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Holy poo poo Dr. Robotnik was a Squat, all his plans and dreams make perfect sense now.
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Oct 16, 2018 00:49
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I didn't follow the last death thread or anything with GW since the death of Fantasy. What the hell happened that they're putting out fun sounding games again? Did someone get fired?
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Oct 16, 2018 02:18
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we entered the hell dimension where GW makes some good stuff
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Oct 16, 2018 02:50
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They kicked out Kirby, to my recollection.
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Oct 16, 2018 03:02
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Len posted:I didn't follow the last death thread or anything with GW since the death of Fantasy. What the hell happened that they're putting out fun sounding games again? Did someone get fired? grassy gnoll posted:They kicked out Kirby, to my recollection. He has some nominal position on the board still I think, but he's not running the day to day. I have literally spent money on a GW branded product this year and it was Gretchinz! Which is like Speed Freaks but with cardboard.
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Oct 16, 2018 03:25
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Atlas Hugged posted:He has some nominal position on the board still I think, but he's not running the day to day. I wonder if he's able to make eye contact with anyone at GW. I wonder if anyone wants to with him.
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Oct 16, 2018 03:38
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Len posted:I didn't follow the last death thread or anything with GW since the death of Fantasy. What the hell happened that they're putting out fun sounding games again? Did someone get fired? They released 5? new armies in Age of Sigmar that are all cool, game is still the same? 40k is doing well, all new releases are pretty great. The brought back all their specialist games. Underworlds is probably has the best miniatures / price / gameplay of any minis games right now. Actual game is great, but rubs some people the wrong way. Just about everyone agrees the sculpts and pricepoint is awesome.
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Oct 16, 2018 03:39
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Len posted:I didn't follow the last death thread or anything with GW since the death of Fantasy. What the hell happened that they're putting out fun sounding games again? Did someone get fired? To expand on a couple other comments - the previous CEO/Chairman was Tom Kirby, a long-time GW dude who was part of the original management buy-out back in the 90s and was/is a major shareholder. He'd been in post for ages and overseen most of GW's direction over the last decade or so, which included both good and bad stuff. On the one hand he invested heavily in plastics tech because he realised that was where GW was ahead of the game, and spearheaded the drive to cut costs from what was quite a bloated company; on the other, he was a management type who didn't like or care about the games they made, and saw it as very much "a model company which happens to make rules so you can have something to do with them, I guess," and had a weird bunker mentality that meant GW was obsessive about controlling leaks and refusing to engage with customers except through a couple of very heavily curated channels. Besides just Kirby, there are/were a lot of old-school GW guys who've been around for ages, and never really got on board with it growing to the size it did. The result was a very weird company, simultaneously engaging in a lot of the worst corporate behaviours, while also not acting like a real grown-up company - see their claims not to do any kind of market research, or the angry refusal to acknowledge that anyone cared about the games as much as the models, and internal attitudes like "marketing is cheating" or basic failures of project management like thinking about sales numbers or planning product releases. It was basically an overgrown toy shop which didn't realise it was a multinational now. This all culminated in Age of Sigmar, where a real problem (Fantasy sells like poo poo and always has) was met with a drastic solution which kind of encapsulated all of the above - they released a series of expensive books for 8th edition Fantasy which derailed their existing universe, which were immediately invalidated when Age of Sigmar dropped. At a stroke, all this old stuff was swept away, and even the bases changed so that people with historic collections were left looking at hundreds of painted, based models for a system which didn't exist and which technically they weren't even usable for the new version of. At the same time, the original AoS rules absolutely sucked - 4 pages of a whatever skirmish game with no army-building system and dumbass rules for the legacy factions which were insulting to anyone except the LOL RANDOM MONKEY CHEESE kids. Somewhere in here there was a shift which I can't recall the details of, but Kirby was ousted and replaced with Kevin Rountree. It was a slowly escalating thing, where firstly Kirby stepped down from one job, then another, then was staying on as a consultant to get one last snaffle at the trough, and then finally he's just in a nominal board position, probably because of his significant shareholding. Rountree is not necessarily a business genius, but he does have some significant qualities. The first is that he actually has a background in business and finance, and he brought over a lot of the common-sense attitudes from that world which GW just fundamentally lacked, poo poo like forecasting and release planning and customer engagement and so on. The second is that he is not at all interested in the old boys club of long-time staffers, and is no longer protecting them or taking their lead. If you read between the lines of the most recent investor report there was a pretty stark bit in there about "people not adapting to change" and the shortness of their future careers at GW, which for CEO-speak in a public-facing report was pretty damning. That doesn't mean that poo poo has changed overnight or that GW never does anything regressive or stupid, but there is at least a culture shift where they're trying not to. The third is that he actually likes and plays wargames. I doubt he's down the club twice a week or tearing up the tournament scene under a pseudonym, but on a fundamental level he gets it, and he took one look at GW's offering when he took over and decided it was poo poo. This has led to a significant change in their approach - reviving old Specialist Games and giving them modern plastics, creating new stuff like Gretchinz/Speed Freeks/Blitz Bowl etc. meant as introductory games for kids to get them interested, simplifying a lot of the rules bloat which characterised 7th 40k, and on the flip side expanding the rules to AoS so that it's a functional game, and so on. The designers have had a devastating release schedule to keep up with for 8th ed 40k, but that has led them to create some of the most fun things they've ever produced, with e.g. the Dark Eldar/Drukhari codex being one of the best books they've ever released in my opinion. The final bit is the change in culture and mentality of the external-facing parts of the company, which basically didn't exist through much of the 2000s/2010s. New GW is fun. The Community team are young and enthusiastic, and they're putting out tons of good content, not only around releases but also stuff like Regimental Standard, the new Vhane Glorious comic, some genuinely funny advertising (advertising!!) etc. They're also proactively going out and engaging with big events and streaming them and announcing releases at them, basically a complete 180 from the old days. There's still a fair bit of hit and miss, and at the end of the day GW is still a company which wants to make money by selling you hams and will act accordingly. This has given us exciting things like Necromunda being released as a partwork over 2 years, Kill Team having a ton of weird content-locking behind boxes of boring non-unique models which many players already owned, and a seemingly endless flurry of "big box" releases with maybe one or two new models in. There's also still problem divisions - Forge World is like the last bunker of the old guard, and refuses to move past 1999. Overall though it's mostly working and the financials show the results, which is that from being a company with flat or declining revenues in an era of constant price rises (i.e. the customer base was shrinking year on year, since what that means is that they're making the same money from fewer sales), they've now had two huge years and are trading very strongly. Living Image fucked around with this message at 07:04 on Oct 16, 2018 |
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Oct 16, 2018 07:00
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Can we talk about how GW's push fit models are like 10 years ahead of the competition from a technology standpoint? I think you can perfectly assemble an Underworlds Warband in under 10 minutes, and there is absolutely no loss in sculpt quality. The join lines are practically invisible. Yeah you can't pose them and converting them is tougher than ever, but they are so drat easy to assemble. Assembly is my absolute most hated part of the hobby. Anything that makes it easier is a god send in my book.
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Oct 16, 2018 07:10
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Rountree whipped GW into shape and they've stopped sabotaging themselves. The Death Thread is about everybody else now.
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Oct 16, 2018 07:27
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Yeah, GW is doing incredibly well and lots of companies that existed in the same space are in trouble. I think 3D printers will take a big bite out of the 3rd party bits market as well. The quality of stuff in the specialist games thread is great.
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Oct 16, 2018 07:56
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Xarbala posted:Rountree whipped GW into shape and they've stopped sabotaging themselves. The Death Thread is about everybody else now. He completed the voodoo ritual and now PP is on the decline 
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Oct 16, 2018 08:27
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I still maintain that the reason why Fantasy sold like poo poo, especially during 7th and on, was due to them cutting boxes of dudes down to ten per box, while still charging the same price, if not more. A game, that requires ranks upon ranks of dispensable dudes. Anyone new and wanting to get into that would have just 'noped' right the gently caress out upon that realisation.
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Oct 16, 2018 10:58
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Thanks for the rundown of what happened. It was just weird to hop back into looking at miniatures and seeing that GW is actually making things that look and sound neat. Meanwhile Privateer Press which was affordable and fun when I started playing in 08 has decided to be less affordable keeping me from picking that game back up
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Oct 16, 2018 11:07
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What's good about 8th in general and Dark Eldar in particular? Sincere question, I've been out of the hams games for a decade and change.
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Oct 16, 2018 13:26
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Mugaaz posted:Can we talk about how GW's push fit models are like 10 years ahead of the competition from a technology standpoint? I think you can perfectly assemble an Underworlds Warband in under 10 minutes, and there is absolutely no loss in sculpt quality. The join lines are practically invisible. Yeah you can't pose them and converting them is tougher than ever, but they are so drat easy to assemble. Assembly is my absolute most hated part of the hobby. Anything that makes it easier is a god send in my book. Broadly speaking I agree with this. Although there are occasional problems like pegs being a bit too long, or the 40k Myphitic Blight Hauler trying to lever itself apart as you push the pegs in. Their standard plastic kits are also miles ahead of where they used to be. The precision is incredible. I've just built Rotigus, the named Great Unclean One, and for a 4x4x3.5 inch model that is essentially a hollow jigsaw shell it was a joy to build. And most of the seams are hidden incredibly cleverly in the folds of the model. Compared to something like the wank Wyrd produce in plastic there is no competition.
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Oct 16, 2018 13:27
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https://twitter.com/nastyradishes/status/1051698771749466112
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Oct 16, 2018 13:52
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Thundercloud posted:Yeah, GW is doing incredibly well and lots of companies that existed in the same space are in trouble. The 3d printer thing is a bit overblown at the moment: yeah, you can get great results, but only if you’re willing to carefully tune the process and deal with the issues inherent to your printer and resolution, especially with FDM. It’s less “plug and play” and more “I have spent a month tuning this thing and get pretty good results”. What I can see happening is more of a shift: there’s a few companies that are already selling files for game bits (Hayland, for example, is apparently selling really well thanks to connecting with Gaslands) and they’re in a position to dictate the field a bit. So you’ll see more companies doing conversion bits files for the printing lunatics, and the traditional casting companies will likely stick to the niche they’re better at. The biggest change I can see coming is Prusa’s resin printer. You can get amazing detail with resin, and they’re a company that really knows their poo poo regarding a high-quality printer/kit that strikes the balance between quality and price. The Anycubic Photon is already getting some press for parts printing, but it’s still a fiddly process, and I think the Prusa is really going to get the resin printing game going thanks to some of the QoL stuff they’re doing. Resin loving sucks to print with, but if their recent feature list is as good as they say, then you’ll start to see things really kick off.
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Oct 16, 2018 14:07
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Irate Tree posted:I still maintain that the reason why Fantasy sold like poo poo, especially during 7th and on, was due to them cutting boxes of dudes down to ten per box, while still charging the same price, if not more. I got into WHFB around that time and I bought virtually everything either second-hand or from GW's competitors. There was a great site on how to explicitly do this: http://hipsterhammer.tumblr.com/ (look at the buying guides)/ Hipsterhammer recently "surrendered" to GW based on their change to new GW--it's currently the second post down.
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Oct 16, 2018 14:37
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Lol
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Oct 16, 2018 14:42
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trump is president and gw is good truly, we all died in 2012
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Oct 16, 2018 15:15
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Oct 16, 2018 15:15
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One of the great hallmarks of the old thread was comparing GW to Gundam kits and how much more advanced the Gundams were despite them existing for a shorter period. It’s nice to see that perhaps GW is improving here, but I imagine it’ll be a long time before they even get to the detail and sonic welding that Gundams have. Have they even talked about plans to make the giant Tau robots have functional moving parts? I still lol that they cost more than perfect kits and yet have none of the features like internal skeletons, posing, or ability to switch weapons. What a good boy
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Oct 16, 2018 15:19
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Hedningen posted:The 3d printer thing is a bit overblown at the moment: yeah, you can get great results, but only if you’re willing to carefully tune the process and deal with the issues inherent to your printer and resolution, especially with FDM. It’s less “plug and play” and more “I have spent a month tuning this thing and get pretty good results”. Unless the Prusa has some magical ability with post-processing it's going to be just as fiddly as the Photon or any other resin system. The part quality is really, really good if you use small layers and dial in the settings, but what really makes the system awkward is having to remove the resin from the plate and wash the parts. You're dealing with a partially cured plastic which may not necessarily deform the way you want and can be aggressively stuck to the plate. It's fun. I don't see 3D printing killing miniature games within a decade or so. Maybe with a consumer-grade powder bed system that's sufficiently detailed (certainly doable), but then you're dealing with powders and that's a nightmare on its own.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:18
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I can see it taking a chunk from 3rd party bitz because it'll never compete with the plastics for economy of scale, but when I need a certain head and a certain arm and a single chainaxe it will beat buying 5 each of those.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:24
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TBH the only thing that's ever made me want a 3d printer is making terrain, since they seem basically perfect for that. It'd be nice to have one for one-off bits, too.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:44
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Depends on how big your terrain pieces are, or how finely detailed you want your parts. FDM printing is going to suck for anything that needs fine detail and clean lines for the foreseeable future. It's great if you just need a brick of functional plastic, and kind of crap for anything else. Resin printing will get you smoother pieces with higher detail, but as B4TBG mentioned, resin sucks to work with. Keep in mind most printer work volumes are smaller than you think. The bigger Lulzbots are about two and a half grand new, down to maybe 1.5k used, and they still don't have a full cubic foot of print volume. If you just want to be able to to churn out Jersey barriers and crates for scatter, though, your average model pretty handy.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:56
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Runewars good! There are dozens of us... dozens!
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Oct 16, 2018 17:20
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Irate Tree posted:I still maintain that the reason why Fantasy sold like poo poo, especially during 7th and on, was due to them cutting boxes of dudes down to ten per box, while still charging the same price, if not more. GW were slowly pricing themselves out of the market. Their games were designed around large model counts and their pricing kept on getting steeper, often even for decade old sculpts. Offering lower model count games with better rules has made them far more appealing again and it is paying off. They still haven't won me over but I'm far more open to the idea than I was a couple of years ago. I still don't like how they are splitting stuff up into endless expansions like Necromunda, but I respect made to reinterpret the game for modern standards.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:25
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Ugleb posted:GW were slowly pricing themselves out of the market. Lol if you believe this
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Oct 16, 2018 17:46
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Lol if you believe this They were making the same sales or less to a dwindling number of customers. They changed approach to more accessible lower model count offerings and sales soared. Yeah I believe it.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:51
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Ugleb posted:GW were slowly pricing themselves out of the market. Their games were designed around large model counts and their pricing kept on getting steeper, often even for decade old sculpts. 40k used to have apocalypse as a separate game and goons used to make fun of it. Now it’s merged into the same game and it’s ridiculously funny to see 3 giant robots a couple feet away from each other.
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Oct 16, 2018 17:55
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grassy gnoll posted:What's good about 8th in general and Dark Eldar in particular? Sincere question, I've been out of the hams games for a decade and change. Things I like about 8th: - The return of the Move stat. - Vehicles using the same rules as everything else, squashing that whole subsystem. Also includes removing facings and firing arcs and pivoting etc.. - Removing blast markers/flame templates, meaning that movement phases don't include spacing guys out to maximise coherency just so they don't get pie-plated to death. - Regular FAQs/erratas and an actively involved design team, which is at least trying to improve the game. For Dark Eldar specifically, the book is just really good. Its external balance is strong, perhaps slightly overtuned against Marines but basically fine. It has probably the best internal balance of any book they've ever made - there's tons of good options all across the range. There's still one or two duff units, but very few real trap choices. The basic unit - Kabalite Warriors - is genuinely good, and an army of mostly them in transports, which is the exact theme of DE, is strong on the table and very fluffy. On top of that, the various obsessions (DE traits) are good and interesting, as are the stratagems, and again there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with it all and an argument you can make for basically all the different traits. Basically it's a book where there's some clear optimal choices, but the suboptimal ones are not so bad that you'd never take them or be surprised to see anyone run them, and there's a ton of different viable builds, and the good ones are all in line with how you expect the army to look and play. That's the gold standard imo - everything in every book isn't ever gonna be good, but if it plays fluffily while still being competitive, and there's good choices you can make across a breadth of stuff, that's enough.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:28
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Ugleb posted:They were making the same sales or less to a dwindling number of customers. They changed approach to more accessible lower model count offerings and sales soared. Yeah I believe it. But they are making bonkers more profit now? So they are priced even better for what you get, logically.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:40
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Corrode posted:- Removing blast markers/flame templates, meaning that movement phases don't include spacing guys out to maximise coherency just so they don't get pie-plated to death. How do these weapons hit now?
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Oct 16, 2018 18:41
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Cat Face Joe posted:How do these weapons hit now? Dice roll.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:46
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Xarbala posted:Dice roll. In the case of flamers it's a die roll for the number of hits. For blast weapons is a die roll number of attacks. I think blast weapons need a boost personally.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:50
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Xarbala posted:Dice roll. 
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Oct 16, 2018 18:51
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IMO the consistency is nice. It speeds up playing since you no longer have players obsessing over positioning.
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Oct 16, 2018 18:54
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Lord_Hambrose posted:But they are making bonkers more profit now? So they are priced even better for what you get, logically. Seldom Posts posted:I got into WHFB around that time and I bought virtually everything either second-hand or from GW's competitors. There was a great site on how to explicitly do this: http://hipsterhammer.tumblr.com/ (look at the buying guides)/ They make more profit now because people by their poo poo directly again. I can buy the Kharadron overlords SC box and have cool models that I can play with right away. I can't do poo poo with a box of 10 dwarf warriors under 8th rules. I also can't do poo poo with 2.5 boxes, which is at the same price point. I don't even like AoS but it's obvious why they're making money.
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Oct 16, 2018 19:29
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