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Ultimately we as the community could simply just wait until an edition is complete to move onto it, that way we get a largely balance patched finished product for 3+ years, and after that just move onto the 'new' edition when it is 'finished'. Admittedly none/not enough of us have the sheer will power to enact this, and it will never happen, but its the simple solution when we cant control GWs release schedule, we just decide to take longer to adopt it.

Karol wrote:
Okey, but most armies don't or didn't have the luxury of something like the Inari rule set to carry some weaker models. If in 8th you build your BAs the wrong way, you were not having much fun playing. 8th is the same, you are not seeing many intercessor heavy lists. Stuff that was popular or obligatory, like primaris tanks or eliminators is not used at all in 9th. And because for a lot of factions the armies are pre build, there isn't much someone can do to adapt. specially if GW decided your army to both bad in 9th and not updated.

Built the army wrong as in "I skewed hard because I wanted to chase the meta and now spamming the same unit 3 times isn't the top list anymore" will hardly get much sympathy from anyone.
I already told you: If you want to chase the meta, feel the burn with the next balance change.

Intercessors are still good and useful. Sorry not sorry that someones 60 IH Intercessors with Apothecary are not considered top tier anymore.
You have to explain what units would be obligatory and why or what you mean with pre build. Last time I checked I could fill my 2000 points how I want, according to the detachment I picked.

Karol's referring to the fact that they got scammed into buying a large Grey Knights army that's just Paladins and Strike Squads.
Now they suck, and he must devote his life to ensuring Dakka knows it.

Release cycle is definitely too short.
Speed of release increases the revenue but comes at the cost of thoroughness.
Result are sloppy rules and less release of models for new codices.

I'm tired of always chasing the new edition. It's not fun anymore. I play the same armies so GW makes less and less from me and costs have gone down unless I decide to start a new army. I did that for 9th and have not played more than 6 games so far and that's not been amazing. The only reason I end up playing the next edition, time after time, is that everyone I game with has decided to move on. The only nice part about a new edition is new models to buy. And that is very hit or miss with me now. I hate all of the new Ork models that came with the last codex and most of the new Space Marines, the ones in Phobos armour, for example. I'd love to stop playing the next edition and settle on an edition. I honestly can't see why an edition doesn't last at least 5 years. and if GW wants to drop a new big box, why can't the drop a new starter box with the same rules and new models or a made to order starter box so that people could pick which factions they want in their box. If I do buy into 10th and so on I will be buying as little as humanly possible. I'm always tempted to drop out of big battle 40K and start playing Kill team or Necromunda but again getting other people, my long time gaming friends, interested just never seems like it's going to happen so I don't bother spending the money.
I doubt I have even 10 years left in the hobby at this point.

You lot should play 30k, that doesn't get updated for ages. Like seriously not even an FAQ since 2019!
No, I'm not crying you're crying.

 Gert wrote:
You lot should play 30k, that doesn't get updated for ages. Like seriously not even an FAQ since 2019!
No, I'm not crying you're crying.

Maybe, but with no easy (legit) way in its an uphill battle

If there was a way to get 30k units that didn't involve forking out £60 for five power armoured models, I genuinely would be playing 30k.

Fun fact, a box of Cadians is £1 cheaper than a box of MK3/4 Space Marines.

secretForge wrote:
Ultimately we as the community could simply just wait until an edition is complete to move onto it, that way we get a largely balance patched finished product for 3+ years, and after that just move onto the 'new' edition when it is 'finished'. Admittedly none/not enough of us have the sheer will power to enact this, and it will never happen, but its the simple solution when we cant control GWs release schedule, we just decide to take longer to adopt it.

Well, I need a new computer, but am waiting to see how the industry responds to the M1 first. And lots of people are using older rules editions - I will continue to use this older model computer too, for different things.
The only real motivation to switch rules and codices is because the originals are terrible. Interestingly, it seems that each edition is made terrible through 'bloat' and 'power-creep' before "fixed", stuff retconned, and a new wave of newness is offered up in response, like the fisherman who gently jerks the lure to attract the fish.
Alongside this jerking is a new focus on narrative, pushing the story forward with Cawl's heresy, new threats from old sources, yada, as if it is the story that demands that prior editions be invalidated as new units emerge to take the spotlight.
Personally, I returned after some time to being actively interested in Warhammer, got interested in buying into 7th, but then saw the free stuff with force orgs and got back into hobby, finally buying myself a nice hardcover "Agents of the Imperium". I was really looking forward to whatever GW was going to do after Shadow War, but 8th was not going in the right direction (for me) and 9th just seemed to double-down, so I have dabbled but...
If I were in the States, in a stable home/place/situation (anywhere, really), then I would likely re-collect older editions first before buying into anything that looks like what GW is doing, now.

My opinions on edition churn are well known, but here it goes again:

TLDR: Three years is too short for an edition, for sure.

Caveats: I play mostly with friends, and I prefer to collect many small armies rather than one big one so that friends who want to try the game without buying in have a way to do so.

Personally, I want a forever edition. And I think the experiments of 8th and 9th offer proof that GW is searching for a way to make that work. It is true that campaign books existed prior to Gathering Storm, but never at the scale we've seen since then. And I think GW is looking for the formula that makes campaign books work so that they don't have to jeopardize everything they've built by hitting a reset button.

Because reset buttons do and will drive players away. If GW thinks the average attention span of a customer is 3-5 years, and editions last 3-5 years, do we not think there's a correlation?

I almost dropped out and stuck with 8th. Crusade is what convinced me to buy into 9th, and I haven't been disappointed- 9th is better than 8th, and I really like Crusade. But now the formula is so close to perfect for me that the only way to go is down. 9th will be my forever edition; changes to Crusade rules from here out affect my armies profoundly, and if a 10th edition is coming, there's no guaranty they'll even bother doing Crusade again. So I'm digging in.

Once all the dexes are out, campaign books could drive the model release cycle from that point forward. I'd do it in quarters; each quarter brings a campaign book, a vs. box and 1-3 releases for the 4-5 factions in the campaign book. At the end of every year, all the campaign book material that is suitable for addition to the dex gets appended to the digital dex (ie. the app), then the cycle starts again.

Essentially, the game will be better if it gets to the place where GW is just maintaining it, rather than having a huge to do list of stuff that needs to be done from the ground up.

 Gert wrote:
You lot should play 30k, that doesn't get updated for ages. Like seriously not even an FAQ since 2019!
No, I'm not crying you're crying.

instead of playing 30k and being stuck in marine vs marine land I would rather snapshot a point in 40k's timeline together with my gaming buddies and play that for a while.

For a recent example (rather then hark back to 3/5th) I would offer up 8th edition, just before the release of marines 2.0. Arguably the most balanced 40k has been in a while.

Twas' a simple jest.

 Sim-Life wrote:

Cronch wrote:

Klickor wrote:
Probably a bad idea to not cater to them enough and focus too much on the kids.

See, the thing is, if you're into GW "ecosystem" for 30 years, GW doesn't have to do jack to keep you in it, sheer inertia and sunk cost will keep you going.

Back in the final 5 or so years of the Kirby era GW was royally screwed so we know thats not true. Remember all the stores being cut down to one staff member and a bunch of stores just closed completely? If I remember the financial reports the tabletop game was barely making them money. They needed to sell the license to any app developer who wanted to make a Warhammer version of whatever was popular at the time to squeek into a profitable year. Hence why we have so many garbage Warhammer app games now.

IMO GW are quickly burning through the good faith they won back with 8th and its only a matter of time before they're back to where they were.

Except that's demonstrably false.
For 2014-2015 which I think was the final year of Kirby, Revenue was 120 million pounds, and royalties were at 1,5 million pounds.
Compare to 2020 half-year report where revenue was at 186 million and royalties were at 8,7 million.
So no, while sales were declining in the last years of Kirby period, they never, at any point had to "firesale" licenses, licenses never made more than a tiny sliver of their profits.
And all it took for GW was to set up facebook and make some self-deprecating jokes for those "disgruntled veterans" to come crawling back.

I'm looking to get back into wargaming after a life induced hiatus. And 8th onwards does look like an okay game, it has elements I don't like but that's been true of every edition. It's certainly an improvement on the editions that caused me to stop playing.

But the value proposition isn't really there for me at the moment. It'll be a big investment in time to learn all the rules and a big chunk of money to buy the rules. I'm not a fan of the shift to 32mm basing as standard for infantry models, and if I play I'll have to rebase my 250 odd Ork infantry to new bases. People say I won't have to, but I see plenty of people with the opposite opinion. The advantage of 40K is the accessible playerbase so if I'm going to play I'm going to want to maximise that advantage by maximising my number of opponents.

So the fast release cycle just adds to this, makes me feel like those investments of time and money are going to be poorly spent. And it just makes me think "Feck it, I'm in my late thirties, I can just start my own group with my various friends playing systems I actually really like using whatever models and bases I want, I don't have to deal with this huge infrastructure around 40K or be annoyed by the direction the game background is going."

It's the value of 40K as a game that is degraded vs. putting effort into doing something that involves fewer compromises on my part. At the moment, 40K is losing out due to that. And the only part of what bugs me about 40K that is likely to change is edition length I think, because I think the bigger scaled minis with bigger bases and new narrative direction are here to stay.

 Gert wrote:
You lot should play 30k, that doesn't get updated for ages. Like seriously not even an FAQ since 2019!
No, I'm not crying you're crying.

Half of my Gaming group does play 30K. I enjoy it a good bit.
I'd love to play more when we can "get the band back together".
My Imperial Guard project that I have been working on for a year and a half now is backwards compatible to just about every edition and I want to field them for 30K when I can.

Maybe people don't realize or have just turned their nose up at 30K, but it is mostly compatible with 7th edition codex books. And I am sure there are a bunch of those on Ebay.
7th edition Orks vs Legions Astartes is a blast. I completely recommend it. Sadly the problem is finding like minded people to play with and some foc negotiation is needed due to formations and special foc's. I have found it worth the time and energy.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
If there was a way to get 30k units that didn't involve forking out £60 for five power armoured models, I genuinely would be playing 30k.

Same.

Have started getting the ingredients for a small HH army(Emperor's Children), but the lack of games and that I can't buy from my FLGS what I need makes things annoying.

30k looks nice, but the idea of needing to buy two 350$ boxs to get an army is way above my budget. Still nice models and seems to be a lot more fun then w40k.

If you aren't averse to MK6 the next box will be an excellent starting point.

crazysaneman wrote:
My two bits, for what it's worth.

GW really missed the mark with 9th edition codex schedule. Too many changes were made to the Core rules that affected too many factions in too great a way to justify this trickle of content in this edition. They had a great thing that one time they did indexes, remember that? Imagine if they had done that at the start of 9th. 2W marines across the board, instead of waiting for codexes to come out. What a time to be alive that would have been./s

I think this is a very good point and GW has burned a lot of people with it. If a new edition features large changes across the board in either stats or wounds it's pretty inexcusable for GW to just say "wait for the codex." It's very silly that loyalists get bumped up to 2W but CSM have to wait over a year. I mean they're all Astartes. They could have easily done a 10 page or less PDF with a points adjustment table and "these units get +1 Wound, these units get +1T" and called it a day. It seems like GW is intentionally not doing a quick update like that in order to get people to buy the Codex. Not a sound business practice in my opinion.

With an inevitable 10th edition I'm concerned they'll pull the same thing.

 Sim-Life wrote:
When GW released 9th instead of 8.1 and PA just had like 8 additional pages per army of fairly half assed rules and reprinted datasheets I knew this was the new standard. People bought the books and continue to do so, so GW will keep up this pace of releases as long as its profitable. So yeah, good luck with that 40k players.

9th is 8.1. Just like 7th was actually just 6th ( most people called it 6.5 ). We just call them 7th and 9th for expediency. I won't speculate when 10th will show, but I will wager it won't be a sea change like 7th to 8th.

Came back in 8th after leaving in 3rd (game wise, still played other GW games) as didn't like the changes from 2nd. Plus GSC were a thing again.

I have my first 9th ed game Saturday with my guard and I genuinely have no idea what rules are valid for them. 9th is steadily losing me, maybe if I had been playing during lockdown I wouldn't feel the disconnect and could have been slowly boiled int he pan, but currently my interest has dropped off a cliff. I don't know what rules are current and what aren't and the mass of corrections and FAQs for my never used rulebook all seems a bit much.

If it had all had an index update like at the start I would be feeling a lot happier. But even then the push to making new armies both tougher and more deadly isn't one I am much interested in. I would go for a new edition if it toned things down and got back to a more sensible balance, but that won't happen for a long time. Currently I wonder if the game isn't going to sink under the weight of the rules and number of changes.

I play 40k because friends, do, currently the pendulum of why not play a better game is swinging pretty hard away from 40k.

 Eldarsif wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
If there was a way to get 30k units that didn't involve forking out £60 for five power armoured models, I genuinely would be playing 30k.

Same.

Have started getting the ingredients for a small HH army(Emperor's Children), but the lack of games and that I can't buy from my FLGS what I need makes things annoying.

Good news for both of you is that it looks like a new set of some kind is coming soon with plenty of plastic Mk6 marines, a new Contemptor, some characters, some terminators, and a plastic Spartan.

 Da Boss wrote:
GW releases a new edition now pretty much every 3 years. That gives 36 months to release content for an edition.
1 of those months goes to the release itself. So 35 months for the rest of the content. I counted, and I think there are at least 23 factions that need releases in that time. One codex a month means two solid years of releases to get everyone updated. Especially if you take into account the tendency to give .5 codex to certain factions sometimes, basically giving them two release slots in an edition.
So assuming no new factions requiring a codex are introduced (and I can't think of an edition where that didn't happen in some form or another, either a new faction or a subfaction). And assuming the focus is on updating an army every month (which they also rarely manage, often two months or more can go by with no update) you're looking at a best case scenario of playing for 11 months with a complete game. More likely, you'll never actually have a complete game, or it will last a month or two if they get there.
.

One faulty assumpion. You are assuming gw is aiming complete edition. Or that every faction will get book during edition. Some will, some get 2, some get 0.

Every faction getting book during edition has been rare. Been done less than handful times 40k/fb/aos combined.

The_Real_Chris wrote:
I have my first 9th ed game Saturday with my guard and I genuinely have no idea what rules are valid for them.

Off the top of my head, and depending on what format you're playing and what's in your army, the following:
- 9th ed rulebook
- MFM 2021 for up-to-date points values (if using points) - also comes with the GT Mission Pack, for more mission options
- Codex: Imperial Guard for 8th edition
- Optional - Psychic Awakening: The Greater Good
- Optional - Imperial Armour Compendium (if fielding Forge World units)
- Optional - Imperial Guard Legends (PDF, but still a rules source)
- Optional - Forge World Legends (PDF, but still a rules source)

Add FAQs for these books to taste

tneva82 wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
GW releases a new edition now pretty much every 3 years. That gives 36 months to release content for an edition.
1 of those months goes to the release itself. So 35 months for the rest of the content. I counted, and I think there are at least 23 factions that need releases in that time. One codex a month means two solid years of releases to get everyone updated. Especially if you take into account the tendency to give .5 codex to certain factions sometimes, basically giving them two release slots in an edition.
So assuming no new factions requiring a codex are introduced (and I can't think of an edition where that didn't happen in some form or another, either a new faction or a subfaction). And assuming the focus is on updating an army every month (which they also rarely manage, often two months or more can go by with no update) you're looking at a best case scenario of playing for 11 months with a complete game. More likely, you'll never actually have a complete game, or it will last a month or two if they get there.
.

One faulty assumpion. You are assuming gw is aiming complete edition. Or that every faction will get book during edition. Some will, some get 2, some get 0.

Every faction getting book during edition has been rare. Been done less than handful times 40k/fb/aos combined.

Nah I know that, but I don't really care what GW does I'm focused on what'd be good for us as customers.

This is a reason why I actually enjoy LotR. The game is pretty much finished, well balanced and you got some expansions every now and then with some nice new sculpts. I can paint my Rohan Army without thinking the model I paint now will suck on 3 months. The only thing I have to deal with is FOMO with regards to models vanishing from the store but they communicate that pretty good right now

In the time I have been helping my parents out with their house at the other side of town for the whole of June lots of stuff changed in the 40k meta but nothing in MESBG changed. Happy I play LotR now and not 40k because if it had been the last year I would have been stressed to paint new stuff for upcoming tournaments to keep up with my marines. Latest release in models for my lotr army is about a decade ago and the rules changes like 3 years ago. Feels relaxing and fun like a game should be.

 Gert wrote:
If you aren't averse to MK6 the next box will be an excellent starting point.

yeah and it is suppose to bne 350$. the content is great, and I am sure it will be gone from the site in seconds. But even if my store somehow managed to have a spare one just for me, 350$ is 17 months of saving up and spending no money . The box looks nice though. Big tank, dread, 10 terminators and 40 marines, plus characters. Very nice set.

One of the reasons I really liked 8th was the release of the indexes, which gave everyone a "you start here" footing.

Too bad they ruined it with the codexes releases, but it's clear the company just wants to shovel the new shiny instead of rules stability.

Rules revisions are way too fast and even exceed D&D's 2E shovelware release schedule; the rules should be more static and well-thought out and the company can make its filthy lucre on "catalog" releases adding new units or refining the look of existing units ... like say, Eldar.

And the damn units should come with full stat cards, not the reductive hieroglyphs of the current kits.