stratigo
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Posts posted by stratigo
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I actually did start a new army this year.
Eldar. For 40k.
Life as a KO player has left me kind of down on AoS. The army oscillates from brutally overpowered to hilariously underpowered and either way it's... not that fun to play. I have largely concluded that KO is the tau of AoS, at a core design level it doesn't seem to be able to play the game in a way that's interactive. And there isn't another AoS army that inspires me aesthetically
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On 3/11/2022 at 11:18 AM, Riff_Raff_Rascal said:
I would like to also remind everyone that GW is in the business of model making, not game design. The low hanging response is to tell GW to get better at rules writing which would alleviate a lot of everyone's concerns and thus make everyone have a more positive take on the "state of the game".
We have every right to have higher expectations for the company for rules writing in particular but I would surmise that there is something more to the "state of the game" than just rules. The community at large perhaps? Its the reason we all keep coming back to this hobby and I propose is the reason that folks still praise GW when they get something right.
GW was a model company. They're an IP company now.
But the reason people come back to GW is because GW dominates the market and a not good game you get to play is better then an excellent one you never do.
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On 1/11/2022 at 8:51 AM, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
It's certainly a possibility, but after everything I have read from people who worked on GW rules design, I have never seen anyone say that higher-ups push them to make units or books overpowered to push sales. I have seen talk of executive meddling in other areas, but not that one. So personally, I think it's a case of something else going wrong, like the rules writers not having the time or ressources they need to ensure a better level of balance. Say what you will about how Wizards of the Coast handles Magic: The Gathering (there is certainly plenty to criticize), but the level of care and testing they are putting into their rules design definitely put GW's efforts to shame.
I mean there was the Hewitt interview that literally said that.
It doesn't happen as often as people presume. Rountree doesn't come down the the writer room every week and demand they up the power of X unit because the sales team told him they should. But it DOES happen every once in a while. But usually not, and you can never know why a particular unit got the love, wether a suit went "Make it good" or the person writing is was just "I am so full of cool ideas! Let's put all of them in" or "Eh, here's something for this unit, I'm not really gonna check it because i don't care about this faction". I mean, I think this one is because the rules writers went "Dragons are Fing cool! Give them all the rules!" It's a problem when you hire for people with passion and no experience cause they cheap. They tend to let their passion run wild, cause that's the thing keeping them in the job. And, like, they aren't paid to playtest thoroughly.
21 hours ago, JackStreicher said:Mhm. Just to ignite the fuse and watch the explosion:
imo dragons are fine.
deal with it
Dragons are not fine.
Deal with it.
14 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:This is exactly what I was talking about earlier when I said the competitive/tournament players think they’re more important. Matched Play is the vast majority that gets talked about, not what is actually played. The internet as a whole, is a very loud, but very small minority of overall players.
matched play was them throwing you guys a bone, but it is 100% NOT how AoS is intended to be played. That’s not to say you can’t or shouldn’t play that way, but you need to realise and understand that the game wasn’t designed for that, and as such there will be ‘bugs in the system’ that gw probably won’t address, because they don’t need to.
i personally don’t think the dragons deserve the negative attention they’re getting right now, and I think 90% of it is just anti Stormcast bias. People getting salty if the poster boys they don’t like beat them. we have a few of them in our tournaments who get really mad about it if the good Stormcast player beats them simply because ‘Stormcast suck and shouldn’t be able to win against me’ and I think a lot of that is what’s going on here, with a sprinkling of jealousy that Stormcast get an army of dragons and everyone else doesn’t. People were, and probably still are, legitimately angry that the dragons ended up being Stormcast units
just for openness sake, these are the armies I play: Cities Of Sigmar (Disspossessed exclusively), Fyreslayers, Stormcast, Seraphon, Flesh Eaters, Ogors, Gloomspite Gits (Squigs and Troggoths), Bonesplitterz, Kruleboyz, Beasts Of Chaos (Warherd exclusively), Kharadron Overlords, Sons Of Behemat. So I’m not bias because I play them
Match play is overwhelmingly the way the majority of players play because it is the only easy, no thought needed, way to create an army and select objectives. Even people playing narrative campaigns will default to match play games because it is by far the easiest way to play, and the one that give the most appearance of balance. Which is actually important. Vanishingly few people make an army to lose all their games.
10 hours ago, Joseph Mackay said:Because the narrative players generally don’t need to discuss the most op units/lists online, or argue about rules interpretations. They simply don’t NEED the internet like the matched players seem to.
matched play is the loud minority and narrative is the quiet majority
Narrative players never organize? they never feel done wrong by an op power list and complain about it?
How many 'narrative' games do you play in a given week mate? Who with?
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12 hours ago, KrispyXIV said:
I'd think that a competitive scenario would be more interested in setting up a level playing field than ensuring everyone's narrative and flavorful artefacts see play, but I suppose I'm more interested in seeing everyone has good artefact options than hoping my limited set will happen to be ok.
Good Amulet sets up a more level playing field for competition. Bad Amulet flatly does not.
There are plenty of things that work differently based on the "carrier", Amulet could have been one of them.
You don't actually seem to get why the amulet was a problem.
It isn't that it was just too good and no tome artifacts could compete. It was because it WASN'T balanced for every army, the save gets MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH better the more wounds you have, because it is a save. A 5 wound hero with the amulet is nothing. A 36 wound Gargent is a nightmare. It was an unbalanced artifact that created winners and losers based on the quality of your hero monsters, and THAT is why it had to go away.
The problem with the amulet is that it did what you are decrying here, make winners and losers based on quirks of tomes.
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1 hour ago, Kadeton said:
In which case, minimum Battleline requirements still aren't appropriate, which is my point.
battlelines tend to be so diverse that you can build any theme around them for most armies.
Ultimately battlelines aren't for realism or logic. They exist for game balance. And I agree that they do a poor job in this regard
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On 12/28/2021 at 11:16 PM, Kadeton said:
I think that's sensible, personally. Most militaries are overwhelmingly made up of a single "unit type", a standardised basic infantry. Most AoS armies should have one or two basic units that make up the bulk of their forces.
The bit that's missing from AoS is that real militaries deploy basic infantry not because they're forced to take a "battleline tax" by some arbitrary rules of engagement, but because basic infantry are the most cost-effective general-purpose military asset. You shouldn't need to force players to take Battleline units, they should just be good value for their points and army composition would take care of itself.
This would make sense on a grand military scale, but AoS is mostly a skirmish. You get maybe 150 models at most. A good representation of a society's army this is not. Indeed at this size it is eminently conceivable that this is a specialized all elite formation.
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Sweet.
I just want to reiterate that I really enjoy soulbound. It's a fun system in a fun setting. Wish I could get more gaming going with it, covid and life issues have really attritted down a lot of my gaming communities.
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10 hours ago, NinthMusketeer said:
GW regularity upends the meta with poor-to-atrocious balance on new releases and only marginally better attempts at fixing it. This isn't an evil company twirling its mustache as it shifts the meta to generate sales (and certainly the evidence never supported that); it's a bunch of primarily narrative gamers who are only now realizing that outside of their group optimization is not a rarity but the norm. Are there benefits associated with that? Yes, absolutely. But we are a loooooong way from a state where imbalance is a net positive for sales. Meta-chasers are less common than people who stop playing because of one-sided matchups.
But now that I'm done with my mini rant over awful balance, I do want to say I am very happy with the update. I like almost all of the changes, love the scalpel-not-hammer nerf to unleash hell and heroic recovery. Those two plus the amulet nerf I think put AoS in a noticeably better place just by themselves. But more than that it represents a change in outlook with GW acknowledging that balance is a serious concern and everyone stands to benefit from it being addressed more significantly and more often. There is a lot they didn't fix and/or should have known better than to break in the first place, yet a step in the right direction is exactly that. I am quite happy to forgive mistakes when there is a good-faith effort being made to fix them.
I think you attribute incompetence too easily. I mean, yes, often GW is just bad at balance (and AoS is by far the most problematic. At least Necromunda the rules writers deliberately go "Balance? Never heard of her"). But they are also, well, obviously seeking money with a lot of changes.
I mean, come on, they literally killed horde meta for monster meta in the edition change. They aren't THAT dumb, they knew what this would do. It isn't even meta chasers, it's just literally anyone at all playing the game. And, considering just how addicted people get to GW games, how powerful the social bonds formed in gaming groups are, I really am not sure that more people stop playing rather then grumble and buy the new meta stuff.
I doubt the hand of corporate reaches down too often, but for edition changes, I am certain it does. The rest of the time they simply refuse to pay their writers enough to get good rules, which is the actual real problem, not that they are a bunch of narrative gamers. They're simply paid too little to put in all the effort required to craft, playtest, refine, playtest, etc.
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21 hours ago, nuttyknatty said:
This is factually incorrect. Model count is much lower on average than in previous years and editions.
It isn't model count, it's overall profit. One big model or 30 smaller ones often cost the same
GW deliberately upends the meta with regularity because that prompts people to buy new models or armies.
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7 hours ago, Marcvs said:
sure, but the question is not how they achieve it, it's just the result. I have 0 clue on consumers' preferences and so on, but I think Age of Sigmar developers/GW managers might believe that it's easier to sell a game you can play in under two hours than one which requires four to complete a match.
They aren't wrong, but they seem to be under the impression that the way to do this is to add more rules.
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Delete.
Happens a lot >.>
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16 hours ago, Marcvs said:
Purely personal feeling but I think this is actually correct, in the sense that they want to shorten the duration of a game of Age of Sigmar to better compete with new and faster miniature games (Marvel Crisis Protocol, A Song of Ice and Fire...) -of course they also introduced rules which slow it down, like out of turn actions and coherency rules, but that's another story). If you can start killing each other in t1 a) there's less stuff around in further turns and b) maybe one day you can play a game over 4 rounds
Both of which accomplish this by being smaller.
ASOIF absolutely does not have a faster ruleset, jut less moveable piece, and rank and flank units move faster
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13 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:
Why is it such a problem to you that Stormcast are now a less mobile army and that a 700 point god model can give +1d6" charge distance to a bunch of Destruction armies at the same time?
You really seem excessively salty about Stormcast sometimes. They objectively came out quite well from the FAQ and will probably one of the main contenders to do well in tournaments for a while.
I mean, it's a big problem to me how mobile destruction (especially OWC) are. Like, they casually charge from one edge of the board to the other. The mobility in this game narrows the tactical space of the game and requires shooting to be super one shot powerful, or it is mostly useless
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Being a KO player is a wild ride, we rocket to the top or the bottom with little in between tome to tome and edition to edition
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*Checks in*
Are KO still a trashfire?
Yep?Okay
*Checks out*
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KO don't have the firepower to eliminate key targets in the current rules at all really. KO has stepped off a cliff.
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11 hours ago, Kasper said:
Its not an easy fix though, well depending on what kind of a result you wish to see. If you capped saves at +1 before rend Im pretty sure you can toss Archaon and a bunch of other units in the bin.
Archaon getting binned is better than having archaon be the reason that 90 percent of the model range is binned.
Archaon is good enough that he suppresses even other hero monsters.
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26 minutes ago, Kadeton said:
Who's saying it's a good thing? I've said multiple times that GW's slow release schedule is a huge problem every time there's an edition change, because it means players wait for far too long for updates to their armies.
But - and this is a really big but, as far as I'm concerned - making improvements to the basic systems of the game should still be done, even if it throws the balance completely out of whack for a while. 3rd Ed's core rules are an improvement on 2nd Ed's, in my opinion. In several important ways, but including allowing units that are meant to be tough really feel tough for the first time ever.
Yes, the edition change has ruined the balance of the old battletomes and invalidated some armies at the competitive level... temporarily. Now comes the work of balancing all the armies to work with the new, improved rules.
Worse than which bit of 2nd? The era where Triple Keepers dominated every tournament with a 70% winrate? The Age of Gristlegore? The times when everyone was crying about the Petrifex Elite? Or Skinks? Sentinel Spam?
Or was it that period when all the Beasts of Chaos and Gloomspite Gitz players got their time in the sun, and played at the top tables? Oh wait.
Don't view last edition with rose-tinted glasses, just because it was relatively stable towards the end.
This is literally what I mean by rigid thinking. "If it never dies, it can't lose! If I can't kill it, I can't win!" You don't have to kill anything to score VP.
You absolutely have to kill things to score vps. You get vps for killing things. There's more than just primaries.
And, again, a hero monster dominates the field. It makes careful movement impossible. I don't know what games you are playing where you manage to win by ignoring a hero monster. I don't think they exist. You reckon with the hero monster, or that monster kills all your objective scoring units. There are precious few ways to keep away from it. Can't score many points when archaon has killed your entire army after all.
Archaon is a damage check, with maybe a scant handful of tricks that can keep him locked down. But he needs to go or be nullified, or you lose.
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4 hours ago, Kadeton said:
Yeah - that happens every time there's a major change in the rules. Lots of stuff gets (competitively) invalidated, it's just how edition changes work by nature. Put pressure on GW to change their release model, because it sucks for most players to have to wait around for months to years before their favourite army gets updated.
Or, just play friendly games against other friendly lists. Play 2nd Ed games, if you prefer!
Lotta people misinterpreting things I've said around here.
The "skill" (though I'm pretty sure I put it in terms of rigid vs flexible thinking, rather than skill) is in figuring out how to respond to the fact the rules have changed and the tactics that worked last edition don't always work any more. And it's not about the player making a save stack (that's just using the basic mechanics), it's about their opponent who has to overcome their own habitual behaviour.
2nd Ed, everyone: "Playing against Archaon. I know, I'll hit him with my hammer units - done! I win!"
3rd Ed, everyone at first: "Playing against Archaon. I know, I'll hit him with my hammer units... oh no, he's still alive!"
3rd Ed, rigid approach: "Ugh, Archaon again. Right, hit him with the hammers... WTF that still didn't work? Every time, I throw everything at him and it hasn't worked once! Why is the game broken?"
3rd Ed, flexible approach: "Archaon again. Pretty sure I can't kill him, at least not when he's buffed like that. Can I win some other way?"
And yes, absolutely - for some armies, the answer to "Can I win some other way?" is pretty much "No". Those armies shouldn't be playing against top-tier tournament lists. That's never going to be a fun time for either player. Soft lists getting curb-stomped by tournament lists is not new to 3rd Ed.
People trying to "fix" save stacking are really just trying to go back to the 2nd Ed approach. Which is fine, as a preference, but then why not just continue to play 2nd Ed? I prefer the 3rd Ed game, where some problems can't easily be solved by brute force.
And it is never good.
Like, just because GW keeps stepping on this rake and smacking themselves in the face doesn't mean this is a good thing. GW should strive to make all armies viable, and most units in those armies. And they clearly don't even try. It's no mistake that threads complaining about balance are pretty much perennial. AoS balance is always trash, and players always want it to be better (Unless they are the archaon player and just like ruining their friends). So, keep complaining. GW isn't deaf, they get motivated to fix things by player sentiment.
And I'd argue strongly that it is much worse now then it was in 2nd. There are fewer viable models, and they are mostly heroes riding monsters.
The haves absolutely can still hit archaon with their hammer and kill him (or archaeon lists would literally never lose). 3rd has done nothing but made the vast gulf between haves and have nots dramatically wider, and changed a few haves and have nots. It has narrowed how you can play the game to such a tiny amount of models and lists. 40k 9th edition didn't do this.
52 minutes ago, Kadeton said:There may well be a problem with Archaon, yes.
If Archaon is a problem, fix Archaon. There's no need to throw out the entire concept of tough units just because one God-level hero isn't costed appropriately.
Archaon is just the effigy. His problem is shared by any 3 plus monster hero. He just concentrates it.
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3 minutes ago, Kadeton said:
Okay. You know from the outset, from the moment you finish writing your KO list even, that you don't have the damage to kill Archaon as long as your opponent has a basic understanding of the game mechanics. So your entire gameplan for that matchup is just "Step 1: Lose"?
You're right, KO are a heavily-skewed faction that aren't very competitive in this edition. None of their core mechanics or unit profiles are geared for contesting objectives, so their only real strategy is to table the opponent, which this edition seems designed to avoid. Their body count is low (extremely low when most infantry are embarked), they have very little sustain, lack wizard or priest support, and are fragile. (Notably, they are fragile mainly because they have very few ways to stack save bonuses where they're needed!). They're a poorly-designed, one-dimensional mess of an army.
You could try a few things: look at ways to compensate for those weaknesses (e.g. allied/coalition units), start collecting a new army that's more competitive in the current ruleset, or take a break from competitive games until your army gets its 3rd Ed update.
Some anvils can also function as hammers, yes. They tend to pay a lot of points for that, and in some cases should probably pay more.
You've identified that your list has a huge strategic weakness that your opponents can easily exploit, and you've immediately identified two potential solutions, just in what you posted above: get some "battleship" units of your own, or find ways to increase your mortal wound output. Or do both!
Which renders a bunch of armies, and like 80 percent of all models completely useless. Like utterly and completely not worth bothering. Game's mighty boring with the same 5 armies using only the same 5 units of their books.
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On 11/7/2021 at 7:12 AM, Kadeton said:
It's the wrong question, IMO. The real question is: if you have a stack of saves available, why is your opponent's entire KO fleet still shooting at Archaon?
How often does it happen that a whole KO fleet continues shooting at Archaon through a stack of save bonuses? Quite often. A lot of players are still stuck in the "focus fire until dead" mentality, which was my entire point. How often do those players then go on to complain that save stacking is broken, rather than recognising that they could have made different choices? Quite often.
Because dealing with those lynchpin models is more challenging than just blowing units with poor saves off the board. You need a game plan that doesn't rely on killing them, which requires that people change their long-established wargaming habits. A lot of people are struggling to adapt... which, again, was my point.
The problem with the statistics is that they don't tell you anything about tactical play, they just give army composition (or often, only the faction). We don't know how each players' resources were used turn-by-turn. Archaon lists are definitely strong, but it's impossible to say from the stats how much of that 60%+ winrate is strength on paper versus tactical nous. There's no data.
I can give anecdotes instead, if that helps? I went to a tournament on the 30th of October, and played against a Slaves to Darkness list with Archaon in Feral Foray. It was easily the most intense, hard-fought games I've ever played - it's a powerful army, and was piloted by a skilled player. Use of defensive resources was extremely important: I had to carefully sacrifice units and spend resources to keep Archaon busy while dealing with the rest of my opponent's army. Only after his support was eroded and his own defensive buffs spent and unavailable did I seize the opportunity to take him out (on turn 4).
My opponent made sure to keep defensive buffs available for Archaon as much as possible, but he also wasn't brainlessly buffing him when it wasn't needed and would use those resources elsewhere when he knew it was safe to do so. However, I do think that the emphasis on keeping a "safety net" for Archaon made him more hesitant to buff other units, and that eventually gave me the edge I needed to scrape out the win (it was something like 29 to 27 VP in the final tally).
If I'd just charged in against a fully-buffed Archaon I would have lost the game, no question. The list is way too strong for that. But recognising that, and having to work out how to survive and win without just taking Archaon off the table right away, led to the most enjoyable game of AoS I've ever played. Hence my position: save stacking makes the game more interesting.
Because KO lose when they don't kill Archaon.
Your mindscape doesn't match the reality of the game man. Archaon moves too fast, KO are too combo heavy. The second Archaon hits the ironclad, game's over. And he'll hit it in the first few turns. There's no way to both avoid archaon and score objectives for KO. Archaon by himself, without literally any other models, has the damage output to table a KO army. He's fast, the board is small, and objectives are close.
As a KO player, you kill archaon or lose. Simple as.
16 hours ago, Kadeton said:That's the outcome that I like - hard units actually being hard. Those units are anvils, a role that previously didn't exist in the game because everything died so easily regardless of how "tough" it was meant to be. Having the ability to buff up an anvil to the point where it can resist a hammer unit is what creates all the new tactical possibilities of 3rd Ed. Previously the only thing players could do against a hammer was screen - now they can also block. That means, as the hammer-wielder, you need to put actual thought into what you hit with your hammer, instead of just smashing everything you can reach.
I honestly couldn't care less if god models weren't playable (or even represented in the game), though I do recognise that they're a drawcard for a lot of people. Even if they weren't a thing, I'd still want anvil units that offer some counter-play to hammers.
Morathi's design, to me, represents the worst possible solution for the survivability problem - a bespoke rule that breaks the fundamental mechanics. She represents what happens when the designers have backed themselves into a corner, and can't see a way to get the outcome they want within the existing rules framework, so they just make a special case. I don't want special cases: I want the basic mechanics to allow for units to be tough enough to survive.
Yeah, I hope I've been very clear through this whole discussion that I never want to see the possibility for a player to make most of their army "unkillable" most of the time. Those defensive resources need to be strictly limited, counterable, and/or require foresight to use effectively. I think the current generic options are well structured in this regard: Finest Hour has to be used before your opponent commits their attack, allowing them to select weaker targets; Mystic Shield can be counter-spelled; All-Out Defense can be Roared away, and draws from a limited pool of CP. And all of them are single-target buffs, so using them on one unit denies them to every other unit. That should be the gold standard, IMO.
Where I do think there's a potential for problems is in a lot of the army-specific special abilities. Anything that buffs multiple units, has no chance of failure or counter, uses "alternative" mechanics (e.g. re-rolling saves), or can be used without consuming limited resources should be treated with the utmost care. I'm hoping to see fewer abilities like those in future battletomes.
It's also worth recognising that your opponent cannot stop your attack - all they're doing is blunting its effectiveness against one specific target unit. You've done the setup work, you can hit them really hard anywhere you want... if you choose to hit them in their hardest, most defended point and break your fist, instead of hitting them in any of their softer areas, that's on you. You know what their defensive capabilities are, what buffs are already deployed and what can be done reactively, so it's up to you to figure out how to direct your attack accordingly to get the maximum impact.
Mortal wound spam is a design failure, I totally agree. Almost all sources of mortal wounds should be removed, so that anvil units can do what they're supposed to do.
Your anvils aren't anvils. They're battleships. They survive everything and kill everything and if your army doesn't have one, or the equivalent of torpedoes (MW spam) you are going to lose. Every. Single. Time
There is no tactical choice to take when the 2 plus unrendable monster hops on the middle objective, in easy threat range of all the other objectives, and can trivially kill anything in your entire army. The only thing it can't kill is itself (unless it is a MW spewer like archaon. Then it just wins all things all the time).
I'd be way more okay with tough low damage output units. We don't got that one mate, we have the strongest units being the toughest units, and everyone else is pretty worthless or uses mortal wounds.
1 hour ago, whispersofblood said:This is likely why a lot units which are exclusively "hammers" appear quite cheap, and why I'm against calls for increasing the points on strictly damage dealing units like Gore-gruntas and Sentinels.
Similarly I think its worth pointing out that the component of the game that uses points, and the GHB does not primarily deal with doing damage or killing units in general. Damage in AoS 3.0 to date is primarily about opening up board space, you can complete 4 Battle Tactics without necessarily needing to do a single point of damage to a model.
The component of @Kadeton's argument that we seem to be skirting is that save stacking as a mechanic drastically segregates good players from the pack. And, we never have really addressed mechanics which segregate are acceptable or not as a premise, as a community. So long as we do not we will continue to see issues generated by this underlying unresolved issue. For example guess ranges, obviously segregated, but are a skill. The argument was that it wasn't a skill relevant to the game; totally sound argument. The question fundamentally in this instance is it ok to be average to mediocre at the core game (effectively strategy and tactics) and that be the cause of most of your in-game problems.
I mean the skill that current save stacking and mortal wound trends test for is how to build lists and how deep your wallet is.
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they need to do the FAQ again to clarify how fly high interacts with movement, and disengages explicitly
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17 hours ago, Greybeard86 said:
I am baffled that, at this point in the conversation, we still need to explain that: 1) a company strong arming reviewers into giving positive reviews is bad for us and 2) GW can make or break channels with early access, coverage in warhammer community and similar tools.
So no, it really isn’t optional for those covering warhammer, not getting this sort of support is a big deal (at the very least they d need to think very carefully about it). It is a phenomenon happening with video games as well, and it is a well known perversion of what reviews are meant to be.
As for being accused of negativity, that is also extremely surprising to me. Given the above, of course a lot of people are going to dislike this sort of actions. I thought this was a place to discuss the hobby, and this most definitely is part of it.
The most prominent of reviewers could possibly make a career of being someone who stood against the shady tactics and use that to push themselves as the honest reviewer. An... honest wargamer if you will (
). But this will be a minority of people who can do this. Smaller then the video game companies that managed this (And, well, giantbomb ain't looking so hot any more anyways. Least Jim's still doing his wierd wonderful thing) since the hobby is also smaller.
It might be why there would be two kinds of NDAs, the thumbscrews to the little people, and a less draconian one to channels with some clout.
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On 9/13/2021 at 8:33 AM, Gaz Taylor said:
+++ Mod Hat On +++
As already mentioned by Runebrush, we don’t want people saying it’s okay to Pirate stuff because GW have changed how they do things. Just plain up no. Not going to discuss copyrights in different countries as I would like to think you would agree that pirating things is wrong.
Any further talk in this topic l, along the lines of “I’ve not got free warscrolls, so you have to pirate/steal it” will result in moderator actions.
I would suggest you follow Runebrush’s example and email aosfaq@gwplc.com. Remember to keep your comments polite and constructive.
Piracy is and always will be largely an access issue. The people who will always pirate are a small percentage of pirates if you make purchasing your product a giant hassle (and, like, are unreachable anyways. Even if piracy is entirely impossible, they simply won't partake).
GW making the product harder to purchase WILL promote piracy.
Also illegal is not immoral, and it is actually quite disturbing conflating legal with moral considering what has been and often still is legal.
So pirating is not wrong, nor is it right intrinsically. Unless you are basing our ethical system on kantian ethics. Which I hope you wouldn't because kantian ethics is terrible. Under a better ethical system (like, say, variations of utilitarian ehtics) the morality of any action, including piracy, is what kind of suffering or pleasure it creates. And that often only has passing relation with what is and is not legal.
Not allowing advocating for piracy is a good policy to have on a forum to protect it from legal action and preserve official relationships. Decrying piracy as always wrong is a moral stance that is... misguided. As in all things, context matters
On 9/13/2021 at 11:46 AM, yukishiro1 said:GW doesn't need to make any of its profits via rules. It could easily afford to make all its rules entirely free, and it would still have world-beating profit margins - in fact, its margins might actually go up, since its margin on plastic is much higher than its margin on paper, so if people shifted money they currently spend on rules to miniatures, it might even work in GW's favor. GW certainly doesn't need to take away free warscrolls to try to drive its profit margin from 43% to 44%. There is making a healthy profit and then there is short-sighted greed that cannibalizes your long-term profits in favor of short-term ones, and this is tipping into the latter. It is so depressing to see GW going in precisely the opposite direction of where they should be re: accessible digital rules.
I mean they gone even crazier and done away with accessing digital rules entirely without a physical purchase. This is legitimately insane to me. You have to buy both the hard copy AND the app to access your rules digitally, in a format that strips out half the neat things I want the book for.
I can't tell you the last time I bought a physical book (well I bought House of Shadows physical copy cause I am a necromunda fanatic, so I can actually tell you, but I am gonna be using a digital copy for 90 percent of any games I play with Delaque), and I purchase virtually all my books, from fiction to rules, to scholarly works online (usually through the monster that is amazon, to my slight shame). And this is quite common. It is a mind boggling move of GW's to force you to buy a hard copy and then pay a monthly fee for their app to access their rules online. And then they don't even have the decency of making a quality online product to force you to work through. If I pay 60 dollars for a book, give me the PDF please.
Like I can't see this as anything but shrinking their sales. I know it has shrunk my purchases. I don't know what i'm going to do when GW finally gets around to updating the armies i actually play, for both 40k and AoS (they still offer digital copies of necromunda and SBG products funnily enough). The answer might be to simply stop playing. Or... continue not playing at this point, thank you delta variant and antivaxxers.
On 9/13/2021 at 1:45 PM, The Red King said:I just wanted to say that I wasn't being snarky. I literally was not advocating for piracy but expressing concern that these actions will lead to more piracy.
Despite how critical I seem at times of GW I don't want them to fail.
luckily no amount of piracy can cause GW to fail. They're not a book retailer (and to be clear, piracy has done a number on many publishing industries). They're a miniature retailer, they make their bucks on models and a little on paints, and very very little on rules sales.
On 9/13/2021 at 2:18 PM, yukishiro1 said:Saying people will get their rules elsewhere doesn't necessarily imply piracy, which to be clear I'm not advocating either. As someone else noted, there is no copyright protection in the rules themselves, just in the expression of them. It doesn't violate any IP rules to create, post, or download detailed summaries of rules, as long as you don't just copy the exact wording and formatting; as such, there is no piracy involved in such an approach to getting the rules for free, as long as whoever originally did the compiling had a legal copy they were working from. Although GW claims you're not allowed to post stats for its games on its IP guidelines page, this simply isn't true as a matter of law in any country I'm aware of - certainly not the EU, the UK, or the US - which GW knows perfectly well itself.
I have to wonder, legally, what is getting a copy of the rules from a friend? That legal or not? How about borrowing their rulebook? I've seen big brained thinkers (on dakkadakka) saying borrowing a rulebook is tantamount to piracy.
On 9/13/2021 at 2:26 PM, Sarouan said:Rules are available on reviewers's videos, anyway. Just have to hit "pause" a lot.
Yeah, warscrolls on GW website are very convenient - though I largely used them for anything but using them in an actual game (have the battletome already for that, after all). More like analysis / check up before buying.
Though it's weird the old warscrolls are still online for the "old units". Anyone sent a mail to customer service and had an answer so far ?
Is it piracy to transcribe paused minutes into image files? How about to take the information and transcribe it in plain text? People on this very forum do that all the time
There's a lot of murky areas about IP laws that no lay person is going to know.
On 9/14/2021 at 3:12 AM, RuneBrush said:This depends entirely upon by what you mean by "rules". If you mean warscrolls and the core rules - absolutely. If you mean battletomes then I'd disagree because GW employs staff specifically to create very high production quality books. If GW did decide to make battletomes/army rules free then I'd expect to see a drop in quality and less financial investment in them - very few companies can justify an entire team of staff to produce free content.
In short - no, we don't know 100% for sure this is going to happen - it's largely been a calculated assumption that's been fuelled by lack of comment from GW.
This is... weirdly naïve. Plenty of actual existing companies in the same market as GW DO in fact produce rules for free. And aren't all going out of business because of it. Or, uh, writing rules that are worse than GW's to put it lightly.
And, like, as we've established, they pay their writing staff peanuts anyways. Can't hardly pay them less. They'd all starve
On 9/20/2021 at 3:42 PM, nuttyknatty said:Apologies to all, but I just can’t understand how something like this gets people so heated.
I can understand why it’s disappointing but really, the level of hyperbole is eyebrow raising. I think the word here is perspective.
We have to spend some money to access some work that someone has produced. The fact that for the last six years we’ve not had to pay for it shouldn’t be a source of negativity. On the contrary, we should be appreciative that we had it for free for so long.Fair enough if you’ve got a political argument against capitalism, but I’d wager that the majority of GW’s customers aren’t either communists or anarchists, so trying to argue that stuff should be free glaringly looks like entitlement.
But I may well be wrong.🤷🏼♂️
I think governments really REALLY need to step in to restrain the modern excesses of capitalism so we can enjoy the benefits of it without the horrible drawbacks, but that modern capitalism also makes it nearly impossible for governments to restrain via coopting the state bodies supposed to restrain and regulate it. And that this will continue to build societal tension until things snap (especially with how climate change is shaping up) and everything is then up in the air and could come down in some very dark ways.
GW is just another company that should have its, admittedly far less serious than many companies, excesses reined in.
On 9/22/2021 at 11:06 AM, Nos said:GW *is* elite. It is by far the upper end of the scale for wargaming in pretty much every area.
If you want to play wargames, there's great models available far cheaper without an expensive rules ecosystem. If you want to paint there are as good hobby resources cheaper, and vastly superior artist products for the same price as GW.
GW is a brand, and you pay a premium for a buy-in to it and its associated perks.
If you want to play wargames without worrying about player base, product availability, continous product service and developments etc they're unrivalled.
So GW are already elite. That's not a danger, its already a reality.
The risks of + and the warscroll stuff is that it becomes impossible to engage with a hobby which requires an already considerable investment on the hobby front without also having to pay for access to the "Universe" of GW.
At the beginning of 2020 it was possible to engage with GW products as a gamer without caring or investing in the lore if you wished.
I think the aim of + is to make it impossible to be abreast of GW gaming trends and rules without also having to buy in to their wider ecosystem of lore, content, animations etc.
Basically, it's the cost of 2.5 supplement books a year. It's a way of making gamers give them the revenue of supplements, ostensibly in return for content, but a lot of that is content gamers would never otherwise want. And then they'll have to buy the *actual* supplements to play the game.
Basically, not become an "elite" but a superfan, or at least willing to pay as much as a superfan as the cost of entry to the wargaming.
Here's an alternative to saying elite.
Old white men.
I desperately don't want a hobby that caters to middle aged and older white dudes over everyone else. I'd rather they cater to excitable 12 year olds. Seriously the demographics of warhammer get real distressing if you price or otherwise block out anyone but the upper middle class and above. And the politics of a plurality of these dudes makes a community ultra toxic (this is certainly true in my local community) to people like me (you know, lgbt people. But also minorities and cis women, which is why its old white dudes and no old white ladies.) So even those non old white men who COULD participate leave because enough of the old white men are just too hateful to be around.
On 9/22/2021 at 12:37 PM, Pyrescribe said:Am I the only one who isn't irked by perceived anti-consumer behavior during a global pandemic when the company in question produces boutique luxury goods? Like, hiking the price of baby formula is one thing. Making warbarbies harder to access is another. Like, if you're weighing the purchase of a limited edition Boxed Game or a designer handbag versus making rent or medical bill payments....I don't know what to say to that.
The less accessible a game, the smaller and worse the community gets. It benefits most of us to have a broader more inclusive community, and only a scant handful to gate out everyone who is different.
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). But this will be a minority of people who can do this. Smaller then the video game companies that managed this (And, well, giantbomb ain't looking so hot any more anyways. Least Jim's still doing his wierd wonderful thing) since the hobby is also smaller.
The State of the Game
in Age of Sigmar Discussions
Posted
Balance to me seems about as bad as it ever was. The games hasn’t become more balanced and the rules have simply shifted from one kind of death star unit to another