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 Da Boss wrote:
Once a month is way too regular. Once or twice a year would be fine.

They essentially only charge one faction each month. For a single faction you can expect about once or twice a year realistically.

So its kinda funny. Reading this thread and the responses here have managed to both light my interest in the game and scare me away at the same time.

What I think the game needs is a simple quick start ruleset. Something straightfoward and easy to manage that so you can play a few games without feeling like you have to go back to college before getting started.

This would solve the barrier to entry issue, as well as draw people who are scared off by the ultra hardcore style of play. But maybe that's not even doable. Maybe the whole point of Warmahordes is the complexity and removing that leaves the game empty. I don't know.

 Phobos wrote:
So its kinda funny. Reading this thread and the responses here have managed to both light my interest in the game and scare me away at the same time.

What I think the game needs is a simple quick start ruleset. Something straightfoward and easy to manage that so you can play a few games without feeling like you have to go back to college before getting started.

This would solve the barrier to entry issue, as well as draw people who are scared off by the ultra hardcore style of play. But maybe that's not even doable. Maybe the whole point of Warmahordes is the complexity and removing that leaves the game empty. I don't know.

They have boxed sets, sort of, try company of iron and ignore the updates that confuse the hell of it. I thought company of iron was the best thing since mordheim.

The me kill team is pants compared to mordheim. The reason? Customization and progression. Company of iron has it. Mordheim had it. Old necromunda had it, new does not. If they wanted to make a 40k mordheim then they need to think more about the lines of Rogue Trader, aka 40k first edition. You have a space marine hero in power armor, refractor field, a jokero digital weapon, a bolt pistol, and a Webber. Etc. An Ork with a bolter,instead of a slugga cuz he stoled it from an umie.

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.

Even if you do get free shipping, you then get hit with Tax (and charges for collecting the tax from the postal service or courier) that mean you're probably paying 30% over PPs price for those BAHI models so it's really, really hard to justify them compared to run of the mill PP stuff you can get a 10-20% discount on

This is no small part of why people hate ForgeWorld in the states.

 LunarSol wrote:
This is no small part of why people hate ForgeWorld in the states.

Do you pay import taxes complete with an arbitrary £8 "handling fee" in the US too?

Shouldn't you blame your postal service for that handling fee? I agree that PP should try to have EU distribution, but that's just an unfriendly policy for imports...

(The separate beef with FW is they still keep the VAT in the price even with non-UK buyers, although apparently if you go buy it there in person you can get a VAT refund at the airport... not worth flying over for usually, though )

 Grimtuff wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
This is no small part of why people hate ForgeWorld in the states.

Do you pay import taxes complete with an arbitrary £8 "handling fee" in the US too?

I mean.... not yet, but give out president time and we'll catch right up.

 RiTides wrote:
Shouldn't you blame your postal service for that handling fee?

Oh, absolutely, but it still needs to be factored in.

The fact that it's a racket is obvious from the total lack of any facility to declare the package as incoming and pre pay the sales tax. You must let the Post Office collect the VAT, and that's what incurs the handling charge. eBay and Amazon have introduced a method of prepaying and circumventing, but that's obviously no good here. In fact, I'm sure an order I made from Amazon US that collected the tax ultimately refunded it when the parcel wasn't intercepted and the tax wasn't charged, but don't quote me on that, it was a while back!

 Phobos wrote:
So its kinda funny. Reading this thread and the responses here have managed to both light my interest in the game and scare me away at the same time.

What I think the game needs is a simple quick start ruleset. Something straightfoward and easy to manage that so you can play a few games without feeling like you have to go back to college before getting started.

This would solve the barrier to entry issue, as well as draw people who are scared off by the ultra hardcore style of play. But maybe that's not even doable. Maybe the whole point of Warmahordes is the complexity and removing that leaves the game empty. I don't know.

PP have been pushing the Champions format recently, a limited format with a rotating lineup of 3-5 casters and 2 themes per faction. It makes list building much more manageable, and reduces the amount of crazy combos possible, and takes out a lot of the "gear check" lists possible. It remains to be seen if it can overcome the inertia of the tournament crowd, but I know local feedback was very positive.

 Azreal13 wrote:

 RiTides wrote:
Shouldn't you blame your postal service for that handling fee?

Oh, absolutely, but it still needs to be factored in.

The fact that it's a racket is obvious from the total lack of any facility to declare the package as incoming and pre pay the sales tax. You must let the Post Office collect the VAT, and that's what incurs the handling charge. eBay and Amazon have introduced a method of prepaying and circumventing, but that's obviously no good here. In fact, I'm sure an order I made from Amazon US that collected the tax ultimately refunded it when the parcel wasn't intercepted and the tax wasn't charged, but don't quote me on that, it was a while back!

This, its an utter joke. I order a lot of stuff from abroad because I cannot get it in the UK (anime merc, <REDACTED> milsurp, etc) and I dread customs and the handling charge. Its a fething joke, an excuse for the government to squeeze money from you, but there are no guaranteed ways to circumvent it.

Watch your language please - BrookM

So much what Az13 and Master have said, the VAT threshold is comically low at £15 (especially as postage somehow counts as value) so on small orders the handling charge is 2 or 3 times the VAT due

As much as I hate the lack of PP support outside the US I can't really blame them for it. No one can really pull off worldwide reach aside from GW and even then it's spotty.

I love the Warmachine universe ever since the Witchfire Campaign and alternate setting for Dungeons and Dragons.

Ultimately what has put me off is there's no players around me. I have about 3 or 4 Warmachine armies (nothing big but enough for caster and jacks), some friends have a few and we just can't drum up interest. The nuking of the forums to the axing of Press Gangers to the tone deaf nature of the company remind me of old GW when the forums were closed in 2006. It was handled poorly then and social media is even more important now. I get there was toxicity but there isnt exactly a few sites out there for Warmachine fans.

Coupled with the so-so models at a very high price point and the poor customer service and it's a bad a combination all round.

I still love the setting and the aesthetics. I hope it gets a slight boost in my area (as we appear to all be speaking anecdotally)

I went to the forums to be part of the gaming community for my Hordes hobby experience.

The forums said " We don't want you here "

I stopped playing.

Simple, actually. Reminds me of GW nuking it's forum more than 15 years ago. Luckily for GW, 40k was big enough that there were plenty of third party forums to visit.

Hordes, not so much.

Zond wrote:
Ultimately what has put me off is there's no players around me. I have about 3 or 4 Warmachine armies (nothing big but enough for caster and jacks), some friends have a few and we just can't drum up interest. The nuking of the forums to the axing of Press Gangers to the tone deaf nature of the company remind me of old GW when the forums were closed in 2006. It was handled poorly then and social media is even more important now. I get there was toxicity but there isnt exactly a few sites out there for Warmachine fans

The forums were pretty bad--it was before CID kicked in and everyone was faction-warrioring like a champ for their faction's broken stuff to stay broken. But (much like with this forum now), a five or six precision bans of certain forum warriors would have removed 90% of the toxicity.

 BuFFo wrote:
I went to the forums to be part of the gaming community for my Hordes hobby experience.

The forums said " We don't want you here "

That sounds like a very literal, even-handed and extremely non-paraphrased summary of whatever actually happened.

I loved their forums and participated a lot, since it was my main game and unlike GW most discussion happened at their official site. Removing faction forums made me lose many online connections about the same time I lost many physical ones with the Press Gang program ending.

I kept playing against Wehrkind in our homes for a year, but with no local scene we started to try other options...

There is lormahordes

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
So much what Az13 and Master have said, the VAT threshold is comically low at £15 (especially as postage somehow counts as value) so on small orders, the handling charge is 2 or 3 times the VAT due

VAT collection in the UK is based on rules set by Brussels and the EU as a large element of the fees that the EU collects from members states is funded by VAT, and the EU Administration want to make sure that its member states are able to pay their membership fees to Brussels!

Within the EU VAT is offsettable across national borders and so is collected via businesses selling within them, but trading outside the EU Customs Union with economies such as the USA or Japan, then these charges are insisted upon as the government has to collect the VAT due instead the businesses as obviously USA businesses aren't registered within the EU for VAT. Until the EU negotiates a free trade agreement covering this area with other national governments, such as the USA, then there is little therefore to be done about it.

Even with Brexit looming we may be stuck with this nonsense unless we leave the EU Customs Union altogether. At which point we can lobby parliament to do something about it, hopefully by negotiating a reciprocal arrangement with (say) the USA so that our small businesses aren't subjected to similar charges across the pond.

Of course if we leave the EU Customs Union then we will still be facing the problem with stuff bought/sold across the border with the states remaining within the EU Customs Union, so, for instance, buying Scibor products from Poland will be charged a VAT handling fee, whereas now they are not.

Swings and roundabouts really.

No short-term solution, certainly!

The PP forums were not exactly known for being very welcoming, especially if you mentioned you were still playing GW games (at least, early on). The infestation of page 5 adherents were not helping matters either.

 AduroT wrote:
Increased competition and the pace/sales of the game started to slow, and they seemed rush out the third edition but REALLY bungled the release and very nearly killed the game. They’ve been recovering though and a few years later the game isn’t in a bad place. Locally we don’t have the numbers of its heyday, but it’s still the strong second after Games Workshop.

True, Warmachine is still the 2nd most played game for retail level games out there. In a way it never really changed. Warmachine is big but really the game just shed most of its 40k players who level because of 7th. The whole deal that the game is dead when they just had a big Lock n Load event and just closed out their Iron Gauntlet PP sponsored tournament is ridiculous.

The edition fumble didn't help but CID, free cards that get updated online, free rules, and theme forces to help manage the huge amount of model choices still keeps it the most balanced competitive game out there.

Oh, I wasn't arguing with your points. Your frustration is completely understandable. I just prefer less divisive ways to say someone is money-grubbing than ascribing to them a specific ethnicity, maligning both in the process.

 Phobos wrote:
What I think the game needs is a simple quick start ruleset. Something straightfoward and easy to manage that so you can play a few games without feeling like you have to go back to college before getting started.

Isn't that what the faction starter box were supposed to do? Play faction starters against each other?

Or at least play at that scale, where it's still (relatively) friendly as a small skirmish, vs a huge Warhammer Fantasy-scale battle .


Offending post removed - BrookM

Please just hit the yellow “mod alert” triangle for matters such as the above in the future, and we’ll handle it...

Back on topic now, please - thanks!

Completely anecdotal, but was at Gen Con and the large PP booth was very, very quiet every time i saw it. It really stood out in it's emptiness. They were pushing Monsterpocolypse rather than Warmahordes, but that seemed to be getting very little interest either. They must have spend hundreds of thousands of $$$ on the sponsorship and booth size and i think it's impossible they didn't make a hefty loss.

MaxT wrote:
Completely anecdotal, but was at Gen Con and the large PP booth was very, very quiet every time i saw it. It really stood out in it's emptiness. They were pushing Monsterpocolypse rather than Warmahordes, but that seemed to be getting very little interest either. They must have spend hundreds of thousands of $$$ on the sponsorship and booth size and i think it's impossible they didn't make a hefty loss.

Was the same last year when I was at GenCon, though friends said it was packed first day with everyone buying the exclusive items. Swinging by booths that I had been at first day and were packed, it was the same thing. Empty most of the con, but they made their money the first day. The people who worked at PP told me that said GenCon was PP's big moneymaker and helped fund the booth and travel costs for all the other shows they would be at.

The only show I know that they would loose a lot of money on was their booth as San Diego Comic Con. They had a decent size booth dead center of the vendor hall among all the big media booths. People who worked at PP told me it was pure advertising and was for Matt Wilson to try to push the various PP IP on Hollywood by making it look like they were big players in the industry. It's been several years since I've been to SDCC, so don't if they still do the show and my contacts at PP are no longer with the company.

 silent25 wrote:


The only show I know that they would loose a lot of money on was their booth as San Diego Comic Con. They had a decent size booth dead center of the vendor hall among all the big media booths. People who worked at PP told me it was pure advertising and was for Matt Wilson to try to push the various PP IP on Hollywood by making it look like they were big players in the industry. It's been several years since I've been to SDCC, so don't if they still do the show and my contacts at PP are no longer with the company.

That makes a lot of sense, especially given Wilson's Hollywood aspirations. I saw PP's ComicCon booth in '07? I think it was that year. Whichever year the first round of Epic Warcasters were released was the year I attended. The booth was glorious, had a full-sized, 7-foot tall Asphyxious display, and overall the entire setup looked really polished.

I just got an email from Games and Stuff, which is arguably the biggest mid atlantic gaming store, and they're putting all but the core WMH stuff on 75% clearance.

As summer winds down, we are moving around lots of stuff here at the shop. Making room for new lines, consolidating others, and expanding even more!

One thing we are doing is consolidating the Warmachine and Hordes lines down to what Privateer considers "Core products" and moving out a lot of extra stock we have.

So as we do that, you win! We have put almost the ENTIRE LINE* on sale at a huge 75% off! This is crazy (must be the heat). So come in and take advantage of this insane sale! This sale cannot be combined with any other discounts (like our 10% off Survey Reward that you should fill out if you haven't had a chance to complete yet)!

ONLY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!

Sale prices apply to everything in the Warmachine line except P3 Paints and August New Releases.

Page 5.

Shame there's no online store for them. I'd probably pick a few things up.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
Shame there's no online store for them. I'd probably pick a few things up.

It was pretty picked over.