Friday, March 11, 2011

GW's Expanding Worlds blog post REBUTTAL


Really?  What the hell!  These are great games that they've practically left to die through;

- Selling models made from the same crappy molds from years and years ago.  This is especially apparent in Epic figures (which are small and the tiniest problem with the mold really ruins the entire model), but I've seen it in recent models purchased for Blood Bowl (I bought an undead team booster), Necromunda (the enforcers packs I bought are covered in flash and mold lines), and as such have refused to buy any more specialist games minis from GW ever!

- Lack of updates to the rules.  None of the specialist games have had GW based rules upgrades for years. Andy Hall had done a good job of setting up a community for the fans to help with keeping the rules up to date - only for GW to go and ruin it by shutting down the original site, giving Andy a huge headache trying to backup all the content on the old forums (not sure he even managed it) and again making all of us wonder why we support you at all!

- Treating the fans who have kept these games alive like garbage!  First they leave the rules to the fans, then when the fans do a great job (eg. the latest version of blood bowl) they whine and remove all the awesome fluff and pictures that are their IP?  All because they can't be arsed to make models for a single new team? (Slann - I'm sorry but there's NO valid reason not to allow Chaos Pact and Underworld teams, they sell models suitable for those teams already!!) To what end - how did that help Games Workshop? All it did was piss off all the blood bowl community so that we now prefer to purchase miniatures from other companies (and in fact, many folks I know refuse to purchase any GW blood bowl minis - myself included!) - great business model there!

- Ridiculous prices.  I downloaded the old "Bommerz over da Sulpher River" PDF board game that Andy Chambers originally wrote.  I've even gone so far as to print out the board tiles on stickers to make my own board.  Then I went to look into buying 4 fighta-bombers and 2 thunderbolts in Epic scale to use.  Fighta-bomberz are $24 CAD for 3 tiny little models (all three would be about as much metal as a single 28mm mini) and I would need to buy 2 to get 4 models.  Then the thunderbolts are $30CAD for 4 tiny models - which would leave me with an extra.  So even if I decided screw the fluff and used thunderbolts for the players and fighta-bomberz for the interceptors we're talking $54 CAD for 7 tiny little planes.  That's over $7 for each tiny plane - NO THANKS!

Games Workshop - get your head out of your ass!  If you want to push your specialist games, treat the gamers with some respect or I can promise we will continue to find better/cheaper alternative models.  This coming from a blog titled GWpertinent!!  Don't make me change my blog name!!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice Rant - I share the sentiments you express.

I did wonder what spawned the post on the GW site this morning when I read it - it kind of seemed out of the ordinary - Maybe they are planning a major refresh? (One can hope).

AbusePuppy said...

The article is especially amusing in light of the fact that some GW stores actually forbid the playing of specialist games during their normal hours for fear that they will take away space from 40K/Fantasy.

Hudson said...

I suspect that that policy may be changing. As for what spawned the post? Perhaps the rise in popularity of skirmish games such as Malifaux, fleet games such as Uncharted Seas, Dystopian Wars, etc.

Tristan M said...

Good points there Hudson.

Andy said...

Totally agree with you. GW has been practically antagonistic to their Specialist Games fans.

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