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.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Are they doing it in sufficiently increased numbers and with sufficiently increased amounts of cash to offer any improvement over its predecessor though? That's the thing which can't be proven by anyone claiming that it's growing.

It's also self evidently not "fashionable to bitch everything GW do" (sic) as can be seen by the positive reactions engendered by anything they do which is widely well received.
A certain amount of cynicism is to be expected, given the last few years behavior, but, by and large, people still get excited by the good things and will give the bad stuff a kicking.

Plenty of people line up on Dakka to give the good stuff a good shoeing as well. It's renowned for it among the other forums and offline. simlly because there are balanced fans of GW on Dakka who will praise their good stuff, and criticise their bad stuff, doesn't mean there aren't both rabid fanboys of GW, and bitter former fans who seem desperate for the company to fail at every turn.

People offer their opinions, these will differ. Dakka happens to be more lightly moderated than some other forums, so dissenting voices are more at liberty to express themselves here than other less enlightened forums.

Plus, humans being tribal in nature, will convince themselves "their" board is the best and consequently criticize the competitors.

Dakka has the largest active membership of any site of its kind, it is therefore reasonable to assume that the views expressed are largely representative.

 General Kroll wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Are they doing it in sufficiently increased numbers and with sufficiently increased amounts of cash to offer any improvement over its predecessor though? That's the thing which can't be proven by anyone claiming that it's growing.

It's also self evidently not "fashionable to bitch everything GW do" (sic) as can be seen by the positive reactions engendered by anything they do which is widely well received.
A certain amount of cynicism is to be expected, given the last few years behavior, but, by and large, people still get excited by the good things and will give the bad stuff a kicking.

Plenty of people line up on Dakka to give the good stuff a good shoeing as well. It's renowned for it among the other forums and offline. simlly because there are balanced fans of GW on Dakka who will praise their good stuff, and criticise their bad stuff, doesn't mean there aren't both rabid fanboys of GW, and bitter former fans who seem desperate for the company to fail at every turn.

Not 'desperate' to see it fail, in my case, but there was definitely a feeling that the worst that I could imagine for the company would be wildly optimistic.

Rountree definitely seems to at least be trying to reverse the march to oblivion.

That said, I am pretty sure that AoS has fewer players than WHFB did - which is not the only measure of success, but is certainly not a mark in favor of AoS.

Going by the local market... AoS hemorrhaged a lot of players to Kings of War - many of whom carted their entire WHFB armies to KoW without pausing by AoS.

A secondary question is whether GW could regain some of those players be releasing a revived and rebalanced WHFB?

The Auld Grump

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

 General Kroll wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Are they doing it in sufficiently increased numbers and with sufficiently increased amounts of cash to offer any improvement over its predecessor though? That's the thing which can't be proven by anyone claiming that it's growing.

It's also self evidently not "fashionable to bitch everything GW do" (sic) as can be seen by the positive reactions engendered by anything they do which is widely well received.
A certain amount of cynicism is to be expected, given the last few years behavior, but, by and large, people still get excited by the good things and will give the bad stuff a kicking.

Plenty of people line up on Dakka to give the good stuff a good shoeing as well. It's renowned for it among the other forums and offline. simlly because there are balanced fans of GW on Dakka who will praise their good stuff, and criticise their bad stuff, doesn't mean there aren't both rabid fanboys of GW, and bitter former fans who seem desperate for the company to fail at every turn.

Not 'desperate' to see it fail, in my case, but there was definitely a feeling that the worst that I could imagine for the company would be wildly optimistic.

Rountree definitely seems to at least be trying to reverse the march to oblivion.

That said, I am pretty sure that AoS has fewer players than WHFB did - which is not the only measure of success, but is certainly not a mark in favor of AoS.

Going by the local market... AoS hemorrhaged a lot of players to Kings of War - many of whom carted their entire WHFB armies to KoW without pausing by AoS.

A secondary question is whether GW could regain some of those players be releasing a revived and rebalanced WHFB?

The Auld Grump

If they bring back Bretonnians, Tomb Kings, fix the problem rules in 8th (squad removing spells and hoards of doom) and expand the setting to cover Cathay, Arabia and whatever the Japan-expy is called...maybe.
It is likely though that many would still be angry at GW, and stick to KoW.
Blowing up WHFB was a mistake; there was still so much potential.

If they really wanted to do some sort of apocalyptic event, they should have just killed off the Empire, and moved the focus over to the East. So as to long invalidate everyone's Empire army though, they could reintroduce Dogs of War, which uses heavy use of ex-imperial units, and could be allied into most Order factions. Cathay would take over the roll as the main human faction.
This idea is probably terrible, but its better than "Meteor falls, everyone dies and goes to LSD warp land"

 455_PWR wrote:
Fantasy was killed due to bad sales.

WHFB was killed due to poor rules and inflated prices.

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

 General Kroll wrote:

 Azreal13 wrote:
Are they doing it in sufficiently increased numbers and with sufficiently increased amounts of cash to offer any improvement over its predecessor though? That's the thing which can't be proven by anyone claiming that it's growing.

It's also self evidently not "fashionable to bitch everything GW do" (sic) as can be seen by the positive reactions engendered by anything they do which is widely well received.
A certain amount of cynicism is to be expected, given the last few years behavior, but, by and large, people still get excited by the good things and will give the bad stuff a kicking.

Plenty of people line up on Dakka to give the good stuff a good shoeing as well. It's renowned for it among the other forums and offline. simlly because there are balanced fans of GW on Dakka who will praise their good stuff, and criticise their bad stuff, doesn't mean there aren't both rabid fanboys of GW, and bitter former fans who seem desperate for the company to fail at every turn.

Not 'desperate' to see it fail, in my case, but there was definitely a feeling that the worst that I could imagine for the company would be wildly optimistic.

Rountree definitely seems to at least be trying to reverse the march to oblivion.

That said, I am pretty sure that AoS has fewer players than WHFB did - which is not the only measure of success, but is certainly not a mark in favor of AoS.

Going by the local market... AoS hemorrhaged a lot of players to Kings of War - many of whom carted their entire WHFB armies to KoW without pausing by AoS.

A secondary question is whether GW could regain some of those players be releasing a revived and rebalanced WHFB?

The Auld Grump

Personally, I don't have any kind of investment in fantasy to have an opinion in it. I can only say what I see going on in my local store and club. I'm not sure those in the club playing KoW would switch back to WHFB if AoS was ditched. So I don't think it would make much difference. What I am seeing however is a lot of new blood enjoying AoS. That's got to be a good thing. Fantasy was dying anyway, so what did GW have to lose?

Is this sales figures and comparisons to 8th edition? No. But it's as good as anyone else's anecdotal evidence.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 455_PWR wrote:
Fantasy was killed due to bad sales.

WHFB was killed due to poor rules and inflated prices.

Don't forget hardly any support and imbalanced armies/codices/what ever they were called in Fantasy.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 455_PWR wrote:
Fantasy was killed due to bad sales.

WHFB was killed due to poor rules and inflated prices.

I have to agree that WHFB was killed by bad sales. That GW didn't know what caused low sales numbers and just threw the game out and started with something new is another, albeit related, story.

GW didn't know what they were doing and they still don't. This is what killed Warhammer Fantasy and what looks like will kill AoS as well. That'll fully murder that whole setting which has been basically destroyed. I can only imagine GW would miff AoS players the same way the miffed Fantasy players. Probably set them against Fantasy players and say it was their fault as well as saying if they don't buy their 40k crap they're not 'true' fans.

I'm sorry GW are such scumbags. All they needed to do is shorten the rules by maybe half, add new stuff to the setting and most importantly branch out into other mediums such as books and esp. popular video games. You mean to tell me Vermintide and the Total War game wouldn't have put Fantasy back on the map? I find that highly unlikely given all the people in the youtube comments sections and friends being interested in the lore and the game only to be disheartened that the game is dead.

Add insult to injury with GW discontinuing lines of models and killing off our discontinued game that we can apparently still play (which is a crock of ****) and we have nothing left.

GW are evil and stupid. I'm sure they'd attribute total war: warhammer increasing sales in Fantasy as a byproduct of Global Warming given how far off the point they've been. They refuse to understand why people are or aren't buying and refuse to understand their customers. Honestly I hope GW goes under. At this point they truly deserve it.

I wonder about the whole "return the old world" thing as well. So many people have gone to KoW or 9th with popular rule-sets for rank-and-file battles that it seems doubtful enough would return to justify keeping the setting supported.

Games would've helped the setting but 8th edition already saw plummeting sales and AoS was started in 2013 with no knowledge on when CA would finish their Total Warhammer game.

I definitely believe AoS has a chance, as long as GW keep doing what they've been doing with community interaction, start collecting sets and pumping out more AoS models. The upcoming Silver Tower game will go a long ways towards showing if AoS can create the player interest it needs.

AoS could definitely benefit from a video game or two of it's own. A game app version of Silver Tower as an AoS heroquest or the like would certainly be nice.

Personally, the response around me has been amazingly positive for AoS, sinply because the rules are concise but still fun. The game promotes beer-and-pretzels gaming where people agree on limits themselves to make the game fair, but that also means it is terrible for pick up games. As such, Sigmar will likely do much better in a small community that plays together are playing the game for fun, rather than as items for a collector who only gets to play once in a while sith people they don't know. It creates the massive swings we hear about, where in some places the game is thriving and in others people deride it ad nauseam.

Indeed, that's a big reason I like it as well. As I mentioned earlier, balance and flavor don't mix so alot of mass battle games are streamlining the rules for as much tournament balance as possible.

Obviously, to some players, this starts to feel like chess: fantasy edition rather than fantasy battles.

So the fun spirit of AoS and it's unbalanced "when in doubt, talk it out" nature is rather refreshing when wanting to have large and small battles that are full of flavorful moments.

GW is trying to turn the boat around, problem is they already hit the iceberg.

They should have taken note what happened with D&D. D&D ended up with a huge split over its attempt to revitalize with the lore-destroying, new rule 4E. Long story short, it didn't survive. D&D attempted to mend the community and recover some players with 5E, but it hasn't been the same; though I like the base game, the line is only putting out a fraction of what it used to, and interest seems to be at an all-time low.

GW could bring back WHFB, but the customer numbers would never be even as good as the last edition - anyone who didn't convert over to AoS probably felt burned and either is stayed with the old game, converted to KoW or quit. The only ones GW might get back are probably those still playing the last edition of WHFB. And they'd probably tick off the majority of those who picked up AoS if they went back to WHFB, or even turned AoS into a specialty game that was irregularly updated.

What GW should have done was offer AoS as a alternate way to play, like a form of Mordenhiem, and gone with dual system books until they could either ease players into AoS or somehow shore up WHFB or slide it into a specialty game slot. And they should have certainly NOT blown up the Old World.

It is definitely too late to just reintroduce warhammer as it was, but there is no reason why they could not follow the Horus heresy model. Have a new game called Warhammer: war of the beard, or just Warhammer historical. There is a vast amount of accumulated background that his not beern explored in miniature form.

They could start small with a minimal budget and guage player interest as they develop it. As a long term warhammer player this would be much more interesting to me than warhammer 9th edition.

 Lt. Donomar StubbornBull wrote:

 455_PWR wrote:

Sorry but fantasy is dead, aos is what is here, growing, and outselling the old wfb.

Where are you getting the figures to prove it is growing? and outselling the old WHFB? Any proof that AOS models are outselling the pre-AOS WHFB models? and do you have some GW insider knowledge on sales figures of the Last Chance to Buy range vs the last 3 months of AOS model sales?

Of course AoS is not outselling WHFB. In the report, sales were slightly down despite the release of a starter, Calth and people panic buying WHFB stuff. If it was 9th WHF starter, there would be a sales increase as usual.

AoS will die in few years time and I will dance on its grave. That it is still supported is GW false sense of dignity.

I think some of the comments here saying GW should go under, etc are pretty harsh. At the end of the day, that would be a lot of folks out of work. I think a lot of us can appreciate there is nothing worse than having the company you've worked for go under suddenly. No one deserves that.

I for one, am quite enjoying the new stuff from GW. They're making a lot of good steps of late.

Yes GW as a whole seems to be on a road to redemption, they need to go faster though. Also prices.

AoS seems to be picking up steam slowly from what I can tell. From a dismal start at launch people seem to have been steadily gaining interest. No sign of reaching a plateau either.

I'm basing this assessment on activity I've seen on the internet. I'm not sure how well this actually translates to sales/income for GW however.

I think after SCGT the whole landscape around AoS has changed. It's been shown the game holds up very well at a highly competitive level (obviously with the addition of points) - couple this with a very strong Orc release - and on top of that, the destruction book signals the stabilising of the range (everyone now knows how their miniature collection sits with the game). The future looks overwhelming positive for AoS and it is finally moving on from the very rocky start it had.

I see AoS doing better than 8th, just because here no one bought anything for 8th except end times stuff, while those who play AoS are doing it with new stuff only.

Additional there are those who buy AoS Stuff for Oldhammer and KoW (seen more Sigmarines as Basilean Angels than original ones here)

How has it been shown that it holds up at a competitive level? Sure, if you add points... but the game itself has removed points. That sounds like it holds up at a competitive level if it is not AoS.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
I think some of the comments here saying GW should go under, etc are pretty harsh. At the end of the day, that would be a lot of folks out of work. I think a lot of us can appreciate there is nothing worse than having the company you've worked for go under suddenly. No one deserves that.

In the long term, their services are better utilized by competent companies.

It's always unfortunate that individuals (who deserves no blame for the mismanagement) have to suffer when their companies go under. But in the long run it benefits all to have those people employed by companies who better knows how to utilize them.

My local GW has more people playing in the AOS campaign they have running than they ever had Fantasy. 29 people, I was told, which is a lot for a game that is 'DOA'.

I think the simpler/cheaper/lower model count nature of AOS appeals to people over painting hundreds of models just to have a reasonably sized fantasy army.

AOS seems like a terrible tournament game, but an amazing narrative game, from everything I've seen and heard other people talk about. Haven't had a chance to actually play, but that's because my hobby focus is on 40k (and I'm feeling slightly burned from buying a thousand dollars worth of Empire and then getting End Times'd).

Of course, Vancouver has had a huge resurgence of Lord of the Rings. Perhaps us Canadians are just more forgiving than you yanks. Or just have a more positive outlook on things.

Besides, I don't think GW really cares if you use their models for KOW or AOS, since they are still selling you their models, or, for the salty veterans who were not going to buy anything anyways... So what if they play KOW? Not going to effect GW, since they were not going to buy models anyways.

Nuwisha wrote:
How has it been shown that it holds up at a competitive level? Sure, if you add points... but the game itself has removed points. That sounds like it holds up at a competitive level if it is not AoS.

When AoS first launched most said it would be impossible to use the game for tournaments - but the opposite has been shown. For all the word "comp" gets used, the SCGT makes virtually no modifications to the core AoS game, and doesn't comp structure beyond the points limit and a limit to one grand alliance and the competition saw an incredible variety of lists as well as very positive player feedback especially on how clear the rules were from game-to-game in comparison to WHFB that often led to rules disputes.

 Bottle wrote:
I think after SCGT the whole landscape around AoS has changed. It's been shown the game holds up very well at a highly competitive level (obviously with the addition of points)

I'd argue it proves the opposite, actually, since clearly a highly competitive event wouldn't have even been possible if not for the introduction of a points system, comp, or some other radical modification to the game.

I wanna see someone run an Age of Sigmar tournament "out of the box", with no special rules, modifications, or balancing done by points/wounds like the community has come up with themselves (doing the job GW couldn't be arsed to). You won't ever see that because obviously it'll be a clusterfeth.

 Bottle wrote:
For all the word "comp" gets used, the SCGT makes virtually no modifications to the core AoS game, and doesn't comp structure beyond the points limit and a limit to one grand alliance and the competition saw an incredible variety of lists

Now how can you claim they make "virtually no modifications" to AoS when they had to assign points to every single model in the game? That's a pretty big fething modification if you ask me. It takes a long time to come up with a formula for pricing things out, hundreds of games to test them out and determine if they're balanced or not, etc. It's definitely not a small task.

But it's not a radical modification to the game. SCGT is pretty much vanilla AoS (in terms of game mechanics) just with some limits on what gets deployed.

In fact the core rules state players can bring as many models as they want - and here both want to bring within the agreed limit defined by the SCGT point values.

Apart from the point values - the only other changes SCGT makes are some house rule additions like 'base-to-base' measuring and buffs of the same name not stacking.

As for events without points, Warhammer World is doing a very good job of that.

 Sidstyler wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
I think after SCGT the whole landscape around AoS has changed. It's been shown the game holds up very well at a highly competitive level (obviously with the addition of points)

I'd argue it proves the opposite, actually, since clearly a highly competitive event wouldn't have even been possible if not for the introduction of a points system, comp, or some other radical modification to the game.

I wanna see someone run an Age of Sigmar tournament "out of the box", with no special rules, modifications, or balancing done by points/wounds like the community has come up with themselves (doing the job GW couldn't be arsed to). You won't ever see that because obviously it'll be a clusterfeth.

Who cares how it is achieved? The community has stepped up and created a points system that makes the game a viable tournament game. Whether that's the "out of the box" experience or not is really irrelevant to the outcome, which is that more people will be arranging and attending tournaments, which in turn means more people playing AoS. I don't get the fixation with the "out of the box" game, it really doesn't matter if people are using those rules or modified rules, as long as they are playing.

You would never see an "out of the box" 40k tournament either... Because it would be a clusterfeth. Doesn't seem to stop people from running and playing 40k tournaments.

@Mymearan I agree! And if GW continue to offer community support for big tournaments like they did with SCGT, then it's much better for things like point lists to be created by the community.

No longer do we have a financial agenda behind the points cost of a model, instead the agenda is nothing but creating a fun and competetive experience for the players. Looks like GW has gotten onboard with it to and I hope to see many events get spotlighted in the future - a far cry even from the 8th edition rulebook that had a blurb about how the rules don't work for tournaments.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Sidstyler wrote:

 Bottle wrote:
For all the word "comp" gets used, the SCGT makes virtually no modifications to the core AoS game, and doesn't comp structure beyond the points limit and a limit to one grand alliance and the competition saw an incredible variety of lists

Now how can you claim they make "virtually no modifications" to AoS when they had to assign points to every single model in the game? That's a pretty big fething modification if you ask me. It takes a long time to come up with a formula for pricing things out, hundreds of games to test them out and determine if they're balanced or not, etc. It's definitely not a small task.

I'm talking about how the game plays on the table - SCGT makes little modification to the game mechanics. The mechanics of the game hold up well in a tournament environment - especially due to the lack of rules disputes that come with it.

 angelofvengeance wrote:
I think some of the comments here saying GW should go under, etc are pretty harsh. At the end of the day, that would be a lot of folks out of work. I think a lot of us can appreciate there is nothing worse than having the company you've worked for go under suddenly. No one deserves that.

I for one, am quite enjoying the new stuff from GW. They're making a lot of good steps of late.

The models do look pretty great. I haven't seen any dud designs recently.
A pity they are super expensive, and the rules aren't great.

Very few major tourneys that I have ever seen organized WFB or 40k, on this forum or elsewhere, appear to have been straight out the box or unmodified (comp'd in some way if you will).

AOS is probably the one best able to claim that, it clearly states it is for the players to work out what to play etc, so having an organizer set the limits, be it points or some other mechanism, and players agree to them is indeed straight out the box.