So what triggered this? Not for the first time it was actually a Facebook conversation that started all this off. The original comment was posted by a former staffer Ben, wondering out loud whether to sell all his GW hobby because "GW doesn't want me to use it anyway!" This comment later turned out to be to do with their pricing, which to be fair gets ridiculously higher on a yearly basis. After which we had the usual bombardment of agreement from bitter veterans, talking up Warmachine, Infinity, Malifaux or whatever. One person in particular, who I won't name since I don't, as far as I know, know the guy in person, was having a fine old time talking about how GW don't care that 90% of people don't like the price increases or the imbalance in the rules, prefering to focus instead on the people who want to buy the lastest new shiny things and divorced parents trying to buy their child's love who make up the remaining 10%. I wasn't sure where he'd got these figures from, but it did make me wonder when was the last time he actually went into a Games Workshop store and found out what goes on down there. I was also amused to see some comments from my former manager Andy, talking up 40K as opposed to the other games in a way that to anybody else might seem formulaic. Having worked for him for year and a half, it was not hard to picture him saying all of those things in the 'dismissive of all non-GW products' manner that I'd come to expect from him, and in spite of everything else I actually allowed myself a little smile at this.
My conribution to all of this was as follows:
"Well here's an argument I never get tired of! It's really not such a big deal; I don't necessarily like some of the things that GW do but since I can always find enough that I do like to keep me engaged, I don't take every possible opportunity to snarl at them either..."
And when Ben realised he'd basically started an argument, he gave his clarified views about the current edition of the games and assured us all that he wanted no one to fall out over it. I followed it up with:
"Ben, I agree with everything your last comment said, with the exception of WH8th, which I have yet to play so I couldn't honestly say one way or the other. But the "GW Sucks" comments annoy me as they usually appear to be opportunistic ranting from veterans who 9/10 will go ahead and buy/play GW stuff anyway. Especially when, as in this case, the comments appear to originate from staffers or ex-staffers, as there is a presumption that those guys know what they're talking about which gives the people who want to complain something that they think is solid to base their arguments on."
After my first comment, Kev, who is or was a manager at one of the Games Workshop stores, asked me "in regards to what? Please be specific as I am curious. :) " And that is going to be the focus of this blog: Answering the questions and having my own say on the matter. As I'm not sure what Kev was asking me, what keeps me engaged or what don't I like about GW that I would otherwise be snarling at, I'll answer both, as they're both means to the same end.
So to kick us off:
Pricing Issues
It's really easy to pick on GW for this as there is no way they can stick up for themselves or pretend that the amount of money they charge for their product is in any way a small amount of money unless you own Switzerland or something. Because of the way they price their products these days, somebody getting into the hobby for the first time would have to drop in excess of £100 on it just to get started, and another £3/400 on expansions and add-ons before they're playing and painting at a level that is touted from the very beginning of their hobby experience. I certainly don't enjoy having to pay £30 for a codex and £23 for a box of Chaos Space Marines, a kid who's only income is a paper round hasn't got a chance, and it's not much better if you're on a part time wage and you have to, you know, eat.
But it does annoy me when people moan about it as though it's a new thing. GW's annual price rise is something that's happened every year now for about the last 12, and should not be news to anyone who's been in to the hobby for longer than a couple of years at the very most. The people who GW plan their business around are the new recruits to the hobby, and they aren't going to know the difference; they'll either choose to buy it at the price GW happen to be charging at the time or they won't. If they do, good for them, and if they don't, then it's no skin off GW's nose because they can't lose a customer they never had in the first place. I don't buy that the amount they're charging for their product is relative to the amount it costs them to produce it and I will NEVER thank GW for making me pay even more for their stuff than I already do. But I accept that it is going to happen whether I like it or not, and no amount of whinging, whining, or throwing my toys out of the pram in the form of quitting the hobby in protest, is going to make the slightest bit of difference.
Balance Issues
Right, this is a bit of a tricky one, as my opinion on this is just that - my opinion. I'm not basing it on fact, I'm basing it on what I've heard from other people and my own hobby experience. So what I say here might not be the consensus, it is literally just how I feel about this.
A large part of the issue with the GW games appears to be that they're not balanced, i.e. you're not necessarily going to put two equal-sized armies on the table and get a fair fight out of it, because one army will inevitably be better than the other to a certain degree. One term I hear bandied around a lot is 'Power Creep,' which refers to the idea that the latest army will be a little bit better than the one that was released before, and that one was better than the one released prior to that, and so on. I don't know if this is true or not because I've never made it my mission to find out all the nasty tournament combos etc; if I like an army I'll collect it, if I don't then I won't. And sometimes I hear that other games are more balanced because they have less factions, better rules, and so on. I don't know, I don't play any of those other games so I'm not in a position where I can say one way or the other. All this is what I've heard.
The problem is that I don't really play GW games at a level where balance issues affect me. I'm not what would normally be considered a 'tournament player,' where such imbalances would become an issue. I don't design my armies to be 'dirty,' 'cheesy,' 'broken' or any of it, simply because I don't know how; I collect the models I like and see where it goes from there. And while I am designing some of my more recent 40K armies with specific tactics in mind, I have yet to see if it will actually do me any good. The only balance issues I've ever come across have been when I've played against people who ARE tournament players, who DO write dirty, cheesy, broken army lists, in which case I tend to get wiped out very quickly and I don't enjoy the game very much because of the rather abrasive attitude that comes with some - not all - such players.
My feeling is that you're playing a wargame; you are going to design your armies to have the advantage over others, and nothing but experience will tell you how to do this. I imagine that any war game is going to have balance issues to a certain extent, because of the different capabilities of each faction that means that one is probably going to be better than the other in at least one respect, and it could just as easily work the other way round. The only wargame I can think of that is 100% balanced with regard to the rules is Chess. So there you go; if you want a balanced game, go ahead and play Chess.
Games Workshop's Business Plan
This title might seem a bit abstract, but it is worth a mention because I've seen many complaints that GW do very little to support their long-term hobbyists. This takes me right back to the 'Bitter Veterans' rant, where I see far too much of 'GW don't care about us, so I don't care about them; I'm selling all my armies and I'll never play the game again.' Just the kind of single-minded obstinacy that really sets my teeth on edge...
As far as I can see, all veterans actually want, apart from a balanced rule system, is for things to remain exactly as they are and never change. Or more accurately, for things to be how they were when they remember enjoying the hobby most, be that 5, 10, 15 years ago or maybe even longer. Sorry guys but that's not going to happen. The hobby has to evolve or it will stagnate; I've spoken about this before, and what isn't helping wargaming in general is a refusal to accept this simple but necessary fact.
So what, you think GW don't care about you because they're updating their rules, bringing out new games, armies, focusing their efforts on recruiting new people into the hobby? Well you're quite right - they don't. They can't. They're not going to run a successful business with the same customers for 20 years; business doesn't work like that. If you manage to stay in to the hobby for 20 years then that's great, but GW do expect you to be able to sort yourself out after that long, even if that means jumping ship to other companies and other games.
Games Workshop are under no illusions about the longetivity of their games, or at least the extent to which they can affect it. They know that if they recruit someone into their hobby, they will have that person for the 1-3 years it takes for them to realise that what they enjoy about the hobby, be it the painting, the gaming, the coversions, the novels or whatever, they can get for significantly less money and higher quality if they know where to look. And they'll milk them for all they're worth during that time, all the while recruiting new people into the hobby for another 1-3 years... by continuing this cycle, and focusing their business plan on new people who don't know or care that it was cheaper 5 years ago (what wasn't?) and certainly give a donkey's doo-dahs about balance issues, GW continues to survive. Not by looking after veterans. They can look after themselves, or at least that is the presumption.
So all that being the case, what keeps me engaged?
Several reasons, really, and I suspect they will all come down to the same thing, but anyway:
The Warhammer/40K material
This had been an integral part of my imagination for nearly half my life, and still would be if Dungeons and Dragons hadn't taken over. High Fantasy and Space-Age Heroes really do excite me.
Now, I'm not necessarily talking about the narrative plots, canon or whatever that you get in Black Library novels. I've read several of them and though Dreadfleet was so bad to the degree that I actually couldn't stand to read it anymore, most of them work well enough. However I do find them rather repetitive, and the bleak apocalyptic visions of the 41st Millenium, which was basically all I did read for about a year, got old after a while. The snippets of information or story that you would normally get in the rulebooks or codices are normally as long as they need to be to keep me engaged, and the longer material is there if I needed it.
No, I'm talking about my own opinions of the background material; what everything is, why it does what it does. And this is kind of hard to explain, but I think this is the reason why fan fiction is quite a big thing - it allows some kind of interaction into the setting or the world you have created. Confused? OK - Best game of 40K I ever played was my old Chaos Space Marine army, which by the standards of most armies was useless, against a guy called James and he had Ultramarines. Straight away you've got a long-standing rivalry. Now, consider the following:
- I was using my own Legion, the Red Earth legion. What do they want with the Ultramarines? Does their rivalry have an even deeper seed than the Horus Heresy?
- During the game, my Chaos Sorcerer managed to take out 14 enemies, including a Scout Squad he dispatched in one turn. Who is this Sorcerer, and what dark pact must he have made to grant him such power? Why is he involved with the Red Earth legion? What is his mission?
- Said Scout Squad was on top of a building. What was in that building? Why were the Space Marines fighting tooth and nail to defend it? (It was an Objectives misson.)
- My Chaos Lord in Terminator Armour actually managed to Deep Strike off the board. Where did he go?
- During the game, I allowed James to make a move he'd forgotten to do during the movement phase, which brought him into assualt range with one of my Chaos Space Marine squads. While it was not tactically sound to do this, I wanted to see if a half-strength command squad could take on a full-strength CSM squad. And the CSMs would have wanted the same thing, of that I am certain.
The People
This works on so many levels that is a whole blog in and of itself, but there are two main reasons I enjoy the company of people who come in to Games Workshop:
- Other than my mate Dave, I don't know anyone else socially who plays, so this is the only way I can really get a game in.
- Regardless of what else goes on in our lives, we've always got the hobby as common ground we can talk about.
The Immersion
I've already talked about the meaning of this with the background material, but at it's most simplest interpretation, 'Immersion' is the measurement of the extent of your engagement in the hobby. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately through the Roleplaying group and also through war games and board games; the most I enjoy any game really is how engaged I am with the character and personality of what I am playing.
For example, the Slaanesh army I'm working on for the upcoming Warhammer World Invasion tournament coming up in April has, I think, a lot of character. All the champions other than the Raptor have Lightning Claws. All the squads number 6 members. They all have the Mark of Slaanesh; utterly devoted to the Prince of Pleasure. I'm certainly looking forward to getting some games in with them to see how well they all work together to the end, and coming up with an explaination as to why they've subjegated a clan of Orks to their cause...
There are other ways to be immersed in the hobby, the game I described above was one of the highlights, but it's really not hard to do. Next time you're starting an army, ask yourself a few questions like:
- Who are these guys?
- Where did they come from?
- Why did they leave (or stay?)
- What do they fight for?
- What tactics do they like to employ?
- What weapons do they prefer to use?
- What weapons/units/tactics do they intentionally avoid?
- If the army has come together from several regiments/chapters/legions/clans, why was the alliance made?
- How do they feel about the battles ahead?
- What will they do when it's all over?
So why don't I play other games?
I read a lot of blogs and have heard a lot of people talking online about Malifaux, War Machine, Hordes, Infinity, Flames of War and quite a few other war games that work in a similar vein to Warhammer and 40K. I was even tempted by Mantic, who have what could cynically be described as their own versions of both games, Kings of War and Warpath. I've heard people say that these games are generally preferable to the Games Workshop roster because of various different reasons, ranging from the better models, better balancing, better rules, or simply by not being Games Workshop. And yes, I've heard that those games are cheaper to get started playing as well. So why don't I play any of those games?
The answer is actually quite simple: I don't know anybody else who does.
Well, that's not literally true. Obviously I know some people or I'd never have thought about it at all. It's just that the people I know who play games like that tend to be online, through blogs, or those facebook friends where you don't really know who they are but you know someone who does. I'm also in a Wargamers Anonymous group on Facebook and those guys talk about those different games as well. Thing is, I rarely, if ever, meet any of those guys in person, and I only consider them 'friends' in the loosest possible sence of the word, if at all.
So why don't I go down to a gaming shop and check them out, I hear you cry? Well, I probably would, but as I live in North Dudley, the nearest shops that do that sort of thing are Wayland's Forge in Birmingham (which I've been in a couple of times before and it feels like a less friendly version of GW,) and Titan Games in Lichfield (run by former GW manager Adam who's a really nice guy and I'm sure is doing great things with his shop, though I have yet to see it in person.) It would take me anything up to a couple of hours to get to either shop, so regular visits are out of the question, plus paying for parking etc... just to get a different game, when I've got 2 Games Workshop stores that are a 20 minute drive away in either direction. It would almost be like starting a new hobby entirely, and that is not a prospect I find very alluring.
Nor is going down to the gaming clubs. I managed to upset one of the guys on the committee of the nearest one to me, Dudley Darklords, by going off on one about the dirty tournament players that make up a significant number of its members, so I will never show my face down there as long as I live. (By the way this wasn't intentional. It's just that, when I'm high as a kite on adrenaline, as I was that day after finishing a particularly punishing game of 40K, I can end up speaking without thinking and saying some incredibly stupid things.) The others that I am aware of all meet on Fridays, and I've talked a couple of times on the blog about why weekends are no good for me.
I know two people socially who play games, one of which I'm pretty sure is almost always strapped for money so the idea of buying into a new game system isn't high on his agenda right now. The other I know through my girlfriend, and he lives quite a long way away so even though he's tried to get me in to different games in the past, it just hasn't worked. I know I'm not exactly helping the situation by not getting invloved with the games. But the plain fact of the matter is that I don't have the time, I don't have the money, and I certainly don't have the space to invest into a completely new game that I only have a very small chance of ever being able to play, for the reasons outlined above, just because someone I barely know has told me that I should. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that I haven't got what I'm going to need in order to make it happen.
Whether that will always be the case I don't know. But for now, I'll stick with Games Workshop. I still enjoy it, after all.
And just as importantly, I still WANT to enjoy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment