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 Bottle wrote:
@Rainbow Dash, you might like AoS. A small model count like LOTR - and it is not restrictive in the slightest. As there is no points attached to the models, no models have "bad rules" really, because if they are weak you just take more of them.

Ehh it's too open for my tastes, I vastly prefer Kings of War, as a game. AoS has no structure, it's an insane free for all, and that's just not my style of game.
I don't need to buy anything, as I said I still have my 2 Fantasy armies.
That and everyone local has jumped to the KoW ship so I did too.

There's plenty of room for creativity in other games as well. Don't fall into the GW centric bubble.




It's just a matter of imagination.

I was more referring to my own and how a game can reward that.
I donno I am sure I am wrong, but it's really just my opinion, though to be fair it could simply be nostalgia.

 Rainbow Dash wrote:
I was more referring to my own and how a game can reward that.
I donno I am sure I am wrong, but it's really just my opinion, though to be fair it could simply be nostalgia.

That's what I was talking about as well.

Hi

One interesting article

http://unpluggedgames.co.uk/features/blood-dice-and-darkness-how-warhammer-defined-gaming-for-a-generation/

saluti

Darth Visari wrote:
Hi

One interesting article

http://unpluggedgames.co.uk/features/blood-dice-and-darkness-how-warhammer-defined-gaming-for-a-generation/

saluti

Indeed, an interesting article.
GW is a model company selling collectibles.
Creativity lacking the creativity department.

 Talys wrote:

 Tinkrr wrote:

Hearthstone is actually very rewarding for players, despite being free.

Oh, how I wish you would post that on one of the Hearthstone forums, like Hearthpwn You'll get the one guy who says, "Yes! I've played 30,000 hours since beta and haven't paid a single dime!" and 8,000 people post that there's no greater pay-to-win mechanism on Earth

But seriously, it's not really free. There's a part that's free to play, but unless you relish playing literally tens of thousands of hours and for months of bashing your head on a brick wall against people who just have better cards than you, you really *must* buy boosters. Plus, most of the single player content is much, much easier to unlock with money (a few bucks... or a few hundred hours of gameplay for a dungeon section...), and they yield cards that you "must" have if you want to be competitive.

The most expensive part about it is really the same "feature" as Magic. Every time there's an expansion, a good chunk of your cards become relatively useless, and some your prized cards become worthless from a game perspective -- because the new cards change the meta so dramatically. Incidentally, I love Hearthstone, for the same reason as StarCraft -- there's a GREAT matchmaking system to find you players of roughly equal skill, which I think is critical to good competitive gaming, and one of the reasons I largely avoid competitive tabletop wargaming (as poor matchmaking as is humanly possible).

GW *wishes* it could make a miniature game like that. Every year, pop a new release, everyone dumps half their army and buys all new stuff!

I think a lot of people simply don't get that despite those games having systems to gain money off of players, they still reward their player base and you can go amazingly far with a budget build.

I made legend my second month playing Hearthstone, while only buying Naxxramas, which was worth the money as it was a fun adventure and the amount of playtime I got from the game as a whole was way over the 20$ the adventure cost me. I even made a thread with deck lists and following my progress: http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/forum/topic/16202341208?page=1

I played Paladin at the time, back then it wasn't a top tier class, and I didn't have cards like Quarter Master or Tirion, but I still made it using what I had. In free games like Hearthstone or League, you're only paying to gain an expedited collection that helps you, but you're not actually paying to win. Even in MtG you can go a long way with a very budget version of the build.

 Xyxox wrote:


Answers:

1) 4E D&D (The experience here was similar to the RPG world what AoS has become for the fantasy wargaming world)

2) I have no experience with this company

3) Mists of Pandera

4) I have no experience with this company.

Publicly traded companies have only one concern, profits in the next financial report.

1.) Companies try different things, it doesn't always work. I hear they're doing much better now. I mean even Magic has had its failure sets before the company was public, to the point that those sets almost killed the game.

2.) ok.

3.) Mists was actually ok, it had some problems but it ultimately came back around and released a lot of good content that stabilized the game. Now if you want to talk about horrible expansions, WoD has almost killed the game, having not only a bigger sub loss than MoP but also failing to stifle that loss of subs like MoP did. For all the problems that MoP had, the Throne of Thunder patch was actually very good, it's just that the expansion had a bad start, and then had a content drought towards the end, which has happened every expansion ever. That being said, the game has suffered a lot of these issues since before it was public, so it's probably a result of other factors than being a public company, as it is a dying genre that has lasted over ten years now. Legion has had a lot of hype though, but so did WoD, we'll just have to wait and see.

4.) ok.

Profit isn't a bad thing necessarily, as the best way to make a good profit is to keep your customers happy, that's where the claim of "the customer is always right" comes from. I mean really now, if you want to be the biggest and the best, doesn't it just make sense that you pander to your audience as best you can? Believe it or not, but the most basic theory of economics and business is a theory that goes into the idea of finding the equilibrium point of where both the business and the customer is most happy, that's just how you optimize profit instead of just making a profit.

One thing that helped GW get so big is the simple fact that even during it's "golden age" of creativity it was run like business, and that they were trying to grow and bring in some money.

Good question. Golden age of war gaming?
The statement that every child in the UK knows GW has surprised me.
In Germany the situation is the other way around. Almost no child knows GW.

 wuestenfux wrote:
Good question. Golden age of war gaming?
The statement that every child in the UK knows GW has surprised me.
In Germany the situation is the other way around. Almost no child knows GW.

Much the same for in the US, except it is not just kids that know nothing about GW.

Noir wrote:

 wuestenfux wrote:
Good question. Golden age of war gaming?
The statement that every child in the UK knows GW has surprised me.
In Germany the situation is the other way around. Almost no child knows GW.

Much the same for in the US, except it is not just kids that know nothing about GW.

Same here in Germany. Not only the kids.

GW is a UK company. It had a major presence here since the later 1970s as sole distributor of games like D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and RuneQuest. It has had the largest retail chain since the mid 1980s. It has always been the biggest manufacturer of fantasy and SF figures.

With all the above, it is not surprising it is well known in the UK.

Slipstream wrote:
Remembering back to that time when they were still a smallish company they did something that other manufacturers didn't do. They started to produce whole ranges. The rest only produced a few figures in a range/ok if you just wanted a few but not ok if you wanted to build an army. It took a lot of manufacturers years to increase their ranges and many never did.

You could build an army one of two ways;first way was to buy ranges from two or three different companies and have the figures all different sizes(even though they were all rated at 28mm!) Or go to GW and have an army perfectly in scale and looking great. That was of course back when figures were dirt cheap! Ahhh!!!! The 80s!

Pretty much entirely untrue.

Look up Ral Partha, specifically the Fantasy Armies range.

They had entire, fieldable, fantasy armies of pretty much everything except Humans - since at the time it was quite possible to field Historical miniatures as Humans. Tom Meier, founder of Ral Partha got into the hobby from the Historical end, when he started sculpting for Heritage.

It was from Ral Partha that GW got the idea - heck, look up Ral Partha Chaos Warriors, which, again, predate GW dabbing their toes in Chaos. (It was also possible to find some very old GW models that used Ral Partha parts, and vice-versa.)

What GW did that was different was to create a setting to support those lines of miniatures, and that, in itself, was a big enough change.

The Auld Grump - I wish that I still had my old Citadel Fantasy Tribe trolls....

Ral Partha tried to get into the mass sales game with their own rules in 1986, three years after WHFB was released. Chaos Wars just didn't really cut it, though.

They got big sales to me, but for the Battlesystems rules, first and eventually second editions.

 jonolikespie wrote:


Once upon a time GW was affordable.

It still is, if you have a job.

That aside: Once upon a time, the price of doing business in the UK was much cheaper. That isn't so anymore.

People say GW stuff is overprices, too expensive. Whatever. It's actually not true. Their stuff is pretty accurately priced (if you can do maths). Okay so there's one or two headscratchers out there (destroyers at £30), but they're decidedly anomalous.

The problem is this: People are cheap. People have become used to cheap things, at cheap prices.

But cost efficiency often means children working in dangerous mining operations, or factory conditions, for no money. Things can be cheap because we can outsource the production to companies with dubious human rights records who can produce things at very little cost at the expense of the workers.

But GW manufactures and produces all of their stuff in the UK. 99% of everything they produce comes from Nottingham. The people who work in their factory are paid (at the very least) the national minimum wage, are treated fairly, and their human rights are respected. GW also pay their taxes like all good companies should. And sure they want to make a profit, but would you run a business and not want to make a profit?

The final result of all of this are (arguably) quality products at prices that people aren't really used to. They seem expensive, but they're appropriately priced when you factor in the cost of an independent company producing goods in the UK without outsourcing to any sweatshops, chinese factories, or whatever.

You may think that your £15 jeans from Primark are 'good prices' but people very rarely stop to consider the human cost of those products.


All in all, you're being charged pretty fairly by GW for their products. If you want to blame anyone, blame the British Government for the prices.

Myc wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:


Once upon a time GW was affordable.

It still is, if you have a job.

That was always the case. I had 2 paper rounds and did some paid gardening jobs as a teenager, making me somewhat wealthy by the standards of the mid 80s teen, but I still found miniatures expensive. Buying one or two (for an RPG) was one thing, buying whole units and armies was another.

Back in the 80s the GW market was teenagers. According to one bank in the UK which researches pocket money in the UK the average weekly pocket money for kids has gone from £1.13 in 1987 (when the first plastic figures started coming out, skeleton horde and fantasy regiments) to £8.37 in 2005 and has now fallen back to £6.20 (recession and all that). That is 460% pocket money inflation over 28 years compared to 162% general inflation.

That was interesting, and makes me wonder whether part of GW prices increases is due to the demand side inflation. "Our target market is 5 times richer why aren't our prices matching that?" Anyone know what prices were for GW stuff back in 1987, I can't remember or find anything.

puree wrote:

Myc wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:


Once upon a time GW was affordable.

It still is, if you have a job.

That was always the case. I had 2 paper rounds and did some paid gardening jobs as a teenager, making me somewhat wealthy by the standards of the mid 80s teen, but I still found miniatures expensive. Buying one or two (for an RPG) was one thing, buying whole units and armies was another.

Back in the 80s the GW market was teenagers. According to one bank in the UK which researches pocket money in the UK the average weekly pocket money for kids has gone from £1.13 in 1987 (when the first plastic figures started coming out, skeleton horde and fantasy regiments) to £8.37 in 2005 and has now fallen back to £6.20 (recession and all that). That is 460% pocket money inflation over 28 years compared to 162% general inflation.

That was interesting, and makes me wonder whether part of GW prices increases is due to the demand side inflation. "Our target market is 5 times richer why aren't our prices matching that?" Anyone know what prices were for GW stuff back in 1987, I can't remember or find anything.

I can understand that. But even in the 80's (anything post-thatcher) the cost of producing things skyrocketed. People lost faith in markets after the coal industry was summarily butchered, and other national concerns were privatised. People, simply, took their business overseas. Things became cheaper as a result, but that's always been at the expense of some factory worker doing 60 hour weeks for 10p an hour with no holiday.

I'm not necessarily trying to defend GW here, don't get me wrong. Even I wont buy some of their stuff (Destroyers, for example. I'm not going to pay £30 for an outdated model). I just wanted to chime in with why GW stuff is "expensive". It's not expensive, it's just that everything else is cheap(er).

But GW is also essentially cursed, because it has to make enough money for its shareholders to get a ROI. That means things are always going to be more expensive than they could be.

Myc wrote:

 jonolikespie wrote:


Once upon a time GW was affordable.

It still is, if you have a job.

And don't live in Australia.

Seriously, I have a fairly well paying job. I also have a mortgage. The money I get to spend on my hobby time supports a few games, and could expand to even more. It'll never be able to support Games Workshop games.

For the cost of the releases they've been doing lately, I could buy so much stuff. Each of the new Tyranids beasts alone would fund the start to another game system. Another Tyranid beast would finish that collection off. One would buy me an expensive, miniature heavy board game. The price of something like the new big Tau kit would buy me a fething Secret Weapon Tablescape.

Making sweeping statements like 'you can afford it if you have a job' is just so stupid.

 -Loki- wrote:
Making sweeping statements like 'you can afford it if you have a job' is just so stupid.

Not really. By your own words you can afford GW's prices, you just don't want to pay them.

 Peregrine wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:
Making sweeping statements like 'you can afford it if you have a job' is just so stupid.

Not really. By your own words you can afford GW's prices, you just don't want to pay them.

That's not what I said.

It'll never be able to support Games Workshop games.

Games, not kits. Merely being able to afford a kit from them once in a while is not being able to afford their games as a hobby, because to play a proper game you need to buy much more than a single kit.

I was merely saying what costs about the same as a new kit from GW these days. I didn't say I was running out every week buying them. If I was, however, to save for a while to the point I could go out and buy Skarbrand, that doesn't mean I can afford to buy the Chaos army I need to field him. For the price of just him I could go buy several Malifaux crews, a pair of full lists for Infinity, a full army for Dropzone Commander, a pretty good selection of X-Wing stuff, or even if I was feeling a boardgame itch, Zombicide and an expansion or Imperial Assault and Twin Shadows.

That's being able to afford the hobby as someone who likes to play the games.

The funny thing is, 3-4 years ago I could afford to play their games, and did. Their prices in Australia have exploded to absolutely unreasonable levels, whilst the rest of the industries prices have remained fairly flat. Which means my money simply goes where the value is better. I keep my house, and I play a wider selection of games.

The day GW went public was the beginning of the slide away from providing the community what they wanted, because they feel that what the community wanted was not profitable.