

Uhhh... there's no such thing as a moral fact.

 Talys wrote:
I agree with a lot of what Hive Fleet Oblivion and Pacific have said in terms of GW's corporate citizenship.

Their chairman is a douche, but the job of a chairman or CEO of a large company is to maximize share profits, not to make players happy..

Actually, since players are also the folks that buy the products that his company makes... this is exactly his job.

Happy players make for happy profits. Happy profits make for happy shareholders. Happy shareholders make for a happy CEO....

Alienating the source of your bread and butter is a lousy business tactic.

The Auld Grump


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 thegreatchimp wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong: The last I heard about Spots the vanguard Veteran with Power Sword was that Amazon immediatly pulled the book when GW lodged their dispute, and the author stated that she hadn't the funds to fight them over it...so it's remained off of Amazon's shelves.So damage done.

In any case I hope GW's execs realised they were being over the top and won't be repeating such ridiculous stunts, it's beneath them. Time will tell I suppose...

Yes, you are in fact exactly wrong.

Games Workshop took a bath on it - the EFF stepped in, as did other lawyers providing pro bono representation - and Amazon had already put it back up (just) before the threat of GW being taken to court over this came up.

Games Workshop's legal stance went squish like a cockroach under a shoe.

The Auld Grump - who laughed.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
Uhhh... there's no such thing as a moral fact.

Yes there is, stuff like "killing people is wrong". Extreme example, much worse but just wanted to use a completely inarguable one.

Nope, sorry.

Is it wrong to shoot someone who's about to stab a baby?

Morality is personal, fluid and cannot be discussed in absolutes.

There's a difference between being fluid and being subjective.

Fine, I wasn't being specific enough. "killing an innocent person for no reason but your own enjoyment is wrong". There, a moral fact.

No, still not a fact, just a consensus.

CrashGordon94 wrote:
^No they SHOULDN'T "protect their IP" that way, nobody should. Ever. That's not an opinion, it's a simple moral fact.

And you don't have to stop supporting 40k or the models or anything, but don't stand up for GW pulling that lawsuit crap.

Its clearly opinion considering if it was a fact that they shouldn't be doing it "that" way it would be law..

 Azreal13 wrote:
A Google result doesn't show what a Space Marine looks like "in the eyes of the world."

What an absolutely daft thing to try and argue!

Seriously, give me anything to Google, and in a few seconds I'll know what it looks like.

I don't need to have heard of the thing before that point, I don't need to be aware it exists, and that's exactly what a Space Marine is "in the eyes of the world" - a thing completely unheard of.

Except that unlike say, an obscure medical instrument or some outdated piece of medieval farming equipment, the term "Space Marine" is so generic that any half intelligent person can probably surmise what it is simply from the name, and I bet, if asked to draw one, sight unseen, a good percentage of people with no prior knowledge would draw something with at least some elements that could be ported straight onto GW's version.

i disagree...

anyone coming up with a new product, whether it be sculpting a miniature, writing a book, or any other commercial endeavor should do their research, and know what products already carry that name...
then it is their choice to carry on, or change their angle...

if you honestly think that a Space Marine, after over 30 years of Warhammer 40,000 and numerous worldwide video game releases (one of which is even titled "Space Marine"), is "a thing completely unheard of" in the eyes of the world, then i have to wonder what rock you live under...
i have never once said that i think GW should be able to trademark the words Space Marine, but if you asked anyone who was not aware of 40K to draw a Space Marine, i am pretty sure that the result would look much more like a character from Aliens or Starship Troopers, and not an 8-foot power armored behemoth...
my point is, which you have neatly side-stepped as usual, there is over 30 years of usage by GW of the term Space Marine, and it is not surprising that they should feel some propriety over the term...
turns out they are wrong, so no worries...

but hey, thanks for trying to imply that i am stupid...again...

cheers
jah

Azreal13 wrote:No, still not a fact, just a consensus.

Nope, a fact. Everyone knows it's true and anyone who "disagrees" is wrong.
Not everything in the universe is mutable or opinion-based. That sort of attitude does nothing but support awful behavior by treating it as a choice that someone disagrees with rather than something actually wrong.
Society can't function without moral facts. We'd end up with stuff like innocent people being murdered with it being passed off with "Well, you think it's wrong but that's just your opinion!".

Desubot wrote:Its clearly opinion considering if it was a fact that they shouldn't be doing it "that" way it would be law..

Nope, just means the law is royally screwed up, hardly the only example of that.

CrashGordon94 wrote:

Azreal13 wrote:No, still not a fact, just a consensus.

Nope, a fact. Everyone knows it's true and anyone who "disagrees" is wrong.
Not everything in the universe is mutable or opinion-based. That sort of attitude does nothing but support awful behavior by treating it as a choice that someone disagrees with rather than something actually wrong.
Society can't function without moral facts. We'd end up with stuff like innocent people being murdered with it being passed off with "Well, you think it's wrong but that's just your opinion!".

Desubot wrote:Its clearly opinion considering if it was a fact that they shouldn't be doing it "that" way it would be law..

Nope, just means the law is royally screwed up, hardly the only example of that.

Morals aren't subjective?

Ask Ted Bundy.

Society functions on a consensus of rights and wrongs, these are then written into law and enforced by state appointed enforcers (the police.)

Right and wrong are human constructs, they are not facts. Water freezing at 0C is a fact. Killing another person is a thing that most of us have decided is wrong, but there's no way on earth you can prove it, because it isn't a fact, it's just a consensus of opinion.

Are people still buying?

I am. Although not anywhere near the amount I used to. With price increases, now I just buy a few minis, and maybe a codex or two. The days of buying an entire army on release day are far gone.

 Desubot wrote:

CrashGordon94 wrote:
^No they SHOULDN'T "protect their IP" that way, nobody should. Ever. That's not an opinion, it's a simple moral fact.

And you don't have to stop supporting 40k or the models or anything, but don't stand up for GW pulling that lawsuit crap.

Its clearly opinion considering if it was a fact that they shouldn't be doing it "that" way it would be law..

considering that GW got the smackdown over Spots and Chapterhouse, i would say that you are right, Crash...
GW should not protect their IP in the way that they do, simply because it is bad for their reputation...
being so publicly wrong in the internet age is something that doesn't go away so easily...
this is illustrated well here, where many people seem to perceive GW as a bully, even though they lost on so many of their claims...

your moralizing doesn't help your argument...
telling me what i should be up in arms about is over the line, as far as i'm concerned...
i don't know you, but it is pretty obvious that i don't share your moral view...
i think GW was wrong in many of their legal claims, and the court agrees...
that has nothing to do with morality, but a lot to do with good business sense, which GW management has shown a distinct lack of over the last few years...

cheers
jah