[Please don't sign up for Warhammer+]

Mods threatening me with ban over my "negative attitude". Same mods who have endorsed WH+ as a group.

Guess it is a great product after all. I mean they can't ALL be wrong, right.

Good bye, I guess I will not survive this injection of toxic positivity.

[Please don't sign up for Warhammer+]

As for the whole "no digital" thing - I love all the dancing around the bush and not naming the elephant in the room as much as the next guy, but the reason why GW is cutting on it is simple - it is easier to pirate. Infinitely easier.

And like all anti-piracy measures, it ends up being an anti-consumer measure that can even cost the company. It is even an anti-environment measure that is also very unfriendly to people with disabilities as we have seen on previous threads.

GW has a significant market of people who are invested in the product via mixture of emotional link to the stuff you own (since you build and customize your army yourself, thus having a fruit of your own labor that is uniquely NOT alienated from you) and sunk cost fallacy. Why should they give you anything for free, when they can extract that little bit of extra wealth? What will you do? Stop? You are hooked, too deep in. It is easier to buy the next rule book, than throw away all those hours of work and all that money invested in the hobby.

Naturally, this kind of mindset is very sensitive to bumps that risk to dislodge it, hence the often seen reaction to any kind of criticism leveled at GW or the game. A significant number of people NEED this game to be the best there is and GW to be a stand up people who do not pull shady stuff.

Ironically enough, it is these people that actually make sure that GW can get away with bad rules and hostile behavior.

[Please don't sign up for Warhammer+]

Wait, we get the privilege of watching the advertisements disguised as mediocre content AND we get to support the poor shareholders by paying for it AND we get access to all the content we had access to for free (but worse)?!?

Where do I sign up?

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

4 minutes ago, Sarouan said:

You know, that way of thinking is awfully close to very dark things in our history's past...and we already know how it ends...

It's never good to be that extremist...

If you are referring to something along the lines of USSR, it was one of the finest projects in human history and a true milestone in our development as a species. Please don't @ me with whatever propaganda you heard about it, I heard it all before, it holds no merit and this is not the place.

As for extremism, it is but a positional description. Go mere 200 years in the past and liberal bourgeois advocating for parliamentary republics are dangerous blood-drenched extremists that want to destroy all that is good and holy in the world but they will never succeed because of human natu... I mean the divine right of kings.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

Just now, ArkanautDadmiral said:

But if I feel like I have all I want and all I need does that not make me rich? How much more material wealth are you saying I should have to ensure I’m not poor in reality anymore?

First of all I am glad that you feel like you have all that you need. That is genuinely great.

Second of all being rich is not "good". Being rich means having innocent blood on your hands, directly or indirectly. No one should strive to be rich. Rich people should not exist.

Now to answer your question: in order to not be poor you need to be the owner of capital that is capable of producing more capital. That is the dividing line between the rich and the poor.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

4 minutes ago, Sarouan said:

What bothers me is that some people use this term here to serve their own ideology / worldview simply to be more impactful. It's certainly more driving to say 99,99 % of the population lives in poverty to inspire rightful indignation rather than actual and factual statistics with a clear definition of when you are considered truly "poor" with your incomes not covering your expenses...

The definitions of what constitutes poverty are arbitrary and established by institutions that are vested in the system and the perpetuation of the liberal myth.

I mean it is funny that you accuse someone of using the term to serve their own ideology and then do not call out liberals for doing the same.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

Just now, ArkanautDadmiral said:

Surely the empty bank account would make me feel more poor?

No, because you have acquired (what us, working class Joes consider to be) trappings of wealth. Being able to spend money on an impulse FEELS like you have more because if you did not, then you would not spend it like that right? Would I, as a rational individual, spend more than I can afford on a whim? Of course not, therefore the fact that I am spending it means that I am less poor.

Human psyche is weird.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

Just now, Sunshine said:

As I have explained there is no such thing as poverty wage. Whilst wage can contribute to poverty and also be the sole reason for poverty, there are also can be other contributing factors. By using the phrase 'poverty wages' you are generalising and categorising people who do not earn a certain amount as being in poverty when that is not the case across the board.

No, poverty wage is exactly that - wage that is, on it's own, not enough to provide even a decent, so called middle class, living circumstance to an individual. It is an indictment of the system, not of the person.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

Just now, ArkanautDadmiral said:

So poor in fact that we all spend our disposable income on admittedly expensive plastic toys. Go figure.

Yes. Working class turns to consumerism in order to fill the gap that alienation from our own labor leaves in our psyche. It also makes us feel less poor.

Our beloved capitalist overlords are more than happy to oblige and feed the addiction to various toys.

Being rich does not mean being able to afford a new car or a new phone. Thinking like that just shows how removed we are from the actual material reality of being rich.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

Just now, Sunshine said:

It depends on my circumstances? If we have fully paid off our house then yes? There is no such thing as poverty wages and it is a discriminatory term being used to prejudge people's circumstances? I am not quite sure why anyone would coin such a phrase.

There absolutely is such a thing as a poverty wage. And it is not a discriminatory term, unless you consider poverty to be a personal failing of the afflicted individual.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

Just now, Sarouan said:

Not a sin, but a stigma. It also implies a confession of social failure.

Also...we really don't need to call them that way to keep advancing the debate here...James never use the terms "poverty wages" in his tweets as well...neither Sophie...

Sigma arises from the idea that something was done wrong. That an individual did something to deserve such a fate.

In this case the idea that lack of funds is not a failing of an individual but by a system, goes directly against central tenets of liberal ideology - those that espouse free market, personal enterprise and meritocracy. That is unacceptable in any ideological framework, including the liberal one, therefore the afflicted must be a sinner.

Now this in turn creates coping mechanisms. 99.9% of the population is poor. People don't like to think of themselves as the sinners, yet they are immersed in this liberal cultural hegemony. The solution is the myth of the so called "middle class". And most people react very defensively when you touch their coping mechanisms, especially if they are deeply ingrained cultural ones.

Under capitalism, unless you can employ your capital to acquire more capital, you are poor. If you are forced to sell your labor to live, you are poor. Working class is poor. There exists a labor aristocracy, of course, a small number of specialists that can eke out a comfortable existence for themselves, but vast majority of us, including everyone here I guess, are poor.

And that is not a failing to be ashamed of, but a reality that needs to be processed.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

People being insulted at the fact that they are underpaid just shows how deep have we sunk in the cultural hegemony of liberalism.

In liberal worldview being poor is a sin, therefore suggesting that someone is poor is akin to accusing them of being a sinner. People get offended at the suggestion that they are not getting their fair cut because the blessed invisible hand gives out exactly as much as everyone deserves, no more and no less.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

3 minutes ago, Sarouan said:

It's definitely a human question. And humans are never eternal, they die, leave or retire and others get hired / promoted to replace the losses. Internal change happen, but it takes time...

This is a rather idealistic outlook. We live in a material universe and material conditions shape the way people act and who floats to the top. There is a reason why rich people and corporate executives consistently show traits of psychopathy and narcissism higher then the general population.

When the "game" is set up in a way to favor certain traits, those traits will show up more consistently and frequently than others. Turning up the heat is the best way to make sure that corpos think twice about their practices because it provides incentive to be different.

That said, GW failing would be only good for this industry and the community even within this capitalist reality.

[James Hewitt discusses his Salary when working with GW]

1 minute ago, Sarouan said:

So you do agree it's not just a GW problem.

Of course, but focusing on shaming GW in this particular instance is warranted.

"Everybody does it" is not a zinger people think it is.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

9 minutes ago, ArkanautDadmiral said:

We’re free to spend or not spend. I can’t wrap my head around how someone can have such utter contempt for company X but still put money into their product, perpetuating the cycle.

Let's say you like miniatures and painting and want to do wargaming as well. You go to your local place where likeminded folks are congregating and you find 10 people that are all playing GW games. You have a choice - you can essentially bet $500-600 on a different game, hoping that someone will like it enough to bet that much money themselves in the hope that there will be a community OR you can put that money on a sure bet that you will have people to play with.

This is not always the case - larger cities usually have a number of clubs, with variety of games represented, but GW has cornered the market and even in the most diverse of gaming communities, GW games will get you the most people to play with because of this inertia - you need people to play with, so you will join the largest group, thus making it even larger, perpetuating the cycle.

How to handle this "support"? If I feel the need for any GW models in my life, I take care to make sure that my money does not end up in their pockets. Buying second hand works great for that and is significantly cheaper, third party manufacturers are also an option. Elf is an elf and dwarf is a dwarf after all.

As for Squidmar tangent - yes, GW are the leeches in this case. Squidmar does benefit from making the videos, sure. But it takes skill, dedication. It is labor. It creates value for the viewer. Unlike the corporate shareholders who get money for not doing anything.

Yes, he uses GW products, but he paid for those (and paid a lot, let's not pretend that GW margin is not insane). Also, circling back to GW cornering the market - it is not like he has a choice in what space will he operate as painting guy. By virtue of controlling such a share of the market, GW forces painters to operate on their territory.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

3 hours ago, EccentricCircle said:

However, I feel like the community is still stuck in a bit of a limbo between these two paradigms. We still feel ownership of something which legally speaking is not ours.

The technical, scientific term for this social phenomenon would be "alienation".

Unrelated, I have to admit it is kind of funny, in a very morbid way, that most people are so engulfed by the hegemony of the liberal ideology, that they are unable to even recognize the basic mechanisms of capitalism. For instance, that corporations do not ever produce anything, labor does. I can't believe that is such a mind blowing concept.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

1 minute ago, Overread said:

 however when their creations are based fully or heavily on the works of others...

This is really funny in the context of this particular company.

That said, yes, by law GW has the capability to pursue and shutdown a lot of people. Might, however, does not make right.

The question is not if they CAN, but if they SHOULD. Most importantly, this conversation is raising awareness of these developments, because when the company CAN do something by law, the only resort a community has to stop it is raising awareness and public outcry.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

52 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Ultimately my point is that GW is acting exactly as it has been told to do. All corporations have been explicitly told to make money before anything else. Faulting them for doing it is pointless. It would be like complaining how ambulances don't respect traffic lights in an emergency, or bemoaning how buildings get wet when firefighters are suppressing fires.

If we want corporations to not put profit above all else we need to stop telling them to put profit above all else. And don't try to feed me the 'but all politicians bad we have no choice' line because we all saw how that worked out in 2016.

No, this is incorrect. The reason why corporations put profit over anything else is because they are literally entities that are made for accumulation of wealth. No one 'told" corporations that this is what they should do. The ruling class tells us what the laws will be.

The ruling class shapes the laws of society in order to maintain and reproduce its power. Under the ideology of liberalism, capitalism is the only possible economic system and under capitalism, accumulation of wealth is the only way to achieve and maintain power.

There is no fantasy land where a class other than the ruling one could override its interests without removing its power altogether and replacing it. That is simply not how the real world works. Best you can hope for are minor concessions that they deem too costly to fight against. Again, this is part of maintenance and reproduction of power, we do outnumber them and they need us to work for them, create their wealth and police each other.

That said, IP laws are entirely unnecessary outside the bounds of liberal ideology and capitalist economy. The problem is not in the fact that without IP Disney will swoop in with its superior resources and steal from you, the problem is that Disney exists in the first place. Creative people worked and thrived long before IP was a thing and will work and thrive long after IP is a forgotten relic of a barbaric age.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

5 minutes ago, NinthMusketeer said:

Let's say I'm an indie animator who has created my own setting and characters. I've got a very popular YouTube channel which is my source of income. But I'm still just some dude and his mates putting original animations together.

Suddenly, Disney starts creating animations using my setting and characters. And they start making a considerable amount of money thanks to building off the popularity and appeal I generated.

Everyone who says GW is in the wrong would logically support Disney in the above scenario. They are saying that I would be out of line in protecting my IP and asking Disney to stop making content based off it.

But obviously that is not the side they would support because for so many it isn't about what is legal or even morally right, it's just about opposing a corporation because it's a corporation. Here's the thing; we live in democracies. We elect the people who write corporate law. If those laws say that corporations exist to make money without concern for morality then no ****** they are going to act the way they do, that is how we told them to behave.

Absolutely not.

I will always side with the little guy over the corporation. In the case you state, Disney is impacting your ability to make a living for yourself, by hogging the marketplace and making you look like you are stealing from them.

And using Disney as an example is kinda bad because Disney is an exceptionally evil and exploitative entity that should be broken up anyway.

Bottom line is, corpos get away with this because people do not make a fuss. Making a fuss is good. It is healthy and nice and creates positive change in the world. No one should defend any corporate entity except if it is under assault from the bigger corporate entity.

Current IP laws are laws, the overlords made sure of that, but that does not mean that corpos are free to exploit them to their full extent - as long as negative publicity is involved.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

At any rate, IP laws are very bad and are not working in our favor.

This is why historicals have the tendency to have much better rulesets - you can't lay claim to a historical period or vehicle or uniform, meaning that people writing these rules actually try to make the best rules possible, and the players have a plethora of choices which system will be used. They also tend to be flexible, taking into account various miniatures manufactures and scales. Most rules allow for play in 28mm, 15mm or 6mm.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

3 minutes ago, stratigo said:

Hmmm, sleboda here to tell us that if you don't support a big corporation's right to lobby the government to declare copyrights only expire in 1000000 years is truly ethical and if you think modern IP regimes are slanted in the favor of corporations you are a bad person.

 

I am shocked. 

How can you tell if the corporation is the enemy? It exists

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

15 minutes ago, Sleboda said:

A company can not have monopoly on its own product. Nobody says McDonald's has a monopoly on Big Macs. 

The "market" for GW is everything GW makes. They own it all. Something simply being huge is not grounds for it being a monopoly.

 

I am quite clearly talking about wargaming market as a whole. McDonald's is a player on the fast food market, not on the McDonald's market.

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

I think people severely misunderstand why companies pull stunts like this. It is a numbers game. The goal is not to completely eliminate every kind of fan work, it is to reduce it by X% in order to make WH+ subscription that much more enticing. They aim to create a void and slowly expand into it. This is a long term thing.

Some content creators will get hit, most will not be affected immediately, few will get discouraged and shut down on their own, some will get assimilated into WH+ where they will have more stable income and more access, some new creators will not even launch due to all this. People will then flock to WH+ and this will cut off revenue from those creators who were not hit, who were not discouraged and who were not assimilated. This is how these things are done and how you build a monopoly. Will it happen 100%? Of course not, most corporate attempts like these fail miserably due to a variety of factors - resilient community, inconsistent corporate efforts, people in charge half-assing it... but this is the idea behind it and it can hurt some people in the process.

[Overwhelming Complexity or Just Old Dude?]

Problem with AoS 3.0 is that you added additional fiddling and tedium on top of a system that is already fiddly and tedious.

And it is not the new system confusion, I've played other games, most of us have. There is a difference between "new and unfamiliar" and "poorly designed".

AoS is a game with identity crisis that has been getting worse over the editions. It is stuck between a miniatures game and a card game, between a skirmish and a battle, between the desire to have simple rules and the huge amount of warscroll text. It shows a complete lack of vision or design philosophy, resulting in rules that are thematically at odds with each other and patches that frequently make things worse. No wonder it is hard to wrap your head around the game and that it feels like homework.

Not to mention that passive aggressiveness and contempt for the customer seems to be one of the core design guidelines of GW. Insistence that Open Play is the default and bestest game mode of them all that is most frequently played is nothing short of pure snark at the fact that AoS launch was met with entirely justified vitriol. This is recognized even by GW apologists as they always insist how everyone has to be super polite and practically beg the company if they want the product that they paid for to work.
 

[The Heavy Hand of Games Workshop - IP Rights]

This is basically setting the stage for WH+ nonsense.

And yes, it is up to the hosts and yes, a billion $ company can put pressure on YT that small authors can't fight.

Like in the example of the way that the lack of digital releases has hurt customers with impaired vision, GW has proven time and again that they are willing to ****** over the customer for profit. To be fair, this is like any other company, but GW has a position of commanding near-monopoly on the market, as well as unreasonable brand loyalty, stemming from a mixture of sunk cost fallacy and community "leaders", who basically work for them in shielding the company from criticism under the guise of "protecting the community from negativity".