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Hmmm...lemme think... AoS!?


I'm eagerly anticipating the OP's next thread:

What was the biggest release for Star Wars in 2015?

AoS is fine. Or at least I finally got over dem feelings for old WHF As for me, the biggest thing I can still qq about is that they did not release separate upgrade kits for exsiting Imperial Knights. I would;ve gladly paid +- 50% of the new Knight price just to get those bits, as they were even more expensive on ebay.

 Zywus wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
For me, it's continuing to remain closed off to the community at large.

Good point. I was going to say AoS but that whole debacle could have easily been avoided, had GW not chosen to distance themselves to their potentially biggest asset; the playerbase and communities around their games.

Almost all or most of GW's boneheaded moves over the years could have been avoided if they communicated with the public. Huge mistake to make in this day n age.

CragHack wrote:
AoS is fine. Or at least I finally got over dem feelings for old WHF As for me, the biggest thing I can still qq about is that they did not release separate upgrade kits for exsiting Imperial Knights. I would;ve gladly paid +- 50% of the new Knight price just to get those bits, as they were even more expensive on ebay.

Ooh, this. Not having those upgrade sprues for sale just pushed me into the loving arms of recasters to get what I needed since they were the only option outside buying all new Knights and throwing the old ones in the bin.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Raising the prices every week.

This.

I generally have no problems with the new releases... Just the price attached to it. And the skullzits... not a huge fan of that, but different strokes for different folks.

Execution.

Not so much End Times/AoS, as it is the missed opportunity they had with it.

They had the chance to make some needed changes with End Times leading into (what would become known as) AoS. It was a big moment for WHFB and a chance to refurbished it.

But I think they got overzealous with the refurbishing part and by the time they were done, we ended up with AoS.

This came off as a money grab and not an effort to save a section of the business.

Removing WHFB.

I think AoS is a fine game and generates a good time, plus giving away rules for free is an awesome idea. So AoS itself isn't a mistake.

However, completely removing one of your signature games and systems that has been around for almost as long as the company was a terrible mistake in my view. End times (at least in my area) renewed a ton of interest in WHFB, and some of those kits are on the 25 best sellers list. Instead of tweaking a set of rules that wasn't that bad to begin with, they imploded the entire game.

THANKFULLY, they still make most of the models, and part of me thinks that if AoS is a total disaster, they can bring back "Warhammer Classic" relatively easily.

Blimey. Of all the sides on Dakka, I'm pretty firmly in what some might call the 'Gee Dubya haturz' tent; but am I the only one in it who thinks this topic is a bit... baity?

(Although, of course, I am not altogether on anybody's side...)









(And it's AoS. Natch.)

I agree with Talys, three months of fantasy space marines just made it obvious the whole purpose of AoS was to just sell fantasy space marines.
Anybody who was on the fence about AoS was just left not knowing if their army would continue to be supported by GW, then loose interest and wander off.

GW makes lots of mistakes but most of them are the same mistakes year after year so I will stick to the biggest mistake of 2015.

Killing fantasy.

AoS is not my cup of tea but if it was released and fantasy was kept, it would be fine. But for every person AoS draws in another was alienated by killing fantasy (at least one - maybe more).

Age of Sigmar, I wanted a Fantasy reboot not overpriced ground marines and an utterly broken balancing system!

We wrote:
GW makes lots of mistakes but most of them are the same mistakes year after year so I will stick to the biggest mistake of 2015.

Killing fantasy.

AoS is not my cup of tea but if it was released and fantasy was kept, it would be fine. But for every person AoS draws in another was alienated by killing fantasy (at least one - maybe more).

This. This is what defenders of AoS don't seem to grasp; AoS is gak, but just being a gak game with gak rules and gak fluff isn't any reason to actively despise it, there are lots of games I think are gak, but that generates no feelings in me whatsoever beyond indifference. The reason I actively dislike AoS is it exists at the expense of a game that wasn't(entirely) gak mechanically and had fantastic fluff. More than that though, the way that GW felt the need not just to stop supporting WHF, but also to very deliberately vandalise and then finally annihilate the setting, and then even further the way the free Warscrolls for the old WHF armies seem to be written to actively take the piss out of people who would try to keep using the old fluff with the new rules by saddling them with stupid clown antics to trigger special rules...that's what makes people angry at AoS and GW.

I guarantee you, if GW had written the End Times series such that each faction/region ended on a cliffhanger, rather than with all their heroes dead, cities burned, and populations slaughtered prior to the whole world 'sploding, then put 8th Ed and the army books up on the site for free with a statement that they were done with WHF and would no longer be providing content or support for it, then moved on to AoS, 99% of the negativity towards AoS simply wouldn't exist, and they'd have boosted sales of Fantasy model kits just as much if not more than they did with their actual behaviour.

I would disagree, its not the idea of age of sigmar, but its execution.

As with most "bad decisions" I have seen with GW the biggest problem is the execution of the idea which in ts root can be quite good actually.

AoS could have been fluff based on a post apocalyptic fantasy world were the living factions fight for survival while the old gods come back to earth to stop chaos engulfing everything bringing it in the same fluff vibe as 40k is and opening it to a new spin.

The rules themselves were not a bad idea, especially if they marketed the warscrols idea as a box purchase and balanced them on this basis so a warscroll of a bloodthirster is balanced with a warscroll of say 40 clanrats, regiments could behave as multi wound creatures ectr.

Ultimately the idea fell on the execution and we got the fluff we got, the rules we got the same goes with most of the things GW does, deep underneath you can identify some fundamentally good idea and then be amazed on how bad the execution of the idea was.

I'll chip in my two penneth and mention the 'revamped' Black Library website, which had got to be the biggest steaming pile of a website I've ever had the misfortune to try to navigate? The old one wasn't brilliant, but the new one is truly awful.

 Grimmor wrote:

Ask an yes shall receive https://docs.google.com/folderview?id=0B18J5DU-6cP_aEg2dHIxbGpaMlk&usp=drive_web

Thanks, I'll give it a go.

DeadlySarcasm wrote:
I wouldn't consider AoS to be a mistake. It seems to have refreshed interest in the dead fantasy side of the hobby.

But none of that interest seems to result in increased sales or appreciation for GW. It's done great things for Kings Of War, Frostgrave and all of the other fantasy systems though. AoS has been great for the industry but awful for GW.

I don't think AoS itself was the mistake, I think it was how they got rid of WHFB that was the big mistake.

Prices of the new kits. Seriously, who buys those big Tau suits that cost more than two playable forces for a lot of other miniature games?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Raising the prices every week.

This right here. As someone who wanted to like AOS, I never got a chance to know it because the books, the novels and the minis were all too expensive to take a chance on. If say 10 SEs were $30, I believe it would have smoothed over a lot of hurt feelings, or at least resulted in more impulse buys and more interest overall.

 koooaei wrote:
I tink that AoS is a mistake. Could have been a big win if it was just an alternative ruleset. You know, like if you want an easy game with a bunch of models with a person who's not familliar with FB, go pick AoS rules. They're brilliant for that. 4 pages of fun.

Now the end of 8-th as a concept is awful. I suggest you looking at "The 9-th Age" project. It's what WHFB should be for the most part. Insightful changes, FAQs, more deepth. That's what you should play if you like WHFB and don't want to run AOS.

As for 40k, it's all as usual. Ballance, prices and a focus on big toyz. But nothing new.

As always, koooaei, eloquently sums up my thoughts as well.

I don't think AoS itself was a mistake, more like the way in which it was released... No warning, killing the old game, no points...

Frankly speaking, a cheap, simple, small scale skirmish ruleset for fantasy, that lets you use any existing army, would have been welcomed as the Holy Grail if you proposed it a couple of years ago. (The same for 40K.)

Canning WHFB was the big mistake.

Charging 5p for a carrier bag...

Their biggest mistake is probably going to be telling investors they're happy with the sales of a tanking mistake of a product in AoS, forgetting their investors aren't 13 year old fanboys who are happy to have them burn their money. Being happy losing money and using creative accounting through selloffs and cash flow to make it look not that bad does not generally impress the market.

No, the bulk of their ownership is comprised of institutional investors whose account reps likely don't care a whole lot as long as the dividends continue to roll in. If they don't like what they see, they reduce their stock footprint in GW or eliminate it altogether which will result in a temporary down tick in share price which makes the stock attractive to other institutions. They generally won't fight with management over internal decisions as there's no personal investment.

 agnosto wrote:
No, the bulk of their ownership is comprised of institutional investors whose account reps likely don't care a whole lot as long as the dividends continue to roll in. If they don't like what they see, they reduce their stock footprint in GW or eliminate it altogether which will result in a temporary down tick in share price which makes the stock attractive to other institutions. They generally won't fight with management over internal decisions as there's no personal investment.

I couldn't agree more. In addition, since there's no activist major shareholder or board member that holds a contrarian position (a wargaming version of Carl Icahn!), GW isn't a growth stock, nobody's expecting and GW isn't forecasting a giant return (based on a risky investment), and the entire GW holdings of its largest institutional shareholders is probably a teenie tiny rounding error in their portfolio anyhow -- and what you get is that the GW shareholders that matter are much more likely to just let GW do it's thing or sell it, rather than to try to figure out how to make GW perform better.

Edit - also, I'm sure GW is a proud UK company, and wargamers in the UK are proud that the top wargame is produced there. But it's not a national institution that a plurality of people in the country really care about, in the way, for example, that Nokia is in Finland. Which is to say, there isn't a big push to make the company the best it can be because it's a source of national pride.

The mistake was not just that AoS is horse gak, it was that they gambled on nothing but 4 months worth of releases for it. Leading to a fairly large up tick in sales for every other wargames company, as reflected by the sales in my 3 lgs and the tumbleweed and sacked manager in my local GW.

But the worst thing about AoS other than it killing off fantasy is the wasted opportunity, I have seen the use of the excuse the GW would do better but they were wed to an ancient core mechanics system.

With AoS they had a chance to look at nearly 3 decades worth of games that have been created since the original whfb. 3 decades worth of advancement that they could have simply plundered with there usual grace from dead systems without even skiming ideas off active games and the best they could come up with is AoS.

On the plus side AoS epic fail lead to GW hitting the big red panic button marked plastic 30k so it was not all bad. Plus we have 9th edition of whfb to look forward too.

 Rav1rn wrote:
Continuing to be the GW from 2014.

This.

AoS, the reignited arms race in 40k and the continued price rises just show they keep seeing their customer base as a cash cow.

AoS and Decurionization.

The former was full of poor design and forethought, the latter took army building and optimization to such bonkers heights as to really stymie my interest in 40k.

Horus Heresy box