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zedatkinszed

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  1. Fair enough I was under the misapprehension that as a 40k line it'd be more popular than a niche AOS Warhammer Quest - but fair point.
  2. What ever it is we have a fairly straight comparison with the launch of the new Hive War starter today. A boxed specialist game full of card, terrain and niche models (i.e more niche than Space Marines). Almost 8 hours later it's still available for preorder even in my FLGS.
  3. Right. I mean look at Warcry and how objectives change that game rather than playing it as a simple slugfest. I think there is a cultural issue with the question of balance. The pick-up game phenomenon - something I have NEVER done btw. Any game I've played is by arrangement and generally long planned for. But it seems to me that the loudest voices in this debate are hyper competitive ppl who want to play Warhammer like MTG or Yugioh or Pokemon. The Honest Wargamer was big into the idea of T-Sports (e-sports but for the tabletop). Warhammer just isn't designed for that. I mean I know so so so many people love tournaments etc. But Warhammer is much better as a narrative event (I don't necessarily mean using AOS's narrative rules but rather the whole event having a theme and a general RPG element to it ala Holy Havoc and NEON) than a pure match-play tourney. It is not designed like poker or darts or League of Legends. That's the elephant in the room and TBH I only got comfortable with the truth of that after I turned 30. Back in the day tourneys were part of wider conventions these days it seems the inverse or reverse is the case - the convention is tacked on to the tourney. Maybe that's just my perspective though.
  4. What happened here is a mess up at the logistical level - either stocking, tariffs, or a messed-up order from suppliers. Basic things that have failed either due to a MIS/software failure, human error or management, development teams and marketing not communicating properly (this last one is least likely given the book - the project clearly had a large budget that somebody in backend of GW made a mess of). Or due to the UK government's mishandling of their own Brexit strategy and their failure to brief, lead, manage and aid British importers and exporters through it. (Many many business owners keep saying their being blindsided by new UK rules every week - it's a really hard time to be a British exporter) GW won't mention this as to avoid being labelled one way or the other on the Brexit debate. But honestly that's not good enough. Anything (WHQ:CC & Crimson Court for that matter) that sells out *preorders* in 75 minutes is a logistical failure. Compare how fast Be'lakor was back in stock. Reason being ... Be'lakor's made in Nottingham. Underworld's and specialist games, terrain and endless spells have the "designed in the UK made in china" stamp on them. Now, funnily enough WHQ:CC has the made in uk stamp on it - which is clearly not the case, as MANY people pointed out you can't make the cardstock in the UK. So Brexit is a STRONG element in this mess up.
  5. Just my 2c but having played Warhammer for nigh on 25 years I strongly believe that while many people THINK they desire balance, balance is not desirable for the game of Warhammer. So for me the real wicked problem is the perception that the game NEEDS to be balanced to be "fair" or "accurate" (how can a fantasy game ever be accurate...) or "good" is the issue, YMMV. Bear with me. War is not a balanced phenomenon. Take the Romans fighting the Celts. Roman soldiers were trained and equipped at high cost. Loosing Roman soldiers had an impact on the General's prestige and the morale of his troops - in so far as loosing men was as bad as loosing battles. The Celts on the other hand ran naked to their deaths and considered it an honour to die. The cost of deploying a celtic warrior was far less than a Roman one. And celtic warriors would embrace suicidal tactics. Take Alexander the great, or rather his dad, Philip of Macedon. The Greeks basically had a perfectly balanced system of war, strong units of Phalanxes on the left, shield walls and long spears. Their wars were glorified rugby scrums with polearms. Then Philip comes along with a longer spear and elite cavalry, and destroys everyone, paving the way for his son to conquer the known world. War is not balanced. War games shouldn't be either. That's where two factors in wargames come into play economics and tactics. The economics is the "points value" which btw AOS tried very hard to escape from and failed. 40K did a better job by creating "power levels". Anyway, either of these systems gives the two players an even playing field of spending power. This was never something that happened in any war and in fact IMHO the only really interesting WHFB battle scenarios were the ones where there was a deliberate points difference with specific victory conditions. Fundamentally if you want a perfectly equally balanced wargame - play chess. If you want to experience battle as it is/was, as an unequal contest that requires thought, skill and luck to defeat a more powerful, better equipped, and more numerous opponent then Warhammer is fine. Sure there are issues with rulesets - but that ain't "game balance" it is "beta-testing".
  6. Not a jab at you. It's a jab at that rumour because to paraphrase Monty Python - it's a silly rumour. If there was any actual copyright/trademark problem like that a) it'd be public and b) they'd take the website down. End of story. As long as ageofsigmar.com/cursed-city/ is up GW are promoting the game - they just aren't promoting its SALE anymore. There's a world of difference. Look you cannot restrict the use of two word terms as commonplace as "cursed city". It would be possible to restrict "Warhammer Quest: Cursed City". Take the names of DnD rulesets "Vault of the Dracolich" is trademarkable because Dracolich is not a real word. "Vault of the Vampire" is not trademarkable because 'Vault' and 'Vampire' are commonplace and commonly associated. Same reason Trump couldn't TM "you're fired". Now take, "Dungeons and Dragons: Vault of the Vampire" this trademarkable because the string of words is not common place, and because it is specific. All in all, just because some dude on the internet saw that there is/was a game called Cursed City and then sees that WHQ:CC is no longer being sold - and then spreads a rumour that there might be a copyright issue - does not mean THERE IS one. It's a pure conspiracy - might as well say Archaon was on the Grassy Knoll in '63. Or that Cypher was RFK's second shooter. "Cursed City" is such a commonplace and use two extremely common place words that no court anywhere would entertain a claim for this and if they did the claimant would loose, and the only winner would be lawyers. No cease and desist order could be enforced and none would be issued within 75 minutes of the product going to market for preorder. That's just silly. Re: the product being pulled: The reason any corporate pulls a product is because in the short term its a money looser. Corporates look at Quarterly earnings, especially in a panicked time like the pandemic. And in the context of a shipping stocking mess up this makes sense. The game could actually have lost an unrecoverable ammount of money if someone order 10 times of card lot A and 10% of Card Lot B. This is not easily fixed. But I still cannot fathom the silence
  7. Probably BS. You can't copyright the term Cursed City (prior art rules that out) - this is pure conspiracy BS. If that were the case the ww.ageofsigmar.com/cursed-city/ would be gone. What's gone is promotional material for a product nobody can buy - which is good consumer relations. It was the first thing that annoyed me - that all the PR and marketing was still up a week after the sell out. Incompetence / System failure is what happened here. The reason we can bank on that is the silence. GW's silence is because the problem is commercially sensitive. If it were copyright that would be a very public battle. If it were a shipping problem they'd be able to explain that and have investors understand and claim against insurance. If it's their own software/warehouse/people mess up - that's something that would damage investors' confidence and rightly so. The tariff issue is hard to get away from - it would still be a mess up. If tariffs are the issue it would be damaging because it would damage the made in UK image of GW. (Yes I know and you know it's made in China but this is/was a mirage). My money was on a shipping disaster (product overboard that kill WHQ:CC's commercial viability) but this *potential* stock mess-up is effectively the same thing. And anyone managing people working from home knows this is exactly the kind of thing we all have nightmares about. It is still damned annoying that GW is not giving the game a second life - I mean there are ways around this. Sell the boards
  8. This is what's annoying people most. Products that won't don't or can't be bought with ads and hype for MONTHS! I mean GW made sure every influencer got a copy so the product could be advertised, but failed to supply FLGS or the public or their own online store properly. Indomitus was the same. I mean jeez guys - delay the release. It's not rocket science. In fairness, I agree. This past 12 months has been a 100% communications/marketing mess. They could have delayed everything and been open about it months ago - everyone gets it, Covid is a nightmare, we can empathize we're living it too! If they had done that and maximized production times and made sure product launches were adequately stocked (a basic law of sales btw) that would have been good planning. But when you promise something and fail to deliver that's 100% different. When you don't tell anyone that a product is a limited run. When you don't have 10-20% supply level when the market is awash with cash (sorry to anyone who is struggling but the fact is right now more people have spare cash because they aren't spending money on Petrol, public transport, holidays, business lunches, or well... clothes). That's a recipe for disaster, and all points to a business plan not working post Brexit and during Covid. Let's imagine something else for 1 second. Let's imagine GW made the models and printed everything in the UK and added 50% to the RRP - we'd buy it. Now imagine if instead of running out of pre-orders they delayed releases and went 100% made to order (you know like Reaper) - we'd buy it. What GW did, it seems to me, is work through Covid on a pre-covid supply/demand model. And kept their focus on in-store supply levels instead of digital (and also accounts for the 3 party supply levels). Which has to be about the real estate costs of the physical shops. Because it's not a model that makes sense otherwise. And my heart goes out to the guys who run Warhammer shops through this pandemic but GW must should have made this statement a long time ago.
  9. First - yes they could print where ever they want to - it's just more expensive to do it in the UK. The China thing is a conspiracy theory but a valid one. The silence is really interesting. Either something happened that is hugely embarassing or hugely political. So this is possible. My own personal belief is that it's a 'mess' up (TGA won't let me write the correct word) over a conspiracy. Either IT WAS a limited run and the marketing team(s) messed up by assuming it was like BSF. Or they were mislead. Other possibilities are: A shipping container fell of a ship (seriously this happens a lot) and was uninsured. Thus the product has therefore lost more money than it can ever recoup. And GW made the decision to kill it. Covid is killing production just like PS5 sales (seriously have you tried to buy one) and other computer components (video cards). Because Chinese companies are not being honest about their workforce and production capacity. Most likely IMHO. The Suez Canal thing had an impact and GW don't want to admit it. Not sure why that would be. Brexit stuff. This is very possible. And would explain the silence as GW don't want to be labelled either way. Something genuinely weird happened on the pre-order day and scalpers managed to order everything. I mean every single site selling it was crashing. It is strange and if they did indeed think they had enough for 6 months the maths of 75 minutes just doesn't add up. I mean that's rock concert sell out speed. So this is unlikely. And honestly the 6 months stock thing makes no sense. If that was true they wouldn't appear to be killing the game and letting hinted at expansions fade to dust. All this aside what I'm really annoyed about are the UK companies taking money for alleged "made to order" copies of CC - which have not been announced.
  10. In fairness no GW have not said anything of the sort. Their replies are along the lines "we'll tell you when we know" and "currently there are no plans to return this to the webstore." We're all expecting CC to be around like BSF. And to be clear so am I. But GW's communication on this is amazingly bad. Also just look at the website. The CC page says "No Longer Available Online". Crimson court (which also sold out on preorder day btw) "Temporarily out of stock Online" I'm sadly thinking there was a genuine mess up here. CC was NEVER meant to be a limited release but GW are acting like it is. If this was like Indomitus and they wanted to cover their blushes with a made to order run - they would have done it. Genuinely that was a demand issue. This isn't this is a supply issue. Also to be frank it's a marketing mess up. Every influencer got a copy. The game was hyped to hell. And no warning about stock was given to customers by GW or by GW NDA reviewers (b/c of GW embargos - which is a fair enough practice). To me it looks like Marketing made a plan AS IF this was a full proper release. Not a release with a supply chain problem. So I think they've gotten screwed over too. NOBODY plans this kind of thing. And even in Covid this is avoidable. The only thing I can think of is the Evergreen / Suez Canal blockage. This was a disastrous product launch because every time GW talk about CC now it will just annoy everyone apart from the people who got one. The problem right now is not the unavailability of the game it's the silence from GW about a) what happened and b) what's going to happen. This might well be because they don't know!! But the issue remains, the corporate silence is not helping. It's not adding to FOMO - it's making ppl resent the company. GW need to say something and soon.
  11. There is a chance - The Ogroid and Gaunt Summoner from Silver Tower were released. In fact they were all released from Silver Tower. However, Blackstone Fortress only saw the villain, Chaos Lord getting a separate release, Obsidius Mallex. It's really very hard to tell. Silver Tower was at the beginning of AOS and was a trial run for the Karic Acolytes and Tzaangors and new blue horrors - all of which got their own eventual new release. Shadows over Hammerhal is anomalous as it had ZERO new models so all previously existed. All in all Blackstone is probably a better comparison as AOS is a lot more mature but it all depends on what GW's strategy with this was.
  12. This is a "holding pattern" communication. Basically they can't answer the question - because they either haven't got an answer or they aren't allowed give an answer.
  13. What ever the story is GW are doing an amazingly bad job at communication. This is just bizare. It looks like the Web/marketing/facebook team have no idea what's actually happening either. Anytime they're asked it's a "when we hear we'll let you know" - well duh it's your job. And the customer service people are syaing "no current plans to return [cursed city] to the website." But it was clear from Uncle Adam's video on Cursed City that the word was out that this preorder was going to sell out wicked fast. GW just need to do whjat they did with the delayed Sylvaneth release 18 months ago and tell us what's going on.
  14. What I think is likely: IDK SCE (there's always an SCE release - even Beastgrave had Ironsoul's Condemnors - here's an easy one - they just use the ETB Castigators) Chaos Warriors (not just STD marauder types - actual chaos armoured warriors). There are usually 2 Chaos bands in each season. (Nurgle & BOC; Tzeentch and StD; Skaven and Khorne) And the current/new Chaos warriors are monopose already. CoS of some kind (maybe Duardin but maybe humans) Death (they've done skeletons and FEC, and ghosts so either Vampires, Bonereapers or pure zombies with a Necromancer). But that leaves out destruction completely. So I'd not be surprised if there were new rules for Giants to be somehow used, especially with SoB on the horizon.
  15. GW please take note: this is how future Slaughter Queens should look!
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