#aos4e

Part 1 - It's Not Competitive Play

This one has been crawling around my head for some time now, and I decided tonight I'd try to finally get it out. I'd originally intended to do this as a series of video essays . . . but then YouTube decided to up the AI ante and I didn't want to make any video content. So I then decided I'd just do some blog posts . . . then GW sued GHAMAK and I didn't want to make any GW content.

But those events didn't stop my brain from chewing on this. So I've been wanting to see if I can do this without praising GW or even giving them undo promotion. And, since this is nearly all about GW picking up some pretty awful habits, I feel I can talk about this without being a fanboy.

There will be praise in here, but that praise will be for the Warhammer Competitive Community. And praise is something they've earned on their own merits without much help from GW.

In short, if you think you know what GW has been up to and why, and your answer isn't them copying the Game Industry, I think you've been missing what's really going on.

How It Started

So AOS4 had a very rough release. It was easily worse than the release of 40K 10th, which is saying something, and even had people comparing it to 1st Edition. And with so much wrong with AOS4, people were wondering how it had happened.

Then this year, we had the same thing happen with Horus Heresy.

And anytime the internet is upset about something, you can bet there will be a lot of content creators ready to rage bait some clicks!

But even among people I thought were sensible content creators, people I felt knew GW and the industry well, a narrative formed. It was and old and well worn narrative that pops up every now and then in various online communities. A narrative that's easy to propagate, easy to drum up support for, and almost always wrong.

It's that damn, dirty, WAAC, Competitive Communities fault!

So let's start here, with seeing if we can accept this alternate hypothesis - the Competitive Play Hypothesis.

And the quick answer is no. Games Workshop is not pandering to Competitive Players.

The Competitive Community

If you've been to a store-run or local event, you've likely run into . . . him . . .

That Guy . . .

He goes by many names. Sometimes he's just an obnoxious, smug, and superior sounding asshole. Sometimes he's a Win At All Cost or WAAC player. Sometimes he's just a filthy cheater.

And if you've played in other competitive scenes, such as Magic, or heard stories from olden days of yore, you probably think that describes any Competitive Warhammer player. When many people, especially on the internet, picture a Competitive 40K player they imagine some fat, arrogant, neckbeard that hastily pushes their miniatures around the table while quickly rolling 6s you never see and screaming bloody murder if you don't individually measure every Boy in your horde or if you pick up a single dice before they've examined it Sherlock style with a magnifying glass.

And to be fair, you will find those people at events. They sometimes even dare to show up to big ones. If it's your first event, and you get stuck on the bottom tables, you might even have to deal with a few.

Because any real Competitive Player will laugh That Guy off the table without breaking a sweat.

The difference between That Guy and a Competitive Player is that That Guy just wants to win games.

Competitive players want to be the best players in the game. And to be the best, you need to be more than just someone that can win.

And to be further fair to some of the sensible and older commentators I follow, I can understand why they might think that the Competitive scene is full of That Guy. Because there was a time when it was.

You can find plenty of stories out there of the dark days of GW, the 3rd-7th Edition Parade and all the shenanigans that happened. I myself went to a small, store run tournament where I met That Guy. He challenged every single line of sight I claimed, demanding we rolled off for it. Eventually I called over a TO, who reminded him how LOS worked. But the game had already dragged on at that point, so he put his guys on the objectives and slow played out the end of the round.

Back then, Magic was kind of the model for tabletop tournaments. And just as you need to know the timing and interactions of every card in the meta, 40K players thought that was how the game should play. Many in the scene thought that winning should be determined by knowledge of the rules and knowing what the broken combos and interactions are.

But there's one huge difference between Warhammer and Magic.

A standard tournament round for MtG is 15 minutes. A standard tournament round for Warhammer is 3 hours.

And nobody wants to play for 3 hours with That Guy.

Over the course of The Edition Parade, the competitive scene slowly started to die out. It didn't help that 6th and 7th were just . . . fucking awful. But the fact that Tom Kirby was running Games Workshop into the ground (I don't know how the narrative got out that somehow he saved GW) didn't stop fans who loved the game wanting better for it.

Tournament players and organizers began working together to try and make the best of a bad game. They began introducing their own rules into their events. Judges and TOs started taking more active rolls. Cash prizes were replaced with kits and hobby supplies. Awards were given out for sportsmanship and best overall player. Eventually the ITC, UTC, and WTC were born.

Slowly some of the worst players were weeded out. Then as That Guy tried to keep up with the changing landscape, the best minds in the game began patching out every attempt he made to stay relevant.

By the time 8th Edition brought about a new wave of interest and fresh blood into 40K, That Guy's days were already numbered.

Meanwhile At the Halls of Sigmar

But everything I just said only applies to 40K. Many of the rants were about Age of Sigmar. And do you know what really sucks there?

Age of Sigmar never had this problem.

When Age of Sigmar first came out, it was widely panned. 40K players often accused it of pandering to them and brushed it off. Fantasy players hated it with a fiery passion and blamed it for the death of their game. Its rules, or lack there of, certainly didn't help. It got accused of being a commercial released playtest, and there is definitely truth to that.

But while many sneered it, a handful of players looked at Age of Sigmar and found a chaotic beauty. Here was a fantasy setting that was taking the Tolkien tropes and trying to do something new. While it called back to The World That Was, it didn't seem to have any obligation to play by its rules. And while people kept comparing it to 40K, it seemed completely uncaring about what 40K players thought or what theories or continuity existed in the verse.

And the game itself, with its crazy chaotic rules and random turns drew a special kind of player to it. These player saw the opportunity to guide and develop a new grand tabletop experiment, and took ownership of the game like never before. Together with the designers, they'd help make AoS the next great tabletop game.

And that game sure as hell wasn't going to end up like 7th Edition 40K or 8th Edition Fantasy.

The REAL Competitive Community

As I said above, the Competitive 40K and AoS mindset isn't about winning games. It's about being the best player. Winning is just one metric to determining your progress on that goal. And at the end of the day, the real goal of the game is to spend a few hours having fun with a friend.

The Competitive Community that formed around 8th Edition 40K and AoS has kept that in mind. Do you know what's better than winning a tournament? Spending two to three days playing lots of fun games with fun people and then winning a tournament. This is the atmosphere that the competitive scene has been working hard to cultivate.

In Magic, all the rules are extremely explicit and, at least before WotC fucked it up, all the rules you need to understand how a card works are on the card. Card position and information are clear. If you try to obfuscate those things, you can get carded. All the tools are there if you want to play an extremely technically skilled game.

But in 40K, models move free form around a table. Positioning is only as precise as your ability to work a tape measure over a 4'X6' table. Line of sight is determined by finding a "models eye view" and determining what can be seen. Rules draw imaginary lines over the battlefield. And all of this abstraction is before you take into account that models and terrain can shift around the table very easily as you move, measure, and roll dice.

Combine this with the fact that information is supposed to be out in the open, with equal access to all rules and stats and the ability to pre-measure, and a new form of play quickly began to take shape around these two games.

Usually called "Playing By Intent", Competitive 40K and AoS turn the game into an open conversation with your opponent. Rather than staying silent as you carefully measure models into exacting positions that won't last the next dice throw, players state what they're trying to do and their opponents discuss whether and how it can be done. Measurements are made, test models or bases are placed, options and ideas are offered back and forth. If the movement would trigger rules, the players make sure they both know them. In the end an agreed upon board state is reached, and both players understand it. No arguments, no gotchas, no um actually's.

And the best part? Fifteen minutes of carefully measuring a single units movement has been replaced by one minute of talking, measuring, and shoving the unit into rough position.

It's such a much better way to play the game. Since both players are actively talking through the game, you can easily give take backs and missed timings. "Remember if you move within 9" I can make a reactive move. Okay let's measure out 9" really quick, and we'll say your unit is standing just outside. Oh you forgot to disembark your unit before moving your transport? Well you said you were planning a charge on my hormagaunts, and we were pretty sure you'd need a six, so just place the unit about 6" out roughly where your transport was."

The game becomes about whose battle-plan survives contact with the enemy (and the dice . . . same thing actually) the best, instead of who know the most rules or tricks.

And that's without even mentioning Teams and how good this environment becomes when you're playing with your friends instead of just against them.

But I know what you're all thinking!

Games Workshop and Competitive Play

"Alright! Sheesh! We get it! Competitive players aren't sweaty try-hards! They're the sweetest players you'll ever meet, and in between pushing models and rolling dice they're feeding the poor and helping old ladies across the street!"

"But that's not what this is about!"

But I really do think a lot of this is. Because the Competitive Play Hypothesis doesn't hold a lot of water.

As I said in my post about the GHAMAK situation, Warhammer is still a really niche hobby. While Magic: The Gathering has easily broken a billion dollars every year since 2022 and only gotten bigger, all of Games Workshop - 40K, AoS, Middle Earth, books, Warhammer+, and licensing - made just shy of 830 million dollars last year.

Magic: The Gathering, just that one game, is bigger than all of Games Workshop.

And most people still consider Magic to be a pretty niche hobby.

So now imagine you're a business evaluated in the billions of dollars, and you have a duty to your investors to grow your business. You need to cross that billion dollar mark!

How do you do it?

The Warhammer fanbase consists of multiple ways to engage with the property. Ideally, you want all of those fans to be engaging on as many levels as possible. You would dearly love for every one of us to buy every single kit you release, paint them all up using Citadel Paints and tools, while listening to your audiobooks and getting tips from WH+ and White Dwarf, collecting the physical books to line our hobby dens, after spending a fun day sharing our hobby with fans at the LGS and playing Space Marine 2 and Total War: Warhammer (with Dawn of War 4 and Total War: 40K on pre-order), all before taking off our licensed clothing and retiring to a bedroom filled with licensed plushies, toys, and art.

But customers only have so much money and so much time in the day. So they engage at different levels and different ways. While some try to do it all, most will have their favorite section of the hobby. There are fans that only care about the lore and spend their time reading/listening to Black Library books or lore posts on social media. There are some that primarily collect and paint, spending hours lovingly rendering each new model. There are some that only play the video games, and never plan or desire to pick up a physical Warhammer product.

And when it comes to playing physical Warhammer games, your customers just break down further. In addition to That Guy and Competitive Players, you've got "beer and pretzels" players that get together with friends maybe once a week at most. You've got narrative players that want to intertwine the lore into the game as best they can. You've got players that play in epic Crusade/Path to Glory campaigns that go for years, and players that may play only a handful of games each edition.

And all of that is before you even get to any of the homebrew or popular internet formats like Horde.

So with all these different interests how do you grow your business?

Let's look at the Competitive Community:

Pros

Dedicated Players - Competitive Players are very invested in the game and unlikely to stop due to changes in the game/business.

Big Spenders - Competitive Players often collect large armies with lots of options and even collect multiple factions.

Online Content - Events often broadcast on the internet and are covered by fan sites. Competitive Players may even create their own content.

Friendly And Welcoming - Competitive Players eagerly welcome new players to their favorite games and formats.

All pretty good. A dedicated community that spends a lot of money and provides free promotion? "Sign me up!" you say! And that is where people that support this Competitive Play Hypothesis usually stop. But lets look at the cons.

Cons

Specialists - Competitive Players often dedicate their time to a single game and are unlikely to branch out. They may even specialize in a single faction.

Poor Outreach - While they are friendly and welcoming, Competitive Players prefer to play games with other Competitive Players. They are honing their skills while other players are at the LGS teaching little Timmy how to paint his Ultramarines.

Vocal - That social media presence has a cost! Competitive Players are the first to ring the alarm bells when you mess up a release.

Stigma - You know that the Competitive Community is great! But many people see that as sweaty try-hards.

And! Most of all!

Size

The competitive community makes up less than 10% of active players. And active players are less than 30% of your customers.

So are you really going to focus on only 3% of your active customers with those pros and cons?

Compare this to painters. They basically have all the same pros of Competitive Players, though they may be more willing to buy miniatures from other companies. But they'll buy models from multiple ranges, they often spend time at game stores sharing knowledge and passion, they don't have the stigma, and they're more likely to stay in their lane when you mess up releases or raise prices. Additionally, their content can be consumed quickly and easily, while a Competitive Game lasts hours.

So are you still going to focus hard on that 3% that has so many negatives attached, especially when your customers keep getting mad when it looks like you're focusing on them?

This is why Games Workshop has a "models first" policy. It's one of the few things that survived from the Kirby era. Focusing on models plays across multiple types of customers and, initially, provided one of the greatest draws to the business. Game systems can come and go, but that model on the shelf is always going to be there with its memories stored in chipped paint.

But before we get to game balance, there are a few more arguments that you see. Let's try and lightning round some.

Other Arguments for the Competitive Play Hypothesis

Model Releases are Aimed at Competitive Play!

Model releases are pushed! Period! GW wants to sell models, that involves making them look appealing. Competitive Players often undercut GW's talking points and push back against releases that look too strong. When a unit looks weak, they're often the first to make content about it.

GW Sends Pre-release Content to Competitive Players!

GW sends pre-release content to content creators. Lore guides, painters, and meme lord fanboys all often get free stuff if GW thinks it will help promote their products.

GW Uses The Competitive Community for Playtesting

GW has multiple playtest groups for multiple levels of play. Competitive Players who have playtested for GW often lament how much they felt ignored.

GW Has a Competitive Circuit

GW is a modern, IP based corporation. Such entities don't like leaving things that might affect their image to independent bodies they have little control over.

If you've got more, feel free to send them my way. But honestly, I think it's pretty obvious the idea that GW would pander to such a small and potentially volatile playerbase is just not good business. Their bread and butter was releasing models people wanted to collect and paint. And that has been shifting more toward licensing and finding other avenues of revenue such as Warhammer+.

But GW still makes games, and people play those games. And there's one other argument you often hear spoken as proof that GW is pandering to the Competitive Community. But since this brings up another alternate hypothesis to mine, it's going to get its own post.

In the next part, let's talk about that thorny issue of game balance!

Part 3 - What's Really Going On

So now we finally get to it. I've discussed this strange compulsion to blame these problems on balance changes and the Competitive Community, and how that doesn't really explain what we're seeing.

Now it's time to talk about what's actually happening.

It's time to actually talk about the lessons that GW is learning from the Game Industry and how they are directly making our hobby worse.

It should be no surprise that GW would look to other industries for money making tactics. We've already seen it with FOMO boxes. And Warhammer+ was very obviously a way to jump on the digital subscription service band wagon. But Warhammer is, first and foremost, a game. So it makes sense that the primary way to improve your business would be to look at what other game manufacturers are doing.

But, just because these tactics do, unfortunately, work, doesn't mean that they're actually beneficial. As we're seeing in the Game Industry, these things may work in the short term, but they can be extremely detrimental to both customers and the businesses that use them.

I've already teased many of these things. But the main tactics we'll be discussing are managing engagement, release cycles, patching, and cutting content.

Let's get this shit show started.

Hell Freezes Over

In 2015, Games Workshop did something completely unexpected.

They released a game for free.

Granted, Age of Sigmar was only the seed of a game at the time. But I remember paying almost $100 for my 5th Edition rule book. Free rules you could just download or pick up in a store was not normal. And while paid rules products would quickly come out, free rules releases would continue for the game, even if GW would eventually pull back on some things like the free army builder.

But then in 2023 something really wild happened!

The 10th Edition of 40K released completely free.

This wasn't some new fledgling game GW was trying to build up. This was the big one! The flagship! A property GW knows people will pay big bucks for. When they ended the Edition Parade and rebooted the game into 8th, they greatly reduced the cost of the rules, but you still had to pay for them!

And here they were, 6 years later, doing the same thing but for free!

If we wanted to, any number of us older players could have taken a snapshot the edition before the codexes came out and continued to play the game with our existing collection of miniatures and never pay GW another dime. And we wouldn't be doing it with house rules or pirated PDFs. We'd be doing it with an official, licensed version of the game GW just gave us.

And the free stuff doesn't end there! Warhammer Community has been releasing free content since it was rebooted too. Free missions! Free short stories! Free datasheets! Free tools! Grotmas! Scourge of Ghyran!

You can go into a Warhammer store and get a free miniature! And you can do it every month!

This is a company that we regularly complain about for outrageous prices! This is the company that kept selling us the same models in smaller and smaller batches for higher and higher prices for over a decade!

And now I have a Deathwing Knight I just got handed by the owner of Warhammer store for coming in on the right day?

What the hell happened?

Well if you play video games, you know exactly what is going on.

To the frustration of many such as myself, the free-to-play, or F2P model has practically taken over the industry. On mobile you basically can't release a commercially priced game, because you can't compete with the ocean of free slop out there. Hell! My favorite game, Path of Exile, is a F2P game! The sequel is currently in payed early access, but will go completely F2P when 1.0 comes out. DOTA2, League of Legends, Warframe, Fortnight, Apex Legends, Hoyoverse, Rivals, you can just download some of the biggest games out there and play them at any time. Roblox has basically taken over the gaming landscape at this point, an entire generation knowing nothing but its version of the F2P model.

Of course all of these games have cash shops where you can buy in-game items for real money. Most of these items are cosmetic purchases that allow you to customize your character. But convenience items or items that speed up progression are also ubiquitous. In some cases you can buy power in a game, even competitive ones, for real money. In others most of the game is free, but there is content that is gated off behind a pay wall.

But in nearly every case, the company behind the game and its fans will say you can play the game as long you want without spending a dime.

Except PoE. We'll all tell you, "PoE is completely free to play! It just costs $30!"

Then you have all the Sterling coined Fee-to-Pay games. These games are all ostensibly commercially released products with MSRPs. But once you get into the game, you're almost immediately bombarded with advertisements and pushed towards a cash shop. Some you can't even start up without going to the cash shop first! These games notoriously employ a lot of "convenience" purchases, despite their retail price model. "Hey! Is that game you paid money for a boring slog? Why not spend more money to not have to play as much of the game you bought!"

But despite how I'm describing it, this model works. And the secret to its success is engagement.

Keeping You Engaged

Lets use my favorite as an example.

Grinding Gear Games currently runs a Challenge League roughly every two-three months. The current Challenge League for Path of Exile, Keepers of the Flame, started on October 31 of last year. The current Challenge League for Path of Exile 2, The Last of the Druids, came out in December 12. The next, still unnamed League for PoE1 will launch in early March.

With enough time to play, a skilled player can complete every challenge in a League in 1-2 months. This means by the time a player has finished or is wrapping up a League, they're already seeing announcements and teases for the next one.

But that's not all! GGG occasionally holds events. March is a bit late for the next PoE1 league, so they're releasing a special event next week called Legacy of Phrecia. Additionally, when an exploit broke the economy and ruined PoE2 in December, members of the community started an open Private League called Second Wind so players could get a fresh start after GGG fixed the issues. When that Private League hit max capacity, GGG went out of their way to raise it to allow everyone that wanted to play in. GGG also actively participates in the community run event called The Gauntlet, providing special challenges, content, and rewards for the event.

And while you really do want to buy stash tabs to play either game, once you've got them you don't ever need to buy more. And it's certainly possible to play through either games campaign with the four you start with. This is a lot of content and work from the studio with no guarantee that anyone will ever enter the shop and spend money.

But that doesn't mean that's not the goal.

The idea behind engagement is to use free content to rent out space in your head. Content gets announced, and you start getting excited for it. You start making plans, seeing if you can get the day off and coordinate with friends for when the release drops. Then the day comes and you play and have fun. You keep playing and having fun for a while, but eventually the fun starts to wane. You start to play less, think about it less, make plans around it less. Then BAM! The next content drop gets announced! Now you're thinking about it again, making plans around it again . . .

The theory is that if they keep you engaging with the product - thinking about it, playing it, talking about it - then every moment you are is a chance to sell you something.

And this works! The most financially successful games of all time are either F2P or Fee-to-Pay games. GTA Online, Genshin Impact, Fortnight, Roblox . . .

The fucking Monopoly mobile game!

If you can hook in your audience and keep them engaged, they will spend money!

All of the sudden that free content on Warhammer Community starts to make a lot more sense. "Come to WarCom! Read the articles! Get free downloads! Get free stories and videos! Also check out what's for preorder this weekend and the new releases in the pipeline! Hey there's also some cool stuff happening on Warhammer+!"

"Go to your local Warhammer store and grab a free miniature! Do you need any paints or tools to go with it? Would you like to look at the new releases that just came in? We have squig and nurgling plushies!"

And this is probably the main reason why balance changes became more frequent.

Balance As Engagement

When I was listing off successful F2P games, I mentioned more than a few competitive ones.

And oh boy! If you think 40K players will throw tantrums on reddit over balance, wait till you see the League of Legends community!

Balance is an issue in a lot of video games. Despite being mostly single player, every PoE league comes with balance changes. Even From Soft, the infamous "Prepare to Die" dev, patches for balance.

But balance can also be a tool for engagement.

You've probably heard the word "meta" before. It comes from the term meta-game, where you step back from the game and develop a strategy around how people play.

Before the most recent changes, when someone described Ultramarines as a meta defining army, or 18 Vicitrix as a meta build, they were talking about something that was happening in general to the game. This did not mean you needed to plan for an 18 Vicitrix plus Calgar when you played a 'Nids vs. Tau game with your buddy. But if you grabbed a pick up a game at an LGS, you easily might have seen it. And if you went to a Competitive event you definitely saw it.

Any game with a large enough community will develop a meta. Certain strategies will be found that have the best chance at success. Then other players will find strategies to counter those, and there may even be counters to the counters. Some strategies will be good enough to succeed but will only be embraced by fans or people who want more of a challenge. Some strategies will have niche power where under the right circumstances you can succeed. And some will just ultimately fall by the wayside.

Eventually a meta will reach a state where it becomes "solved." All of the best strategies become known. You then either embrace those strategies, or you have to accept that if you don't you're playing at a disadvantage. Solved metas are also often called "stale metas." It's not as fun to play the same iteration of a game over and over.

This is another place where I think people unfairly blame the Competitive Community, as you're only really going to notice this if you're playing a lot of games. So while non-competitive players may complain about stale metas, you're more likely to see a Competitive Player mention it.

Video game companies learned a long time ago that stale metas are bad for engagement. Many competitive games have relatively short matches, and even a casual player may play dozens of games in a session. If you constantly run into Jeff mains on Rivals, it's gonna stop being cute and fun really fast.

So while you would think a game designer would want to try to make the meta as balanced as possible, companies have learned that can be a speedrun to a stale meta. Instead they've learned meta bogeymen and underpowered builds can be good for business. The goal is to introduce just enough imbalance so that it's noticeable without breaking the game. This way on any given patch, your build, character, or strategy might get its time to shine. If you get nerfed, maybe it's time to try something new. Worst comes to worst you skip a patch and they might grab you with the next one. But if the game gets boring, they might lose you forever.

The key here is while the more games you play, the more this affects you, it affects you if you play at all. While Competitive Players definitely had to figure out what to do with Vicitrix Guard, any player could go buy a box and try it out. It was in the meta just long enough the average 40K player could preorder one or two boxes, build and paint them, and get a few games in before it got nerfed. Same thing with Knights, Death Guard, and More Dakka.

But how did you know Vicitrix was going to be broken and you needed to pre-order it? Because content creators were telling you it was! GW released the datasheets and the Blade of Ultramar detachment to content creators a week before pre-orders went live. So everyone knew what was going to happen. Same thing for Titus and his squad and all the other new Space Marine characters. The way these releases hit, the entire 40K community was talking about them weeks in advance.

And talking about the game means you're engaging with it.

And if you don't want to be left out, if you don't want to miss your chance to play with broken units, you need to be engaged too! Join us! It's fun to talk about 40K! Fun to talk about strategies! Fun to get mad at broken builds! Fun to yell about how stupid and greedy GW is! Even rage posts are engagement!

Epic, three part rants are engagement!

This is the primary reason I hemmed and hawed for so long over this post.

The balance passes are just another tool to keep you tuned in and checking on GW content. "Time to see if I'm ready for a fun day at the LGS tomorrow! Wait a minute? Have the rules changed since I last played?"

Even those surveys I mentioned in the last part are engagement. See here's the thing about marketing surveys: you'll never know the result.

Imagine a company sends out a survey about a product you showed interested in. They want to know what you think about various price points. How likely are you to pay if it's $30? $50? $100?

Now imagine that product releases at $50. The implication is that the company used that data and determined they would make the most money selling at $50. But you don't actually know that. The survey creates the perception that enough customers indicated they'd buy at $50, but for all you know everyone said they wouldn't buy it at $30!

At least twice now, GW has asked the community how frequently they want balance changes. And both times they increased the number of balance changes they were doing in a year.

But is that because the people answered in the survey that they want more balance passes? Or is it because GW wants more balance passes and wants to say they're doing it to better serve their customers?

And that's the most insidious thing about engagement. How many people are going to say they don't want GW to fix balance issues? How many people are going to say they don't want free content? How many people are going to say they don't want free products? On the surface it all looks very customer forward. If you never spend another dime on GW products, you can still benefit from these services. It seems hard to say these things are making the hobby worse.

But always remember, the goal is to get your money. And this engagement opens the doors to other tactics.

Building Hype and Release Cycles

The ultimate form of engagement is the release cycle. For GGG, it's every two months or so. For Call of Duty, it was every year. For GW's recent partner Creative Assembly, it was also every year. Ubisoft tried to do it with Assassin's Creed. Many F2P and Fee-2-Pay games have seasonal formats and battle passes of varying lengths. Some even tried to do them as frequently as every month!

For Warhammer it's 3 years.

Release cycles are a way that companies can manage hype, engagement, and spending. See every customer base's tolerance for engagement varies from community to community and waxes and wanes. What works for one game doesn't work for another. GGG tries to snag the most diehard ARPG fans, and they are more likely to stay engaged if they have something new to do every couple of months. EA and Activision try to snag casual gamers that like playing games with their buddies. They may be college students or have jobs, and will look for those handful of times a year they can binge some gaming with the latest Madden release or CoD game.

Warhammer is a bit more of a slow burn. It takes time to learn a new rule set or codex. It takes time to play a game. It takes time to build and paint a unit. It takes time to collect an army. A player may get less than a game a month and still consider themselves active.

Once a game has its audience, it can plan and design accordingly around the best time and ways to release content and build hype for it. This hype cycle not only helps with engagement, but greatly increases the chance that that engagement will turn into purchases. The general pattern is to start with teasers for the new release, then slowly build with more and more information over time. By the time the release is due, content has grown exponentially and players have a ton of information to pore through and be excited about.

Warhammer is almost built perfectly for this. Today's Rumor Engine could keep internet sleuths guessing for years. Lore drops, short stories, and books, hint at directions each setting might be going. Around the turn of the year, serious teasers start for what's coming. Then the big reveal show hits, and the new launch box is unveiled in all its 'Eavy Metal painted glory! Now with studio grade CG cinematics! Over the next few months more information about the edition comes out to get people excited for all the new changes that are coming. In the lead up, content is released daily. After all, most Warhammer games have multiple factions. Its an easy enough thing to dedicate a post to one or two factions each day.

By the time the box goes up for preorders, many fans have gorged themselves on teasers and hype.

This whole blog actually started as a hype blog covering the teasers for 10th Edition!

And I won't lie. I miss it!

The pattern is extremely successful. GW sees massive spikes each summer as even players that aren't planning on buying into the new box get engaged. I did not buy Saturnine, but I still spent money on Warhammer last summer.

But unlike other forms of engagement, this has a very real cost.

Despite increasing the size of their studio, GGG has struggled to increase their release cadence from every three months to every two. Ubisoft found they couldn't keep the annual Assassin's Creed games going, as they grew into buggier and buggier messes. Creative Assembly wracked up a ton of technical debt they're still trying to dig themselves out of. EA just started releasing the same games every year with new rosters, sometime with the old assets for previous games still visible.

And the least that's said about Black Ops 7 the better. Save for fuck AI.

If video game companies making digital products, where you can do things like reuse assets and code, can't get away with this in the long term, how is a physical game manufacturer supposed to do it?

And this, above all else, is the reason GW releases have been shit recently.

Three years is not long enough to release a new game in the scale of Warhammer. Not Kill Team, not Horus Heresy, not Age of Sigmar, and most certainly not 40K!

Why did these editions release in such horrible states? The developers didn't have the time to make them! They didn't have time to do all the proper balance adjustments and play testing. They didn't have the time add fun and flavorful options into these games. They didn't have time make sure every unit and model had a proper stat line. They didn't have time to make sure all the rules got into the final print run.

They didn't even have time to realize how bad the AoS4 Regiment system would be for army viability, and literally everyone saw that from a single WarCom article!

But hey! It's alright! It's okay! Because after all . . .

"It's Not How You Launch, It's What It Becomes"

The Game Industry version of "We'll fix it in post!"

It's okay to release your game as buggy, broken mess! That's what patches are for! You can just fix it later!

Here GW gets a two-for. Not only can they stick to their hype and release cycle, but when they inevitably have to patch and fill in content gaps that will drive engagement. Even any outrage at the state of the game will also drive engagement!

But this is not going as well as planned, and you only have to look at the Game Industry to see why.

The quote above is from Bethesda Game Director, Todd Howard in regards to the disastrous release of Fallout '76. This, and other quotes like, "It just works!" have made him a laughing stock in the Game Community. He went from a respected developer for some of the Community's favorite games, to a scorned figure viewed as either a blatant liar or out of touch executive. He is blamed for the disappointing release of Fallout 4, the disastrous release of Fallout '76, and the flop that was Starfield.

But if Todd was here, he'd probably point at Fallout '76 and how it's now a successful live service game. He might talk about other disastrous launches like No Man's Sky that are considered now to be fantastic games.

And if Kevin Rountree were here, he'd probably point to how successful 10th Edition was. He'd point to how AoS4 is currently thriving, how well Kill Team releases are doing, and would insist that Heresy3 will get there too once everything is said and done.

And that's the frustrating thing. They're not wrong! There's a certain appeal to a comeback, to a studio falling on their face and picking themselves up again.

But while these success stories exist, they are buried under the broken, buggy messes that litter the ground of the Game Industry. The Andromedas, the Anthems, the Suicide Squads. Every year there are multiple games sent out by studios to die. And almost every time the studio will stand by the release, they'll trot out apologies and roadmaps and talk about how their "actions will speak louder . . ."

But the apologies are meaningless, the road maps never followed, and the lack of action certainly does speak louder.

And so the Game Community has become more and more skeptical of and hostile towards big studio releases. More and more they've stopped preordering, they're watching and waiting, and ultimately not buying in unless the game proves it's not just another cash grab.

Could the Concords of the world eventually been good games? We'll never know. They've started failing so spectacularly the studios don't even bother to trot out the old song and dance now.

And we've been seeing this in Warhammer. 10th Edition was the most successful GW release of all time. But while AoS4 was still successful, it also significantly performed below expectations. Did the AoS community not want their new rats, or did they see how the same marketing hype had panned out for 10th Edition? When commentators and content creators expressed concerns, were more players willing to listen before buying? It's my understanding that Saturnine similarly underperformed, and may not have even been a successful release.

You can only use, "We'll fix it later!" for so long. Sooner or later, people start getting tired of broken promises.

And that's before we get to the final problem with this strategy!

Do you know what employees working on fixing the previous release aren't doing? Working on the next release! Every broken datasheet, every bad rule, every poorly thought out detachment is a debt studios might end up having to pay later. And that debt can pile up fast. Just ask Creative Assembly!

Now GW will almost certainly fix this with iterative editions like the Edition Parade, 40K 9th, AoS2 and 3, and so on. But this doesn't make those iterative editions better. When 11th Edition, AoS5, and Heresy4 come out, they will be built up on the pit their predecessors started in, instead of starting from a strong foundation. Not to mention the community sentiment around the previous launches!

And it gets even worse!

Selling It To You Later

I haven't talked about Legends and Kill Team much yet. But I definitely have feelings there.

So you're GW. You have a successful hype and release cycle. But you know that you can't deliver on it. You can definitely fix balance issues later, though that's going to create additional expense. But there's always another option.

Instead of trying to deliver on what your customers expect and failing, what if you just don't try?

This mindset actually evolved from a genuinely good place that got ruined by greed.

In the days of yore, game designers would have planned features for games that just didn't make it in. At the end of the day, money and time are finite resources. And projects that accomplish their goals on time and budget are mythical beasts indeed!

But it's okay! That content on the cutting room floor isn't useless. If your game is successful, players will want a sequel. You might even make an expansion and include the cut content there. Just because you couldn't get it to a playable state for this release doesn't mean it won't be a fun addition in the next one!

But then Bethesda sold us horse armor.

When publishers saw that they could sell us individual pieces of content for games, a genie escaped that has been terrorizing gaming for decades now.

Of course they swore up and down they wouldn't intentionally cut content from a game to sell it later. No! This will just be content that wasn't quite ready for release. Or it will be stuff the team can work on while they prototype the next game.

Then Dead Space 3 released without an ending. Street Fighter 5 released with characters already on the game disc that you had to pay extra for.

And lets not even talk about all the stuff that EA has cut from their sports games to sell as new features later!

The worst part is you can never know what was a planned feature for a release, and what was always going to be sold to you later.

Now so far, it doesn't seem GW hasn't sold us any rules content back. Anything that's hit the cutting room floor has obviously gone into these free content cycles.

But models? That's a different story.

In 2015 as Fantasy ended, GW released supplements that provided stats for older miniatures that were no longer available under the heading Warhammer Legends. Then in 8th Edition 40K, this term was expanded to many out of print 40K miniatures. GW occasionally even did re-releases for some of these.

But in 10th Edition the idea of Warhammer Legends took a darker turn. Large swaths of some ranges, especially both loyal and traitor Marines, were sent to Legends. These included popular kits like Land Speeders, Scouts, Dreadnoughts, Daemon Engines, and Lord variants. Support was ended for so many models! Then in AoS4, they not only culled ranges, but an entire faction got sent to Legends.

But it's fine! The models aren't gone! GW can't go to your home and take your models off your shelf. You can still use them in games with these Legends rules. No harm no foul!

Yeah, quick question then. Where are the Legends rules for The Red Terror?

The Red Terror came out in 3rd Edition and continued to be sold through 9th. However it hasn't had rules support for some time, and was treated as a "counts as" miniature for many editions. By 10th Edition The Red Terror wasn't even in "counts as" lists.

But it's okay! We've got the Mawloc! That's an even bigger, better Red Terror!

You just have to buy a new model!

Once a model is no longer in the rules, GW clearly doesn't feel any need to extend support to future editions. That doesn't mean it won't get a shiny new kit later, or be replaced by something else. But you can never know how long they'll support it for.

But by far Kill Team got it the worst.

With the release of the last edition, Kill Team began the Classified system. Any Kill Teams that didn't have official boxed releases from the previous edition were culled. Now, only the actual named Kill Teams get rules. Additionally, Kill Teams can be designated as Classified or not. If a Kill Team is Classified, it will get rules and support for Competitive play. Otherwise it's basically a Legends unit.

Now again, GW would say you can still play declassified Kill Teams in regular games. And you can certainly arrange for such games. But if you go to an LGS, you might run into some issues.

See the standard for table top gaming is that if you try to pick up a game at a store or event, you'll use the competitive rules. Otherwise you have to make prior arrangements. It's been this ways since WotC released the first competitive formats for Magic. And GW knows this.

They know that when a Kill Team becomes declassified, it will eventually lose support among the players. They know that when models go to Legends, eventually people stop playing with them. And they know that many players will want that shiny, new plastic eventually!

And even if you have rules, that doesn't mean you can keep playing with your old models. Many newer releases are significantly larger than previous ones. And since bases determine range and auras and terrain interactions, and line-of-site uses every part of the model, there can be a significant advantage to using an older model.

Another Tyranid example, it is my faction after all, but compare the new biovore/pyrovore kit to the old ones. The new ones are significantly larger, making them harder to hide, harder to move, and harder to run as units. If you use the older kits, you gain a gameplay advantage. And not every player is going to be happy about that.

So GW can happily cut models from the game to decrease workload, free up inventory, and replace them with newer shinier models. They know that rules, social pressure, and their marketing machine will always be working against us to get us to buy more plastic.

Final Thoughts

So I hope I've convinced you that this is the real problem. Competitive Play and its fan base are just a scapegoat for business practices GW has picked up from the larger Game Industry. They want you to stay engaged with their properties, get hyped for their release cycles, and trust that the end product will eventually be good. And they'd very much like you to replace your Termagants with the shiny new ones. No not just the 25 mm ones. Those push fit ones from Leviathan too! Don't you know they're better with spine fists? And why wouldn't you take those free special weapons?

I hope you didn't get tired from all the Tyranid examples.

And maybe you're fine with that. Honestly no judgement! The world sucks right now! If iterative editions that require frequent updates sound like fun, honestly me too! If you like collecting and painting new models and will always want the latest and greatest, I'd love to see your collection!

In the end, a lot of this was about trying to direct anger at the people calling the shots instead of other 40K fans. So I'll happily celebrate your love of these games and models with you!

But if these unfinished editions keep bothering you, if you don't like broken metas and subpar options and balance swings and L-shaped ruins, what can you do?

Well as I said in the GHAMAK post, vote with your dollar.

There's not a lot of us, and each one of us tends to have a lot of affect on GW's bottom line. Every person that decides their pile of shame has gotten too big, every person that decides to try other hobby lines, every person that takes a spin down memory lane with older editions and the models we already have - put enough of us together and we can make a big impact.

If you're angry enough, and you've got a Warhammer+ subscription, you can cancel it. That's an immediate action that sends an instant signal that GW is losing a customer.

But for the rest, lets go through the list.

Engagement

I'm not going to tell you not to engage with something that brings you joy. I'm not even going to tell you to engage less with it. And this is the least insidious of the techniques I described. It is perfectly fine to draw the line here and say, "I like free content for my hobbies." Just try to not let this justify other terrible behaviors GW gets up to.

If you are concerned, you can get that engagement in different ways.

Join smaller, more private communities if you can. Avoid engaging with big communities on social media GW might draw stats from. You may even want to leave those groups. Get your Warhammer news and information from preferred and reliable content creators that cover all sides instead of WarCom. In fact, stay off of WarCom.

The Hype and Release Cycle

Hype can also be a lot of fun. It's genuinely a great feeling to be excited for something. So if you want to enjoy the hype, again, feel free. But don't let that hype turn into action until you have a better view of the story.

Again, pay attention to content creators that provide quality analysis on what's being teased. If they're concerned, even if you don't want to let that impact your hype, keep those concerns in mind before purchasing. Don't give into new edition FOMO. Starter boxes often get additional print runs and are usually available for months after release. You can wait on reviews of the game before making your purchase.

Broken Releases

If you're tired of bad releases for games, there's honestly only one remedy, and that is the words of House Biscuit. "We do not pre-order!" Don't let companies sell you games before you know if they're good or bad. Don't buy bad games. It's really that simple.

The corollary to this is that you should buy good games. So if GW does put the time and work in, then you might want to consider buying their product. But establish that it's a good game first, and one you actually want to play, then buy.

Cut Models

Again, if you get a lot of joy from buying and painting the latest miniatures, more power to you. Seriously! Share your collection with us!

But resist the urge to fall into the "Competitive Play equals balanced game" trap. As much as I love Competitive Play, most players can experience a fun and balanced game using the standard matched play rules. Most Legends rules are fine for a friendly game, as are older models. Be generous for counts as and proxies. Let me-I mean that Tyranid player-give their Leviathan Termagants spine fists.

But, of course, watch out for That Guy.

It is unfortunately likely that Games Workshop will only become stingier with their IP in coming years, and will only search for new ways to expand their business and get more money out of us.

Part 2 - Balance is Just Part of It

So in the last part I rejected the Competitive Play Hypothesis as an alternate hypothesis to what I think is going on in the House of Workshop. For ease, you can find that here:

This next part is trickier, because this isn't an idea you might think you can reject. Games Workshop is a business, and they can pursue multiple business strategies. They almost certainly take the Competitive Community into consideration when they make decisions, but it's probably just a foot note and definitely not the cause of the changes to AoS and Horus Heresy.

Balance is different.

While Games Workshop became a "miniatures first" company under Kirby, they do still make games. And under Rountree, their game division has definitely been busy. Making "balanced" games sounds like a pretty good business model if your customers associate "balanced" with "quality."

So that's it, right? I can't reject the hypothesis so I have to move on.

But remember, what I'm arguing is that Game Industry ideas are the reasons why GW games have had so many troubled releases recently. So the alternative hypothesis is not, "GW is pursuing balance as part their business model." It's "Balance is the reason why GW games keep having troubled releases."

And I reject this hypothesis. GW's idea of "balance" is just another lesson they've learned from the Game Industry.

In fact, many problems people had with AoS4 and Heresy3 can't be explained by balance at all!

But game balance is definitely part of the strategy. But before we get to that, I'll prove my work.

What's Wrong With Balance Anyway?

So if for some reason you're reading this and you're not a Warhammer fan . . .

First of all! Hi! Welcome to the Warhammer fandom! We've been hating the thing we're fans of and the people who make it since before you were born! It's one of the best parts of the hobby!

You're probably really confused at why anyone wouldn't want a balanced game.

And you should be! Because games are more fun when they're balanced and both players have a fair shot at winning!

So then what's the problem?

Well as I said above, some Warhammer fans, including those I think are actually good content creators, feel that many recent game releases have been subpar. The reason they often point to is game balance. But not that the balance is bad (even when it is), but that the games have been changed for the worse in the name of balance.

The blame for this then gets passed onto the Competitive Community. And they don't deserve it.

So what are these changes?

Streamlining the Game

I started in 2nd Edition back when I was in high school. There were so many crazy mechanics from that hallowed era that never made it to 3rd. One of my personal favorites was the barrage template. It was a cardboard blast template with four circles on swivels. You placed the first circle with the arrow pointing at the gun that fired, then rolled dice and moved the next circle to line up with the number. Then you did that for the remaining two circles. This was the template for the Hive Tyrant's Venom Cannon. And I always managed to do so much damage with it! It was fun! It was flavorful!

It was lost to the ages.

Ask an old Warhammer fan about their favorite edition and faction, and you will hear stories like this. So many fun, flavorful, and crazy rules that have been lost to time.

When 10th Edition and AoS4 were streamlined, balance and Competitive Play were blamed for it.

And it makes a certain sense. If the rules are simpler and more consistent, then they're easier to balance. The damage value of a gun with four swiveling circles is much harder to balance than, "D3 attacks with BLAST."

But while this is easier, I think this is a latent benefit. GW's intention for streamlining their games is well known. They're trying to attract new players who they fear will be overwhelmed by the rules. Balance isn't even the reason the barrage template was removed. It was removed because Kirby pushed 3rd Edition into a darker, grittier, and less fun setting and system. This is when 40K truly became Grimdark. One easy example is what they did to Orks. Ghazghkull went from this happy guy.

Two this bland, clunky mess.

"Where's Makari?" we asked. "His luck finally ran out . . ."

The streamlining of 3rd Edition had nothing to do with balance. It was all about a new vision and direction for the game.

And the thing is, 3rd Edition played much faster and smoother than 2nd did. I got way more games in and those games tended to be larger and more epic. This is the same intention for 10th Edition and AoS4.

Streamlined rules not only attract more players but allow for and encourage larger games. 10th Edition especially exploded in model count from its previous edition. And that means more models sold.

You'll also note I haven't mention Heresy3 in this section yet. That's because Heresy3 got more fiddly and complicated than its predecessor. They even brought back the old Rogue Trader mental stats for it! So if GW is just pushing streamlining for balance, why did they make their most recent game even more complicated?

The fact of the matter is that you can balance around fiddly mechanics. You can balance around inconsistency and randomness. Games do it all the time. If they put the barrage template in 11th Edition, and the player based suddenly doubled, you'd bet they'd find a way to balance it.

In short, this is about attracting players, not balance. It's about selling more models to existing players too. But I'll also have more to say about it in the third and final part.

Options Are Being Removed For Balance

You could put this under the streamlining, but I had to make it separate for Heresy3. One complaint that a lot of players had for AoS4 and Heresy3 was it felt like options had been simplified and removed. Fewer options, less to balance! Those sweaty try-hards are at it again!

Oh boy! There are so many reasons why there are fewer options. I'll get to one of the big ones in a moment. And again, I'll have a lot to say here in the final part of this. But fewer options would make it easier to balance. Once again though, that's just icing, we know why they're really doing this.

A while back, GW lost a court case where they were trying to stop a third party manufacture from making bits for their models. One of the arguments raised and accepted by the court, was that GW games encouraged kit bashing. Their games often featured units that didn't even have models for them. If players wanted to play with those units, they had to scrap them together themselves.

Of course GW wanted us all to use their bits for this. Want that Doom of Malan'tai in your Tyranid army? Get some green stuff and Tyranid bits and make it! The court considered this an expressed license by GW for people to make derivative works based on their IP. And so people could make bits or even whole models if GW wasn't doing it.

And thus began "No Model No Rules." GW even made it their official policy that models must use official GW plastic at their stores and events.

This is one of the main reasons options got taken out of Heresy3.

That and they literally forgot to print the rules for some.

But to top it off, the options that are available are more complicated. Thus they are actually harder to balance. Before, Heresy just had a bunch of flavor options that were always subpar. The intention was to revitalize the game (and sell more models) by making other options more impactful.

The same is true of AoS4. Although not to the same level of success. Here I need at least tease one of the important aspects of the final part of this rant. Time was almost certainly the primary issue here. But a lot of it was streamlining as above. And here's the thing, we know that this streamlining doesn't mean you actually end up with fewer options.

Because 10th had their options streamlined far more than either game.

Tenth lost a ton of unit customization, separate points for wargear, many options off of individual units, and plenty of actual units. The end result is many of those options were redone or have since come back as additional units. This has had the result of making many of those choices more useful, and also making it so you want to buy more models for your army.

Oh yeah, you can bet we're going to talk about that in the final part.

In short, the goal was to make it easier for new players to make armies, to attract a larger audience while protecting IP. They can then introduce or change around options to encourage people to buy plastic. And then time restraints just made things worse. Balance had almost nothing to do with this.

Balance Is Why Models Get Removed

. . .

Do I really even have to do this one?

Okay, so I'm skipping over the "Fewer models easier to balance!" part of this. Both that argument and the real reason are just too obvious.

Let's start with the official reason.

So originally Citadel miniatures were made of pewter. People didn't like that. Kids play these games, and GW wants kids to play these games. So pewter had to go.

It was replaced with finecast resin, one of the most reviled substances in the hobby. Fun fact! That shit is toxic! Oh it's fine if you're just touching it. But if you've got fine particles of it, say because you're sanding or trimming poorly cast resin, you do NOT want to breath that shit in.

People didn't like that. Kids play these games, and GW wants kids to play these games. So resin has to go.

Right now, GW is walking a fine line by listing some of their kits as 15+. But they're working to replace all their kits with plastic as quickly as they can.

But lets face it. We all know the real reason they remove kits. And I'm not going to wait till the next part for this one.

They are removing kits to sell you more kits.

Yarrick gets "retired", and Lord Solar Leontus comes out. Karandras goes missing in action, but Warp Spiders get a new Phoenix Lord.

Just look at Kill Team! The Kill Teams are literally on a Standard style rotation!

Even if you hang onto your pewter and finecast, other people are going to sell them to collectors to buy new kits. And even if you don't, you face a day when one of your faves has a new model, on a new base, and the old one is no longer supposed to be used at official GW stores and events.

So yeah, while balance benefits from some of these changes it is not why GW is doing them. On the whole, GW is streamlining games to attract new players and changing options/removing kits to sell you different ones or replace them at a later date.

Balance Changes Make It Hard To Keep Up and Makes Books Worthless

And now we get to the big one, and the moment I realized what GW was doing.

For all of the above complaints, there was a definite and obvious reason why GW was doing it that had nothing to do with balance. In many cases, balance eventually became harder, not easier, which is a pretty strong argument over it being the intended goal. When balance benefited, it was clearly a happy accident.

But this is different. This is a problem that exists directly because of balance changes.

So I'm going to do this one a little different. I'm going to talk about the problem, talk about how this ties things back to the Competitive Community, finally put the Competitive Play hypothesis to rest, then talk about why GW would claim they're doing all this.

In the end, I'm going to reinforce that this is not balance ruining launches, so it doesn't mean I have to keep balance as an alternative hypothesis. Then I'll finally go on to the third and final part where I show how Game Industry trends better explain everything we've discussed so far.

Back when I started playing Warhammer, and basically every tabletop game except for CCGs - Hell back when I started D&D with the Black Box! - you just bought a game and played it.

For 2nd Edition I bought the big starter box, gave the miniatures to my friends, and hung onto the books and components. I then bought the first Codex: Tyranids, which is still on my shelf, bought my miniatures and played. Other friends would buy other boxes so there were more books and components to spread around. Between us we had my Tyranids, two Space Marine players, one Space Wolf player, one who switched between Orks and Chaos, an Eldar player, and a Guard player.

Those kits and books lasted us through high school.

Shortly after graduation, 3rd came out. Again I got the box. I kept the miniatures this time but have since lost them. I got my new Codex when it released, the wonderful and often derpy 3rd edition 'Nid minis, and that was how I played the game for 5 whole years. I still have all the 'Nids save for one stray Carnifex that accidentally got left behind when I moved.

It should be obvious there is a lot of nostalgia there. And I would have said that was the main reason for this complaint. People miss a simpler time when playing games seemed simpler.

But not long ago I played a game with a new player. They were just starting their Guard army. They went to their LGS got some minis, got the datacards, and downloaded the Core Rules and Guard Index.

They then got frustrated when I told them that their rules were out of date.

They had planned out their army and were excited for what it could do. But it could no longer do that thing. They spent money on those datacards, and some of them were now worthless.

After some rule 0 conversation, we decided to play with the new rules. Everyone in the group was playing the most recent version, and that's what they wanted to play.

But they still felt bad that they couldn't play the army they had been excited for.

So this is not a nostalgia problem. While it is a problem that can be fixed in the rule 0 planning phase, some people just don't enjoy keeping up with the balance changes. And no one enjoys buying a book only for it to be out of date a month later!

Those things are way too expensive!

But there is a nostalgia aspect to this. There was a time when people just bought the books and were happy with what they got. And if they weren't, they would go back to older editions. Or you would have a D&D4E to Pathfinder situation.

But you know who wasn't happy? Competitive Players.

Now I've already discussed all the horrible ways oldschool Competitive Play went wrong. So balance was only part of the issue. But as the Kirby era ground on, things got much worse. Believe it or not, there was a time during the older editions when GW published errata and answered FAQs. There was a time when things would get fixed in supplements or White Dwarf. But as the Edition Parade continued, GW interacted with their games less and less after release. And that left Competitive Players griping about bad, broken, and busted rules. And since events always used the most recent edition, they couldn't rule 0 or houserule out of it (at least until the circuits started).

This is where the connection between balance and a - again only at the time - toxic Competitive Community formed.

So why else would they do balance changes? If a lot of players don't like having their books become broken and having to rewrite their armies between games, who are these balance changes for?

GW Is Not Just Balancing for Competitive Players

Everyone! The short answer is they're doing this because everyone wants them to!

The long answer is in the next part.

The vast majority of players want their games to be balanced. Yes, there are WAAC players that only want to play overpowered builds. But we don't care about them. Yes, there are try-hards that like to try and win with underpowered builds. We already have that in 40K, it's called Imperial Agents. And yes, there are players who have fond memories of playing games with quirky and silly interactions that couldn't have possibly been intended. But even they talk about not playing other games because they were bad or they didn't enjoy them.

What was wrong with those games?

Could one of those things possibly have been balance?

If you sit down to play a friendly game with a friendly friend, and one of you is going to win and one of you is going to lose, you will more reliably have fun if that is determined by luck and skill and not because "you're playing the broken army!"

We have seen this in 10th Edition and AoS4. One of the biggest contentions people had for both games is they released in completely broken states. Eldar Wraith Knight spam and Night Haunt were both brutal to deal with on release, especially if you were playing something like AdMech or Iron Jaws. And everyone hated it! Often including the Eldar and Night Haunt players!

The same people I saw making bad takes about balance hurting the game were also complaining about these things. Some complained about the state of Combat Patrol and the Leviathan launch box. Some complained about Leagues of Votann and Codex Creep in 9th Edition. Some complained about Iron Hands and Knight Castellans in 8th.

If balance only matters for try-hards, why did they complain so much about it?

And we saw it with game numbers too. Games of 10th Edition spiked sharply after release only to drop down to below where they were when 9th Edition was ending and no one wanted to play it anymore. I heard similar reports from AoS players. So it wasn't just people bitching on reddit. People legitimately didn't want to play the game.

And while GW was notoriously bad at market research under Kirby, you know that has changed under Rountree. So they know we care about it.

They even did surveys on the issue. And after each one, they increased the update cadence. We'll talk about those later, as though this implies what I'm saying, there's more to it than that.

GW Doesn't Even Seem to Balance for Competitive Play

Additionally, while Competitive Players want and benefit from balance passes, it's clear GW isn't balancing the game around them.

Back when GW was actively talking about balance stats, they often talked about Win Rates. Win Rates are often brought up by Warhammer content creators. Some even seem to treat them as the be-all and end-all of balance.

You know who doesn't care that much about Win Rates?

Competitive Players.

Win Rates are only one piece of the story, and they can be skewed by factors such as how many active players a faction has, and the skill and experience level of the average player in that faction. Competitive Players also look at event wins, how often a faction reaches top tables, and undefeated runs. And they'll compare all stats with how many players are actually going to tournaments with an army.

But the average player is never going to care about any of that. To them, Win Rates are going to be much more reflective of their experience.

Additionally when GW posted Win Rates, they could be considerably different from known tournament stats. They more closely resembled stats compiled by organizations trying to collect data on games of all types and levels. So they weren't just using tournaments as their only measure of balance.

And because Competitive Players play so many games, they care a lot about what builds can succeed. One of the joys of Competitive Play is seeing a player go to events with a new and innovative list and win. Many are always trying figure out the next strategy that will lead them to victory. However sometimes there's a meta boogeyman that keeps you pinned into specific strategies. Other times a build looks fun and interesting, but doesn't have the support it needs to be viable in Competitive Play.

And while points changes help, viable builds are often a rules issue. Now GW has definitely shown a willingness to change rules - just look at AdMech - but they're also often strangely stingy with those changes. There are lots of detachments in 40K that are in desperate need of love, archetypes that have fan support that just languish. Arguably there's an entire faction that's gotten that treatment.

And no, I'm not talking about Agents. They're not a real faction.

Custodes have been really suffering this way since their book dropped. Their rules paint them into a corner and they really only have one viable build. Some have suggested that just changing Wardens could be enough to set them free.

But community data shows Custodes have a good win rate. The average player can have a lot of success with the faction in multiple builds. It's only Competitive Play where the limitations of the faction hold them back.

So it's actually pretty clear that GW cares more about the general perception of the game balance than the nitty gritty of Competitive Play. After all, while sometimes this leaves some Competitive Players unhappy with the state of their factions, it's usually a handful of that previously mentioned 3%.

Why would GW risk the enjoyment of the average player for those they know are already invested?

Rejecting Balance

There are a handful of other balance issues we can talk about. There's the terrain thing with the L-shape ruins. That falls under streamlining. There's the fact that the average player may not have the models to change builds with balance passes. But that falls under the whole, "Buy more plastic!" thing.

And honestly, there are just angry WAAC players who hate it when their broken builds get nerfed.

But I don't care about them. I care about players and content creators who I know are reasonable people who just want to have fun. And some of them have developed the impression that their fun is being impacted by these balance changes and a style of play they don't participate in.

Like I said, this is a little tricky because GW obviously does care about balance. They are investing the time of their rules team into improving the balance of the game. Yeah, this improves the apparent quality of the game, so it's good for marketing.

And GW would obviously say that this is what players want. They would tell you they have the data, they have the feedback. Players care about game balance and they care about their . . . snirk.

Okay, I will damn with this faint praise. While GW probably doesn't give a shit about their players past what's needed to earn revenue, the employees working at GW are a different story. Especially now that they're more front facing, they almost certainly want to be remembered for good editions of their games. And that almost certainly includes balance.

But is that really all?

And even if it is, I feel there the balance hypothesis just doesn't fit what we're seeing.

It's obviously a part of their strategy, but it's not why we're seeing the changes we have. It's not why there have been so many issues with recent game editions on launch.

But now it's time to stop rejecting alternate hypotheses and advance my own. GW has been pulling these strategies from the Game Industry at large. And it's hurting our hobby!

Please join me in Part 3 . . .

TOMORROW!

Cause this took way longer than I planned and I really need to sleep. >.>

Sorry for the tease there. But I'll try to get this finished as soon as I can!

[Edit: It's up!]

I'm once again liveblogging my reaction to a Warhammer preview, and I couldn't be happier!

Why?

Because the Preview was live again!

If you've followed my Warhammer Liveblogs you know how much I hated that they moved to prerecorded live shows. And I wasn't the only one! But once again the studio has listened to the community and it looks like we've got live shows back.

This is one thing I will constantly press about Games Workshop. Being less than a billion-dollar global company, in a niche hobby, means they still have to respond to us. If we make our displeasure known for long enough, and it impacts their sales, they have to act. If even 1% of Warhammer fans don't buy the latest and greatest product that GW releases, it hurts.

It also helps that they're under UK corporate law instead of American corporate law.

And I have a feeling from some of the things I've seen on discount retailer sites, that certain big releases have been under-performing. So hopefully this is the first in some course corrections.

Give San Guard their wings back!

I'm still wondering about what's going on with how few releases have been announced for Christmas. They do seem to be pushing War of the Rohirrim more than I was expecting, so maybe they really are trying to just let releases breathe instead of smothering them. I'm wondering how Necromunda Secondus and Mechanicum performed given how they released along side Age of Sigmar 4.0.

Honestly I think that most Warhammer fans hold GW products as being the best in the market. When they start taking a downturn, we start asking why we're paying so much for them. I think GW really should go back to a slower release cadence of higher quality products. Releasing both of their major game systems back to back in essentially a beta state should not happen. There's no excuse for 10th Edition Eldar to release one summer only for 4.0 Nighthaunt to release the next. And the less said about 4.0's Regiment system the better.

All and all, I'm still really excited for this Preview. I'm not expecting too much right now, but I'm willing to be surprised. For now, just having a live Preview is enough.

Enough rambling! Onto the Preview!

Preshow

Our hosts today are veterans of the Preview shows, Alex and Nick. This was one of the first things that got me excited when I checked in on the stream after discovering WarCom was down. After some of their traditional introduction, including asking for location shout outs, Alex tells us what we've got in store. The reveals today are for Underworlds, AoS, 40K, Kill Team, and Legions. Legions in the past hasn't gotten a lot of love in these Preview shows, so I'm hoping for a little better presentation this time around.

But then Nick slyly cuts in that those are just what was announced, and we should keep our eyes pealed. I've heard some rumors already, but let's see what they actually tease for us.

Underworlds

We're starting with GW's original Skirmish game set in the Age of Sigmar. I'm still really hoping that Warcry gets some love again soon, but I'm betting Underworlds must be just slightly outperforming it.

Oh wow! So with the new edition of AoS out and the story advancing with the Vermindoom, the team has decided to release a new edition of Underworlds. And this edition looks like it will also start with a Stormcast verses Skaven box.

They're once again pushing that accessibility factor with this new edition. I will say this much, other than a few sticking points I have I don't really feel this push to accessibility has resulted in any "dumbing down" of these editions. Probably the worst offender was Kill Team 2nd, and they've undone some of that. Admittedly they pushed the worst part even more . . . Still I feel that 40K 10th and AoS 4.0 are still very tactically deep games. And that, at the end of the day, is what really matters.

And unfortunately we're probably never going to see this push to expand the audience through accessibility ever go away. Businesses in the current corporate world live and die through growth. There's only so much money GW can wring out of their current audience. There has to come a point where GW expands their audience, or investors will leave and the company will decline.

Unfortunately that's tricky to do when you also keep raising the prices of starter products.

But Underworlds has always been relatively inexpensive compared to GW's other products. It's a perfect example of creating a stepping stone into the larger hobby. Buying a board game style starter box with only a few push-fit miniatures to assemble and paint is much easier than buying and painting something like Skaventide. And GW looks to be leaning into that.

They're really throwing a lot of long looks into the miniatures and the board. Still, no matter how much time they spend here this is never as good as the bright, close-in pictures WarCom usually has later. One advantage of the Live previews is we often get to see some of those ahead of time. Hopefully Nick and Alex will focus in on some like they used to.

Here's our box reveal.

And you're making me nervous Nick. This is very similar to a lot of those prerecorded shows. Now that the reveal trailer is done I don't want to be here having someone presenting a prerecorded message on why I should want to pick this up. I want to be back in the studio, with chat, getting live impressions and active responses to questions and feedback from you and Alex. You got me excited for a live show, Nick. Don't turn this around on me.

Uh oh! It's a reset! Normally, this would have me excited. But there are two things that make me nervous here.

The first is that this game incorporates cards and deck building. If they're completely updating the rules, does that mean previous cards won't work anymore? Will we have to get new decks for any warbands we play?

The second is Kill Team. In case you didn't know, Kill Team just introduced a Standard style rotation that means that eventually your Kill Teams won't be legal in competitive play. Many classic Kill Teams already don't have rules in the new edition. Now many of those Kill Teams are still perfectly fine for casual games . . . for as long as GW writes compatible rules for them. But eventually you won't be able to play a given Kill Team without going back to a prior edition of a game. That's fine for collectors who have lots of friends going back to previous editions. But for most LGS communities, that creates a problem.

I'm guessing Underworlds will work in a similar way. I don't know if any previous Warbands will get retired, but they'll probably introduce a cut off point and then rotate out older Warbands eventually. You'll probably have to go buy a new deck for any of the older Warbands to use them in the new rules. This is all just speculation, but it's speculation based off how GW has been running their other games.

This may be a small point to some, but it's a legitimate up-sell to me. GW has gotten considerably better at creating and designing rule books. They've gotten much easier to read in recent editions of their games and much easier to use at the table. I'm hoping they continue to refine them. Also their apps have gotten better too for looking up the latest version of any given rule.

We're also going to single boards, war scrolls, and they're defining Warbands with stat systems to help you understand their play style. One thing I'm not sure of is the replacement of card art with miniature photos. I kind of liked the way the cards added some of that great GW art into the game. I'm not sure how well the various cards will depict the action if it's just still photos.

All and all the new edition looks good, but I've got questions that are going to need answered.

Back in the studio we've got some great shots of the miniatures - not sure I'm liking the sculpt around the eyes for this one - but we're not getting any community interaction yet. There's no point in these being live shows if we don't have any response to the community feedback and questions!

Hm . . . We've got them just talking over these repeating slideshows. I'd honestly prefer to just seem them sitting their and talking to each other to gauge their live reactions. And while I'll admit that this is a new edition, and there's a lot to talk about, they're kinda just going over what the presentation showed. Yes! I'm going to harp on this! I want community interaction, dammit!

Okay, here's one point answered. The starter set is going to come with four decks in it, one based on each of the now named play-styles, Strike, Take and Hold, Flex, and Mastery. These decks will be playable with any Warband. So any of the old Warbands that receives rule updates can use these decks to start with.

It looks like with other recent new editions, we'll get our first chance to see this played at a GW event. In this case it's the Tampa Open, which is next weekend! So we'll probably learn a lot about the game in the coming days.

. . .

And now we're moving into the next part of the show. No questions taken, no feedback, not even a glance at chat. I'm not happy.

Age of Sigmar

And it's just the Warhammer Day miniature. We've already seen this. It's a pretty cool looking miniature to be sure, but why are we covering it here?

My hype is draining away.

Same thing with the Darkoath. Though this looks like it might be a box set, and that means it might have some new miniatures.

Oh! While they didn't show it, this is the announcement for the Slaves to Darkness Battletome. I did miss that this box set is the Darkoath Spearhead. So this will be our first big release for AoS 4.0 following Skaventide.

We're getting a new release for a Sorcerer Lord outside of the Warhammer Day model. This one sounds like it will have a few options for it. Hopefully we'll see these on WarCom.

And here's our Battletome reveal! It sounds like they're doubling down on how little changed between the Skaven Index and Battletomes. This is potentially bad as some of the AoS armies need some real changes.

We are getting a new Army of Renown, Be'lakor's Legion of the First Prince. So hopefully that will bring something interesting for AoS players to experiment with. It's my understanding though that Regiments of Renown aren't seeing much play right now. But we can wait and see.

Speaking of! We've got a nice rules preview here of a new Regiment of Renown that can be included in any most of the god-aligned Chaos factions. The Daemon Prince gets to keep it's Gift of Chaos that it would have claimed in an S2D army and gets the relevant faction Keyword too. However, I can't imagine spending a drop on this the way AoS 4 currently plays, unless they change how drops work in the next rules update.

Battleforces

They didn't mention any universe transition, just that big boxes are on the way soon. My guess is this is our first look at the holiday boxes, which will probably included both 40K and AoS, maybe Old World if we're lucky.

These are all themed after detachments. The Tau box is obscured, but we saw it earlier in the preview, and is the Retaliation Cadre. This means that this is probably a sneaky reveal of one of the new Imperial Knight Detachments, the Valourstrike Lance. Though that sounds suspiciously like it might be a rename for the Noble Lance.

I'll note that none of these battleforces are Chaos themed. We've got three Imperial battleforces and two Xenos. But there looks like there's a lot of value in these kits. That Tau box has a Riptide in it, the Knights have a Paladin and four Armigers, the Sisters comes with two vehicles and a pair of Penitent Engines, the Necrons get the Void Dragon, and the Dark Angels get The Lion. I'm not gonna add everything up here, since I can't see exactly what everything is, but that's over $300 worth of Knights.

And just as I suspected, we immediately go into AoS boxes.

We're only getting four here, Maggotkin, Cities, Iron Jaws, and Flesh-Eaters. One for each Grand Alliance. These don't appear to be based on any Regiments or Armies. And I'm not seeing anything popping out at me for high value items.

These are indeed our holiday boxes. As with recent years, these are designed to go along with the intro boxes. So if you get a Combat Patrol or Spearhead alongside one of these, you'll have a pretty decent collection. Whether they match well with previous Battleforce launch boxes, I'd have to check. But at the very least, I know the Dark Angels one didn't have The Lion in it.

They're saying they're supposed to match Regiments in AoS. I only checked Iron Jaws, but looking through the others they also don't match any current Regiments. So these might be renames or new Regiments coming in the Battletomes.

Hah! They even just mentioned that the Cities of Sigmar force can represent different Regiments! So maybe there wasn't any actual consideration made there at all.

They also just brought up that there's duplication with the Morbheg Knights. So not so good there for the AoS portions either.

Warhammer Armoury

They tease that no one knows about this reveal yet. But it's an Officially Licensed product, so outside of games I'm not sure how much interest there will be.

Warhammer Armory! Okay, you have my attention.

Also, gee! I wonder what's about to be revealed?

There it is! Ghal Maraz! (Subject to GW's approval.)

i haven't gotten my hands on any of these, but I really want to see if I can. I just love stuff like this. If my father's business could get them to sell, we would in a heart beat.

I still have my Slayer of Kings. It's sitting right next to me. I'd honestly love to collect more stuff like this.

Legions

So we've already had Mechanicum for Legions revealed, so they're starting off by going into the lore. I guess that's one way to try to pay more respect to the specialist game. Still I'm hoping for more news for Legions.

"Now you're probably sat at home, thinking, "Games Workshop we've already seen these." It had crossed my mind, yes.

Dark Mechanicum! While they haven't shown any traitor specific models yet, the new rules will allow you to field these models in both Loyalist and Traitor forces.

But they're not keeping us waiting for long! This is the Serperos Heavy Stalker. Looks like it's a near Titanic scale model for the Dark Mechanicum. Like most of the new Mechanicum stuff, I'm totally here for this.

I'm also still hoping to see some even larger creations hitting Titanicus and Legions. Say a certain class of Titan that hasn't had an official model for a while . . .

And book reveal! This book will apparently have the rule for playing both factions. So hopefully we'll see more force specific miniatures in the future.

A Special Surprise

Something a bit more lighthearted. A feast in the field, huh? Blood Bowl? Don't they already have halflings?

40K! I know what this is! Apparently Death Korp isn't all the Guard is getting!

"Make a pie crust from compressed cardboard and fill it with a tin of Munitorum issued nutrient paste." Yummy.

I'm so here for this!

These ratlings look fantastic and have so much life and character to them! This is a fantastic addition to the Guard range!

Oh! It's a commemorative model! Boo! I want this to be a part of the main range!

Oh well. Looks like I'm picking up at least one thing for myself this year.

Kill Team

They teased more ratlings, but look at these Boyz! More proper Orky miniatures! Yes!

And there's our new ratlings! Look at the bulldog!

So I guess the next Kill Team box is Orks verse Ratlings. So much for the idea that the next team would be Storm Boyz. Specifically this is Ratling Snipers verses Tankbustas.

All of these miniatures look pretty bespoke. The ratling kit is definitely new, but that doesn't look like an upgrade sprue on the Orks either. I'm wondering if all the Kill Teams will be new kits from now on?

This Kill Team set will include a bunker terrain piece and missions for trying to defend the bunker or storm it. Sounds like a fun time.

The holiday miniature will also have a mission for trying to steal the food for their provisions. So there's another fun detail.

Hmm. New animation or game?

Bandai Namco? Guessing game.

Oh! I was wrong! It's an animated short! Looks like a free one too!

Our next preview will apparently be in November, for the Championships and Grand Narrative Campaign. I'm hoping they do a better job there.

But as the sign off, they hit us with one more teaser.

Final Thoughts

I've apparently hit my image limit, so I'm not gonna go into more details on the miniatures. But on the whole they were fantastic. Not the biggest fan of the Stormcast models for Underworlds but the Skaven models were cool. All the other new models, especially our new Kill Team set and commemorative mini look fantastic! While this Preview was light on new models, what was shown was great!

And that's all the good I have to say.

So this did definitely need to be a Preview because they were revealing the new Underworlds. But honestly, they could have made the whole show about that and I think it would have been better. The Kill Team reveals were good, but the rest was stuff that would normally just be a WarCom article. So they may as well have just dedicated it all to an Underworlds deep dive and left the Kill Team stuff for later.

And while I think this was better than the prerecorded stuff we got before, this might as well have been prerecorded. In fact I'm sure there are gonna be people who accuse this stream of being prerecorded. There was zero interaction with chat. Yeah, they asked chat to call out where they were from like they used to, but then didn't acknowledge any responses. Chat might as well have not been there, and that means this might as well not be live.

This isn't okay! And while I appreciate the nod to the old format, this was honestly something where I wanted to see designers talking about what they were doing. I don't want to hear Nick and Alex talking about the new mechanics and design ideas of Underworlds, I want to here it from the people who made the game! While I didn't like the mock interviews, there's no reason not to have the designers on there talking about what they're excited about.

I've almost recovered from COVID, so I'm going to actually watch the livestream for Adepticon and catch the reveals! Whoot!

Before we start, let's try and make some predictions. First, the easy one. We're probably going to get the reveal for Age of Sigmar 4th Edition, though they'll probably just call it the next edition. Everyone's calling this one, since we're currently wrapping up this edition's narrative campaign and GW seems determined to keep to their 3 year cycles. It's practically a gimme.

We know we're only getting teasers for Heresy and Necromunda, so I don't have much to say there. For 40K, we're probably going to see something Chaos. I'm not exactly sure where we are on the roadmap, but that teaser definitely feels like Chaos. I don't think they'll reveal our mystery Codex just yet, but I'm ready to be wrong there.

For Warcry I'm guessing we'll be getting a new box announced. Same for Kill Team, though I don't think we've seen all the previously announced boxes released yet. I'm betting we'll see something similar for Old World, since they seem to be bringing armies back a box at a time. They've been talking green skins, so maybe they'll show us a full box set for them.

For Underworlds I'm going to go a bit further. They'd mentioned new ways to play some older war bands, so I'm guessing they'll be announcing some new rules or expansions to breathe some life into older Underworlds sets.

With those predictions pinned for me to suffer or celebrate, on to the show!

IMMORTALITY IS A CURSE

That's the heading we're beginning the show with. Okay then!

Just Lewis today, then? Okay! Hello, Lewis! What you got for us?

Okay! So they're going to have various presenters talking to people to do the reveals. That's new! Let's see how it works out.

Yep. Those are some spikey boys.

Dread Talons! Oh hey! We've got the Chaos Lord with Jump Pack back! Definitely some new sculpts there. After the show, I'll go through the articles and take a look at what exactly is new.

We got Nick and Simon for this part of the reveal! They definitely look like they're ready to have some fun! Oh! And we've got both Stu and Josh today!

Oh wow! We're getting two new CSM battle forces! Interesting!

Mentioning Vashtorr, I hope he gets a bit of a glow up. I really like him, and it would be nice if he got rules that make him feel like he the Lord of the Soul Forges.

They're announcing eight detachments for CSM. Couldn't let the slaves of the corpse emperor have all the detachment fun! This is definitely going to be a sticking point considering Tau players just got their hands on their codex and it only has four. While I'd prefer fewer, more well balanced detachments, the way GW has been dishing them out to each faction is kinda weird. I'm expecting to hear some grumblings about this.

Okay, so they're trying to go for kind of an interview style feel to this presentation. But it's feeling very scripted. Like . . . really scripted. WarCom's purpose has always been to be the hype train for GW. But even with the obvious restrictions on how they'd interact with chat, there still felt like there was a little bit of genuine interaction. This feels very phony to me. Not sure I like this new way of doing presentations.

And, of course, they're suggesting all the CSM fans should run out to grab both boxes. I'm curious how this will turn out. On the one hand, this will allow someone still collecting their army to pick the box they think will serve them best. On the other, that's even more FOMO boxes coming out. And again, can't help but note that Tau only got Kroot in their box, so Tau players that wanted to actually play Tau didn't get served very well. But CSM is getting quite the spread it seems.

Wow! Even the way that cut off felt abrupt and forced. Geh. Really not liking this so far . . .

So apparently that's not it for 40K. They really want all the 40K fans to stick through the entire show and maybe find something they like from the other systems. For now, it's time to visit the Mortal Realms. Don't think it's AoS yet, but let's see what we get.

It's Warcry! And it's a new boxed set! Looks like an Osiarch warband verses an Idoneth warband! Those are gonna be some interesting miniatures! Of course we already saw those new hounds teased.

Just Nick and John this time.

Oh! I was wrong! Looks like it's Sylvaneth, not Idoneth. I got a more Idoneth feel, but these look like they're both oddballs for their factions. The Osiarch warbands are exiles. And the Sylvaneth have been infected in some way.

Warcry isn't going to smaller box sets yet it seems. This boxset will contain both warbands and the terrain.

Oh! Moving right on to Underworlds it seems! Let's see what's up!

Underworlds often gets the craziest warbands. We've got a Death warband, and I think a Chaos warband? It's honestly hard to tell, they've got kind of a torture asylum kinda vibe to them.

So this is our new box and season. Oh well. Maybe there will be more, but it was a swing for the fences prediction.

So our Death warband is Flesheater courts. The delusion for this band is that they're all gourmet chefs getting ingredients for their lavish banquets. Yum!

The Brotherhood of the Bolt are crazy flagellants that have at some point been struck by lightning. And so they believe they've been chosen by Sigmar! Like I said, Underworld warbands are fantastic.

Now we're back to get a little bit more build up for the full AoS reveal. What could it be?

Oh! Getting teased by some Chaos boys! This dude looks badass!

Looks like Cities of Sigmar verses Slaves to Darkness.

Oh! Dudette! Abraxia, Spear of the Everchosen! Really awesome model with some really cool lore behind her.

From here, we're moving on to the next chapter of the Dawnbringers. I'm not caught up on this lore, so I can't comment much here. As I keep watching and listening though, I can't help but be reminded of how well the AoS lore has developed. I really loved my read of the Dominion book and of Morathi. There just isn't enough space in my life for both setting and systems to receive equal attention.

Teaser time!

Dune. Arrakis. Desert Planet.

Oo! Something Mechanicum this way comes!

The little post teaser chat has me thinking this is Mars and that we might be doing something with the war there. It would be nice to get a campaign for the Martian Schism with rules for both Mechanicum and Dark Mechanicum forces.

And now Dwarves! Looks like they'll be getting our next Old World box set! Dwarf players rejoice! Most of these are looking like older sculpts still, though I think that one champion might be new.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's a new Dwarven champion. And he looks awesome! We're also getting a new Dwarf King that can be fielded either on Shield Bearers or on foot.

Oh! I see GSC!

Yes! I'm finally getting my GSC kill team! And they'll be up against an all new Votann Kill Team! Unfortunately, it doesn't look like my Kill Team is all new miniatures, as we've got part of the Broodcoven here. I was kinda hoping for something more bespoke. It's not like we've got a large variety of units.

Votann, on the other hand, definitely needs new units. So I'm glad they're getting some much needed love. These are Hernkyn Jagers, and are part of the advance forces for the Leagues.

Rotlock Negotiation! Heh!

"Anyone else want to negotiate?" "Wh-wh-where did he learn to negotiate like that?" "I wonder . . ."

Oh! It's specifically a Brood Brother Kill Team! Veteran Brood Brothers! Very nice! Looks like it is at least a little bespoke!

And I think this is our Necromunda teaser. Hah! Well that was quick!

Alright! Time for that "just one more thing."

Got quite the badass taking on some Tzangors! Oof! Really intense depiction of how harrowing being a Stormcast must actually be!

Woah!

That's one way for the Skaven to begin their assault! Bloody 'ell!

And yeah, they're just calling it New AoS, the New Edition. We can count guys! You realize we're only up to 4, right? There are Orks that can count to 4!

Alright! We're going to get into rules here! It sound like we're getting a full, proper Edition change along the lines of 40K 2nd to 3rd, 7th to 8th, or 9th to 10th. Wonder if they're going to try what they did for 10th and give us some free rules.

"Opening up the game to more players than ever."

. . .

Guys. You realize that AoS was already the simpler system, right? How much more simple are you going to go? I'm okay with streamlining, but you can go too far. There are parts with 10th Edition 40k where I feel you slimmed down too much. While I do think there is potential fat to trim in AoS, there's some things they slimmed down in 10th I don't want to see happen here. For example, I don't want to see AoS go to a 10th Edition style Enhancement system. They went to lean with that system, and I hope they expand it in future editions. Kitting out your heroes is an integral part of any fantasy setting. You can't do that if you've only got three Enhancements for your entire army!

He's literally using the same language Stu used for 10th Edition. I'm all but waiting for him to say "Simplified, not simple."

But! One thing I think AoS could use, is something like Combat Patrol. If they took the Vanguards and made them standalone buy and play armies, that would be good! I'm hoping that's more how they're planning to get newer players in, not by greatly "streamlining" the game.

D'oh! Combat range is gone. I know one AoS fan in particular that's not going to be happy about that. That was such an elegant way to do different size weapons without Rank and File. Oh boy, this is turning into my anti-hype . . .

Oh! Here we go! Spearhead looks to be the AoS version of Combat Patrol. There's the claim from 10th, that it will be the most balanced game. We saw how well that worked . . . I'm trying not to be down since this is still good. But I hate hearing the same marketing hype that we already saw fail to play out.

We're getting more USRs, so that's definitely good. I'm a big fan there!

Okay, there's another one they claimed for 10th that I please, please, PLEASE want them to actually have followed through on! Stu had talked about how in 10th they tried to make it so that when you look at unit, you know roughly what to expect from that. But 10th just has no consistency as to how strong or tough weapons or models are. I'm really hoping that when Ben says they lined models up and tried to assign stats to them, they really actually did it.

Okay! They're doing free rules at launch. That definitely helps things!

And with that, that's the end of our reveals. And we're back to that banner, "Immortality is a Curse." Which is incidentally, one of the reasons why corporations suck!

Final Thoughts

Okay, my initial plan is that I was going to go through the reveal show, and then take a closer look at miniatures. But I think I'm going to make that a Part 2, since I'm seriously running out of gas. The 4E reveal really didn't help.

What is it with fantasy settings and fourth editions?

I'm trying not to be to anti-hyped by this. There were cool things in this reveal show. Let me TL;DR my sticking points.

I don't like this new style of presentation. It's too staged and controlled and there's no opportunity to get more information or clarifications live.

Two FOMO boxes for CSM is maybe too much. On the one hand, I like the idea of having more purchase options. On the other, I can't help but feel this is them seeing if they can sell more big boxes.

Eight Detachments for Chaos. Fluffy, and puts them on par with the divergent Space Marine chapters, but also makes anyone who got five, or even only four detachments feel even poorer.

They're selling the Broodcoven again! Did they just make way too many of these? Chances are if you play GSC, you've already got this. It greatly reduces the value on this box set. I hope we can get those Veteran Brood Brothers by themselves.

All those selling points for 4E are the same ones we got for 10th. And they really failed to deliver on them. That doesn't mean they won't succeed with AoS. But taking weapon ranges away is a bad start.

Other than that, those were some great reveals with great miniatures! Abraxia looks absolutely sick! We've got Mechanicum teasers for Horus Heresy! Dwarves are one of my favorite classic Warhammer armies! And the new warbands for Warcry and Underworlds are all awesome!

I hope we get real livestreams back. I hope those boxes are just what CSM players needed. I hope they do more with the detachments in the future to bring more balance and parity. I hope I can get those Veteran Brood Brothers sooner rather than later. And I dearly hope that all my fears for Age of Sigmar 4th aren't justified.