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http://www.torrentoffire.com/7348/product-management-games-workshop-and-the-future

Chip Boyd posts a column lamenting GW for killing 40k and leaning towards dumping 40k from his site.

Just when I get two Imperial Knights for Christmas ........

I rarely posts images to express myself, but this one was eye rolling enough.



Long melodramatic blog posts are the snake to my mongoose, or mongoose to my snake. Either way, its bad.

 Iechine wrote:
<snip>

What I read:

STOP BEING A RESPONSIBLE CONSUMER. KEEP ENCOURAGING AWFUL BUSINESS PRACTICES.

A little less sensationalism all around please, gents - it's Christmas!

Thanks all

On the topic, looks like TOF is going to decide (and maybe announce their decision?) by January 1.

Certainly, if 40k ends up going the AoS route, there won't be a huge market for tournament analytics. But for now it still seems useful, although the competitive tournament scene is probably waning a bit from its heyday.

 nullBolt wrote:

 Iechine wrote:
<snip>

What I read:

STOP BEING A RESPONSIBLE CONSUMER. KEEP ENCOURAGING AWFUL BUSINESS PRACTICES.

I understand if people just jumped on the bandwagon and didn't play the games but I would have thought 15 years of customer loyalty would give me some grounds to complain on but it seems some parts of the net disagree.
Not that I listen to them lol.
More then anything I just feel bad for GW, in a way, I feel bad for the game and more of a sadness then an anger when I think of the games and how they are and how they were.

I think this announcement will be met with a shrug by the community. After initial success and a rise in the number of events that used ToF, the whole enterprise tanked. Technical issues and the presence of other tournament tracking software made ToF largely useless. The ITC also proved to be a much better way to bring the community together and "track" successful armies and players.

So it seems like of the 4 points of product management that Chip lists below, his own product failed at number 2 and never got to number 4.
1. Listen to the market to understand the problems your product needs to solve
2. Build a product to meet the market’s needs
3. ??
4. Profit!

It's certainly easier to blame GW for their numerous failures than to admit that the product you built to piggy back off GW's profits just wasn't very good.

Chip has done a great job with ToF, but between ITC and the massive failures at ETC this year I understand why ToF may not be around much longer in its current form.

The failures of TOF are one of the great icons of the gakky side of our community. It became one of the more impressive scapegoats for user error or poor TO preparedness I've seen, in a community where it is extremely common for event organizers to seek to offload any error on other causes.

Chip via tof has provided the most responsive, tailorable tournament software this particularly small gaming community has yet seen. Some marketing and technical errors absolutely occurred, but none of the other options out there come even remotely close, speaking as someone who desperately needed what he provided to manage formats built to cater to all player types. Not having to compromise format details to meet the limitations of inferior, inflexible software has been a true gift to the experience of thousands of people paying TOs to provide a gaming experience.

In fact, most formats out there not using TOF do compromise some of their "pie in the sky" format ideals because the software they use can't meet those ideals perfectly.

That said, Chip's software will still be fully functional and available from what I've heard, just no longer the monthly investment in a professional team of developers. I know chip personally, but don't know his business details, so don't take that as gospel.

Like American politics, we on the Internet have a very bad habit of ignorantly and blindly demonizing those we don't know. Kinda grosses me out. Chip put tons of dollars, hours, and emotional expenses on the line for the community, and people who simply show up to play leverage half truths and falsehoods at him like some sacrificial robot there to be carelessly torn down as a form of getting one's eGun off.

MVBrandt wrote:

That said, Chip's software will still be fully functional and available from what I've heard, just no longer the monthly investment in a professional team of developers. I know chip personally, but don't know his business details, so don't take that as gospel.

Like American politics, we on the Internet have a very bad habit of ignorantly and blindly demonizing those we don't know. Kinda grosses me out. Chip put tons of dollars, hours, and emotional expenses on the line for the community, and people who simply show up to play leverage half truths and falsehoods at him like some sacrificial robot there to be carelessly torn down as a form of getting one's eGun off.

The only example I'm referring to is at ETC 2015 where the server side of TOF was down for hours with nothing the TOs could do, which was pretty catastrophic. Avoidable, perhaps, but unfortunate none the less. Anyway, I work in software, and I know that gak like that will happen no matter how good your product is.

Anyway...

Just saw Chip's email. Unfortunately, not much there that everyone in the hobby hasn't been saying for years... I guess he has hit the breaking point and made the smart(er) decision to get out Fortunately, I suspect the software side of things will keep going and we'll just see a (total) drop of content which I think may be the wiser move.

 1PlusLogan wrote:

MVBrandt wrote:

That said, Chip's software will still be fully functional and available from what I've heard, just no longer the monthly investment in a professional team of developers. I know chip personally, but don't know his business details, so don't take that as gospel.

Like American politics, we on the Internet have a very bad habit of ignorantly and blindly demonizing those we don't know. Kinda grosses me out. Chip put tons of dollars, hours, and emotional expenses on the line for the community, and people who simply show up to play leverage half truths and falsehoods at him like some sacrificial robot there to be carelessly torn down as a form of getting one's eGun off.

The only example I'm referring to is at ETC 2015 where the server side of TOF was down for hours with nothing the TOs could do, which was pretty catastrophic. Avoidable, perhaps, but unfortunate none the less. Anyway, I work in software, and I know that gak like that will happen no matter how good your product is.

That was a DDOS attack on their database.

Unrelated to ETC I've used ToF for over a year for all my events and have convinced other local TOs to use it and there was only 1 problem that I've run into that was an actual bug. The rest has been my error.

ToF is a great product, and I hope to he continues to have the software side open so I can continue to use it to run my events. Hell if it wasn't for ToF I wouldn't have agreed to run my FLGS events!