The Rumour Thread

[Doko]

Yes,a simple faq cancelled for covid and also cancelled the 40k faq and all this would be avoided.

But 40k got faq even with less time and aos didnt got is the problem

Edited January 26, 2021 by Doko

[Ogregut]

How many games has everyone played in the past 10 months? 

How many events has you attended? 

How much feedback have you sent to the faq team? 

Reading some of the comments here you'll think GW are some bond villains in their Nottingham lair coming up with some diabolical plan. 

I couldnt give 2 hoots about the faqs, I've not played a game or attended an event in nearly a year. 

As I've said before GW has done a great job during the past 10 months providing constant content and products to keep everyone entertained. I know my mental heath wouldn't be as good as it is without the hobby. 

But they are still a company run by people who are also affected by the pandemic and while they have done a great job keeping things running as smooth as possible, it's understandable that somethings will slide. 

I can understand people are dissapointted that it was a small faq and no point updates but does it really have that much of an effect? 

It's no more an indication that AoS is the forgotten game than Fyreslayers are being squatted because they've not had anything new in x amount of months. 

AoS imo is in a great place, again imo the models are the best the company makes. The armies are so varied there is something for everyone. 

We're at the beginning of a great narrative arc, 2nd edition battle tomes are starting to roll out and we've had a look at some stunning new models coming out. 

Things really aren't all that bad. 

[Nizrah]

27 minutes ago, Ogregut said:

How many games has everyone played in the past 10 months? 

How many events has you attended? 

How much feedback have you sent to the faq team? 

Reading some of the comments here you'll think GW are some bond villains in their Nottingham lair coming up with some diabolical plan. 

I couldnt give 2 hoots about the faqs, I've not played a game or attended an event in nearly a year. 

There is plenty of data gathered by players from around 2300 events. Not every country was hit hard as murica... I personaly played at 5 one day regular tournsments and plenty of normal not tournament games. THEY HAVE DATA, THEY SHOWN PART OF IT and yet still didint care to fix problems. But hey they cared enough to fix problems in 40k and give them proper faq. 

[Killamike]

I've played at least 1 game a week and played a handful of events.  

Your anecdotal evidence means nothing and just because you don't care about an FAQ being released or not also means nothing.  

The excuse was fairly transparent lie. As people have said the 40k FAQ released with points and rules changes.  Last I checked 40k doesnt magically supersede covid.  

[Skreech Verminking]

9 hours ago, KingBrodd said:

I'm spreading my Hope's and dreams onto Fyreslayers. I would absolutely love a King Brodd/Leader kit or an updated Mancrusher for Underworlds or just AOS but those are years off at best. 

I really hope Fyreslayers recieve the Lumineth treatment and get a massive wave of new units in 3.0

I’m actually hoping for a combined fyreslayer/dispossesseds battletome.

[Heijoshin]

I think all the points (hur hur hur) were covered by others as to why this (non) FAQ is a massive letdown and that GWs justifications just don't make sense. What really grinds my gears though is GW's community marketing speak acting completely oblivious to this fact:

"Has your army changed in the Warhammer Age of Sigmar January FAQ?" - No GW, it hasn't. You know that, and you know that I know that. You literally tell me in the same article that you haven't really changed anything. Why are you pretending it has and why put this as the title of an article about how you haven't changed much? 

"The result? A comprehensive set of FAQs covering numerous factions, plus Broken Realms: Morathi." - Comprehensive: "including or dealing with all or nearly all elements or aspects of something.". 

* looks at FAQs* "Oh, only 6 armies updated..."

'nuff said here I think

"We’ll have another big update – including Pitched Battle Profiles – in the next set of FAQs later on this year." - I admire the confidence GW, but you're pointing the gun at your own foot here. I get that vaccines are rolling out now across the world, but things ain't gonna be back to normal by the Summer FAQ, which means that if there are still "not enough tournaments / games / feedback" and thus "not enough data", then you've basically painted yourself into a corner. Then you either release points and show us you CAN do it without lots of feedback, or you don't and I have to watch Kroak's dumb 320point face laughing at me from the other side of the table for another 6 months.

"Did you miss the 41st Millennium-flavoured FAQ earlier this month? Go take a look at the Warhammer 40,000 updates here." - Yes GW, that's it, guide me to the FAQs of the other game you make and show me all those nice points changes you managed to do, despite the reduced games due to Covid. May as well just kick me in the nuts and be done with it. 

Edit: Part two! 

"You’ve all been playing games, reading rulebooks, and submitting your questions and comments – thanks for that!"

but yet 

"We have decided to withhold any changes to Pitched Battle profiles in this update because of the reduced number of games being played around the world and, therefore, the reduced amount of feedback and results from events that would follow them."

Schrödinger's FAQ - Where enough games / feedback have simultaneously been and not been played / given.  

"Although a small number of events were still able to take place last year, there is not enough data for us to confidently and accurately provide points changes to the system" 

but yet
 

and

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/10/22/metawatch-warhammer-age-of-sigmar-1-list-building-with-dan-street/

 

It boggles the mind....

Edited January 26, 2021 by Heijoshin

[eciu]

7 hours ago, Eternalis said:

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

You mean CB doesn't have worshippers so actually they have to mind their product and quality (rules included). 

[HorticulusTGA]

Oh my, such salt

I am not saying I regret the fan-made points systems era but.... You matched play / tournament crowd are a strange lot.

Joke aside I can totally understand the frustration given the current situation... But given most of us are all more or less playing with friends these days, is there really nothing you can't prevent with gentlemen's agreement (house rules if you feel creative, ALSO if you are a tournament organizer - I would do if I was) ? 

Also let's not forget : 

1. It may be hard to accept, but 40k is more popular than AOS (being SF, older franchise, etc.). It has more than twice the number of fans on Facebook alone, you can also check places like Reddit. So even with COVID, there would be more 40k "data" than AOS'. We don't know what is "enough" data for GW.

2. UK is still hit pretty hard by COVID, so it could have forced GW to set priorities (given n°1... not in AOS favor, that is), as the FAQ are free material and we are "alas" not entitled to them...

3. Been said, but 3rd Edition is still probably coming this summer, so that could impact the FAQ business too.

4. Metawatch is mostly interviews of experienced players, with a few charts and statistics (actually mostly based on 2019 data) to make it look evidence-based. Not exactly the same business as FAQ and erratas.

Now excuse me as I return to the contemplation of WARHAMMER QUEST : CURSED CITY arts (and vampires)...

[Greyshadow]

3 hours ago, Ogregut said:

But they are still a company run by people who are also affected by the pandemic and while they have done a great job keeping things running as smooth as possible, it's understandable that somethings will slide. 

Well said @Ogregut and @HorticulusTGA. Just what I was thinking. Now, back to rumours about Cursed City please.

Edited January 26, 2021 by Greyshadow

[Marcvs]

38 minutes ago, HorticulusTGA said:

4. Metawatch is mostly interviews of experienced players, with a few charts and statistics (actually mostly based on 2019 data) to make it look evidence-based. Not exactly the same business as FAQ and erratas.

I have a different opinion on the other points but this one is just provably false. After the metawatch article of october, Dan published (as always) the spreadsheet with the tournament results on twitter

There's no "mostly based on 2019 data" there -and this specific dataset is ONLY for IRL tournaments so it leaves out the huge amount of TTS events. Personally, living somewhat removed from big clubs and communities, I have never played so much AoS as during these months (thanks to TTS and the community around it) so most of all I am a bit bored with the present state of the game.

[whispersofblood]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the changes to the core rules. 

[Marcvs]

17 minutes ago, whispersofblood said:

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the changes to the core rules. 

which changes? I see only a handful of clarifications, most of which (I'd say 4/5) were already pretty straightforward, but maybe I've missed something?

[sandlemad]

It’s probably worth noting that you can be uninterested in matched play AoS as a Thing and feel like the dominance or weight of tournament play fundamentally isn’t good for the game or hobby and still feel like this is a half-assed rush job by a company that knows people will grumble, suck it up, and keep buying any old whatever.

[ian0delond]

Why do a FAQ when you sell a Campaign Book and a new Battletome for the same army a couple months apart, and the next edition of the game is probably already ready to print?

Edited January 26, 2021 by ian0delond

[Austin]

31 minutes ago, sandlemad said:

It’s probably worth noting that you can be uninterested in matched play AoS as a Thing and feel like the dominance or weight of tournament play fundamentally isn’t good for the game or hobby and still feel like this is a half-assed rush job by a company that knows people will grumble, suck it up, and keep buying any old whatever.

Wrong.  You must post a long discussion of the QUALITY of the models, the OVERREACTION that people are having to a small faq (even if that is actually the source of the complaint), wait did I mention the models are FANTASTIC.

?

Or, if you are like me, you can wonder what any of that has to do with a company making statements that are blatantly untrue.  Though if I were them, I would be quite comforted to know they can say anything as long as the models are GREAT.

@Ogregut GW didn't give many of the reasons you listed above.  They didn't say, AoS doesn't need an FAQ.  They didn't say 3d edition is coming soon.  They didn't say, hey covid prevented us from getting this done (just delayed).  I think if they had said any of those, the pitchforks would not be waiving.

[Third]

People not outraged by this are missing the point (in my humble opinion). This is not about the FAQ, this is about the communication surrounding the FAQ. And they failed hard in this regard. Ask yourself why a bare bones FAQ was delayed from the usual mid December release? They knew they didn't have the data long before this, and could easily have communicated this to us well in advance. 

Instead we got a lie thrown right in our faces which @Heijoshin breaks down pretty well..

It is mindblowingly bad communication by the "community team" no less. And we have every reason to point this out. They can't improve if they don't know that stuff like this isn't a good thing.

I want them to do better, I like their game..... 

[Kasper]

4 hours ago, Ogregut said:

How many games has everyone played in the past 10 months? 

How many events has you attended? 

How much feedback have you sent to the faq team? 

Reading some of the comments here you'll think GW are some bond villains in their Nottingham lair coming up with some diabolical plan. 

I couldnt give 2 hoots about the faqs, I've not played a game or attended an event in nearly a year. 

As I've said before GW has done a great job during the past 10 months providing constant content and products to keep everyone entertained. I know my mental heath wouldn't be as good as it is without the hobby. 

But they are still a company run by people who are also affected by the pandemic and while they have done a great job keeping things running as smooth as possible, it's understandable that somethings will slide. 

I can understand people are dissapointted that it was a small faq and no point updates but does it really have that much of an effect? 

It's no more an indication that AoS is the forgotten game than Fyreslayers are being squatted because they've not had anything new in x amount of months. 

AoS imo is in a great place, again imo the models are the best the company makes. The armies are so varied there is something for everyone. 

We're at the beginning of a great narrative arc, 2nd edition battle tomes are starting to roll out and we've had a look at some stunning new models coming out. 

Things really aren't all that bad. 

Your post effectively boils down to "hey this doesnt affect me so it is alright guys, calm down!". That is just being super selfish. There are people playing physical games across the globe and even more playing on TTS with almost weekly tournaments. Just because the FAQ wouldnt affect you doesnt mean it wouldnt affect someone else. 

 

Im super disappointed. Not only was our FAQ delayed, but the hype for the AoS FAQ was real after seeing the 40K FAQ with massive changes to armies and point changes. I expected somewhat the same for AoS. If there wasnt data for AoS, how come there was data for 40K? Does Covid-19 somehow not affect 40K?

I think the answer is rather simple - There are two different teams working on the two different games and they took different approaches. 40K is also the bigger game and just had a new edition, so they probably put all their focus on this and left AoS as an afterthought for now.

 

Covid has no impact on the FAQ. The FAQ does not require a physical meeting to take place. All of this work is office work anyways that can be done through Skype, Microsoft teams, Google Meet or whatever the company uses. There are TONS of companies across the globe that  are made up of office work and they arent dying or cancelling things - They just work from home through these online solutions. An effective and proper FAQ could have been resolved through 30-60 mins in one of these online solutions.

 

I know the warhammer community page isnt "official GW" but they have articles about metawatch etc. I dont get why they didnt just make small but subtle point changes to the clear and obvious offenders. Even if people cry for Kroak to increase to 400+ pts, give him a subtle 20 pts increase and say "yo we dont feel like we have enough data to make proper and precise changes, but we feel like this will push things in the right direction". This would have been perfectly fine. 

 

On the backfoot of the 40K FAQ this AoS FAQ just feels super halfarsed and I honestly cant think up any excuse for it. Either you ****** both games and keep to your excuse/story of not having data, or you update both.   

[Clan's Cynic]

4 hours ago, Nizrah said:

There is plenty of data gathered by players from around 2300 events. Not every country was hit hard as murica... I personaly played at 5 one day regular tournsments and plenty of normal not tournament games. THEY HAVE DATA, THEY SHOWN PART OF IT and yet still didint care to fix problems. But hey they cared enough to fix problems in 40k and give them proper faq. 

I don't want to sound like I'm justifying people doing it at this point in time, but I'm continually surprised by just how many people in the United States are actually playing. Tables in stores may not be as packed together, numbers/restrictions on tournaments may (or may not be) tight, but I'm still seeing on Facebook and other places a lot of evidence that plenty of people outside of Europa are playing, including in the States. 

The big headline grabbing "FIFTY BAJILLION PLAYERS COMPETED AT ADEPTICON/LVO" stuff is cancelled of course.

At the TTS argument, GW will never 'risk' acknowledging it's existence as somebody in marketing will be having a meltdown the second he hears it, from the 'risk' of losing sales due to people opting to use the mods instead. Even if there was a million-person tournament on TTS, it would never be publicly acknowledge and I wouldn't even be shocked if staffers were banned from acknowledging it internally.

Anyway, I think it's reasonable to assume 'but Covid' is just an excuse when they can produce something like Metawatch and 40k's FAQ. I know it's hard for some people to believe a publicly-traded billion-pound company possibly ever spin the truth to keep it's customers onside, but on this occasion I think it's pretty clear they were caught out.

Edited January 26, 2021 by Clan's Cynic

[eciu]

6 minutes ago, Clan's Cynic said:

Anyway, I think it's reasonable to assume 'but Covid' is just an excuse when they can produce something like Metawatch and 40k's FAQ. I know it's hard for some people to believe a publicly-traded billion-pound company possibly ever spin the truth to keep it's customers onside, but on this occasion I think it's pretty clear they were caught out.

<cough>..... "analog-corpo" game ... <cough>

[Feii]

2 hours ago, HorticulusTGA said:

Oh my, such salt

I am not saying I regret the fan-made points systems era but.... You matched play / tournament crowd are a strange lot.

Joke aside I can totally understand the frustration given the current situation... But given most of us are all more or less playing with friends these days, is there really nothing you can't prevent with gentlemen's agreement (house rules if you feel creative, ALSO if you are a tournament organizer - I would do if I was) ? 

Also let's not forget : 

1. It may be hard to accept, but 40k is more popular than AOS (being SF, older franchise, etc.). It has more than twice the number of fans on Facebook alone, you can also check places like Reddit. So even with COVID, there would be more 40k "data" than AOS'. We don't know what is "enough" data for GW.

2. UK is still hit pretty hard by COVID, so it could have forced GW to set priorities (given n°1... not in AOS favor, that is), as the FAQ are free material and we are "alas" not entitled to them...

3. Been said, but 3rd Edition is still probably coming this summer, so that could impact the FAQ business too.

4. Metawatch is mostly interviews of experienced players, with a few charts and statistics (actually mostly based on 2019 data) to make it look evidence-based. Not exactly the same business as FAQ and erratas.

Now excuse me as I return to the contemplation of WARHAMMER QUEST : CURSED CITY arts (and vampires)...

Just give us a timeline, say the things might get pushed 1-2 months back because of covid but say us that in Broken realms books we are getting points changes for almost all factions and then we will eventually get AoS 3  and so that's why this FaQ is weak. 

[El Syf]

I've squeezed a few games last year and my complaints are the same as they have been since AoS 1. Morghasts are too expensive for what they do and in Bonereapers unless you like the models too much (like I do), most people will just play Stalkers instead.

I'm quite resigned to the fact this will most likely never change.

[Ragest]

There were tons of matches played, Aos Shorts has a chart about tournaments IRL, DKHM made a chart for IRL and online games, and I know for sure many faqs were sent to them (I sent a question about horrors, per example).

They just refused to do their work, but that could have been not so disappointing if you communicate it better. Why you let 40k real faqs come first? Why you delay faqs to not doing any faq at all? Why you show a metawatch just to say “we have no data”?  Better come with the truth, say you have been very busy with 40k and you don’t have time to work on AoS and that’s all. Because is not just about faq, we see things like the latest chaos warcry is still missing points. Unacceptable.

And I need to understand how COVID affected to make a pdf. 

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

10 hours ago, Chikout said:

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. 

 

That's basically my stance on it, too. I think the reception would have been much more positive if they had come out and said: "We don't have the kind of data this time around that would make us comfortable with making huge, sweeping points changes. That is why we are only touching the stuff that's most obviously out of line." And that's Kroak, Spell-in-a-Bottle and Tzeentch.

The most popularly suggested "fix" for Spell-in-a-Bottle is not even a points thing: It's to errate it to only be able to take non-faction specific endless spells.

 

1 hour ago, sandlemad said:

It’s probably worth noting that you can be uninterested in matched play AoS as a Thing and feel like the dominance or weight of tournament play fundamentally isn’t good for the game or hobby and still feel like this is a half-assed rush job by a company that knows people will grumble, suck it up, and keep buying any old whatever.

It would be really good if GW more strongly distinguished matched play from tournament play. I think the vast majority of players does not go to tournaments, but still uses matched play rules. And stuff like Kroak being super underpointed is not a tournament problem. Just taking Kroak and all his synergies from the Battletome is not some kind of in-depth tournament strategy. It's the most obvious strong build once you have decided to include Kroak. Even very casual players will hit on that strategy if they decide to include Kroak just because they like his fluff.

 

Personally I find this situation frustrating because it's just another in a series of recent communication problems from GW. It seems to me that they constantly keep undermining their own hype. We can see that from the preview show: Lumineth getting a big update should make people excited. Objectively, it's good news for Lumineth players. But those players are still frustrated because they feel like GW is abusing their trust when it comes to battletomes. Even though it's not stated outright, it's reasonable to expect that if GW makes you pay for both rules and models that at least the rules will be stable for a while. Sure, GW never outright makes that promise, but it's completely reasonable to be frustrated by a company that signals "Our relationship to our customers is completely one sided, we don't take your satisfaction into account, profit is always the highest priority." with their publishing decisions.

Same for BR: Morathi. Some people are saying you should not expect a narrative book's rules to be current forever. But at the same time, the books are very obviously also rules patches. It's completely reasonable to expect them to be current at least for a while, like until the next edition that we are all expecting. Of course you can say "You idiot, you should be expecting GW to try to heck you over! They never promissed that BR books would be rules patches that would last!". But at the same time, they very strongly implied it with their marketing, constantly talking about all the cool new rules in that book.

Not providing rules updates/rebalancing is a similar problem. A lot of players these days are not from the 80s/90s/2000s, where not getting rules updates was the norm. These days, most people are familiar with games like Magic, which gets constant attention, or video games, which are patched all the time. The expectation is not to just git gud and deal with out-of-balance, negative play experience rules for a few years. The expectation is that a modern game will receive a reasonable amount of attention even after "launch".

To me, the signal GW is sending is "Don't buy our stuff unless you are OK with it being obsoleted out of nowhere in a few months." So that's what I will probably be recommending to people for the time being: Only buy into GW stuff if the price is worth it for you right now, not with the expectation of getting value out of it for several years.

 

On more word on the rules team, because I have seen that pop up in this thread a lot: I don't want to lay any blame for this FAQ at the feet of the rules team, or accuse them of being dishonest. They are probably among the people at GW most passionate about just making AoS a good game (regardless of financial success).  Maybe (and here I go shilling again) they are hard at work on AoS 3 right now and that takes up all their attention. But if that is the case, just a little bit of a heads up that the FAQ would not be big and some adjustment of the worst, most obvious imbalances would have been all it takes to make people happy. I am laying the blame for that at the feet of whoever is in charge of PR at Games Workshop.

[HorticulusTGA]

2 hours ago, Marcvs said:

I have a different opinion on the other points but this one is just provably false. After the metawatch article of october, Dan published (as always) the spreadsheet with the tournament results on twitter

There's no "mostly based on 2019 data" there -and this specific dataset is ONLY for IRL tournaments so it leaves out the huge amount of TTS events. Personally, living somewhat removed from big clubs and communities, I have never played so much AoS as during these months (thanks to TTS and the community around it) so most of all I am a bit bored with the present state of the game.

Yeah alright but those long-time AOS players didn't forgot their 2019-and-before play experience "just like that". So it is still part of their analysis. 

BTW I am not saying Metawatch isn't huge work. What I mean is that even they recognize their 2020 data are too few, cf. the next Tweet from Dan you posted :

"(1) the sample size is what it is because of the new circumstances for tournaments. I’m just glad some countries are still getting events. "

[whispersofblood]

I'm curious about what the actual difference in game data is. Sure there are events, but do we even know what GW pulls its data from? Like if GW pulls data exclusively from events of 100 players or more it's irrelevant that there are several 50 player events globally. 

1 hour ago, Marcvs said:

which changes? I see only a handful of clarifications, most of which (I'd say 4/5) were already pretty straightforward, but maybe I've missed something?

Mostly the ones about objectives, the rest seem pretty obvious.