yukishiro1

Even if Chaos Dwarves someday make some entrance back into AOS, it'll surely be in a completely reworked faction with new copyrighted names for everything, and riding something weird like lava lamps with moving tripod legs. Bedlam Duardin Dominator on Lava Beaconwalker.

Copyright laws vary by jurisdiction and I am not an expert in the subject internationally, so I do not want to outright claim you are wrong here as to whatever jurisdiction you call home, but in general the impact on the market value is one factor (typically of four) in evaluating fair use, which is something you only get to where there has been actual copying of a copyrighted work. In other words, it's a defense to what would otherwise be infringement. In none of these jurisdictions would it be accurate to say that "If sharing the information may affect the market of the book you are not allowed to share it." One clarification I should make is that it might have been better to use the word "idea" than "information" in drawing the dichotomy between what is copyrightable and what is not. In this context, the distinction is pretty obvious, but information is certainly copyrightable if it's expressive rather than functional in nature. The point is that someone's particular expression is what is copyrightable, not the functional information laying behind that expression. I deliberately didn't get into fair use because it's impossible to really generalize about. But you don't need to worry about that if you aren't copying without authorization in the first place, and summarizing rules is not copying. The only place this becomes a gray area where fair use potentially comes into play is if you are reproducing word-for-word the exact wording of a complicated rule. Copyright in major jurisdictions protects expression, not ideas, processes, procedures, mechanics, or the like. The points value of a unit, or hitting on 4+s, etc etc are not expression, and therefore not protected by copyright in any major jurisdiction that I am aware of. For an example of this in practice, you can read this case about a company that copied the rules for its CCG from another CCG; the judge threw out the lawsuit, making clear that rules are not subject to copyright. https://casetext.com/case/davinci-editrice-srl-v-ziko-games-llc-3 I don't think it makes sense to get into this topic more deeply here. My intent was simply to calm some nerves and lay out the basic framework so people can have a better idea of what they should or should not watch out for. If you want to tell people I am wrong you are free to do so, and each person will have to decide for themselves whose information is accurate. To the person who asked, I am an attorney, but not a copyright attorney. Nothing I wrote here should be construed as actual legal advice, and you certainly shouldn't take my word for it simply because of my qualifications; it doesn't matter what someone's title is, what matters is the accuracy of what they write.

And as long as whaling continues to be a viable business strategy, what incentive does GW have to change it up? At some point, GW will reach the natural zenith of the growth it can achieve by selling more and more $ worth of stuff to the same people, at which point you may see some more serious efforts at bringing in new people. But we aren't there yet, and GW isn't going to do anything it doesn't see as in its own financial interest just for the sake of being considerate. Multi-billion dollar publicly-owned companies don't run based on doing the nice thing.

GW isn't interested in being your friendly neighborhood game company. They don't care about making customers happy, they care about how much $ those customers spend. The only reason they make changes is if they think it will hurt sales not to. You can be as unhappy as you want on the internet and it doesn't bother them, as long as you still grudgingly open your wallet for the next release. The only reason there was a big shift in GW's strategy during 7th edition 40k and early AOS was because it was bleeding customers. Voting with your wallet is the only thing GW understands, and right now, customers are lining up to let GW take their money, so you're very unlikely to see any significant changes in the way they operate.

WYSIWYG isn't a real rule, and any place that actually tries to enforce the strict version of it is probably not a place run by someone with very good judgment. What you do need to be able to do is tell what is what. So you can't have a unit all armed with the same weapon and be like "but actually this guy here has something different, even though he looks identical to all the others." And likewise, you can't have two identical-looking units of eels and be like "these are zappy ones and these are defensive ones, you just have to remember which is which, deal with it." But that's it. As long as all identical-looking models are the same thing, there's no rule in the rulebook that I'm aware of that their armament has to be accurate. Similarly, if you want to use Volturnos as an Akhelian King or that named Fox as an unnamed one, there's nothing to say you can't, as long as you don't also have another one in the list that you're claiming is something else.

No, it's also there to break at the first time you transport it anywhere. 😀

There seems to be a lot of confusion here about what copyright law covers. To try to dispel it (and to be very clear, this post is not advocating piracy in any way - the whole point is to explain what it is so people can avoid it): It absolutely IS NOT piracy to read a summary of the rules on 1d4 chan or anywhere else. Copyright applies to creative works, not to information. You cannot copyright rules themselves, because rules are information, and information is not copyrightable. To give a concrete example: GW has a copyright on the particular chart that comes at the end of a battletome that lists the points values for the units. 1d4 chan can't just take a photo of that chart and upload it (nor can it reproduce the same chart with the same formatting in word or paint and post that - the point is that you are copying the creative expression, not how you copy it). But it is absolutely, perfectly legal for you or 1d4 chan or anyone else to summarize the information in that chart on your own site. Obviously the topic is somewhat more complex in its nuances, but the takeaway the average person needs to know is this: 1. You cannot copy a battletome itself and post it somewhere, because you are reproducing GW's creative works without authorization. Viewing someone else's copy that has been posted somewhere in violation of copyright is not technically copyright infringement, but it is benefitting from someone else's infringement. Downloading someone else's copy is creating a copy yourself, and therefore direct infringement. 2. You are absolutely free to extract any and all information in a battletome and post it in a different format yourself, and you are absolutely free to read someone else's summary of that information as well.

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.

They could still keep selling the tomes for people who wanted to buy them. Whether they would or not would answer the question of whether they actually make significant profits from them. I don't think they do - the cost of printing and distribution is pretty much fixed and it's well known that printing a glossy hardback color document is extremely expensive, even when you do it in China - but obviously I'm not privy to their internal accounts, so I can't say for sure.

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.

I wasn't trying to twist your words. I guess I should have said that 100 euros is three drops in the ocean (32 x 3 = 100), not one. Which to me still sounds pretty much insubstantial, though it appears based on your last post that you didn't mean it to be so. My point was only that paying 100 euros a year for rules is a lot, not a little. Whether you have three armies or six or whatever. GW's rules delivery system is hugely out of date, and doesn't make much economic sense. Printing those hardback books is hugely expensive; most of the reason we pay so much for rules is just paying for the physical printing of the books, not their content. Many miniature companies give away the rules for free online, realizing that their profit margins are in plastic, not in the rules. If GW started making all its rules available completely for free online (or even in the app, for the $1 a month), its profit margin would probably increase, not decrease.

Orcs already got the winged cabbage, so you're probably safe there. It could, however, be a carrot with legs.

GW is really inconsistent at writing rules, I think that's the best way to describe it. Sometimes they put out really good stuff - Morathi, for example - and sometimes they put out stuff that amateurs would be embarrassed by. The quality control simply isn't there, for reasons that were understandable when it was five guys in somebody's basement, but that is pretty hard to fathom for a company worth billions.

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.

If you are someone for whom 100 euros is a "drop in the ocean" you are definitely GW's ideal customer, but I'm not sure about the validity (or, frankly, good taste) of trying to generalize your experience.

Obviously somebody's been buying a lot more, since they've just had the best year ever by some margin, despite Covid. Anecdotally, I got back into the hobby because of Covid - I had a bunch more time to sit around at home and figured it'd be a good way to do something fun at home. And it has been, even if games have been hard to come by. Again anecdotally, I had always stayed away from AOS because the rules felt like such a silly mess. I finally jumped in this year because I got the sense that GW was finally treating AOS like a serious game, and Morathi confirmed that impression. But like most things with GW, you have a step backwards for almost every step forwards, and this is a definite step backwards. Rules clearly do matter to the long-term health of a game, BTW. I'm not saying they don't. I'm just saying that I don't think GW really takes rules all that seriously except when they are so bad that they start bleeding customers because of it, e.g. 7th edition of 40k or early AOS.

Oh, it's certainly not an excuse. But with GW, it frequently is an explanation. As someone else said elsewhere, if they were being honest they would have simply said: "lol we couldn't be bothered and we know you will keep buying our stuff anyway because we just had our best year ever despite most people being unable to play." The rules only exist to sell plastic. As long as people keep buying plastic, GW does not care about the rules much at all. That's the reality. It's definitely disappointing though, especially since they just showed in Morathi that they are actually capable of making good rules when they set their minds to it. Morathi felt like a big step foward for AOS rules design, so it's pretty lame to see them go back to dropping the ball again as soon as the profit motive is gone.

Although I agree with the general sentiment, I don't think it's really incomprehensible. It's just disappointing, a clear sign that GW's overwhelming interest in AOS is still simply selling people more plastic, not the state of the game rules. They just don't care much about the rules. I actually kinda wish phoning in a half-arsed FAQ was incomprehensible, because that would say better things about the company.

Enough data to do "Metawatch" articles hyping the competitive side of the game, but not enough data to know that Kroak is a joke at 320 or that Barak Zilfin WLV Spell-in-a-Bottle is oppressive. Even by GW's normal standards, this is blatantly insulting to the intelligence of their players.

Well, the FAQs got neglected, that's for sure. But then, they don't make money like roowarriors do.

You can tell a lot of work went into "a comprehensive set of FAQs" that people spot extremely obvious, sloppy errors in within 5-10 minutes of their release. Not least of which they didn't even actually upload all of them. Unless these are all of them, and the "comprehensive set of FAQs" only actually includes about 1/3 of the armies in the game?

Saying they didn't have the data to do points changes is a bit of a joke when they had no trouble updating them for 40k. The real translation of that is: "We were too busy doing other things and didn't want to bother." The FAQs bear this out in that they don't actually change anything significant. Not a single nerf to any of the oppressive factions - absolutely astoundingly, KO Barak Zilfin can still do all their tricks, and the only thing they thought to FAQ to say you can't do is something practically nobody was actually doing (dismounting an arkanaut company after flying high in the hero phase - nobody cares about this). Also, despite the fact that they claim to have FAQs for "every faction," they've only put ones up for about 7. Presumably they are still being uploaded, since we don't even have the Morathi one that they made a big deal about...but it's so typical GW in terms of sheer incompetence. And, if we're to judge by KO, Lumineth, Tzeentch etc...there aren't going to be significant changes to anything else either. Finally, despite claiming they aren't changing points values...the Nighthaunt tome actually DOES raise the points values of several units back to what they were before GHB2020. This is presumably just a sloppy error in that whoever updated the document forgot to remove the points values that were in it before - but they did update them to January 2021, bizarrely. So right now Nighthaunt actually DID see points increases. This is such typical, disappointing GW. So incompetent.

There's a couple good units in STD, not just marauders. But the internal balance is definitely not the best.

Wound carry-over plus lack of toughness does drastically compress the range of defensive profiles you can have, and consequently, significantly limits the amount of different damage-based roles you have in AOS compared to 40k.

Those warcry units are only endurable because nobody actually plays them. Can you imagine what a freaking nightmare it would be to play or play against someone whose whole army was made up of that junk?