Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

My local bookstore never bothered with Visions - but had stopped carrying White Dwarf some months previously.

It is possible that newsstand sales had dropped to the point where it was no longer feasible to maintain White Dwarf as a regular magazine.

If so, then it is possible that Visions, crappy as it may be, was an attempt to keep something on the shelves at your local Books-A-Million! and Barnes & Noble stores. (Though, as I mentioned, my local BaM! didn't bother - so if that was the point, then it did not entirely succeed.)

The magazine industry is brutal - if you can look around, you can find accounts by Liz Stevens of Paizo talking about it, and why they are so glad to be out of it. (And why the Pathfinder Adventure Paths are considered Books, not Magazines.)

The other direction to go is digital - which did not work well for WotC when they took back Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo. (Paizo had built the circulation up - so WotC brought it back in house, went digital only, and then watched Paizo take the #1 spot in RPGs... it is not only GW that can do things that in retrospect look just plain dumb.)

The Auld Grump

Falling magazine sales was mentioned in GW's half-year report in January. So they're probably not doing awesomely.

For me, Visions might as well not exist. I have absolutely zero inclination to buy one ever.

WD... Ehhh... I used to like them back when they were good. They always lacked subtlety in trying to sell new GW products, but when they also came with some value, it wasn't such a big deal. Batreps, guest articles, tournament summaries, beautiful armies, conversions, paintjobs, inspiration, etc. Now it's nothing but a gakky sales rag. It's not even good at it. Every week it's "here's our new stuff, it's totally awesome, see ya next week!" And that's it. Nothing else.

Why would I buy one?

 NoPoet wrote:
I'm glad that people have explained WHY they like or dislike WD and WV. The Dakkadakka forums are not something I've used extensively, but my questions have received dozens or hundreds of answers in a few days, each answer showing everyone's unique likes, dislikes and so on. THIS is why I didn't Google this question about WD.

Davor also raises a good point: many of us were likely to have been outcasts in our youth and in many cases, into adult life. I see people in two broad characters:

* The intelligent, emotional, passionate dreamers, who like unusual and interesting things and who can't be content with a mundane existence. They realise the universe is an epic place stranger than sci-fi, but it's where they belong, and they explore it with their hearts and minds. These are us. We are the ones who get bullied and left out by the second group.

* The ordinary, selfish, reality show-watching, newspaper-reading, iPhone-owning trogs who go home and open a bottle of wine in front of the telly. All they want is to be rich, famous and well-laid. The universe is horrifyingly large, empty, but also boring and needlessly complicated. This is the group that believes it owns the Earth and they are the ones who bully the first group.

LOL. You are hilarious, man. There is so much stereotype and oversimplification that it's mind-boggling. You make so many assumptions.

1. That hobbyists and gamers can't be both intelligent and passionate dreamers, AND rich and successful
2. That kids that were bullies couldn't have grown up to be booze-guzzling losers that sit in front of the TV
3. That people who booze up in front of the TV are losers and meanies
4. That people who are gamers and nerds can't also be bullies
5. That there are only two groups of people in the world - what about the adventurer who climbs mountains and walks the woods; what about the athlete who lives to compete; those who dedicate their lives to medicine; those who dedicate their lives to helping others; those who give their life to their faith?

99% of the world could give a hoot about miniatures or miniature wargames, and likely 75% of the world would hardly miss science fiction if it weren't produced. That doesn't make the bad people or bullies. Or RICH, lol. It just makes the different from you.

Seriously man... with an attitude like that... how do you ever get a date?

Talys wrote:
99% of the world could give a hoot about miniatures or miniature wargames, and likely 75% of the world would hardly miss science fiction if it weren't produced. That doesn't make the bad people or bullies. Or RICH, lol. It just makes the different from you.

Congratulations on totally missing my point. I said I see people in two basic groups. It's oversimplified, but I doubt anyone would read a 425-page dissertation about humanity. It didn't have anything to do with who plays Warhammer, I just see Warhammer players tending to fall into category one. EDIT: And it's couldn't give a hoot. Why does nobody understand grammar these days?

Talys wrote:Seriously man... with an attitude like that... how do you ever get a date?

As I stated elsewhere, I'm an aspie, and despite the inherent social problems that come with asperger syndrome, nearly all of my friends are female, I have never had trouble getting a date (unless you count the anxiety in talking to people I don't know) and I've declined to take things further with three of the girls I work with. So... whatever your point is, it just got buried.

@NoPoet -

My point:

There are tons of very nice successful and wealthy people. A miniscule percentage number play wargames or are interested in miniatures.
There are tons of poor people who are jerks. A miniscule percentage number play wargames or are interested in miniatures.
Seeing the world as "us and them" (wargamer and non-wargamer) is ridiculous, because most of the world doesn't play wargames or care about miniatures. Yet, I believe in the basic decency and goodness of humanity (and assert that it has nothing to do with being a nerd, having wealth, finding success, enjoying science fiction, or even being a creative type).

My crack at getting a date is that my observation of people who are THAT negative on such a large ratio of humanity are generally not that socially compatible with a pretty large segment of the population.

You have my genuine sympathy for having to live through life with Asperger's. I would submit to you my hypothesis that this as likely the reason you were mistreated in youth as anything else, because, frankly, children can be very cruel to other children without being aware of it.

Also: you are absolutely correct that grammatically I should have written, "couldn't give a hoot". On the other hand, "Could give a hoot", which syntactically means the opposite of what the phrase means to convey, is a common colloquialism.

Thanks, Talys, you just earned huge respect for your reply.

Being an aspie has advantages that you never seem to hear about. I guess I was being overly negative, it's not a fifty-fifty split between dreamers and bullies, most people are inherently decent. I just don't like the fact that I've always been a dreamer and I feel held back by people who weren't also dreamers.

As for dating etc, what I've learned is that women are similar to men but approach things differently. Men get to know women by being intimate with them, women get to know men before being intimate. (Of course this is generalising again, I know women who would say or do pretty much anything to get sex, just like some men do.)

Being intimate overloads my delicate aspie senses, making me more reluctant to do it. This gives me a really empowering 2+ invulnerable save (with re-roll) against feminine wiles.

The downside is, I miss out on opportunities that men *and* women have called me insane for. The plus side is, you get way, way more respect from women in general if you're known to not put out on the first date. This is conforming to female standards rather than male standards, but life should be a compromise, and this is actually a decent moral standard to live up to.

I've always said women are like cats. Chase them and they run, ignore them and they'll be in your lap within five minutes (unless you're blatantly ignoring them to get their interest). If there's a pretty girl, and everyone except for one person is trying it on with her, she'll tend to favour the one, which leads to friendship, and any relationship that isn't built on friendship won't endure.

One more thing. They say "On a date, a man wonders if he'll get lucky, a woman already knows". The point is with me, they DON'T know. If they don't know what's going to happen next, it makes things exciting, and believe me, this makes a HUGE difference to your attractiveness to women.

Visions, from day one, has been a great mag, in my opinion...
i get the digital format, so the two-page spreads never seemed wonky to me...
i was not even aware that it was a small format mag until i came back to the US a couple of months ago...
now GW has increased the size of the physical mag, so at least they are trying to correct some of the complaints of their customers...

as a person collecting WD mag since issue #75, i was sad when they split the mag...
WD Weekly in digital format doesn't have the same slick, polished look of Visions, and i don't need the rules, so i haven't been uying it...
Visions, on the other hand, has all of the things that i loved about WD, like Golden Demon pics, Blanchitsu, Kit-Bash, and the like...

since i live in Mexico, where there are only one or two cities that even have stores carrying GW products in the entire country, which is the size of the US (imagine if i had to travel from L.A. to Austin just to get a mag), i was stoked when WD went digital on iBooks...
the layout was so beautiful, and i enjoy the interactive elements...
when they split, i was sad to see that WD Weekly just looked like a PDF, but stoked to see that iBooks (or whatever their publishing templates are called) was used for Visions...
even more so, when i saw that Visions had all the hobby (as opposed to gaming) content that i enjoy...

for me, since i live in a hobby wasteland, Visions is my monthly touchstone with the imaginary worlds that i enjoy so much...
i get just as excited for the monthly release date now, as i did twenty years ago...
it's like having a little birthday, or Christmas, once a month ...

cheers
jah

This is the best thread... Went from white dwarf, to bullies, to women...

Back on topic.. I picked up a couple of vision magazine when they first came out. It's a nice magizine to look at while your on the toilet. The thing I could not stand about it was the size of the magazine which recently then increased the size. Not a huge fan of WD since they took a lot of the things I found intresting out. If you want to read a good magazine pick up PP no quarter, blows the WD out of the water. Good battle reports, lots of fluff to read, good painting articles, excellent conversions, terrain building,its everything I miss about the old WD

I like WD at the mo' but GW is in a no win situation here really, folks were pissed off when it was the old style, claiming it to be full of ad's! well no crap, It advertised latest GW product, that's what folks forget.

Then they brought out the interim thick version, folks were pissed of with that, now it has gone through change #3 to a weekly edition, and guess what? Folks are pissed off with that as well.

If you don't like the mag and Visions then don't bloody buy them it is that simple.

 Achaylus72 wrote:
I like WD at the mo' but GW is in a no win situation here really, folks were pissed off when it was the old style, claiming it to be full of ad's! well no crap, It advertised latest GW product, that's what folks forget.

Then they brought out the interim thick version, folks were pissed of with that, now it has gone through change #3 to a weekly edition, and guess what? Folks are pissed off with that as well.

If you don't like the mag and Visions then don't bloody buy them it is that simple.

To be fair, I've been pissed off with it, and not buying it, for the best part of 10 years now

Find a magazine from around the late 90's or early 00's. Look at the magazine was, the company was, have a few tearful sobs of nostalgia, buy Wargames Illustrated.

My topics rule, I don't mind a bit of digression now and then

I might do what others do here and buy the occasional WD, nobody is forcing anyone to buy every issue.

I must admit I actually quite like the weekly White Dwarf. I get it from my local independent at a discount so it costs me £1.90 a week which in the grand scheme of things is peanuts really.

I'm glad they have started putting rules content and missions etc in there and paint splatter can be good from time to time.

Monthly Visions I am so-so about. I have bought all of them so far - as has been said they are a great resource for painters.

However they have started to repeat content which is getting frustrating and it's also very predictable - you know it's going to be photos of whatever models came out one month earlier. And although I enjoy Blanchitsu I don't want to see it every single month - something else would be good.

I guess the other frustrating thing is that if you put the two magazines together you would essentially get the White Dwarf that everybody wants.

But when you add up the monthly cost it works out at about £15 per month - whereas the old WD was about a third of the cost.

But I still buy it and still enjoy it.

@StraightSilver - I too like the weekly release, because it matches their product release cadence. But I probably get more excited about and buy more models than most people, and I'm almost always there the day my FLGS gets their shipment in to get my grubby paws onto new sprues.

I think the issues since the end of last year are much better than the issues before.

The problem with combining Visions and WD in a monthly is that it would just be way too huge. I suppose they could turn it into a bi-weekly, and have it a reasonable size, but the problem is, then people who don't want the photography/model content pay for it.

 Pacific wrote:
buy Wargames Illustrated.

You mean that magazine where about half the pages contain some sort of advertisement for Battlefront product and that won't dedicate more than a line of text to any game [Warmahordes in particular] that isn't based off some historical period?

 NoPoet wrote:


Davor also raises a good point: many of us were likely to have been outcasts in our youth and in many cases, into adult life. I see people in two broad characters:

* The intelligent, emotional, passionate dreamers, who like unusual and interesting things and who can't be content with a mundane existence. They realise the universe is an epic place stranger than sci-fi, but it's where they belong, and they explore it with their hearts and minds. These are us. We are the ones who get bullied and left out by the second group.

* The ordinary, selfish, reality show-watching, newspaper-reading, iPhone-owning trogs who go home and open a bottle of wine in front of the telly. All they want is to be rich, famous and well-laid. The universe is horrifyingly large, empty, but also boring and needlessly complicated. This is the group that believes it owns the Earth and they are the ones who bully the first group.

Good grief. How many fedoras do you own?

I used to prefer the old format of plaint splatter, battle reports, showcases along with a little bit of fluff and interviews. I begrudge paying £7 something or whatever it is for the monthly visions one and whenever I have got the weekly one it just feels like a sales pamphlet trying to sell me whatever they are releasing that week.

I don't bother with it anymore. Probably the same with other publications like video game magazines etc. Why pay £6-£7 a month for something that you can just read up on online for free? I get latest news, painting tutorials etc online and find that youtube has plenty of good battle reports. White Dwarf offers nothing the internet cannot. Just a sales pamphlet/booklet nowadays.

 NoPoet wrote:
Why is it that nobody is allowed to ask a question without someone saying "Google it"? Perhaps I wanted to talk to people from Dakkadakka because I like dealing with human beings and want first hand opinions, not some closed two year old thread in some corner of the net..

Because White Knights need Princesses to rescue.

I have a feeling Battle Reports will be making a comeback - but just not in the pages of White Dwarf.

I would be very surprised if Warhammer TV didn't become a subscription service with Battle Reports in the same vain as MiniWarGaming or StrikingScorpion82.

 sing your life wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
buy Wargames Illustrated.

You mean that magazine where about half the pages contain some sort of advertisement for Battlefront product and that won't dedicate more than a line of text to any game [Warmahordes in particular] that isn't based off some historical period?

That's the one, but it also contains loads of scenarios you can use in sci-fi/fantasy, painting guides, and terrain building/hobby guides. If you also like history, it's brilliant. It's also nearer half the price of Visions.

I have to concede though that there really isn't a sci-fi/fantasy magazine out there beyond Ravage (which covers GW stuff better than GW does), but it's hard to get outside of the US.

This threat warms my heart. White Dwarf has never been as good as it was in the past. It doesn't matter when you started reading it, it was cooler before that.

I've been in the hobby since 2002 or so, and the topic of how White Dwarf has gotten worse continues, unabated.

To be fair, it really has gotten worse, but part of that is because of the nature of GW, and part of that is the shift role of a print magazines in our society.

Because when White Dwarf finally is cancelled and gone, It will be sad to no longer have this topic around.

 Polonius wrote:
This threat warms my heart. White Dwarf has never been as good as it was in the past. It doesn't matter when you started reading it, it was cooler before that.

I've been in the hobby since 2002 or so, and the topic of how White Dwarf has gotten worse continues, unabated.

To be honest, the most disappointing two changes for me for White Dwarf were when:

1. They stopped printing AD&D supplements!
2. They got rid of the comics in the back, specifically Thrud the Barbarian

All downhill from then!

I can live without the AD&D stuff, I guess. But gimme back Thrud!!

The Division Of Joy wrote:
I love these threads, you could have literally spent 5 minutes finding this information via Google.

But nothing beats a thread full of mutual back slapping over GW eh.

So do you sit around silently googling stuff with your friends instead of talking? I bet you're fun at parties...

Yes you can google anything, but there's also the fun of human interaction on :gasp: a discussion forum.


So why are you a member of Dakka? YOU could google everything being discussed here...

To be fair, you can't Google snarky buzzkills.

Visions did have a number of cool conversion tutorials for Daemon Princes actually a while back

I enjoyed the WD of the early 2000's, there was still a lot of converting there. Not the level of deodorant-to-land-speeder mind you, but green stuff and eclectic mix-and-matching of bits. Plus a lot of fluff got published there, as well as campaigns, detailed battle reports, rules (kill team and inquisitor retinues were big back then), and support for the range of things GW was connected to (the DoW stuff, particularly the armies made for it, was particularly awesome).

Earlier than this period was certainly great as it went way beyond even the GW-specific stuff. Nowadays however you're much more just paying for a catalog, so I think the dissatisfaction is quite reasonable.

Bought 2 copies of WD weekly - one had a half decent article about taking photos of minis, the other was when I was flirting with playing Harlequins.

With both copies, it struck me that you can go from cover to cover in less than 10 minutes and not really get a proper read out of it.

Shame.

 Pacific wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
*SNIP*
And this was definitely NOT the case in the past. Yes I'm about the bring up the glorious days of Fat Bloke again. But White Dwarf was a great read back in the day.

1. Bring back Battle Reports. They were funny, they were exciting, they showed you the game in action and most importantly they showed you the 'highest level' of the hobby, I.e. beautifuly painted miniatures fighting over incredible terrain. It was something to aspire to.

2. Bring back the staff characters. Who writes white dwarf now? What is the white dwarf bunker? The magazine feels so soulless because there are no characters and no banter in the magazine anymore.

Think this is pretty much it. The magazine now is a buying companion if you're getting the latest army, and that's about as far as it's use extends. It's not a 'magazine' in terms of the journalistic content it contains, and hasn't been since about issue 315/316, when the mag transformed fully into an advertising pamphlet, which is nine years ago now - can you believe it!

The amount of quality magazines that have died over this period; 'The Word', 'Hotdog', etc. and this steaming pile of horse gak has managed to survive like this for nine fething years.

You have to assume that it only persists as its made for peanuts (a text count on a par with the back of a cereal packet means you don't have to employ people to write) or else operates at a loss and is propped up GW's profits from elsewhere. But in actual fact 'White Dwarf', as everyone who loved the magazine knows, died many years ago. This imposter wears its skin, but the facade lasts until you open the first page, and when you get close you notice it smells a bit funny..

Totally agree, I used to love the batreps, I don't know when I cancelled my subscription, I think it was about 2011. It massively went to gak though compared to what I was used to reading.

Herzlos wrote:

 sing your life wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
buy Wargames Illustrated.

You mean that magazine where about half the pages contain some sort of advertisement for Battlefront product and that won't dedicate more than a line of text to any game [Warmahordes in particular] that isn't based off some historical period?

That's the one, but it also contains loads of scenarios you can use in sci-fi/fantasy, painting guides, and terrain building/hobby guides. If you also like history, it's brilliant. It's also nearer half the price of Visions.

I have to concede though that there really isn't a sci-fi/fantasy magazine out there beyond Ravage (which covers GW stuff better than GW does), but it's hard to get outside of the US.

There is another new (quarterly) magazine called 'Tabletop Gaming' that covers most of the Wargaming/Board game releases out there, well worth a read

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/651454.page

I still remember most Battle Reports from the mid 90's ... Imperial Guard and Elder vs Nids.

Orks vs Space Marines on that huge Plattform.

And many many more..

 Pacific wrote:

Herzlos wrote:

 sing your life wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
buy Wargames Illustrated.

You mean that magazine where about half the pages contain some sort of advertisement for Battlefront product and that won't dedicate more than a line of text to any game [Warmahordes in particular] that isn't based off some historical period?

That's the one, but it also contains loads of scenarios you can use in sci-fi/fantasy, painting guides, and terrain building/hobby guides. If you also like history, it's brilliant. It's also nearer half the price of Visions.

I have to concede though that there really isn't a sci-fi/fantasy magazine out there beyond Ravage (which covers GW stuff better than GW does), but it's hard to get outside of the US.

There is another new (quarterly) magazine called 'Tabletop Gaming' that covers most of the Wargaming/Board game releases out there, well worth a read

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/651454.page

Good shout, I'll keep an eye on it to add to my WS&S and WI collections