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This silliness is exactly why GW needs to actually be on social media - to either dismiss things like this with a simple "I assure you, we're still rolling dice at GenCon", or take it in stride, "Well, customs doesn't want to let Khorne into the country".

Their lack of any outward facing social media other than a fantastic painting personality on youtube, helps spur the toxicity towards them. :/

So im kinda confused about the FW/GW relationship. Both seem to do their own thing and seem to have completely different styles for selling and marketing. So is FW actually run and governed by GW? or is it just a thing where GW labels their name on something and give them freewill?

Forgeworld seems to have most of their gak together.

FW = GW. They're just set up to deal with the more veteran side of GWs universes.

I believe Tony Cottrell is still at the helm of Forgeworld, and tells GW main where to get off now and then. It's certainly been mentioned to me in the past that there were (and presumably still are) occasional... differences of opinion, and clashes of planning.
As it's a division that is both publicly very popular and (IIRC) reasonably profitable in its own right, messing with it too much is difficult.
It's hard to say exactly why FW is so popular - the models are nice designs, sure, but the quality is sometimes spotty. (Yes, their service is excellent and they will make sure you eventually get models that are to the standard you want). However (and I think this is a major point in how this market works), there is a definite impression that they all LOVE what they do. Everyone knows Tony's a complete and utter treadhead. He can't hide it - and he doesn't attempt to. You can't read an Imperial Armour book and not be grabbed by *something*. There's a lot to be said for this cult of personality and sheer enthusiasm in appealing to niche markets. Especially when those personalities do their best to actually show you what they like, what they're working on and so forth. GW used to be like this way back when, but they're lost. And damned, it appears.

http://www.beastsofwar.com/eventslist/gen-con-2015-live-blog/

GW at GenCon selling Age of Sigmar...

 jah-joshua wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:

 Pacific wrote:
As someone who has had close friends who have fallen victim to some of the mini- you seem to get working in border control, I have a lot of sympathy for the people this happened to.

Surprisingly, if you inform yourself beforehand and bring everything you are supposed to bring, you run into little to no problems. Weird, huh?

i wish this were true...
i am American, and every time i come back to my own country it is a massive hassle...
immigration does everything they can to try and turn me away, and have done for the last 20 years...
i don't know if it simply the way i look, or if they suspect i am always up to no good, but they sure don't let me straight back in, and i'm a citizen with an American passport...
things usually end up getting pretty heated at customs...
those guys can be real jerks...

as someone who has been deported from a couple of countries, i can tell you that there is no talking your way out of any small mistake...
once the officials have anything to go on, they love doing their job...
saying the wrong thing, having the wrong papers, or even having stayed one day over a visa on a previous visit gets jumped on real quick...

at least these guys will have a good story, if this is true...
i know i have gotten a lot of milage out of my deportation stories...

cheers
jah

Feel for you about this and agree 100%, from personal experience. Maybe saying 'little hitlers' is a bit strong, what I will say is that the guys you get in history putting on brown shirts and smashing shop windows under orders seems to be the same kind of people you seem to get working in border security, at least here in the UK.

That's what happens when the goverment throws £4 billion at something in a knee-jerk bit of politicking, without really conceptualising what the money is used for other than 'get results'.

End result is that you get situations like with a friend of mine who, visiting the UK (and despite having the correct visa) can get stopped and locked alone in a room for 6 hours with no contact allowed with the outside, cold, hungry and scared, and with me having to practically beg to some bitch to let her into the country (completely this person's decision, who was able to detain anyone they saw fit with no grounds other than 'suspicion'). Obviously a female 30-something, 5'2" teacher with a cello is in the 'high risk' category.

What's hilarious is that years ago I got stopped from going into China (without the correct visa) and was treated that much better. I was even given a cup of tea while the one person they had there that spoke a few lines of English explained everything to me. And to think we are meant to be a bastion of liberty, it boggles the fething mind.

 notprop wrote:
FW = GW. They're just set up to deal with the more veteran side of GWs universes.

And with US customs as well, apparently.

FW has for the longest time done conventions on their own across Europe and the like. So chances are each division of the company looks to its own travelling arrangements.

 Qcbob wrote:
http://www.beastsofwar.com/eventslist/gen-con-2015-live-blog/

GW at GenCon selling Age of Sigmar...

How dare you post a link to a site where they don't say anything negative about GW's booth or how their staff doesn't look professional! That's just crazy!

winterdyne wrote:
I believe Tony Cottrell is still at the helm of Forgeworld, and tells GW main where to get off now and then. It's certainly been mentioned to me in the past that there were (and presumably still are) occasional... differences of opinion, and clashes of planning.
As it's a division that is both publicly very popular and (IIRC) reasonably profitable in its own right, messing with it too much is difficult.
It's hard to say exactly why FW is so popular - the models are nice designs, sure, but the quality is sometimes spotty. (Yes, their service is excellent and they will make sure you eventually get models that are to the standard you want). However (and I think this is a major point in how this market works), there is a definite impression that they all LOVE what they do. Everyone knows Tony's a complete and utter treadhead. He can't hide it - and he doesn't attempt to. You can't read an Imperial Armour book and not be grabbed by *something*. There's a lot to be said for this cult of personality and sheer enthusiasm in appealing to niche markets. Especially when those personalities do their best to actually show you what they like, what they're working on and so forth. GW used to be like this way back when, but they're lost. And damned, it appears.

Most of the personalities have been weeded out of GW which seems to be the way they like it. The design studio is just faceless to me now rather than having the run by hobbyists-you'd-like-to-meet feel.


I'd chalk this up to poor organisation. Someone at GW just didn't think you need work Visas for a convention. Years ago one of my dad's friends worked on the GW novel range and was to attend a weekend convention with a huge stock of their latest books. The stock didn't arrive until the Sunday evening or Monday morning when it was as good as over, not sure who was to blame, GW or Boxtree. They ended up handing the stuff out free or abandoning it because provision wasn't made for 100% stock return.

Oh cmon guys. The TSA are fethheads but,if you do your research, respect foreign customs (in this case ours,) and do your research it is easy.

I mean they already have a U.S branch. All they should have needed was a work, B-1 visas, or... kept their mouth shut and just used a tourist one.

Edit: Now that I have had my coffee, pretty sure our tea-loving father of a country likes us enough to have a waiver program.

Does anyone else find it weird that in this instance people have decided that anything from Natfka must be the gospel truth?

Natfka says something about a rules rumour and it has to be taken with a mountain sized pile of salt, but as long as it's possibly embarrassing to GW then it's absolutely fine and must be 100% true, even though there's evidence to the contrary in the form of them actually being at Gen-Con.

 Goliath wrote:
Does anyone else find it weird that in this instance people have decided that anything from Natfka must be the gospel truth?

Natfka says something about a rules rumour and it has to be taken with a mountain sized pile of salt, but as long as it's possibly embarrassing to GW then it's absolutely fine and must be 100% true, even though there's evidence to the contrary in the form of them actually being at Gen-Con.

The British GW staff is at GenCon?

As amusing as the irony would be, I think Blackfang has it right.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
In order of likelyhood:

1) Natkfa pulling stuff out of his rear for his tabloid

2) Border guy power-tripping

3) GW paperwor screwup

Is this really news? GW are at gencon. Who cares about who did or didn't make it through customs

Honestly I don't really believe this rumor but, this is from the same company that brags about no research and royally messed up with chapterhouse.

Then again thanks for pointing out it is Natfka. That guy has always rubbed me wrong for some reason.

 Stormwall wrote:
Honestly I don't really believe this rumor but, this is from the same company that brags about no research and royally messed up with chapterhouse.

Then again thanks for pointing out it is Natfka. That guy has always rubbed me wrong for some reason.

Yeah their boasts about market research and their legal case with CHS don't have any relevance to their travel arrangements unless I'm missing something

PhantomViper wrote:


The British GW staff is at GenCon?

- Was there British Non-FW staff at GenCon last year?
- Why would they fly/paperwork separate to the British FW staff present?
- Did somebody ask the guys for their nationality?
- Why is the burden of proof on GW, showing Natfka is making gak up, rather than the other way around?

 Bull0 wrote:

Yeah their boasts about market research and their legal case with CHS don't have any relevance to their travel arrangements unless I'm missing something

Merely evidence of institutional incompetence.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Bull0 wrote:

Yeah their boasts about market research and their legal case with CHS don't have any relevance to their travel arrangements unless I'm missing something

Merely evidence of institutional incompetence.

Yeah, because HR make all the legal and commercial decisions in addition to making travel arrangements

GW has been on a cost cutting spree when it comes to administration over the last couple years. The person who organized tthe trip probably had the task dumped on them in addition to their day to day job. Anyone who's been at an office with tons of layoffs knows what it's like.

Also remember that GW made an author and game designer head of intellectual property. A guy with zero legal experience or training. So yeah, definitely institutional incompetence combined with greedy cost cutting of admin (and salary freezes don't help with morale either). I'm not surprised cracks can start to show in such a situation.

 Bull0 wrote:

Yeah, because HR make all the legal and commercial decisions in addition to making travel arrangements

You are aware of what institutional means in this context?

Well, they certainly forged a narrative there.

This kind of stuff happens - most likely the person doing the job hadn't done it before, and screwed up.

Forge World likely had somebody on the job that has done it before - knows to dot the i and cross the t.

It seemed simple, so the new guy just didn't look to see what was really needed - likely didn't know that anything was needed.

I've seen this kind of thing happen before, even with just the US/Canada Border.

They'll know better next time, and in the meantime... will probably just call in somebody stateside to handle it for them.

The Auld Grump

 Stormwall wrote:
Oh cmon guys. The TSA are fethheads but,if you do your research, respect foreign customs (in this case ours,) and do your research it is easy.

I mean they already have a U.S branch. All they should have needed was a work, B-1 visas, or... kept their mouth shut and just used a tourist one.

Edit: Now that I have had my coffee, pretty sure our tea-loving father of a country likes us enough to have a waiver program.

I don't know, they can get touchy about really random stuff. I have traveled abroad for academic conventions and had to be really careful about what I say about "presenting", as in "I am talking about a paper I wrote in front of some folks". They want to know that you are not being paid, and not selling anything, and get really sharp eyed as soon as anything remotely to the contrary comes up. This on the outgoing and incoming (home) side of the deal. Some of the officials are really cool, and some are just nuts, like "the rules here are different from every one of the other 25 American airports you have passed through in the past year" nuts.

There is a lot that can go wrong, especially if you are offering information that gets the officials confused because you don't know what they are looking for.

I got deported from Canada for doing work without a proper visa. (I just had a standard passport) The company I used to work for did electrical inspections for industrial facilities and I was up in Montreal, one of the employees was cheesed off that there were dirty english speakers working in the plant, (filthy american english speakers no less) so he called up whoever it is that's like the Canadian INS and had us arrested. He made a big scene about it and was boasting to all the other employees about it, most of which were basically facepalming like wtf since the company we worked for is Canadian owned and we were just part of a US branch.

We'd already finished our work and were about to head back to the airport, so we were escorted by the police and had to stay in the airports holding cell for 3 hours while we waited for our flight, we weren't allowed to sit in the terminal to wait and were escorted onto the plane in hand cuffs. As part of the "generous condition of our release" I wasn't allowed to re-enter Canada for 7 years, not really a big loss eh?

In GW's case its likely somebody with a grudge called it in, or somebody answered wrong at customs when they were asked why they were here could have said to "work" a convention, because if there's one thing both Canada and the US hates is dirty foreigners "takin' err jobs!"

Work is apparently a dirty word round these parts.

 Fishboy wrote:
Sounds to me like GW was finally treated the same way they treat their customer base. No sympathy for them.
@reds8nt. In that picture it looks like the GW backdrop display is falling down. Is it designed that way or falling apart?

Jesus Christ, these are just some poor people who work at GW and were thrown out of the the country because some admin missed their morning coffee and made a mistake... This has nothing to do with GW as a company or their games. But of course any opportunity to gak on GW can't be missed, got to get some more "otiose", "forge the narrative" and "marketing research" "jokes" in there and laugh and pat each other on the back.

 lord_blackfang wrote:
In order of likelyhood:

1) Natkfa pulling stuff out of his rear for his tabloid

2) Border guy power-tripping

3) GW paperwor screwup

One of each please

The funniest part is UK border control refused to let them back in, so now the team live on in a sort of airport limbo, devoid of foundation, logic or grounding in reality. They now dwell in the space between the four airport "realm gates", forever lost. Thus ends the old times, and thus begins the Age Of Heathrow.

 insaniak wrote:

 Hivefleet Oblivion wrote:
) But go on, side with the little Hitlers if it makes you happy!

Stopping with the whole equating a genocidal maniac with some guy whose job involves processing people through border security is what would make me happy.. ..

That's what I'm saying! If anything, this guy is more like a Joseph Stallin' amirite?!