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 zedmeister wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Could be more of that toxic interdepartmental rivalry stuff coming to the fore?

Wouldn't be surprised. I can imagine there'll be people internally celebrating the death of Forgoworld's website...

Sometimes GW baffles me, but honestly my impression is that some of that rivalry has died since they moved away from Kirby's approach to specialist being mostly boardgame "one and done" releases toward the more current attitude of them being more long term and also using plastics not just resins.

We do still get odd choices here and there like a FW making tanks in resin instead of plastics and such. So there's clearly still some fight for resources internally.



But yeah it could just be some random inter departmental thing; heck maybe its just that the web-team are so totally separate that they've really no clue that necromunda or AT or such are as main-line as regular games and they are just copying the same design structure that's hung over since the kirby days. And no one tells them any different cause the manage that approves it is also that far removed

Bit of a shame. I can imagine a lot of the non-players who purchase GW stuff (gifts for family members etc) will just use Amazon as it's a lot simpler to navigate. From the homepage of both sites, sticking "space marines" in the search bar returns a good selection of popular kits on Amazon, on new Warhammer.com it's mainly dice, books, datacards and Forge World kits.

Pushing people towards 3rd parties on Amazon or wherever is going to be a way lower margin than direct web sales - what a mess up.

Personally I hope/ am pretty sure most of the apparent problems of the page will be fixed within the next weeks. I just wonder why they thought they had to put out the Alpha version of their new page, they didn't have an official date to release this, right?

It makes you wonder what went wrong with the Legions Imperialis book when GW at the same time puts a webpage like this to the public.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Personally I hope/ am pretty sure most of the apparent problems of the page will be fixed within the next weeks. I just wonder why they thought they had to put out the Alpha version of their new page, they didn't have an official date to release this, right?

It makes you wonder what went wrong with the Legions Imperialis book when GW at the same time puts a webpage like this to the public.

10th Ed. was an alpha-version of an unfinished game-why not do the same with their website?

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Could be more of that toxic interdepartmental rivalry stuff coming to the fore?

Maybe interdepartmental rivalry is just how GW playtest games. Each department is assigned a faction (HR is Necrons) and depending on how well they can screw over other departments translates over to how strong the next codex for their assigned faction is.

you are assuming anyone there know enough about the rules to actually play a game (but I fear there is none)

I'm not getting much of the negativity.

Maybe its just that I only ever engaged with their sales part of the website, but thats basically the same as it was. You click "store" and it gives you the various filters to find stuff.

The unit entries all appear to have nice little flavour bits, which is nice.

I agree on the "show more" thing though

the splash page on the front is really only for people who have no idea on anything about the company or the hobby. There are direct links to WarComm and Warhammer+ right there as well.

Minimalist, but I don't think its terrible.

I'm a bit surprised if they're dropping the "forgeworld" name entirely, I'd have expected them to brand things on their site with it rather than just calling them "expert kit 15+"

I for one find the new website rollout highly entertaining. Which proves once again that the best entertainment from GW is that which they provide for free.

grahamdbailey wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Personally I hope/ am pretty sure most of the apparent problems of the page will be fixed within the next weeks. I just wonder why they thought they had to put out the Alpha version of their new page, they didn't have an official date to release this, right?

It makes you wonder what went wrong with the Legions Imperialis book when GW at the same time puts a webpage like this to the public.

10th Ed. was an alpha-version of an unfinished game-why not do the same with their website?

So was AoS. It's a longstanding tradition.

More seriously, I have to wonder if GW hasn't grown too comfortable with putting out low effort products and service and getting all the monies in return, and this is just the latest expression of it. All flash (according to some manager, at least), but serious functionality issue. Bugs are to be expected at launch and will get ironed out. But clunky functions? What's the point in making shopping at their online store a smooth and pleasant experience if the customers are so determined to throw their money at GW that they're going to put up with bad website design, just like they put up with that kind of stuff in other contexts?

Looking at it like this, I hope the new website is a bust and GW receives a noticeable kick in the bottom line because of it.

 Flinty wrote:
I'm not getting much of the negativity.

Maybe its just that I only ever engaged with their sales part of the website, but thats basically the same as it was. You click "store" and it gives you the various filters to find stuff.
.

Well, for one, you didn't have to start over from 'store' (or a dedicated search for one item, presuming you know exactly the GW wacky unit names) each time you wanted to look at something. You could display (and sort) multiple ways. There are suddenly a lot fewer filters, and the category navigation bars were where they're supposed to be (at the top, and persistent)

 Geifer wrote:
More seriously, I have to wonder if GW hasn't grown too comfortable with putting out low effort products and service and getting all the monies in return, and this is just the latest expression of it.

they are already #1, so why try harder
and for now, nothing they have done had any negative influence on the financial report

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
Personally I hope/ am pretty sure most of the apparent problems of the page will be fixed within the next weeks. I just wonder why they thought they had to put out the Alpha version of their new page, they didn't have an official date to release this, right?

Also to add a bit of speculation to my previous post, on the point of an official release date, there wasn't one. But I could see an internal one being mandated by how The Old World is going to get released. Specialist games have had a mix of plastic kits on the GW website and resin models on the Forge World site for a while, which was not ideal. GW might have decided that such a split is going to cause issues when applied to an army level game that does not get the plethora of tankstankstankstankstanks new plastic kits like Horus Heresy and whose shiny new toys are largely cast in resin and not available on the main site that only displays the crummy old plastics from twenty years ago.

Provided the Legions Imperialis delay took over The Old World's release slot in November, it's conceivable that the new website release was locked in to get it up in time for the Old World release and delaying the rollout of the webstore was either not possible or not desirable.


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 kodos wrote:

 Geifer wrote:
More seriously, I have to wonder if GW hasn't grown too comfortable with putting out low effort products and service and getting all the monies in return, and this is just the latest expression of it.

they are already #1, so why try harder
and for now, nothing they have done had any negative influence on the financial report

There's a difference between product and sales infrastructure. You'd hope that a company in the vice grip of bean counters wouldn't be as cavalier about the latter as they are about the former.

Yeah, prefer the old store. And I didn't even particularly like that one.

I tried to find a few things and I dislike the unpinned bar, I preferred just having the categories listed across the top instead of hidden within the "SHOP" menu. Tried to find a couple of things and it feels more clunky than the old store. Having FW on there is nice in some ways, but also just clogs it up. It only shows 12 items at a time, and they got rid of the "view all" feature which is basically what I used exclusively on the old site. If I just want to scan what's available for a faction, that seems harder now than it was before.

And I say all that given I didn't particularly like the old store. They could have added some basic functionality that was missing from the old site, for example it'd be nice if we could middle click menu items to open in new tab (e.g. I want to look at two different factions in two different tabs/windows, or look at troops on one and vehicles on another). Also would be nice if when you click on an item, there was a link to take you back to the item's location on the site, I guess that might have conflicts when 1 item is located in 2 or more places, but I'm sure they could manage something.

Overall, meh, don't see how this improves the website experience, feels like an upgrade for upgrade sake that is actually more like a sidegrade.

It actually feels more difficult to use the website to simply scan the range, which is 99% of how I used to use their website previously.

For Australians... I don't see shipping terms listed for the FW items in the Delivery section of the website, seems like a bit of an omission as I doubt it's only going to be $7 and 8 days shipping for FW items.

 Mentlegen324 wrote:
I'm a bit surprised if they're dropping the "forgeworld" name entirely, I'd have expected them to brand things on their site with it rather than just calling them "expert kit 15+"

Honestly I'm not. FW as a brand name worked years ago, but GW central now makes kits just a big in plastic. Plus the market has WAY more model companies in it now and a good many of newer generations didn't even fully realise that Forgeworld was part of GW. They would think they were just an approved 3rd party.

Plus we can see that FW are doing plastic and resin kits at the same time and it was silly to have things like Necromunda and AT with half the products on one store and half on another. Bringing it all under one brand to market and one website is a very sound move. Especially when over the last few years FW has stripped a LOT of their most iconic models out. The entire Old World range are gone; the greater demons are gone; a good chunk of other armies have lost models over the years too. Meanwhile the specialist games have grown and grown.

Of all the changes I think this one makes the most sense, esp if GW have upped the capacity of FW's resin casting to meet demand of a larger market by bringing it under the main brand and highlighting it. Heck over the years one big complaint I've had was that the marketing hardly touched on FW - even to the point where I saw them do a whole article on Exalted Greater Demons and use the plastic models not the official exalted resin ones from FW. It was also very telling that the only FW models that got any marketing for AoS were the Gloomspite Gitz ones nad they were some of the last to go (and I suspect that meant they actually sold in good numbers)

So this is how I imagine things went at GW yesterday.

Mod edit. Please do not upload non-wargaming images to the Dakka galleries. Linking from off-site sources is fine however.

Was going to say that it looked like the site update may have broke warcom as there weren't any content posts made today, but right before hitting submit on this post they finally got something up.

 Overread wrote:

 zedmeister wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Could be more of that toxic interdepartmental rivalry stuff coming to the fore?

Wouldn't be surprised. I can imagine there'll be people internally celebrating the death of Forgoworld's website...

Sometimes GW baffles me, but honestly my impression is that some of that rivalry has died since they moved away from Kirby's approach to specialist being mostly boardgame "one and done" releases toward the more current attitude of them being more long term and also using plastics not just resins.

We do still get odd choices here and there like a FW making tanks in resin instead of plastics and such. So there's clearly still some fight for resources internally.

My understanding is that its not much of a fight. The operations/production team basically provides a planning schedule of available plastic production "slots" or whatever to management, management in conjunction with the bean counters allocates those slots out to the respective studios/teams/departments. In this case, the forgeworld/specialist studio gets its cut of slots, and then has to determine what they will be using their slots for. They internally prioritized using one of their "big kit" slots to produce a plastic Kratos over the Squat tank for Necromunda, for example. As such, the Squat tank gets a resin release instead.

Honestly I'm not. FW as a brand name worked years ago, but GW central now makes kits just a big in plastic. Plus the market has WAY more model companies in it now and a good many of newer generations didn't even fully realise that Forgeworld was part of GW. They would think they were just an approved 3rd party.

Yeah, common issue with the newer generation of players. Guess GW had to dumb down their product offering for them

 Geifer wrote:

 kodos wrote:

 Geifer wrote:
More seriously, I have to wonder if GW hasn't grown too comfortable with putting out low effort products and service and getting all the monies in return, and this is just the latest expression of it.

they are already #1, so why try harder
and for now, nothing they have done had any negative influence on the financial report

There's a difference between product and sales infrastructure. You'd hope that a company in the vice grip of bean counters wouldn't be as cavalier about the latter as they are about the former.

there might be a difference, but as people have said it with the App, this is a model company, not a software company so we should not expect a perfect software product for them /s

and for GW, they won't see a decrease in sales no matter how bad the shop is, so why even try to make something good when the cheapest available option gets the job done

chaos0xomega wrote:
Was going to say that it looked like the site update may have broke warcom as there weren't any content posts made today, but right before hitting submit on this post they finally got something up.

Remember they're an hour behind now because they had their version of falling back an hour on Sunday. Last article of the day will be at noon, Eastern, with the first article at 8am Eastern.

They also dumped alot of the usual Wednesday articles yesterday. Hence the yawn-inducing post about where you can watch organized play stuff today, rather than on Tuesday or Thursday like usual.

Ah true that, didn't think of it.

 insaniak wrote:
I would guess that the improvement is on server load, rather than functionality - they have sacrificed the bells and whistles in favour of not overloading the website when traffic is heavy. Although the fact that they've done all of this and still apparently have a queue system is more than a little bewildering.

Can I ask for some sort of citation on it? Because not only the new site runs slower, every single thing on it I saw requires way more server calls than previous one. Old site, done well, could have worked with a handful of calls. This? Even such simple thing as showing you product was reduced from 20 items to 12. You want to load more? A call. You want to look at pics? It dynamically loads them, making each separate call, instead of preloaded gallery old (IIRC) had. Scrolling? A call. Hell, even item descriptions, instead of being loaded whole, have 'read more' button more often than not. Even simple browsing requires order of magnitude more loading, going back and forth, stumbling around till you find what you're looking for unlike old site. Each of these is dozens of loads on its own per click where there were none before, easily.

Everywhere I look, there is dozens if not hundreds of pointless, superfluous server calls just to make this gak work like trendy mobile site dynamically loading content when you surf on the phone... Which, like I said in previous post, is how net surfing works in small minority of regions GW store actually serves, never mind the rest of the planet which is even more behind in this regard

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I can't even work out what "bells and whistles" they've saved on.

None. In fact, it works much slower on my old bedroom desktop I use to measure site performance for typical users without top end machines - which means there is tons of pointless scripts slowing down the whole thing in the background. And the worst part is, I have no clue what they are even doing, because they should be working to make the user experience better, not worse, and I don't see a single indication they are even trying to do that.

Honestly considering how similar parts of it are to the community pages I wonder if this is purely GW deciding that they want a single website platform and chose to use the community software they've been running with a "store addon".

More likely developer just offered them some cheap store template and clueless GW leadership just accepted it as is instead of going through proper requirement and architecture phase that would actually need some work from GW to specify what they actually want/need. It's what you get when customer can't even formulate their feature wishlist tailored specifically to their operation (and the dishonest developer just goes with it because it's easy and fast instead of trying to help them to do that).

This website reminds me of that. It's like a webstore designed by someone who has never used a webstore.

Nah, it reminds me of basic webstore template that lacks X or Z functionality because template author assumed the customer will insert their own instead of just accepting it as is and crippling the page with lack of basic functions. Much like first year web development students behave when they have to adapt a ready base layout for the first time because they have no idea how to edit anything more than basic code inside yet

Am I blind or are the Kill Team Inquisitoral Agents just gone?

They've been out of stock forever so maybe GW just gave up?

Somewhere there is a UX/UI coder that is crying.

The website is so bad. Not that the previous one was stellar, but I think this one has broken every single rule of a 'modern' web page.

It feels like it was built by (and for) a person who has only ever used the internet through a phone.

I'm surprised it even has responsive design. It's not very good, but it does have it.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Am I blind or are the Kill Team Inquisitoral Agents just gone?

They've been out of stock forever so maybe GW just gave up?

That sucks. The fact that Ashes and Faith sold out like immediately and I can't find it anywhere for a reasonable price just adds salt to the wound.

Everytime I open that Page, I'm ask to change my language...

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Am I blind or are the Kill Team Inquisitoral Agents just gone?

They've been out of stock forever so maybe GW just gave up?

Dunno about the kill team, but the MESBG Gondor terrain has been out of stock for ages & showing as 'No longer available online'. Rumour is that they have been discontinued already, yet the items have been uploaded to the new site so it looks like they just moved everything over from the old store, rather than taking the time to tidy up.

So it could be the agents are just missing, been placed under the wrong tag or they are indeed gone for good.

My comment is not much help I know, but I should be hired by GW on the strength of this comment alone as its still more useful than the new store!

The gondor mansion is supposedly discontinued due to damage to the mold or something. I believe the tower is back in stock or at least still available. Ruins should not be affected.

Sometimes I think this might happen when a mould breaks or takes damage much earlier than normal and there's an internal question mark over if it will get a new one or a repair or not. It might even be one of those choices that gets pushed to the background or passed over multiple times for other things and before you know it several months have gone by.

 Snrub wrote:
Right. Without a doubt the worst iteration of the GW website. Can we go back to the mid-00's version please?

What's funny is that even if they did that it would still suck, or at least suck worse than it did, due to the degradation of the rules into mush.

There are no longer any logical subcategories for units within a single faction (like, say, HQ, Elite, Troops, etc.). No unit types. I guess there are keywords, but only a couple would make any sense as filters.

 zedmeister wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Could be more of that toxic interdepartmental rivalry stuff coming to the fore?

Wouldn't be surprised. I can imagine there'll be people internally celebrating the death of Forgoworld's website...

I had no idea there was contention with them. I mean, I dislike Forgeworld stuff, but it seems stupid for the company to have beef with one another.


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 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Am I blind or are the Kill Team Inquisitoral Agents just gone?

They've been out of stock forever so maybe GW just gave up?

A lot of the Kill Team stuff isn't tagged properly. You need to search to find the Starstriders or the Navy Breachers, for instance.

 Scottywan82 wrote:

 zedmeister wrote:

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Could be more of that toxic interdepartmental rivalry stuff coming to the fore?

Wouldn't be surprised. I can imagine there'll be people internally celebrating the death of Forgoworld's website...

I had no idea there was contention with them. I mean, I dislike Forgeworld stuff, but it seems stupid for the company to have beef with one another.

It doesn't even have to be contention. There's also a lot of compartmentalising that went on at GW (esp during the height of the Lord of the Rings being new). You had things like the whole of FW not even knowing End Times was actualyl going to end the setting nor that AoS was coming along after. Ergo some of it will be your standard office politics; some the jostling for projects and finite resources and some of it purely because department A and B aren't allowed to talk to each other and have no clue what each other is doing.

 Flinty wrote:

Maybe its just that I only ever engaged with their sales part of the website, but thats basically the same as it was. You click "store" and it gives you the various filters to find stuff.

The filters are much less detailed then before, where you could filter by unit type or even keyword.

 Flinty wrote:

The unit entries all appear to have nice little flavour bits, which is nice.

Those were also present in the old website




Automatically Appended Next Post:
And now in true GW fashion, they've released a FAQ for the website launch HAHAHAHAHAAHAH

https://www.warhammer.com/en-GB/warhammer-com-launch-faqs?