I hate that i may have been right

[CoffeeGrunt]

Personally, AoS died here despite the best concerted efforts of the local store owner, partly due to balancing issues, and partly due to people not caring. That said, WHFB had a quiet following here that never really played it, merely owned it, so probably not the best litmus test.

AoS got a good try from most of us, but it feels too simplistic. I dunno, I'd say it's the perfect game for a new person who wants to get into The Hobby as a whole, before they move onto something a bit more cerebral. It seems to draw from a lot of the lessons GW learned in LotR, WHFB, and 40K, but ultimately ended up with something complete unlike any of them with the gaming flavour of wallpaper paste.

The balance was actually the biggest problem, despite our local being pretty non-competitive. The local store owner and a regular got massively into it, the store owner resurrected an Ogre force and built it up, and the regular got into the Sigmarines hard. They had regular weekly games, and one of them would thrash the other. Then the other would slightly adjust the list, maybe add another unit, and thrash the other. They realised after a month or two that they were literally incapable of fielding comparable lists, because they had no reference on how many Ogres a Sigmarine was worth, or vice versa.

It also doesn't help, personally, that I kinda like the challenge of list-building. It forces me to think and strategise, to a point. 170pts left in my Guard list, do I take a Manticore for some across-the-board firepower, a Demolisher for a linebreaker tank, or a Vendetta for some AA/AT support that I can pop a small squad in. Each of them has done me proud at some point, but it forces me to step back and think how the whole thing's going to work together and how each element supports the others.

The AoS format applied to 40K would result in me simply putting my 15K of Guard on the table every game and steamrolling my opponent. Despite it being pretty fluffy for a Guard army, it'd be a heck of a hollow victory.

[Muninwing]

I don't blame anything on the "old guard." The "old guard" gave up on Warhammer long ago. People have moved on...

the Old Guard got the brunt of the blame for the demise of WHF... but that was more CEOs refusing to consider their role in undermining their own product.

and "not buying until the next edition fixes all the stupidity going on right now" is not "moved on" -- it's desperately trying not to move on.

sales dropped. why? because the game was not worth investing in. some of the models that came out, regardless of prices, were astounding. Wood Elf and Dark Elf stuff, in particular, was both beautiful and well constructed. but buying Witch Elves at $60 boxes (different when it was metals at $50, adjusted for inflation up to the $60) didn;t go over well -- because who wants to invest in a game that's either way too easy if your army is "top-tier" or too frustrating if your army is "bottom tier" and there's no effort to rectify the obvious problems from the parent comany that cannot be bothered to invest in their own product.

i play(ed) Beastmen. i was used to being an underdog (no pun intended). i looked forward to the 8th ed rules to smooth out some of the problems, and was gifted with more problems. before that, i had wanted to see the army have some minor fixes to make them playable in a new generation... and was given a completely different army with a total background change and a huge shift in play style (which was what attracted me to them in the first place, sadly). instead of investing points into an army i did not find fun to play, i put more into my 40k stuff. and the same happened in my area, meaning that there was less impulse to actually buy for a game that would be difficult to play.

new rules would have helped. 9th partially being a reversal of the damage that 8th did... and on and on. that was too hard, so instead we got a completely different game. one that was foolishly billed as a replacement for a game it was nothing like.

most of the hate that AoS initially got was from the terrible way GW launched it. and blaming the very people who could have supported the new game after killing the one they liked was seen as adding insult to injury. thus, a lot of the hate involved comes out of a personal slight (or a perceived one) by those who should have been relied upon to support and grow the new game.

[Erik Setzer]

most of the hate that AoS initially got was from the terrible way GW launched it.

Yeah, the AoS launch was basically a textbook example of what NOT to do.

You have WFB out there, and you put together this exciting series of books and new models (End Times), which rejuvenates interest in it. And suddenly people are buying into WFB and speculating how these rules might signal changes in a new edition of the game.

Then, suddenly, out of the blue, you tell people there's a new game with a new name. It's a completely new setting, not like the game they've been playing for years at all, and all the books they just bought are completely useless. Models are recommended on a completely different base shape now as well. Everything's entirely different. No warning. No hint that the books you were charging a lot for would suddenly be moot. Just prompt people to spend a lot on a game, and suddenly kill that game off, and bring out something totally different without advance warning and expect people to warm to it.

And they didn't think there'd be problems with that? You'd have to be stupid - or, potentially, just literally insane - to think that'd be a good idea. At the very least, there should have been a buffer between End Times and AoS, so the memory of six months with hundreds of dollars spent on WFB stuff wasn't fresh in folks' minds. Then advertise the new game, which was so vastly different. Let people know what's coming. Give them time to prepare mentally.

The sheer stupidity of this from a marketing and business standpoint is astounding. They set themselves up for failure. It'll take a lot of work to pull a serious long-term success out of it.

[Muninwing]

Actually, this is where AoS frustrates me most... There's potential there, but it's just left on the floor, malnourished. I bought a Dwarf Slayer just to convert a "Fyreslayer" (that spelling makes me cringe), because the idea of a Dwarf with literally flaming hair is awesome, even if that's not quite what they are. There are tiny throwaway bits of the fluff that are interesting. But then they drown that out with a rather dull and boring overarching story, and we still don't know why we're supposed to care about these scraps of living flesh who've managed to survive a few hundred years of Chaos rule. There's no resistance movement, nothing to suggest anyone is trying to fight back, no hint of what the nations were that got destroyed before we could even be introduced to them. It's just so... empty. There's potential, but rather than do anything with it, they want to push their new models' factions as being the most important and, in doing so, make everyone else so devoid of importance that the game might as well be just two factions, one of which is kind of dull. People can find drama in that faction, but at the end of the day, they're Space Marines with less personality.

There's also contradictions and the fluff just feels so sloppy in places that thinking of it makes my head hurt.

i've heard this a lot, and it's the core of my issue as well.

compound this with the rumors they had let fly unrestrained, you had a community already annoyed with the decreasing quality of the products they were buying who became convinced that they were getting a rebooted game that would potentially clean up the past problems. instead...

one of the most compelling ideas (at elast to me) is that we are not the first civilization, not the first era, not the first empire. that before us, there were others... and maybe more before them. reading about Harrapa and Mohenjo-Daro, about Babylon, about Schleimann's excavations of what might be Troy, about Carthage, and having the remnants and ghosts of their civilizations to show us that the world is bigger than we thought it was. learning about Gobekli Tepe and realizing that it is possibly 13,000 years older than our childhoods, when a vocal minority believe tha thte world isn't even half that age, breaks the mind.

What were the realms? what did they look like before Khorne's second rise? why start with a dead world with a prior history, if you are not going to bother creating the ghost of what was? good writing includes deatils that have significance, not dropped lines that never go anywhere. proper editors help to cull the unnecessary and create a more succinct product.

had GW taken their time and released AoS when it was a complete thought with a unified overarcing vision... and had not tried to bill it as a replacement for something it was never like... and had considered keeping a form that would work for the old guard...

etc etc.

the older players who are now crying "rank and flank forever!" are justified in their anger. but not in keeping their grudge. move on or be quiet, but leave those who feel otherwise to enjoy their game, even if you are envious of that game as it used to be according to GW.

even so... in a world that is now thousands of years old on to of thousands of years of prehistory, it does not feel as if any of the history matters in the least. empires could have risen and fallen, entire societies and cultures and eras could have shaped and modified thinking, incorporating new aesthetics into the game... but no. nothing. literally nothing. and what does exit may as well be norse myth fanfiction written by a 14-year-old who just discovered that the greeks didn't write the only ancient stories.

i'm glad they are expanding, trying to even it all out. but even the last 40k book (the tau campaign) was horribly written. that's only making it harder to dig out of the hole they created.

[Morgrim]

A steadier transition may have helped. Release AoS and say "this is where the setting is going" right upfront. Release the free rules for using WFB models in AoS, say it's preferentially on round bases but any base is okay, and maybe bring out some of those round base ranking sheets used in War of the Ring.

Then go back and release an edition of WFB set right after the End Times. Say that forces are scattered and tumbling through loose portals and nobody has any clue what is going on. If you give rules for certain special characters, mention that they're legacy rules only so you can still use the models. Start modifying the rules of WFB to match up better to AoS, so that everyone knows that this is the direction things are going.

And then in the fluff everybody KNOWS that the humans are going to get crushed and be left scattered, desperate outcasts fighting to hide from Chaos. Everyone KNOWS the elves are going to [whatever happened to the elves goes here. Kidnapped to a pocket dimension by Slaanesh?]. It's clear and obvious that chaos is going to win! But the fun is seeing HOW they win. And knowing that after another couple of books with a century or two of timeskip in between, Sigmar is going to crash back into the scene with his shiny new army and fight back.

It'd give people more time to adapt and a bridge to keep the fluffy side going.

[Erik Setzer]

Yeah, the point where we are in the fluff is really a horrible place to start out. There was a setting there, it might have been interesting, but it's already been steamrolled by Chaos and every civilization crushed so hard that the only survivors left are slaves or people running for their lives who are amazed to live past 18 (which really doesn't explain how they haven't gone extinct... apparently the oldest and youngest are the easiest prey, so I'm not sure how any children even get to their late teens, and they'd have to start procreating the moment they became physically capable). Chaos came along and crushed things, but didn't get an "ultimate" victory (because of really flimsy reasons). And now it's just Sigmar launching an offensive to take everything back. There's just no stakes there... From the point we're starting, literally the only direction you can go is up, and either we know the good guys are going to keep winning or Sigmar's guys are just weak and pointless and we're just watching a really protracted stalemate at best (but more likely End Times II: Chaotic Boogaloo).

Speaking of that flimsy reason for Chaos not wrecking everything... If Khorne really was ascendant and Khorne was wrecking the other gods, then how is Tzeentch so powerful he remade Kairos? Kairos was destroyed to summon a Khorne Greater Daemon (Ka'banda or something like that... sorry, no caffeine yet). That's not really something a daemon comes back from. It was one more "meaningful" death that turned out to not happen. (And we still have no explanation for why so many people who died are suddenly back and seemingly immortal, with the added bonus that Malekith forgot what his name is.)

The timeline is really weird, too. It's been at least a thousand years or so. Civilizations had a few hundred years to grow, and Chaos wrecked the joint a few hundred years ago (which is another reason it's hard to believe humanity isn't extinct, at least free humans). So that means Tyrion and Malekith have been searching for Slaanesh to cut his belly open and free the Elves for over a thousand years (and Teclis may or may not be with them).

Oh bother... I'm actually thinking about it again. It hurts. I want to go off on a rant about all the holes in the story, the ways it makes no sense, but most of all, the problem that we have zero reason to even care about anyone in the setting.

[Ray Rivers]

Wow... amazing.

Look, I was never a fan of GW. I don't buy any of their products... at least up until the release of AoS. So I don't really care about the what happened with Warhammer's rules, mini's, etc. I never liked Warhammer. I am not compelled to "Die for the Emperor." So all that "history" is nothing but irrelevant noise to me.

And there is absolutely no way to "kindly" discontinue a 30 year line of miniatures... or any product for that matter. I have run a cafe in Europe for 22 years. Now where I live is a "Coke" friendly place and we have sold that product for 21 years. However, their service, quality of product and management incompetence forced me to switch to "Pepsi." I didn't give my customers any notice. I didn't explain to them the problems I was having with the company, I just stopped serving Coke and started serving Pepsi. Now, of course, some folks didn't like that. But they didn't stand in front of my place raging at me for changing. And I didn't bombard Coke with complaints about their company. Only loons act that way in real life.

I mean lets be clear. If you ran across a guy standing in front of a Games Workshop store with a sign that says "Your miniatures are too expensive," people would think you should see a doctor, or possibly kindly direct you to another toy company. We are talking about toys here.

So please folks, try to put some perspective into your life. I mean, is it really THAT important to grief folks who like a product you don't?

[Auticus]

If one's goals are to crusade and dissuade people from buying a product to try to force a company out of business, then yes trolling and griefing are common tactics to use.

[Erik Setzer]

Switching your drinks from Coke to Pepsi isn't the same as telling someone, "You know those hundreds of dollars you just spent? Yeah, we're making that stuff obsolete. Also, we're killing off the game you enjoy, and it will never be produced again. But hey, buy this new game in a new setting!"

And customers of any kind who are upset with a company should feel free to let the company know. That doesn't mean they're "lacking perspective." They're simply letting a company know why it lost that person's sales.

[Reldane]

I have to Agree with Erik on that matter, the comparison of switching from Coke to Pepsi falls down pretty fast (not least that you can buy coke from the newsagents 2 shops down). A better comparison would be if your local sport team (lets say Soccer) decided that rather that buying new players to revitalise the team they instead decided to buy a full (if mediocre) team for a completely different game (say basketball). People might like watching the basketball and all the old merchandise would still be sort of relevant; but it is at its heart a different sport, not the soccer that the old fans spent years following.