The Rumour Thread

[Eternalis]

Isn't the Data problem about online tournaments? I mean i can organize a TTS tournament tomorrow, but is it a valid tournament for GW?
No Plastic, no minis, only thousands of people "hacking" the game thanks to unofficial mods bringing no money to GW? 

[eciu]

12 minutes ago, Eternalis said:

Isn't the Data problem about online tournaments? I mean i can organize a TTS tournament tomorrow, but is it a valid tournament for GW?
No Plastic, no minis, only thousands of people "hacking" the game thanks to unofficial mods bringing no money to GW? 

Obviously people keeping their engagement with a game by whatever means possible atm. is not generating profits to GW.......

.... that's an way good example of that failed and backward old GW thinking.....

 

(hint: Total War: Warhammer as an example.....)

 

Edited January 25, 2021 by eciu

[BaylorCorvette]

15 minutes ago, elfhead said:

Just to bring a positive note to all this faq discussion: GW did do some rules for solo games you can play in lockdown. So they did do something rulewise, only not for te game which most people can’t play right now anyway.

Yup. For me personally i have played like 3-4 AoS games since March 2020. However the single player rules that they published early / mid last year interested me and it snow balled into writing an entirely custom RPG game that is kind of an AoS / D&D Hybrid. Fast forward and a few buddies and myself are about 110+ hours in to the campaign which I am DM'ing for and my Word document with all the narrative and background that I've prepared is currently sitting at over 160 pages. I think I've assembled and painted over 40 unique models. Mostly GW but some 3D printed stuff specifically for this game. Most of which I would have never bought had I not started this game. I'm a LoN & Khorne player. However, I've bought various "creatures" and a few Underworlds Warbands that I'm using for this game.

Edited January 25, 2021 by BaylorCorvette

[Bayul]

8 minutes ago, eciu said:

Obviously people keeping their engagement with a game by whatever means possible atm. is not generating profits to GW.......

.... that's an way good example of that failed and backward old GW thinking.....

 

(hint: Total War: Warhammer as an example.....)

I don't get. An example for what?

[Nighthaunt Noob]

1 hour ago, JackStreicher said:

That’s not the reason. The actual reason is manifold:

- People try to keep occupied (painting, building, watching an endless tide of grey rising)

- People Plan armies for games once the Pandemic  ceases

- People might play with their wifes/ children/ room mates and therefor need a second army

- People Are trying to cure the rising mental pressure and decreasing mental health by consumption (hobby goods)

- People like the models and so they buy the models

- Quite a flood of new players that discovered or rediscovered this hobby which keeps them occupied.

Simply claiming that only the Model matters and that‘s why sales rise is losing sight of the complex situation at hand.

On the contrary:

My brothers and I for example have bought as few models as never before during the lockdown. Reasons: Yeah there are cool new models, but I already have enough cool models that need painting. I‘ve sold about 350 models and only bought 30 new ones as I realized that I have enough of everything. 🤷🏼‍♂️ (And the Marketing is rather anti-Hype for me lately).

What about other hobbyists I wonder? Did they buy more or rather less than usual?

Only 1 of the 6 reasons you provided require GW to make nuanced rules tweaks. My "people only care about models" comment certainly contained some hyperbole, but at the end of the day I stand by the assertion that GW doesn't have to do much above and beyond to tweak and improve their existing rulesets to keep people buying their products. AOS is a perfectly playable game without big FAQ updates to balance the meta. You'd think the way some people are reacting that AOS literally was left with a totally abandoned ruleset because, gasp, the rules today are almost exactly the same as they were yesterday.

[Hashut]

IMO the lack of effort here points pretty strongly to 3.0. Why bother with investing energy into tweaks when the core rules will be changing in a few months anyway?

[BaylorCorvette]

3 minutes ago, Hashut said:

IMO the lack of effort here points pretty strongly to 3.0. Why bother with investing energy into tweaks when the core rules will be changing in a few months anyway?

I could buy that. Especially since the 40k FAQ was more substantial. But then again it is possibly a case of 40k just being more popular and demanding more attention.

[Eternalis]

5 minutes ago, Hashut said:

IMO the lack of effort here points pretty strongly to 3.0. Why bother with investing energy into tweaks when the core rules will be changing in a few months anyway?

Because they did it in December 2019 for 40K? Oh right, it was a book we had to pay 

Edited January 25, 2021 by Eternalis

[Gaz Taylor]

2 minutes ago, Hashut said:

IMO the lack of effort here points pretty strongly to 3.0. Why bother with investing energy into tweaks when the core rules will be changing in a few months anyway?

I’d back this bet 😉

The feel of what happening, I think we will see a new edition in next 12 months. I also wouldn’t be surprised if there has been other things in background. For example my whole family have been hit with covid and I’ve had last few weeks off. Also from a work point of view, we’ve been hit with people being out due to illness and it’s already effected some of the major projects we’ve been working on. I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar has happened at GW as well

[yukishiro1]

Given the extent to which they blatantly used Covid as an excuse for not doing anything because they "didn't have the data" (which I guess even the "it's because of AOS 3.0" crowd doesn't actually believe), if there was any good Covid-related reason for why they put out such a shoddy set of FAQs, I have no doubt they would have said so.

I understand the impetus to try to make a positive out of a negative, but I really think all the tea-leaf-reading here is unwarranted. They just did something shoddy. It's not the first time GW did something shoddy, and it won't be the last. It doesn't mean everything they do will be shoddy, but it also doesn't mean they have some grand plan that we need to just Wait And See (TM) to find the amazing wisdom of. 

If you want to look at 40k, they also completely dropped the ball on the points that came out when 9th edition launched - embarrassingly so. That wasn't because they had some genius plan to fix it in the Winter FAQ - they just did a really shoddy job, and at the launch of a new edition, no less. GW is so inconsistent that the fact that the did one thing well or badly has no predictive power over what is going to come next. 

 

Edited January 25, 2021 by yukishiro1

[Hashut]

I’m not trying to make a positive out of a negative- and it does seem pretty slap-dash and dodgy of GW. Covid has definitely messed with the release schedule, so it’s possible a lot of stuff is missing because BR books will update other armies soon anyway. 

The only reason I think that it’s because of 3.0 is that there’s no other good reason for such a half-assed job, but we all know GW will never admit 3.0 is coming (until the hype train is due to leave the station).  

[yukishiro1]

I think they would have liked to have AOS 3.0 out this spring, but Covid put paid to that. They can't even keep up with current production at the moment, leaving huge portions of their range out of stock. I don't think there's any way they'll feel ready to launch a new edition of AOS until Covid is behind us, or, at a minimum, until their factories are caught back up. GW is a plastic company, not a rules company. They have no reason to bring out a new edition of AOS if they can't leverage it to sell a bunch of new plastic. 

If I had to guess, AOS 3.0 is probably being pushed back to this holiday season, with the final decision being put off till May or June to gauge whether the vaccines are really going to put paid to Covid or not. 

[Neverchosen]

I am going to echo a pretty common sentiment in recent months. We are living in fairly unprecedented times. Games Workshop has done very well financially but as @Gaz Taylor pointed out it is still a company full of people who are also existing in our turbulent era. I am actually pleasantly surprised by the amount of content we were able to receive and I sadly have not had any real games during our downtime. I am not opposed to the virtual representation of our hobby but much of my interest in the game comes from building and painting an army and then spending an afternoon or evening with a friend playing the game. I feel that is fairly common for this Hobby and so despite statistics coming out from virtual formats many people have not been able to play and give feedback. More than simply tournament numbers, they also rely on feedback from the community and much of the community has yet to actively play against some of the new meta. So I understand the frustration but I also feel like they are doing their best during this time (although I am upset about a lot of their sales tactics), and I am happy that we got some FAQs even if I am personally underwhelmed by them.

Edited January 25, 2021 by Neverchosen

[Iradekhorne]

.... I feel like AOS rules and gameplay is very secondary for GW, 40k is by far her main game. 

They just admmited it today. The AOS faqs are out a month after the 40k faqs, and they had datta for 40k, and not for AOS.

Well, this is not about virtual or phisic game.

Is only about Age Of Sigmar is only a bunch of miniatures for collect and friendly play.

If you want collect beautiful miniatures go for AOS or 40k, whatever you like more. But if you want a good and competitive game you need go to 40k, thats what GW told us today, intentionally or not.

Edited January 25, 2021 by Iradekhorne

[Dreddships]

To the chat about 3.0, remember Lockdown 1 in the UK happened out of the blue, without any preparations, and 9th 40k still launched. 

This financial year was massive for GW - as it turns out when we're all locked indoors, we inevitably buy more dollies to keep us happy.

They've been beating their targets every year for a while now. I don't see why they wouldn't want to keep that streak up, especially when last year absolutely smashed them.

3.0 will happen on schedule, and if that's the summer, it'll be here by summer to keep those financial year targets running, especially after they put a massive media focus on their success.

Indomitus and 9th 40k's success meant they paid back their government loans way earlier than expected and got them some pretty good press from even the BBC to boot. 

This FAQ was a farce, let's be fair, but we got one. It fixed stuff - maybe not everything - but it did something and it happened.

I'd hope it's due entirely down to the remote working situations that the staff handling the rules are dealing with and GW focusing towards 3.0. 

As the world is vaccinating and we begin to enter a 'post-pandemic' world, hopefully we'll enter it with a sweet new edition, and fingers crossed it'll be gucci when it happens.

They've got a plan - they got this far, after all - and I trust that the company knows what they're doing. 

I just hope that a lot of the more 'toxic' areas of the fan base stop being such tools on the internet to GW staff over an FAQ.

The staff members ain't to blame - they're just doing what they're told to put food on the table like the rest of us. 

[Chikout]

I am disappointed by the lack of points changes. They could have compromised and agreed to change the 4 or 5 things we ALL agree are wrong like Kroak. There is one thing that could be considered a bit of a positive though. Gw has turned a blind eye towards TTS . A more litigious company like nintendo or Disney would probably have gone after them and forced them to remove gw content. That probably means that gw has to pretend that data doesn’t exist. From an official gw perpesctive there hasn’t been a UK or US AOS tournament since last February. 

 

[Austin]

Call it marketing or call it gaslighting, GW is excellent at it.  From someone who lived through the Kirby years and the total cluelessness when it came to marketing it is quite the transformation.

It doesn't particularly bother me that the FAQ was nearly pointless (ha! pun not intended).  What is interesting to me is that GW can give a totally obviously bs reason for not doing something like points, and a large segment of people are like "yes yes obviously this is true because they said it was despite evidence I can find easily" or literally acknowledge that the FAQ did nothing but say "at least we got one."  Did you?  Did you really?

 

[Eternalis]

7 minutes ago, Chikout said:

Gw has turned a blind eye towards TTS . A more litigious company like nintendo or Disney would probably have gone after them and forced them to remove gw content.

I guess it's better than nothing, on the other hand, companies like Corvus Belli are supporting their game on TTS. Infinity had some updates 3 weeks ago based on the tournaments played on TTS. They're even telling their players to play on TTS if they can't play IRL.

But Corvus Belli is a small company, I guess they have to make some moves to gain players...
 

Edited January 25, 2021 by Eternalis

[Clan's Cynic]

10 minutes ago, Austin said:

Call it marketing or call it gaslighting, GW is excellent at it.  From someone who lived through the Kirby years and the total cluelessness when it came to marketing it is quite the transformation.

The only real difference from the Kirby era on that front is they'd shove this out the door and say nothing. Now they put it out the door with a positive remark on Facebook and a "Whoops haha our bad XD" on an obvious error and, uh, well that's about it. It's hardly night and day, they just implemented a very basic social media presence which is only remarkable because GW was late to what pretty much every other company had.

The bar for improvement was so hilariously low that it was pretty much buried, but that's also meant GW has had to very little for it to look like a night and day improvement. It's a testament to GW's fanatical brand loyalty that this kind of thing is pretty much expected, if not low-key accepted, when any other company would be crucified and ditched like a bad habit for such things.

What's funny is I could probably accept the "sorry, not much data lol" excuse if they hadn't been pushing things like Metawatch and, even if it does have a 300% bigger fanbase, a pretty sizeable equivalent in 40k and only half a year into a new edition at that. 

Edited January 25, 2021 by Clan's Cynic

[Third]

Couldn't care less about the FAQ (I collect Slaanesh, so 😋).. What really bothers me though, is the total failure of communication by the "community team". 

This is a 1 month delayed FAQ which.. I could give about 1/2 a fu** if they had come out on time, in December, telling us they weren't going to make any meaningful changes because of lack of data. 

Now it just hurts my view on the company greatly, that they think this is in any way acceptable community management. 

Didn't have high hopes, but I'm still disappointed.. (sorry for being a negative Nancy, but in my opinion GW, and the community team, deserves every negative word coming their way after today) 

 

"Fun" fact, the Azyr app is still lacking the artifacts from the GHB2020 😑

 

Edited January 26, 2021 by Third

[Bayul]

1 hour ago, Third said:

Now it just hurts my view on the company greatly, that they think this is in any way acceptable community management. 

Didn't have high hopes, but I'm still disappointed.. (sorry for being a negative Nancy, but in my opinion GW, and the community team, deserves every negative word coming their way after today)

Don't be sorry for being negative. It's valid criticism and I feel the same. I am glad that some of you have some optimism left for the release of 3.0 though, but be prepared for a turbulent year for AOS.

[Sleboda]

9 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

I am not going to say that those prices are justified, but GW does at least partially tie the price of kits to their point cost.

The cost of a GW kit is tied to precisely one factor: How high can the price go before the people who would buy it decide not to?

For example, I would have purchased 5 or 6 gargants at $100 each, 2 or 3 at at $125, and maybe 1 at $150 ... but 0 at $195.  So, the raw dollars spent could have been as much as $600, with whatever profit that would have given them. Instead, I spent $0 on even 1 model because of the perceived value, to me, of the kit. That's just an example of behavioral drivers, not a complaint about the price of that kit. The thing is, they may be perfectly fine with my choice (not that they are paying attention to me in particular, of course). Maybe their cost per gargant kit is $85. If so, my 6 at $100 would only make them ($15x6) $90. Selling someone 1 kit at $195 profits them $110 in this hypothetical scenario. Perhaps they determined that the loss of my purchases is made up for by the huge profits on what they sell to others. 🤷‍♂️

 

In other words, how much profit will the kit make in its life cycle? That is what matters.

"How high can we price this kit to maximize profit before those who decided to not buy start hurting the bottom line?" That's the big question.

We can analyze the factors that contribute (points, army popularity, etc.) to the answer to that question (most of which can also boil down to "how many will we sell?" using stuff like it being a box of troops that will sell 4 times to each customer compared to a special character that will sell once to each customer), but in the end it's all about selling as many as possible for as high a price as the market will bear. That's it. Nothing else.

 

And, of course, ever since they went public, even that above question is ultimately just a factor (a big one!) in answering the single most important question of them all:

How can we increase shareholder value?

But that's a different topic.

Main thing here is that price is 100% down to selling as many kits as possible at the highest margin they can get.

 

[Shearl]

Maybe I'm just an optimist (or just naive) but I imagine that the reason 40k got point changes and AoS didn't is more a matter of the newness of 9th edition rather than GW not liking AoS or something. A lot of 40k points and status are currently in a state of flux at the moment and if they hadn't gotten a new edition a few months ago I doubt they'd get point changes either. 

The rhetoric that GW is intentionally ignoring AoS or doesn't care about the game reminds me of the kind of silly claims that Cities of Sigmar took so long to come out after being revealed because they were embarrassed or didn't like the battletome. 

I just wish GW would be more transparent about things like this. I feel like some of these bad feelings could have been avoided if they simply explained why 40k is getting changes AoS isn't. Just like I wish they had put out an article about the discontinuing of the Forge World chaos dwarf line just to give the owners of the army a heads up, rather than many waking up to the unpleasant news. I think there's a line between transparency while still keeping enough secret for generating hype, I think GW still needs to find out where that line is.    

[GreatWhiteNorthIronjawz]

2 hours ago, Third said:

Couldn't care less about the FAQ (I collect Slaanesh, so 😋).. What really bothers me though, is the total failure of communication by the "community team". 

This is a 1 month delayed FAQ which.. I could give about 1/2 a fu** if they had come out on time, in December, telling us they weren't going to make any meaningful changes because of lack of data. 

Now it just hurts my view on the company greatly, that they think this is in any way acceptable community management. 

Didn't have high hopes, but I'm still disappointed.. (sorry for being a negative Nancy, but in my opinion GW, and the community team, deserves every negative word coming their way after today) 

 

"Fun" fact, the Azyr app is still lacking the artifacts from the GHB2020 😑

 

This sums up my view. If they’d got out in front of this in December and tempered expectations, totally different reaction, IMO. 

[yukishiro1]

57 minutes ago, Shearl said:

Maybe I'm just an optimist (or just naive) but I imagine that the reason 40k got point changes and AoS didn't is more a matter of the newness of 9th edition rather than GW not liking AoS or something. A lot of 40k points and status are currently in a state of flux at the moment and if they hadn't gotten a new edition a few months ago I doubt they'd get point changes either. 

The issue is that this rationale is directly contrary to the rationale that they gave, namely that they didn't have enough information to make informed changes. The fact that 40k is newer and major changes were made more recently would be even more reason not to do anything there too. And yet 40k got comprehensive changes, whereas AOS got effectively nothing.

A lot of the blowback here is because GW is blatantly lying about why AOS got nothing. As you note, transparency is better than obvious lies. 

Edited January 26, 2021 by yukishiro1