What's the real story behind the launch of Age of Sigmar?

[Overread]

One issue with getting rid of points in Warhammer is that because of the vast diversity in both visual and theory style of models and armies, it becomes very hard to self-balance matchups; esp if you've never played a specific army (or against it) before. If everyone had spearmen and archers, light and heavy cavalry and heroes were basically just normal troops with one or two bonus stats then you coudl easily balance by just mirroring armies against each other. Or even having a very basic "one archer equals two spearmen" approach to balance.

That kind of approach falls apart for AoS because heroes and monsters and even infantry are vastly different. Furthermore even things that are the same visually look different. 

 

So by removing points you basically introduce a system of continual trials and errors at every single game club as gamers try to work out what is fair. Thing is without points what's "fair and fun" varies so much. You've got players who want to have faithful battles who might only take one hero and one monster; through to people who see AoS as a realm of magical monsters who would want to take way more heroes and monsters nad fewer troops. You've got people with big and small collections - so suddenly you've got to spend way more time before a game in planning a game. That can be fun, but it destroys quick pick-up games where you might go to the club or shop for a game.  It also creates a huge barrier of confusion to a new player because now they are in a sea where each club is vastly different in attitude. Online advice is near pointless and only confuses further etc.. Basically if fragments the playerbase. 

 

So yes it could be done, but the stats and visual side of the game would, I think, have to have drastic changes to allow for a no-points approach to it. You can't just take the points out and have it work. 

[Lousy Beatnik]

6 hours ago, zedatkinszed said:

TBH this thread is veering WAY off topic into the launch of AOS and how that could have been better. The OP asked a simple question: why did WHFB get canned and why did they choose to do AOS at all. That's been answered multiple times and comprehensively with the great post by @Kaleb Daark

While I agree the thread has gone WAY off topic... That isn't it all the question the OP asked! Yuk yuk yuk!

The question he/she asked is an interesting one, but I guess we'll never know the answer, and just go in circles with our own experiences or old complaints about early AoS.

[Envyus]

8 hours ago, Ollie Grimwood said:

On the no points aspect is was clearly the intention that people find ways to balance their own games based on their circumstances.  Balance of units was and still is very situational.  Quite a few people came up with innovative and interesting  ways to balance their games Mo Comp,  SCGT and there was a formula based mechanic that was tried  

I felt many of the claims that the game was impossible to balance coming from existing WFB players were somewhat disingenuous at best. Coupled with the claims there was always a long list of examples of unbalanced situations, if people were so capabale of working out what wasn’t balanced they were just as capable of working what was. 

There were also claims of ludicrous numbers of Archaons (or Bloodthirsters or Nagash for example) being fielded by individual players.   Again quite easy to work out that wasn’t going to work and let’s face it, pictures or it didn’t happen. 

Are GHB points easier? Yes and their release  did galvanise AoS sales. However they weren’t and aren’t as good as what the community came up with and I really liked the possitive attitude towards ownership of the game and shared gaming experience that existed in the AoS community before their existence 

N.B. This is my opinion of the situation as a whole and shouldn’t be considered to be about any individual in particular 

I feel this is very disingenuous. And quite disrespectful as well. 

 

16 hours ago, Kaleb Daark said:

This very long reply to one of my posts.

Why did you quote me. What I said has nothing to do with what you are talking about. 

[Fairbanks]

I have a conspiracy, here it is:

On the Christmas before the World-That-Was' Destruction and subsequent release of AoS, Warseer had a massive rumor thread about what was to come. It described a skirmish game with 6 factions in the ruins of the Warhammer world.

My belief: Someone got an advanced look at Shadespire and assumed that it was the game to come.

[Lousy Beatnik]

The early Warseer etc. Rumours were hilarious, and worth looking back if anyone has the time

Regalia and the Nigmos orcs? Races surviving in bubbles of reality, randomly crashing and that's how battles begin?

One of the main "fighting in the realm of chaos/ruins of the dead world" rumours had every race/army worshipping chaos and you'd pick which God. That actually sounded fun

Back on topic, I'd love to know if there were people (Jervis?) Who honestly thought no points/restrictions would work long-term. I recall Gav Thorpe in an interview wondering how many people actually read the back of the Inquisitor rulebook, with his designer's notes and ideas on how to play.

[Sleboda]

The less said of Warseer, the better. Mos Eisly.

[Kaleb Daark]

5 hours ago, Envyus said:

Why did you quote me. What I said has nothing to do with what you are talking about. 

ok. I won't do it again.  ever.

ignore facility should sort that out.

carry on.

[Ollie Grimwood]

8 hours ago, Lousy Beatnik said:

The early Warseer etc. Rumours were hilarious, and worth looking back if anyone has the time

Regalia and the Nigmos orcs? Races surviving in bubbles of reality, randomly crashing and that's how battles begin?

One of the main "fighting in the realm of chaos/ruins of the dead world" rumours had every race/army worshipping chaos and you'd pick which God. That actually sounded fun

Back on topic, I'd love to know if there were people (Jervis?) Who honestly thought no points/restrictions would work long-term. I recall Gav Thorpe in an interview wondering how many people actually read the back of the Inquisitor rulebook, with his designer's notes and ideas on how to play.

 

I maintain they believed the Community at large would come up with their own solution (and they did) and then either leave it at that or adapt it for their own (which they did).  It’s worth noting that points in AoS are different in form to those in WFB. 

Of course there’s quite a lot of arguement as to how effectively they do balance the game.  When I do use them I find AoS army list building a much more pleasurable experience than I did in WFB though 

I think @Skreech Verminking  hits in on the head with the Beta test analogy. There was a whole experiment going on with what actually went into a comercially successful Wargame. Which we saw with the rapid evolution of the game and number of aspects that were adopted in 40K. In they hadn’t paired the whole thing right back it would have still carried too much baggage for it to be effective in that way. So pretty much everything had to go. 

[Dead Scribe]

On 12/31/2018 at 6:15 PM, Lousy Beatnik said:

Precisely. Good or bad, it wasn't designed for playing in a "tournament hall"

And I think thats exactly it tanked.  I realize anecdotes cannot be used as proper backing for a debate or argument or whatever, but I don't know anyone that plays these games that would play without a tournament mode.  Online discussions are also almost predominantly tournament mode.  I can understand that that is not representative of the entire population but no tournament mode means not selling your game, and I think that they proved that to themselves on the initial AOS release.

[Fairbanks]

17 hours ago, zedatkinszed said:

TBH this thread is veering WAY off topic into the launch of AOS and how that could have been better. The OP asked a simple question: why did WHFB get canned and why did they choose to do AOS at all. That's been answered multiple times and comprehensively with the great post by @Kaleb Daark

I don't know why @Skreech Verminking is only showing GW's stock for the first few years of AOS timeframe, because there's really little point showing that in the absence of context. By the way AOS was decided upon in 2012 or 2013 according to Jervis Johnson so any stock analysis (which TBH is not all that helpful) needs to go back to 2008 or 2009.

Now, here's the stock picture for GW for the last 5 years:

 

As you can see GW stock took a slight dip in 2016 and then rocketed up after Kirby left. Honestly I'd love to say that the stock upsurge was about AOS's reform and the improvement in the GW marketting style. But TBH it was about the CEO.

Oh and BTW GW itself is saying it's in a bubble and that it's stock will fall. It will so don't panic when it happens (unless you invested at the high point - in that case bummer).

This is a topic for another thread, but GW may have made a windfall profit because of its international sales (mostly US and Canada) during Brexit. When you aim to hit £X, and then every $ becomes more £ than originally, you blow your profit goals to kingdom come.

This may have also coincided with a big release or two.

[chord]

Can we lock this as it will devolve into people who love points vs people who don't.  We've discussed this endlessly in the past. 

[Overread]

I don't know if Brexit has as much effect as people think because I don't recall GW prices being lowered as the value of the £ went down compared to the $. Plus the number of people who grey import is often a lot smaller than the domestic customers (plus sometimes the difference, once tax is applied, is often minimal unless you're buying products into the £1000s). 

Certainly GW's overseas reach has gained them a lot more revenue than if they'd just stuck to the UK and we can't ignore that the USA is a vast market unto itself. That said I think that what we are seeing is more a result of policy change, communication and big releases. I think we'd have seen near the same profit patterns without Brexit (in fact without it we might have seen higher sales, esp on the home ground). 

[Ken]

On 12/31/2018 at 2:09 AM, Bellfree said:

I know I'm a little late to the party but this is bit of a  watered down and 'put a smile on it' explanation for what that period was like. While we have no 100% accurate first person views of what happened during the lead up and first year of launch or Age of Sigmar, we do have enough podcast recordings, youtube videos, FLGS testimonials, financial information, and 'insider gossip' to piece together a timeline that's certainly more complete(and DEEPLY interesting)  than 'paid off in the long term'.

Here's what I've managed to piece together after long hours of research into this situation. It's one of the most fascinating business cases in the 21st century. If they ever get a complete record of what exactly happened, it'll be taught in every business school for the rest of time.  As it stands it's mostly evidence based speculation as getting a 100% honest take out of most likely NDA bound GW staffers is dam near impossible.

Starting in response to your comment. The 'We're a miniatures company not a games company' thing is a deliberate mocking of the community of both 40k and Warhammer Fantasy by Ex-CEO TOM Kirby. His administration said this in response to people calling out their objectively shoddy rules writing. This is the GW equivalent of the kid on Xbox live calling you a 'try-hard nerd that needs to get a life' when he gets beaten. (sidebar: In October Kirby started doomsaying on GW's stock price, because he's a ******.)

It wasn't just points they didn't worry about, armies tended to be wildly broken relative to one another(even moreso than we see today. 7th edition 40k ended up being a game where it was almost mathematically impossible for some 1850pt  armies to kill a single model against optimized lists), core rules didn't function correctly, or created unforeseen combinations that led to unkillable units(literally unkillable. As in 99% reduction to ALL damage. No mortal wounds in this era). They also had some of the worst onboarding in the history of gaming. You needed to memorize probably close to 150 pages of rules to even be able to start playing a game of either 40k or AoS. Teaching someone either was a massive pain for both of you. BOTH games were an absolute nightmare to play before their reboot, although Fantasy was a LOT better off than 40k was by the end of 7th.

AoS was a massive gamble yes. But just saying 'it paid off in the long run' does a serious disservice to the entire chain of events. When AoS first dropped, Warhammer Fantasy died basically overnight, with 0 warning or communication. Everyone's armies were no longer valid, and were unlikely to be supported even if you intended to continue with 8th edition Fantasy. Extremely expensive end-time books became paperweights and the game that they introduced was seen as a joke. A guy burned his Dark Elf army on YouTube and while in retrospect it's a pretty rash thing, at the time it wasn't totally unreasonable. Saying that 'they supported older models' is a pretty significant retcon too. Two armies got squatted outright and there was absolutely no guarantee at launch that ANYTHING would survive beyond their initial warscrolls(many of which are so terrible that they've mostly all been reworked whenever a new book comes out). No one could be sure of anything and even people who DID support the game at launch did so knowing that the rug could be yanked out from underneath them at any moment.

Imagine if tomorrow, you woke up and Age of Sigmar was suddenly Hello Kitty Island Adventure and you were pretty sure your army wasn't going to be getting anything anytime soon, if ever again, and that's about what this felt like. This outright killed a ton of FLGS and tanked GW's profits pretty hard. Compound that with the first wave of releases being hilariously overpriced(Varanguard 100 USD for THREE models. Liberators and Judicators being so overpriced that they had to rebox them to make them semi-reasonable) along with (and I'm sorry here open play people but) a basically unplayable game. Release AoS had 0 guidelines on how to build armies out of the box. Even for people who stuck with it, it took MONTHS of playtesting against similar forces to figure out what a roughly 'fair' fight was and pickup games were nearly impossible. That's even ignoring the fact that Nagash can literally fill up a deployement zone with so many units that you run out of space to put things.(Yes, there were a subset of people that worked through the launch issues of AoS and found a vast sandbox of creativity and narrative that could only be achieved by the near carte blanche the launch rules could give you. This was a very small group of people, even relative to Fantasy's niche playerbase.)

This almost killed GW outright. AoS was putting out some of the highest quality(and most expensive) models anyone has ever made and they were selling like Snowcones in a blizzard. Stores couldn't shift ANYTHING Sigmar. Between the ridiculous pricepoints, the ruleset that wouldn't even qualify as a Dev-kit for most companies, and the ire leftover from the Death of Fantasy, Sigmar was a massive drain on GW's margin.

 Which leads me to the reason GW isn't anywhere near the dumpsterfire of a-holes and d-heads they used to be: A rare moment of humility. One group of people managed to help create a pretty significant community with a fairly large tournament scene out of the ashes with their own HEAVILY modified AoS ruleset. These were the guys from South Coast GT. They called those guys in and said 'We want to make Age of Sigmar the best game it can possibly be' . Together, the guys from the South Coast GT and the designers (who were never bad guys, just a bit put upon by their frankly evil corporate structure) created the General's Handbook. The single best selling rules supplement GW has EVER released(at least at the time). Sales of Sigmar exploded, basically overnight(especially in North America) and this led GW to reach out to other prominent community members Like Reece and Frankie of Frontline gaming and the guys at Nova and Adepticon, which compounded on itself to jumping back into social media, actively supporting their rules, being more involved in the community, being involved in the Independent Tournament scene, the Twitch stream, and every other cool thing that GW has done as part of their 'New GW' initiative. This then spread to 40k, which also resulted in a MUCH better initial launch that revitalized the game and has 40k more successful and popular than it's ever been as well.

Everything good or admirable that GW has done in the past few years is a DIRECT result of their mishandling of the Fantasy-AoS transition and the serious negative impact it had on them as a business. Both games are thriving and it's because they got their nose smacked and learned from it. Remember when you couldn't have an online shopping cart for GW products? I member.

This is one of the most powerful stories of a company choosing to behave in a more ethical, customer centric, and all around more positive way, and being massively rewarded for treating their customers like people instead of numbers on a spreadsheet. The turnaround is amazing and I hope companies in similar positions can learn something from them.

That said, GW still has a long way to go. Their prices are still fairly ridiculous, their processes could be a bit more transparent, some of their rules decisions are still highly questionable, along with a few other issues that persist from their Kirby days. They're doing so much better than the mustache twirling villain GW used to be though.

If you disagree with my overall take on this or want to get more information for yourself I HIGHLY recommend looking into anything you can find from the Kirby era to the GHB from financial news sources, game sites, content creators, official shareholder statement, and even 4chan if you're brave enough. It's a pretty interesting rabbit hole and a great way to spend a quiet Sunday afternoon brushing up on your investigative journalism skill.

Everything you say makes sense,  except for the part where you say that the termination of WFB caused the demise of many LGS’s.  

 

[chord]

AoS was a huge hit in our community prior to points.  After that it all started to die off.  

[Overread]

1 minute ago, chord said:

AoS was a huge hit in our community prior to points.  After that it all started to die off.  

I'd be interested in knowing if it was points that killed it off or the novelty factor wearing off. Especially considering that points are optional and if they were a dealbreaker for an entire club then I would have thought the club could just collectively ignore them. 

[chord]

2 minutes ago, Overread said:

I'd be interested in knowing if it was points that killed it off or the novelty factor wearing off. Especially considering that points are optional and if they were a dealbreaker for an entire club then I would have thought the club could just collectively ignore them. 

Points; it brought in a unsavory crowd (old WHFB players mostly) who were ultra competitive and not fun to pay against. Many people just stopped showing up to play.    

Plus with allegiance abilities, artifacts, etc. it got really rule heavy.  

[Overread]

So it wasn't the points so much as it was the players at the club. I can well understand experienced competitive players making a game not as fun for noncompetitive people. However you can mitigate that with social changes - even in so far as to split game nights into experienced and beginner or casual and competitive games.

Provided you had at least 6 or so casuals you could easily have them play against each other and ignore the competitive players. 

[chord]

Just now, Overread said:

So it wasn't the points so much as it was the players at the club. I can well understand experienced competitive players making a game not as fun for noncompetitive people. However you can mitigate that with social changes - even in so far as to split game nights into experienced and beginner or casual and competitive games.

Provided you had at least 6 or so casuals you could easily have them play against each other and ignore the competitive players. 

Umm...you are probably  from the UK but there are not really "clubs" in my entire area of the USA.  Its more you show up at a store and play. So you can't really do what you suggest.  Without points the game was more fun and drew fun people.  Points drew in the unsavory crowd.

[Fairbanks]

27 minutes ago, Overread said:

I don't know if Brexit has as much effect as people think because I don't recall GW prices being lowered as the value of the £ went down compared to the $. Plus the number of people who grey import is often a lot smaller than the domestic customers (plus sometimes the difference, once tax is applied, is often minimal unless you're buying products into the £1000s). 

Certainly GW's overseas reach has gained them a lot more revenue than if they'd just stuck to the UK and we can't ignore that the USA is a vast market unto itself. That said I think that what we are seeing is more a result of policy change, communication and big releases. I think we'd have seen near the same profit patterns without Brexit (in fact without it we might have seen higher sales, esp on the home ground). 

2016-17 Annual Report, Pg 7, last sentence.

Quote

As a global business with 75% of our sales made overseas, our results this year have also benefitted from favourable currency translations.

From a US player, we have also not seen a price decrease from the currency change (though there is more involved in it than a straight price exchange, such as shipping and handling).

5 minutes ago, chord said:

Points; it brought in a unsavory crowd (old WHFB players mostly) who were ultra competitive and not fun to pay against. Many people just stopped showing up to play.    

Plus with allegiance abilities, artifacts, etc. it got really rule heavy.  

We miss the mark by blaming 'no points' for why people left Warhammer Fantasy. Competitive players left the game because the game effectively ceased to exist. Having no Points/Balancing System (no matter how good/terrible said system was) was a big reason for why said players did not rejoin AoS in the first place. It makes perfect sense as to why those players would come to the game the minute after points were introduced.

Bringing back Ultra-Competitives is the biggest negative of Pro-points. But personally, I'd rather play a reasonably fair game against a stranger than an accidentally unfair one against a friend.

[Overread]

Surely if its store run that makes it easier. Just organise game nights and events around the whole concept. Talk to the store owner - ideas that will generate increased customer base are surely going to be popular. 

[chord]

14 minutes ago, Fairbanks said:

2016-17 Annual Report, Pg 7, last sentence.

From a US player, we have also not seen a price decrease from the currency change (though there is more involved in it than a straight price exchange, such as shipping and handling).

We miss the mark by blaming 'no points' for why people left Warhammer Fantasy. Competitive players left the game because the game effectively ceased to exist. Having no Points/Balancing System (no matter how good/terrible said system was) was a big reason for why said players did not rejoin AoS in the first place. It makes perfect sense as to why those players would come to the game the minute after points were introduced.

Bringing back Ultra-Competitives is the biggest negative of Pro-points. But personally, I'd rather play a reasonably fair game against a stranger than an accidentally unfair one against a friend.

We had well done community systems (personally I thought better as the pool system was more flexible) .  

[chord]

15 minutes ago, Overread said:

Surely if its store run that makes it easier. Just organise game nights and events around the whole concept. Talk to the store owner - ideas that will generate increased customer base are surely going to be popular. 

From a few got the big old not gonna turn away people who want to show up.  So in effect no it's not possible.  Maybe just our game store owners are that way. 

I know it's hard to believe but points were not universally a positive thing.  

[Ollie Grimwood]

1 hour ago, Fairbanks said:

Bringing back Ultra-Competitives is the biggest negative of Pro-points. But personally, I'd rather play a reasonably fair game against a stranger than an accidentally unfair one against a friend.

I didn’t and don’t mind folks being a competitive as they like, what did change was the attitude of players/community sorting issues themselves to an expectation of GW doing it and a return, in my option, to a less positive approach to the game. 

It has been noted than even on here there was a noticeable tone change. 

Of course it has occurred to me that I don’t see the release of AoS as a failure. In the metric that means the most to me, how much I enjoy a thing, it smashed out of the park and rejuvenated my love of the hobby to the same levels picking up Rogue Trader did when I started. 

[Ken Mitchell]

On 12/28/2018 at 9:15 PM, BunkhouseBuster said:

When the General's Handbook came out in 2016, I jumped at the chance to play Age of Simgar, because I knew those players would have some limitation on what they could or couldn't do in the game.  Since then I have been trying to focus on developing a bunch of Narrative games and help get the AoS community in Missouri, USA off the ground.

 

Hi, I'm new to this community (old time player, just new here) what part of Missouri are you in? I'm in the middle of nowhere in the north part of the state, just curious where other "locals" are at.

[Kyriakin]

What was the deal with the "Spanish rumours"? They were something I was somewhat aware of late WHFB. Did they turn out to be a portent of things to come?

For me, the true realisation was Darnok's "If you like Warhammer, I suggest you better take a seat..." thread on Warseer. That was an incredible moment of realisation for literally hundreds (or thousands) of responders.

During the End Times and WHFB-to-AoS limbo period, the arguments weren't "points vs. no points" or "WHFB vs. AoS", but was "rumour believers vs. rumour non-believers". Many were adamant that the rumour mongers (even the likes of Harry and Hastings) knew nothing, and 9th Edition would basically be another WHFB game.

And then a Skaven Screaming Bell was pictures in the background on an oval base... Game over. Literally.