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.

With all respect to V. G. Maltsev, creator of Wahapedia
if GW made a website called, let's say, "codexastartes.com" which showcased and updated all the rules, complete with artwork and lore,
I think it would go a long way to sell the game

the only downside being sales of codices.

The first problem is that GW wants to sell you books, which is how they've traditionally provided rules.

The second problem is that GW wants to sell you a WH+ subscription, which is how they've elected to provide their Battlescribe equivalent.

And the third is that GW doesn't seem to feel that letting you see the rules for free might entice you to buy things you wouldn't otherwise, so as far as they're concerned it's a straight loss.

So, all in all, the only reason Wahapedia exists is that .ru at the end. Older posters may remember a time when even discussing points values wasn't allowed thanks to GW pressure. They're not exactly at the bleeding edge when it comes to embracing technology.

That would indeed be better. As would allowing said rules to be downloaded, so that they could be read/referenced offline.

However, I can't see GW doing that when people are apparently still willing to fork out ~£30 for a book that will be obsolete within a few years.


EDIT: As is so often the case, catbarf beat me to it.

 catbarf wrote:
They're not exactly at the bleeding edge when it comes to embracing technology.

They seem to actively fight against it at all levels of their business. They took down their forum, abandoned all social media for a long time, stopped offering digital PDFs for rules, had a website out of the 1990s, and their preferred method of communication from fans is a hand-written letter. Their new app seems to be a half-assed attempt at extracting an extra $6/month out of their playerbase. It has more errors than Battlescribe which is a free app made by 1 guy who abandoned it a year ago...

Toofast wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
They're not exactly at the bleeding edge when it comes to embracing technology.

They seem to actively fight against it at all levels of their business. They took down their forum, abandoned all social media for a long time, stopped offering digital PDFs for rules, had a website out of the 1990s

Aside, their older website seemed much nicer.

The new one is bright and shiny but it's an absolute arse to navigate and the search bar can go die in a fire. As can the popup box that asks if I need help because I've been on the same page for 30 seconds and haven't bought anything yet.

The old one wasn't exactly cutting edge but actually had articles and lore and other stuff besides products.

The new website is utter trash and I can't believe how much they spent on it. I could make a copy of their website with better functionality in Big Commerce and it would be a $2-3k job. It could then be run by a single intern with a basic knowledge of computers. Instead they spent millions and got a website that doesn't even have the most basic functionality like showing "temp OOS" vs "no longer available".

game would be borderline unplayable for most of the regulars at my LGS if wahapedia didnt exist

My theory is that GW is desperately clinging to print in order to prevent the issues that arose in the WMHDs community where the game completely decoupled from the fluff and the commuinty burned out its casual segment and leaned fully into the competitive segment. Say what you will about GWs heavy competitive focus over the past edition or two, they are still supplying a lot of narrative content and pushing fluff aggressively by releasing narratively focused campaign supplements that contain matched play rules in order to try to keep the competitive community some degree of grounded in the fiction.

My retort is "theres got to be a better way than this".

GW's convinced that if they don't force people to buy art books to get the current rules every three years nobody will love them anymore. It's not particularly rational, no, but they seem to be rolling along under their own weight in spite of all the screwiness the Codex release model causes, so...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

chaos0xomega wrote:
My theory is that GW is desperately clinging to print in order to prevent the issues that arose in the WMHDs community where the game completely decoupled from the fluff and the commuinty burned out its casual segment and leaned fully into the competitive segment. Say what you will about GWs heavy competitive focus over the past edition or two, they are still supplying a lot of narrative content and pushing fluff aggressively by releasing narratively focused campaign supplements that contain matched play rules in order to try to keep the competitive community some degree of grounded in the fiction.

My retort is "theres got to be a better way than this".

That doesn't make that much sense to me. The Warmachine community was never that into the lore, because the selling point of Warmachine is "here's a competitive game that works properly," so even back when Warmachine was big the competitive/casual divide was between Warmachine and 40k players, not internally within each game.

Also given that hanging around people who are really into 40k these days in person feels more like I'm hanging around with people who have just discovered Monty Python and don't realize that the fifteen-year-old Internet memes they use to converse get less funny the more they say them I don't think keeping books in print is keeping people any more connected to the lore than dropping all of it and making Dawn of War the start and end of canon would.

 catbarf wrote:
Older posters may remember a time when even discussing points values wasn't allowed thanks to GW pressure.

Ah that takes me back. I remember when we used to use the cost of meltabombs as reference for everything else in the game.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
Older posters may remember a time when even discussing points values wasn't allowed thanks to GW pressure.

Ah that takes me back. I remember when we used to use the cost of meltabombs as reference for everything else in the game.

Points totals for lists were allowed, though. Somewhere in a closet there exists the paper on which I reverse-engineered the points totals for all of Lord of the Rings using simple algebra just to make a point to someone who told me I'd never use math class for anything.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
GW's convinced that if they don't force people to buy art books to get the current rules every three years nobody will love them anymore. It's not particularly rational, no, but they seem to be rolling along under their own weight in spite of all the screwiness the Codex release model causes, so...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

chaos0xomega wrote:
My theory is that GW is desperately clinging to print in order to prevent the issues that arose in the WMHDs community where the game completely decoupled from the fluff and the commuinty burned out its casual segment and leaned fully into the competitive segment. Say what you will about GWs heavy competitive focus over the past edition or two, they are still supplying a lot of narrative content and pushing fluff aggressively by releasing narratively focused campaign supplements that contain matched play rules in order to try to keep the competitive community some degree of grounded in the fiction.

My retort is "theres got to be a better way than this".

That doesn't make that much sense to me. The Warmachine community was never that into the lore, because the selling point of Warmachine is "here's a competitive game that works properly," so even back when Warmachine was big the competitive/casual divide was between Warmachine and 40k players, not internally within each game.
.

It depends who you're excluding/including from 'the community.' If you mean their forums, they were split, but heavily for competitive. If you mean local groups, most of the ones I dealt with were pretty fluffy. Even WM players got tired of competitive only Steamroller blah blah blah theme lists.

Killing the books and the lore really did have an effect on the local scenes. (As did the edition shifts- we had a lot of old players who decried Mark2 as the devil, and then just laughed at their own dire prophecies when 3 came around and pushed more peo[le out).

Indeed- when seacat left, that was it for me.

As to wmh players not liking the lore i'll personally disagree as I loved the lore/setting and have all the lore books back all the way to the original Witchfire trilogy.

Yeah, not gonna happen … the mystique of the changing “meta” is a revenue generator. GW will keep the game opaque and its changes unpredictable in order to feign progress alongside its tepid narrative. Meh.. in the near future, there is only moar.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The Warmachine community was never that into the lore

This is patently false. Having been in the game and community since Mk1, the early growth of the game was dominated by the fluff and the majority of players were invested in it. The shift away from the fluff occurred with Mk2 when PP made War Room available and sealed the fate of books like the "Force of Warmachine" series, and Wrath, Colossals, Vengeance, and Reckoning - books with the vast majority of players never purchased or looked at because it served no real purpose to them when they had instantaneous rules access to everything by way of the app. The fact that the Mk2 design paradigm had also moved the game away from fluff-driven rules of Mk1 in the name of balance and standardization certainly also helped cut players off from the narrative, etc. At that point there began a mass-decoupling of the playerbase and community from the fluff, even people who were previously invested in the fluff (such as myself and most of my Mk1 gamegroup) moved away from caring because none of us bothered to by the splatbooks, etc. after the app released, there simply was no need because we were getting all the rules via another source - a source which contained no fluff or narrative content to help keep us invested in the character, setting, story, etc. We didn't bother buying the books, not because we were anti-fluff, but because the only justification for us to spend $30-40 on a rulebook was for the rules themselves, the nararative and fluff content of those books was really just bonus window dressing to many of us, but one which inadvertently helped keep us grounded in the fiction. By the time PP started trying to push fluff via novels, it was already too little, too late, as many of us had become completely adrift of the fluff and couldn't even tell you what fictional year it was anymore or what the status of the various war(s) was or who was winning or where the borders were or what the various powers goals were, etc. Whereas in Mk1 this was all stuff that most players of the game seemed to actively discuss both around the game table and on PPs now-defunct forums. Hell, go back on dakkadakka to the mid-2000s and you'll see most of the time that someone on these forums was pitching the game to someone they would include a phrase to the effect of "and unlike GWs static setting, Warmachine and Hordes have a continuing plotline that gets moved forward regularly and causes characters to change and evolve - and potentially even die!", etc. Seems like people cared about that sort of thing if they bothered to mention that, no?

In the same way, if GW moved all of its rules to a competently designed app where a one-time payment or subscription fee got me access to everything like it did with War Room, I would never buy another Codex or rulebook again and probably never read another page of fluff - and I am *very* invested into the lore of the game to the point of reading at least a half-dozen to a dozen black library novels/year, but realistically speaking much of the catalyst for me picking up those novels comes from the novels building off the interests I develop in specific aspects of the lore courtesy of those codexes.

 Matt.Kingsley wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
Older posters may remember a time when even discussing points values wasn't allowed thanks to GW pressure.

Ah that takes me back. I remember when we used to use the cost of meltabombs as reference for everything else in the game.

I never put two-and-two together, but do you think thats why most of the units that used to have them have been stripped of the option to add meltabombs? lol I used to use them heavily in some of my lists during 4th/5th/6th, but through 8th and 9th I've often found myself missing the ability to add them to my units.

Deadnight wrote:
Indeed- when seacat left, that was it for me.
As to wmh players not liking the lore i'll personally disagree as I loved the lore/setting and have all the lore books back all the way to the original Witchfire trilogy.

Yep, there was a pretty massive outpouring of grief when Seacat announced his departure, but his departure came years after the fluff had already been sidelined, and was partially motivated by the fact that his role was of declining relevance and importance to both the company and the community.

Exalted.

The OP explicitly asked for a solution that included artwork and lore to avoid the PP issues.

And I do agree. Pretty pictures+unit lore+rules presented in the same way wahapedia currently is? I'd pay for that.

FWIW my memory of WMH lore was that you did have cool stories/moments in Mk1. There were a few in Mk2 - but progressively you had 40k style problems. Every faction was being pushed up against some massive cataclysmic event.... which could never happen because obviously they weren't going to delete a faction, even if they'd evolve characters.

And so especially late on, the stories evolved into the crap we see in modern 40k codexes. I.E. "The usual suspects walked down the road, had an inconclusive fight one of the other factions, met the new units whose rules are in this book, and then there was a cliffhanger that you knew wouldn't be resolved next year."

I don't know if Mk3 changed this because Warmachine effectively died round here and I gave up.

Really the issue is a divided playerbase. People who play a lot - and often have multiple armies - would love an app. By contrast people who play say one game every 6 months still end up buying a codex - but are unlikely to maintain such a subscription.

Tyel wrote:


And so especially late on, the stories evolved into the crap we see in modern 40k codexes. I.E. "The usual suspects walked down the road, had an inconclusive fight one of the other factions, met the new units whose rules are in this book, and then there was a cliffhanger that you knew wouldn't be resolved next year."

I don't exactly remember what book it was in (I want to say Exigence), but it was so so refreshing to read the parts of the Skorne invasion of Ios due to someone actually taking notice of this trope and subverting it. Casters got killed, though they were ones you had never heard of and then you had the Iosians had absolutely no idea who they were up against, something which has bled into 40k with it's Avengers-esq big damn heroes narrative where everyone knows everyone.

Instead of them just going "I see Lord Tyrant Herexis and Dominar Rasheth across from us milord!" they just gave a vague description, "I see a heavily-armoured Skorne with a large polearm and a gigantic fat one on a palanquin that goes against literally everything intelligence has told us about this race."

Toofast wrote:
The new website is utter trash and I can't believe how much they spent on it. I could make a copy of their website with better functionality in Big Commerce and it would be a $2-3k job. It could then be run by a single intern with a basic knowledge of computers. Instead they spent millions and got a website that doesn't even have the most basic functionality like showing "temp OOS" vs "no longer available".

Well then, luckily for you they're still advertising for developers - https://jobs.games-workshop.com/search-and-apply?_business_section=information-technology

beast_gts wrote:

Toofast wrote:
The new website is utter trash and I can't believe how much they spent on it. I could make a copy of their website with better functionality in Big Commerce and it would be a $2-3k job. It could then be run by a single intern with a basic knowledge of computers. Instead they spent millions and got a website that doesn't even have the most basic functionality like showing "temp OOS" vs "no longer available".

Well then, luckily for you they're still advertising for developers - https://jobs.games-workshop.com/search-and-apply?_business_section=information-technology

I split my time between Florida and Colombia. I wouldn't live in the UK if you paid me $1M/yr.

 VladimirHerzog wrote:
game would be borderline unplayable for most of the regulars at my LGS if wahapedia didnt exist

This. GW should get the Wahapedia creator out of Russia somehow and pay him to fork his site. Make it 5 pounds a month, with codex updates and faqs applied to one searchable database. Make codices more "fluff, art, and lore" with no rules content in them that's not also available on the website.

They'd never do it because there's some suit who thinks they could squeeze even more money out of people doing it some more tortuous way, but it'd be really good for the game. Get that subscription model going.

I don't need artwork and lore with my rules. GW's new format makes it impossible to have much unit lore. I want a separate publication where there is room for fluff, artwork and stuff like that for my Necrons instead of shoving it in the margins of my codex where it only annoys me.

chaos0xomega wrote:
My theory is that GW is desperately clinging to print in order to prevent the issues that arose in the WMHDs community where the game completely decoupled from the fluff and the commuinty burned out its casual segment and leaned fully into the competitive segment. Say what you will about GWs heavy competitive focus over the past edition or two, they are still supplying a lot of narrative content and pushing fluff aggressively by releasing narratively focused campaign supplements that contain matched play rules in order to try to keep the competitive community some degree of grounded in the fiction.

My retort is "theres got to be a better way than this".

Maybe titanslayer lasguns is the wrong direction then. The rules should tell a narrative, every army having a 6" re-roll 1s aura that doesn't affect vehicles (except for Dreadnoughts høhø) isn't that.

As long as people buy codexes , GW will sell them.

Look to third parties for rules, and avoid official venues (where official Books are mandatory) to game in the 40k universe for cheap .

You also need to find a like minded community, some people will die on the Hill of the crazy (but profitable) pricing model - avoid them.

I mean while we're wishing for GW to give us free stuff, It'd be great if GW just gave everyone a free army too!

BrianDavion wrote:
I mean while we're wishing for GW to give us free stuff, It'd be great if GW just gave everyone a free army too!

I think most people would be willing to pay the same amount of money for properly maintained and presented rules as they are paying for books and app.

Wahapedia has done more for the game than any other singular 3rd entity, and GW needs to see this trend.

People also need to understand that they are paying for more than just well-crafted plastic. They are paying for lore authorship and art as well.

 Just_Breathe wrote:
Wahapedia has done more for the game than any other singular 3rd entity, and GW needs to see this trend.

People also need to understand that they are paying for more than just well-crafted plastic. They are paying for lore authorship and art as well.

Still have to give a shout out to Battlescribe as well. Party poppers can gak on it all they want, but I have the ability to fiddle with ANY list super quick.

The big archivement behind BS is not the mediocre UI client everyone complains about, but the modular data and the infrastructure behind it that enabled a big community to keep it up to date at all times.

Every other project eventually burned out the developers which had to constantly keep up the the changing game.

 Jidmah wrote:
The big archivement behind BS is not the mediocre UI client everyone complains about, but the modular data and the infrastructure behind it that enabled a big community to keep it up to date at all times.

Every other project eventually burned out the developers which had to constantly keep up the the changing game.

I find the UI just fine to be honest. Not sure how it isn't user friendly.