How I feel about Games Workshop

Ladies and Gentlemen it has been a while, but I am back with another running commentary about games, gaming and people who game. Now, since a lot of the inspiration for this entire blog comes from the negative attitude towards Games Workshop, I thought I would make my own contribution to it. Let us be clear though: This is not a rant. I know I sit on the fence a lot with this kind of thing, and usually I'm not willing to make a decision one way or the other, but actually this is more of a 'hit-back' at those who have nothing better to do than to rant at GW. Still interested? Read on...

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.

So those 5 factors alone - and there were many more - were conducive to the fantastic experience of playing a game, and it made me feel that THAT is what a 40K game should feel like. Those moments are what makes any game great.

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:

1. 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.
2. Regardless of what else goes on in our lives, we've always got the hobby as common ground we can talk about.

I'm not saying I'm best friends with everybody in there, but it can work on that level. Think about it; you might go in and have a game with someone, keep in touch, keep gaming with them and start seeing them socially so that you're friends with them because you're friends with them. Six years later they're the best man at your wedding. Friendships really do have the opportunity to flourish through the catalyst of hobby games, and who knows where it might lead. Those little things that affect the course of your lives have a far more profound effect on me than any amount of new releases or rules updates, and I'm not going to throw the former away just because I'm dissatisfied with the latter, even if that were the case.

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?

When answering the last 7 of those questions, follow it up with an 'And why?' explaination. If you can do that, you'll be far more engaged with your army than buying the newest release, or the hardest army for an up-and-coming tournament, or a nice-looking model that you want to paint. None of that is bad, necessarily, but to be immersed and engaged with your whole army is what makes it all work for me.

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.

Painting: Chaos Defiler, Chaos Rhino

I bring to you for the first time in a while a long overdue painting blog. These are additions to the Khornate Chaos Space Marine army I started last year. And a bit of a rant as well, but more on that later...

Daemonic posession might just give it the edge...

OK to start us of we've got a Chaos Space Marine Rhino. This wasn't actually planned; how it came about was that just after Games Workshop released 6th Edition 40K, I turned up at GW to participate in a 400pt tournament. I took my Chaos and my new Space Marine army as well which I have yet to show you guys so get ready. Now the Space Marine stuff I had, but for the Chaos Space Marine stuff I needed a Rhino to make a 400pt list so I got to the shop early and bought this, and painted near enough all of it in the morning apart from the heads and that on the spikes running across the top of it. I painted it pretty much the same way as I painted the Bezerkers; copious amounts of Mechrite Red and Gold painted from Brown. I was pleased with the muck and dust coming up the sides, done with Khemri Brown and Denheb Stone, but I was less pleased when I noticed that I hadn't done it on the back. Ah well, there's always the next one. The detail on the heads were probably my favourite bits to paint, to be honest; I'm getting better at doing that! You can't see it on the photos but I've painted the Space Marine head as though he was from the Black Consuls chapter that I'm painting up as well; the last time I painted a Space Marine head it was Dark Angels and I didn't want to do that again what with Dark Vengeance out now, so I chose a colour to offset the Red: Black. On the whole I think it came out pretty well.

Where were the lascannons?

And then there was this hulking monstrosity. I painted the Defiler in the same way although I found I did have to go over it in Mechrite Red again after I'd painted all the metal. It made a more solid coat of paint which was great. I didn't go into a lot of detail with this one; the metal bits were metal, the brass bits were brass and everything else was either red or my attempt at obsidian; black highlighted with grey. I avoided weathering effects because I honestly couldn't see how to apply them to this. Neither of these models are my best painting job ever, but I never said they were. To be honest, painting tanks is not my favourite part of collecting an army; I think I find infantry models more fun now that I'm actually getting quite good at it. I just haven't got the experience in painting larger models like this. Still, I have to start somewhere, and for what I'm going to be using them for (gaming, largely,) they work as well as they needed. They'd certainly get me into the Throne of Skulls tournament, though I doubt I'd win any awards for best looking army!

Which brings me on to something that's been annoying me about a lot of the models I've been buying, particularly for 40K. You plan an army list, you look at your codex, you equip your squads and vehicles in the optimum configuration... only to find that THE WEAPONS DON'T APPEAR IN THE BOX!!!

This has happened a few times over the models I've been building. The original plan for the Scout army, for example, was to give one of the sergeants a Power Fist. It's allowed in the rules, but the Scout models don't come with power fists. The Khorne Bezerkers that I painted last year, I wanted to give them Power Axes (now that 6th edition makes a distinction between Power Axes and other weapons, I'm very glad I made this decision,) and Plasma Pistols, but you can do neither out of the box, even with the Skull Champion. And then there was the Defiler, for which the original plan was to have a Twin-Linked Lascannon for the right arm. Except when I opened the box THERE WAS NO BLOODY LASCANNON! So instead I'm stuck with the Reaper Autocannon instead, which thinking about it would probably be more useful for supporting infantry charges, but it's still not what I wanted!

Now I know what you're thinking: "Well, why don't you convert it?" Yes, except that what with the Defiler being the only substantial vehicle in my army at this point, there's nothing to convert it from. The only thing I can think to do is if I were to drop another £35 on a Predator, and stick the turret with the Twin-Linked Lascannon on it onto the arm. Which would render the Predator completely redundant since the turret would then be on the Defiler. No chance in Hell, would be my answer to that. Same with the Space Marine Scouts; I'd have to spend more money on a box of Space Marines just to get the Power Fist out of it - assuming it comes with one - and to be honest it would probably have been better employed on the Space Marines anyway. The Bezerkers I actually did convert from Ork parts, and that worked reasonably well, but I'll need to find a way to get hold of a plasma pistol before I paint the next lot or I won't be able to equip them properly.

Of course, I know why it's happened - the rules that allow those weapon options were written after the box was designed. I don't know what you were allowed to do with a Defiler before the current edition of the codex came out but if the designers had no reason to put a lascannon in there, they wouldn't have put one in, and they're not going to redesign the whole box just because of a change in the rules. With the Scouts I'd suggest it's pretty much the same story. The Bezerkers are a bit of a funny one; those models were designed for 2nd edition (the frame of the Sprue says 1994, which even by GW standards is an old model) and while aesthetically at least they work as well as they need to, the fact that they've not had an update for nearly 20 years means that they're currently lacking in a lot of the equipment that is allowed in the rules.

Nonetheless, I'm going to be urinated if the Chaos Vindicator I've ordered doesn't have the Havoc Launchers in there, since every vehicle in my army has them. Not quite as urinated as I would have been if I hadn't got a couple of Havoc launchers left over from the Rhinos I made for my previous Chaos army, but urinated nonetheless. Apart from that, there's not really a lot more to this army as I'll be painting it in pretty much the same way so unless something really amazing happens with the Vindicators, this will be the last you'll hear from them until they're ready for the table...

See you then.

Bitter Veterans

OK normally I'm not one for moaning about people on my blog. It's not something I've done since I used to do gig reviews; in all honesty I'm not a fan of receiving the backlash that comes with saying negative things about people. It rarely came up because I was never nasty about it, but the few times it did knocked my confidence quite a bit.

However, with the games I've been involved with in the last sort of year and a half, and some of the conversations I've had with people, there is a demographic with which I find my patience rapidly receding into the dark and spite-filled hole from whence it came. That demographic is what I've now come to recognise as 'Bitter Veterans,' and since there are quite a few of this sort of people around and I know many in person, I'm in quite a strong postition to say I'm not talking about anybody in particular here. When I refer to specific conversations I'm not going to use names, most of them ought to know who they are and if they've got a problem with what I'm saying, well, maybe they should think about the reasons why I'm saying it and be a bit more careful what they're saying in future.

So what is a 'Bitter Veteran?' Let's start with Veteran shall we - I don't really know what characteristics you need to be able to call yourself a veteran but I tend to find they're people who've been doing the hobbies for a long time and are particularly good at playing the game or painting the models where applicable, or both. Now I've been doing the Games Workshop hobby on and off for half my lifetime and I don't think I'm much good at either painting or gaming, and I don't consider myself a veteran for that reason. So it's a subjective matter as much as anything else.

I'm afraid that my attitude towards veterans isn't always kind, and this is largely to do with the time I spent working for Games Workshop. A lot of the reason it caused me so much anxiety was that I always had to make a terrific effort to go up to people and talk to them, and particularly if I knew those people didn't want me talking to them. With veterans, I'd say this was the case about 80% of the time. Understandable to a degree - I know the GW staff come on too strong sometimes, and it can put people off going in to the shop at all so it's not surprising that veterans don't always think too kindly of the GW staff either. But what I really didn't like when they would say things like "I've been doing this longer than you've been alive," as though I'm not going to find that the slightest bit condescending. The worst one I had was when I worked in the Walsall store, which at that time was packed with veterans who didn't think I had the right to be telling them anything at all and that I should just let them get on with it. Every single time I worked in that shop I closed up wishing I didn't work for the company, it was horrible. The specific incident I'm talking about was when one person I'd never seen before but was clearly a hobbyist - he knew everyone in the shop and had a certain 'look' about him - came into the shop to either buy a model or pick up a mail order, I can't quite remember which. When I handed over whatever it was I asked him if he'd got all his clippers, glue, paints etc, a perfectly reasonable question that I would have asked anyone who'd brought a model. He gave me a look of bitter amusement then looked back into the shop, saying to everyone something to the general effect of "He's asking me if I've got clippers and glue?" There's something about being treated like a pile of dog mess that still resonates with me, years later.

Now to avoid tarring everybody with the same brush, some veterans are actually really nice people when I get talking to them. Most of the ex-staffers I'd happily sit and talk to for hours. A lot of the regulars who went into the Dudley store when I worked there I have no problem with. Even one or two of the tournament players, with whom I usually entertain very little patience indeed, escaped my prejudice because they had no problem with talking to me and understood what needed to be considered in a shop environment. And it's those people whose names and company and remember as being the good bit about working for GW.

So, moving on. Bitter Veterans, what are they? Well, for a start, applying everything I've just said about veterans, bitter veterans are miserable buggers who don't really enjoy the hobby anymore and think that nobody else should either. Everybody's story is different, but the pattern rarely varies: At some point, the game company they have been following for years and years and years have done something, said something, or heaven forbid release a new version of their game, the bitter veteran isn't happy with it and on principle decides to boycott the game, the company and all who play it. The reason they annoy me so much is that they've somehow got the idea that just because they think that something is rubbish, that means that no one else is allowed to enjoy it either.

And what better time to see them cropping up like boils on a backside than after Games Workshop release 6th Edition of 40K? One particular conversation I saw on Facebook yesterday involved one person wanting to sell something like 27,000 points worth of Tau because the new rules didn't fit his tactics, and he'll never play the game again. Now I can understand that some of the new rules don't fit all the armies quite as well as they did before, but to be brutally honset this nothing more than a bitter veteran having a strop. A few holes in his comments to pick out straight away:

1. The Tau codex was designed for 4th edition. Of course it's not going to work as well with 6th; that shouldn't be news to anyone.
2. That being the case, Tau are probably going to get an update in the mid term future, where they'll be resdesigned to work just as well as they ever did, if not better.
3. In the meantime, if you have 27,000 points of an army and can't find SOMETHING that works in the new edition of the game then you probably shouldn't be playing it anyway. Be honest, when did you last play a game?

So yeah, go ahead and sell everything you've spent all that time and money building up just because you're not happy with a change in the rules that alters the way you use the army in the game. Really clever decision, that.

I saw this quite a lot with the new edition of Warhammer Fantasy as well, a lot of people who I knew from the shop - I'd not long left, at that point - wanting to sell their armies because they don't like the new edition of the game, their armies don't work, or whatever. Now, I'm not being funny, but if your current army doesn't work, it can't be that much of a tall order to find something that does? I shouldn't imagine that it would be much more of a job than coming up with an army list that will work better in the game, and buying another couple of units if you need to? I'm not sure how many Warhammer armies get an update in one gaming iteration - I've never really sat Warhammer out from one edition to the next so I don't actually know when a lot of the current army books were published - but chances are, if your army is that bad for the current edition of Warhammer, an update can't be far away? And GW have more freedom to do this with Warhammer than they do with 40K because they aren't restricted to lavishing so much attention on Space Marines...

Now I've seen a blog from FrontlineGamer - well worth a read - who is quite adamant about his dislike of the current edition of Warhammer Fantasy. Initial reading of his blog might make him come across as the kind of veteran that I wouldn't necessarily enjoy talking to while I worked for GW. But looking a little deeper and you discover that his opinions are formed not by taking the popular opinion, or by looking at the rulebook and deciding he hates it, but by road-testing it and actually playing some games. Reading his coverage on Warhammer, he did actually give the new edition a go and found that he didn't enjoy it because of the way the game plays. Now to me, that's fair enough, for two reasons:

1. He's formed an opinion on something more solid than arrogant wishful thinking
2. At no point during any of his reviews does he instuct that people do not play the game; he recognises that others have their own opinions and reviews are there to form and assist opinions, not instruct. So he's never said "None of you must ever play Warhammer 8th!"

I see it in other games as well, and if you want to see a spawning ground for bitter veterans look no further than Dungeons and Dragons. My word, that game divides opinion like no other. Spend 10 minutes on Youtube, guarantee you'll find someone's posted a rant to the general effect of (dorky scene kid voice) "Oh wow dude, like, no one can play D&D 4th because it's, like, totally retarded, and it's all about the combat and not about the roleplaying, and it's destroyed everything that Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about, and it's like, whoa..." and his mate standing next to him going "Schyeah, whoa..." No wonder I find it so hard to get a game in, if even its own demographic aren't prepared to take the game for what it is and give it a go.

I could go on, but... Basically, I find conversations with bitter veterans uncomfortable, claustrophobic and infuriating. It's ironic that they voice their opinions about games so strongly as they are the people I am least likely to listen to. Because at the end of the day, I can't help but think that most of them are moaning for it's own sake; they like to have a bit of a whinge, and because they're not enjoying something quite as much as they did before they think that none of the rest of us are allowed to enjoy it either.

Now, I'm not exactly rushing to Games Workshop or Wizards of the Coast's aid here. They're the more popular companies for roleplaying and wargames and are easy to pick on. I know GW has made some appalling decisions in the last few years that I don't agree with, but funnily enough I'm still coming back to them after 13 years... Because the plain fact is that with the popularity of their games still outstripping their competition by quite a long way, this is where the new hobbyists/gamers/roleplayers are going to come from. And by refusing to get involved in anything new, all they're doing is stifling themselves from the evolution of their own hobby. Change is going to happen - it has to. Otherwise the companies that make the games will stagnate, fold completely and you'll be left with all you've got now. It will never change, and you'll be stuck playing the same game for however long it takes you to get fed up with it.

In the spirit of this, I sometimes find myself in a position of responisbility when I'm running games; it's up to me to make sure that everybody's having a good time so that they'll come back and have another go; I'll talk about that another time.

So yeah. Not a fan of bitter veterans.

Now I've avoided saying what I think about the new edition of 40K because that's something for another blog I think. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can get some new painting blogs and some commentary on my armies out. Until then, ciao, hope you've enjoyed my thankfully rare rant and I'll see y'all again soon.