WFB 9th Edition Rumor Roundup

[40kGamer]

They need to do something splashy to get customers to return or attract new players. Given the mess 40k is at the moment I don't have a lot of hope that the WFB reboot will be all that special.

[Erik Setzer]

Warhammer just needs to replicate its previous success.

Malifamahordes barely touches the sides in the UK. There most certainly are those who play it, but they're relatively few and far between. Ditto Infinity.

Can't speak for the U.S., but in my experience it's very rare to find a gamer of any stripe who hasn't played Warhammer at some point.

Well, GW used a lot of wonderful tactics like working with FLGS's, running sales, having bundles with discounts, a useful magazine full of cool articles, and generally loving what they do to build themselves up to the top... which attracted some folks who thought it was a good cash cow (ha) who've since reversed a lot of that.

Its rise to the top muscled out a lot of other games and left a lot of people having armies for GW games. And that's why a lot of people still play, because they already spent hundreds or thousands on GW products, so might as well just keep on going, right?

New games need players to build a base. But people take this attitude of "I won't play if there's not people to play with." Only, see, if people don't start playing, there's no one to play with. The same goes for stores stocking it. "We'll stock it if people will play it." "We'll play it if we can buy it from the local store." This creates a silly cycle where it's hard to get people to start on a game, because some folks have to be willing to take the risk and take money from their FLGS (or try to put in a special order) to get armies, and you usually have to have more than one, so you can demo the game for other people.

And for some reason, people stopped being willing to take a leap of faith. (Probably around the same time tournaments stopped being a place to have fun, show off a painted and converted army, and try to beat people with an army that encompassed the fluff.)

One of the local FLGS's (well, the one actually called "FLGS") just got in the Bolt Action rulebooks last week, and some starter sets this week. I felt kind of bad buying the rulebooks a couple weeks ago (didn't know he was going to get them in) on Amazon, even though the Kindle versions were silly cheap... less than $35 for the rulebook, British army book, and German army book (my friend wants to play Germans). But now he's got models in, so I can start buying there, and hopefully things will pick up. Meanwhile, people are getting into the Star Wars games, because you can even get them at some of the chain bookstores (like Barnes & Noble) as well as pretty much every game store.

GW's banking on their being the "top dog" and people being afraid to invest in other games, but I don't think that's going to last, and I think that's part of what hurt WFB and will start eating into 40K. People like games they can get into and play an interesting match with options for less than $200. Meanwhile, GW's two remaining games are a $135 buy-in just for the rules, and $65 won't get you a usable army, especially as they tried to strip all the small game rules out of the rulebooks to encourage people to spend more (oops, that backfired).

All WFB really needed was to add the Skirmish and Warbands rules back into the game, make them part of the rulebook, make the rules cheaper, fix some of the worse prices (they could probably get away with a lot, but not stuff like Witch Elves or Blood Knights), and a little clean-up. No need to swap to round bases and all that.

But eh... I'm willing to be a pioneer. They've already convinced me to drag most of my money away and put it into other games, and I'm willing to get multiple armies for various systems in order to build them up. Heck, I can still get into three, maybe four, systems with two forces and the rules for what one GW army cost me.

[Mr Mystery]

And we still don't know that a (for want of a better term) multiple scaled game isn't whet we're about to get, and I'd say the recent rumours point to the game not being made small scale skirmish....

Withno kits being withdrawn, it's bloody hard to see how something such as Malekith could fit into a small scale game when it's a bloody expensive single model. Malekith The Eternity King just ups those points.

Now, introduction of smaller scale rules which sit alongside large battle rules do help to explain why some said whole units are being dropped.....it's a misunderstanding between 'not in the skirmish rules' and 'no longer available in the game at all at all'

But we shall have to wait and see.

[Mr Mystery]

Just thinking a bit further....

How many of the products being allegedly withdrawn (always allegedly until it's done!) are due to repackaging? Templates are nice, but look dated in terms of packaging.

Wouldn't be the first time! Ditto movement trays.

[Wildeybeast]

Riddle me this; why would you pull all the Warhammer stuff from sale five weeks before offering anything else? Surely you'd want to run your old stock down as much as possible. Indeed, I cant recall GW ever pulling rules for sale before a new edition. Secondly, why have models still for sale but no rules? You aren't going to attract any new buyers and existing players are very unlikely to buy models when they have no army book as they will be suspicious about whether said shiny new model will still exist. Either GW have lost all business sense (not to mention going against their previous behaviour) or something about these rumours doesn't add up.

[Mr Mystery]

Some stuff has been in the past.

Guess it depends how radical the new edition is. My bet? Not as radical as we might think.

[Erik Setzer]

Just thinking a bit further....

How many of the products being allegedly withdrawn (always allegedly until it's done!) are due to repackaging? Templates are nice, but look dated in terms of packaging.

Wouldn't be the first time! Ditto movement trays.

Movement trays are moot if the game moves to round bases, as they're made for square bases. And by "templates" I think they might mean the set of WFB goodies that includes, among other things, a unit turning template, which isn't that useful when the default isn't ranked units. So it makes sense to drop those rather than continue making them. They might get replaced by something else.

They could easily do a scaling game without going the round base route. The bases are what bother me, really, especially as - unless you do like I'm going to and seek out square bases for new models - new additions to an existing army won't look right. And you can't really do traditional WFB with round bases, it has to have some kind of fundamental change at the core.

[Mr Mystery]

If I'm right in recalling, only 'Birds In The Trees' has said there's a solitary model apparently coming with only round(ed, oval to be precise ) base....and that's so not a reliable source!

[Erik Setzer]

I thought I'd seen more of that popping up?

It's part of the problem I have with GW right now... You have no idea what's coming down the pipeline. They're paranoid about everything and don't even prepare their own store managers properly. This is a huge shakeup of one of their major product lines, but they won't even officially announce that's happening, or what's happening with it.

As contrast, not only do other companies give people advance notice, but a lot of times will give people an idea of what's changing, and sometimes will take feedback from the customers. When D&D needed a new edition to erase the mistake of 4th edition, they did a lot of playtesting with people around the world while building the new rule set, and, as a result, followed up the hot mess of 4th edition D&D with a new edition so popular the Player's Handbook is tricky to track down in stock.

So here we are, 50% of GW's games on the line, and we're stuck relying on conflicting rumors and grasping at anything we get. Because somehow GW's even worse at how it treats its customers than EA is.

[Path Walker]

Whatever Age of Sigmar means is going to be pretty cool, the last few years have been the best time for the hobby I've ever know in my 21 years of being in it. Even if they utterly change Fantasy, its better than just letting it die a slow death, they've recognised that people are playing it less and less and have addressed that issue.

I'd also point out that there was nothing at all wrong with 4th edition D&D, its a perfect example of how internet forums can get out of hand and ruin a product, it was a great game, the tactical combat aspect of it more balanced and easy to run than ever, as much as I've enjoyed 5th Edition so far, its still a fair bit behind in the combat model compared with 4th, its looser and allows for more interpretation and play styles, which I enjoy, but its still a lot more fiddly. 4th suffered from a bad review saying it was like World of Warcraft (in that it has power cool downs) and that opinion spread. People who never played it still pan it as a mistake, when really it was just an edition that expected (correctly) that most people had access to a computer while playing and offered to organise that online.