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It’s a catch 22. If everyone ignores CID then it doesn’t do its job.

 AduroT wrote:
It’s a catch 22. If everyone ignores CID then it doesn’t do its job.

Sure. My point is if keeping track of CID is overwhelming you, the easy answer is to ignore CID until it closes.

Sunno wrote:People going on like WM/H is really hard to get hold of in the UK. All the big online stores, Firestorm, Element etc stock PP products. Its only the BAHI models which you cant get in the UK and most of them are at a price point where you don't pay shipping.

Sure, you can get the models but stuff that is PP exclusive like this mystery box is essentially unavailable to anyone in the UK. It would be fun to get but the pricing on P&P is insane, and adding another box to try and ease this only increases it. Coupled with the shoddy rules PP is a dead game company.

Honestly PP's issue in the uk more outlines how weak the UK is in terms of game shops. Games Workshop has a very strong store presence, and even they have had to cut down to 1 staff member per shop and move to the semi-good area of the highstreet - 15-20 years ago they had 3 or 4 staff and were right in the best part of the highstreet.

The highstreet is currently brutal to stores - food, mobile phone shops and some clothing stores are holding on; but in general many hobby level shops are closing up or having to move to very small sites or off-the beaten track regions of town.

This means less retail space to showcase models; less stock room and less table room to even wargame. It puts a lot more pressure on companies like PP to get noticed in the UK because it basically relies on a local club member to push the game on new people and encourage it and with PP having done away with their promotion scheme that's a very sore point.

The USA, from my reading, seems to be better in this regard (At least in the bigger urban areas) and has a more healthy geek-store network and thus has more shelf space to attract people into Warmachine/Hordes.

 AduroT wrote:
It’s a catch 22. If everyone ignores CID then it doesn’t do its job.

I was responding to someone saying "the rules change every week". They don't, though you can choose to play with beta rules and give feedback in order to test them.

Yeah, I would not consider keeping up with CID to be mandatory at all. Playing with CID rules should not be considered the expectation for all games.

 Elemental wrote:

 AduroT wrote:
It’s a catch 22. If everyone ignores CID then it doesn’t do its job.

I was responding to someone saying "the rules change every week". They don't, though you can choose to play with beta rules and give feedback in order to test them.

I might be misunderstanding this - what makes CID rules official? I didn't think they were stored up for book releases, but are instead released on an ongoing basis as they are finalized online, right?

From my perspective, that's still much harder to track than it was previously, especially if War Room auto-updates and I don't have a good idea of what stats changed...

I can see it helping balance, but I'd highly prefer the changes to be stored up and released bi-anually at most...

They only do changes about once a month and they list summaries online.

https://privateerpress.com/organized-play/game-rules-errata

Once a month is way too regular. Once or twice a year would be fine.

 TheWaspinator wrote:
They only do changes about once a month and they list summaries online.

https://privateerpress.com/organized-play/game-rules-errata

It's hard enough keeping up with just the model bloat.
Then there's an errata every month as well.
Unless it's the only game you play, that's extremely difficult to keep up with.
Like I said, having the rules in a constant state of flux isn't helping with bringing in new blood. And without community reps who stay on top of that, makes it doubly difficult to get into the game.

 master of ordinance wrote:

Sunno wrote:People going on like WM/H is really hard to get hold of in the UK. All the big online stores, Firestorm, Element etc stock PP products. Its only the BAHI models which you cant get in the UK and most of them are at a price point where you don't pay shipping.

Sure, you can get the models but stuff that is PP exclusive like this mystery box is essentially unavailable to anyone in the UK. It would be fun to get but the pricing on P&P is insane, and adding another box to try and ease this only increases it. Coupled with the shoddy rules PP is a dead game company.

Well I mean sure, if you consider the fourth highest selling Miniatures company to be “dead”. I guess that really sucks for everyone who doesn’t play GW or Xwing.

 Overread wrote:
It puts a lot more pressure on companies like PP to get noticed in the UK because it basically relies on a local club member to push the game on new people and encourage it and with PP having done away with their promotion scheme that's a very sore point.

Fun fact, PP would not provide a club with an OP kits, y'know the ones you paid to ship from the USA store, unless your club had a retail address. This, combined with mkiii destroyed the game at my old club.


Distribution has a lot to answer for - mark iii was a screw up in the UK with smaller retailers not getting everything they had ordered, which in turn damaged their attempts at generating interest. Missing parts plagues PP and in the UK that often meant 2-3 weeks waiting, longer if god forbid you had the temerity to purchase and find a missing part in the convention season, which apparently stretches from around Feb through to October. They made army books pointless yet used resources to produce them. Grymkin were a great idea then trashed by a £150 starter and an art style at odds with the rest of the warmahordes world. Losing cards in the packaging. Not everyone wants to use the app which is a memory hog.


There are few companies I hate, my usual reaction to being screwed by them is to just spend elsewhere. PP I hate because they actively went out of their way to annoy the hell out of the people who supported them in mki and mkii.

 AduroT wrote:
Well I mean sure, if you consider the fourth highest selling Miniatures company to be “dead”. I guess that really sucks for everyone who doesn’t play GW or Xwing.

More like "dying", as it is losing players and the players it still has seem to be rather discontent with the game and its direction (the Lock n' Load keynote, for example, seemed to anger more than excite). But GW survived for years with an angry, abandoning fanbase, so who knows?

 AduroT wrote:

 master of ordinance wrote:

Sunno wrote:People going on like WM/H is really hard to get hold of in the UK. All the big online stores, Firestorm, Element etc stock PP products. Its only the BAHI models which you cant get in the UK and most of them are at a price point where you don't pay shipping.

Sure, you can get the models but stuff that is PP exclusive like this mystery box is essentially unavailable to anyone in the UK. It would be fun to get but the pricing on P&P is insane, and adding another box to try and ease this only increases it. Coupled with the shoddy rules PP is a dead game company.

Well I mean sure, if you consider the fourth highest selling Miniatures company to be “dead”. I guess that really sucks for everyone who doesn’t play GW or Xwing.

In Burgerland it may be doing okay, but over here in the UK Warmahordes is dying rapidly. We used to have an active scene at my club, now there is just one player, and Warmahordes Weekends see plenty of players, but most of them come from across the country just to get a game. Bad shipping coupled with poor rules and entire armies being invalidated crippled the game.

In Burgerland it may be doing okay, but over here in the UK Warmahordes is dying rapidly. We used to have an active scene at my club, now there is just one player, and Warmahordes Weekends see plenty of players, but most of them come from across the country just to get a game. Bad shipping coupled with poor rules and entire armies being invalidated crippled the game.

Same here. We have just two playing battling every Wednesday evening in our gaming club.
The rest plays 40k and surprisingly AoS.

Bangers and mash aren't popular around here. B&M is dying! You can't get it anywhere! Um... Schnitzel? Isn't popular around here. Schnitzel is dying! You can't get it anywhere!

It's a regional thing. WMH is a North American game, it will be more expensive in Europe. GW is a European country, it will be more expensive in North America.

Maybe 3rd edition of WMH is the 7th of 40k. People move away from it for a while, and come back for 4th ed WMH / 8th edition 40k. Except I like WMH 3rd because I didn't have a 1 and 2 to hate on it for, and despised 7th edition 40k 'cause it was gak.

I can say from my point of view I've never been able to collect models for a game I enjoyed at such a cheap rate. It may not be great for LGS, but it's great for garage gamers. I'd like to see a quicker, smoother experience from a potential mk 4, I'm not going to lie. I don't like the model on model combat, and would much rather see unit on unit combat where the resolution is quicker... d12 + modifiers rather than piles of d6 that you can only resolve one at a time... but that's just my taste.

I enjoy the core of the game. I can understand the view that WHM changed dramatically from 2 to 3, and that many older players didn't like it... but I like the game just fine, so the rules haven't driven this newbie away. I honestly just wish the local WMH time wasn't Friday night. I'd be all over Saturday afternoons.

 master of ordinance wrote:


In Burgerland it may be doing okay, but over here in the UK Warmahordes is dying rapidly. We used to have an active scene at my club, now there is just one player, and Warmahordes Weekends see plenty of players, but most of them come from across the country just to get a game. Bad shipping coupled with poor rules and entire armies being invalidated crippled the game.

And it's doing fine here (Leeds area). Shall we play the fun old game of "my anecdotal evidence is surely representative of the whole country", or shall we accept that we can't give a definitive answer about PP's status through our limited personal experiences? Though I agree they certainly haven't done themselves any favours over the last year or so.

Is once a month-ish errata any different from what GW is doing? They're regularly releasing game-changing codexes and errata for them. Sure, those usually only affect one faction at a time, but that's the same for WarmaHordes.

 TheWaspinator wrote:
Is once a month-ish errata any different from what GW is doing? They're regularly releasing game-changing codexes and errata for them. Sure, those usually only affect one faction at a time, but that's the same for WarmaHordes.

because its the testing and balance tweaks that really should have been done prior to pushing out Mk3

yes 40k FAQ's and 8th are kind of similar but GW didn't / doesn't push 40k as a tight and balanced ruleset for competitive play

Simple answer, it's a sinking ship. There are those who have bailed, those currently bailing, and then those few in denial who will go down with the ship and be stuck with collections worth nothing.

Again, I work for an online store. Last month we sold about as much for Age of Sigmar as we did for WarmaHordes. If WarmaHordes is dying, so is AoS.

 TheWaspinator wrote:
Is once a month-ish errata any different from what GW is doing? They're regularly releasing game-changing codexes and errata for them. Sure, those usually only affect one faction at a time, but that's the same for WarmaHordes.

It does feel a bit different, to me, but I think we'll also see pushback about the frequent GW rules changes once the newness has worn off of 8th edition... but I guess we'll see!

All this talk has me wanting to play Warmahordes again, but as noted the problem is my scene completely dried up with Mk3 . It's interesting to hear it selling similarly to AoS for Waspinator (which lost even more of its playerbase in the reboot) but I think the trajectory is different. From what I can tell, AoS is picking up steam and Warmahordes is still steadily losing ground to other games...

I'd like to see them turn it around, but I don't think they're in position to do so without the Press Ganger program. GW has a huge infrastructure dedicated to bringing in new players... obviously, PP doesn't have to compete directly with them, but there are a Lot of skirmish-level smaller games to choose from now, that they will have to beat out for play-time / new players.

So far, 2018 is pretty comparable to 2017 for WarmaHordes revenue. This isn't really a zero sum situation: other games doing well doesn't mean WMH is dying.

I could see that being fair - that it took a huge popularity hit with Mk3 releasing (honestly, I think this is undeniable) but those that stuck with it have continued to do so.

The problem is, imo, the ability to bring in new players. Monthly rules changes along with no Press Gangers makes it feel daunting even for me, a pretty veteran player... (at least, it was my main game for a long time, not saying I was any good ).

I'm slowly trying to unofficially Pressgang. I'm painting up 4 different battle boxes, in addition to my main and now huge collection of cheap Retribution.

My small town has a huge war game following, but mostly GW. I think it should be easy to light a fire and bring a few people in. Frankly, if I can find 4-6 other people that are interested, that would keep me in fresh games and opponents, if I can get a game in every week or two.

I can pick up battle boxes for $25 (CAD) over the last year. So long as a faction works with a largish battlegroup, I've got half-sized armies for $50.

 TheWaspinator wrote:
Again, I work for an online store. Last month we sold about as much for Age of Sigmar as we did for WarmaHordes. If WarmaHordes is dying, so is AoS.

There's three or four places locally that I can get AoS. I can't get WMH here (anymore) except online. I don't think this situation is rare. This might be skewing the online sales for WMH considerably. Also, PP's online store is crap, while I wouldn't hesitate to use GW's.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 TheWaspinator wrote:
So far, 2018 is pretty comparable to 2017 for WarmaHordes revenue. This isn't really a zero sum situation: other games doing well doesn't mean WMH is dying.

2017 was already after Mk3 released and the drop in players was starting to be noted. How does it compare to 2016 and before?

Well from my POV today WM/H is as strong as it has ever been (London and SE England) Tournaments are still full. New faces are coming into the scene and staying around. Old faces who got frustrated or put off at Mk3 launch have come back. But i know its not the same everywhere.

If you would have asked me the same question 8-10 months ago i would have said that i was very worried and the community was in a worse state but things seemed to have straightened out.

Was the launch of Mk3 a total bungling mess? Yes. Has it taken a year and a bit of CID to get it sorted. Yes. But i think the community and the game is better for it.

WM/H is a smaller game that 40K and AoS. But tbh, i like that.

Sunno wrote:
Well from my POV today WM/H is as strong as it has ever been (London and SE England) Tournaments are still full. New faces are coming into the scene and staying around. Old faces who got frustrated or put off at Mk3 launch have come back. But i know its not the same everywhere.

If you would have asked me the same question 8-10 months ago i would have said that i was very worried and the community was in a worse state but things seemed to have straightened out.

Was the launch of Mk3 a total bungling mess? Yes. Has it taken a year and a bit of CID to get it sorted. Yes. But i think the community and the game is better for it.

WM/H is a smaller game that 40K and AoS. But tbh, i like that.

Yeah, it really seems to depend where you are, and it's hard to get the bigger picture. Heck, a couple of years ago, you had the same thing going on with GW--"they're doing badly in my area, ergo they must be about to collapse". Which isn't to say there can be no problem, but (again, like with GW in the late-7th days), a lot of the doomsaying here and elsewhere seems to come from those who just have a very obvious axe to grind.

 Elemental wrote:

Sunno wrote:
Well from my POV today WM/H is as strong as it has ever been (London and SE England) Tournaments are still full. New faces are coming into the scene and staying around. Old faces who got frustrated or put off at Mk3 launch have come back. But i know its not the same everywhere.

If you would have asked me the same question 8-10 months ago i would have said that i was very worried and the community was in a worse state but things seemed to have straightened out.

Was the launch of Mk3 a total bungling mess? Yes. Has it taken a year and a bit of CID to get it sorted. Yes. But i think the community and the game is better for it.

WM/H is a smaller game that 40K and AoS. But tbh, i like that.

Yeah, it really seems to depend where you are, and it's hard to get the bigger picture. Heck, a couple of years ago, you had the same thing going on with GW--"they're doing badly in my area, ergo they must be about to collapse". Which isn't to say there can be no problem, but (again, like with GW in the late-7th days), a lot of the doomsaying here and elsewhere seems to come from those who just have a very obvious axe to grind.

Looking at the ICV2 rankings it's clear WMH isn't dead. Given I see more people playing X-wing than WMH, you would think it was doing better, but X-wing dropped off the chart instead. Question is those that are supporting it, how much longer are they going to?

Nah, the reason you're seeing X Wing played but not ranking is an edition change publicized several months in advance.

A completely reasonable dip in sales totally unconnected to players' satisfaction with the game. It'll no doubt bounce back in time for the next report.