This is what you get when you ask a honest question I guess, from people collaborating with CB no less
The “dark net” (please note I talk about this term in a whimsical funny way) talks about some playtesters who step too much out of their plate and manners and got out of the playtest program as a result. Which led into a second wave of play-test recruitment not so long ago. Chances are that if those people you trust are one of those you’re fully immersed in a echo chamber. But since you want other opinions… let’s say that I am a 42 old wargamer, hobbyist and general overall geek who has been playing anything with a miniature or dice or a microchip since I was aware of conscience. Warcrow is AMAZING. Some of the points of it: - The activation/stress system is well implemented and provides relevant choices to be made. - The measure and movement system is agile, elegant and prevents any “cheating” of “ops-I measure too much”. - The unit system of officers position being the one relevant to your own unit declarations, but making your whole unit “shadow” to be targeted for other player declarations allows fast play while at the same time allowing hard choices of covering battle lanes or not. - The dice system and changes allows much more variety than the usual d6/d10/d20 of classical wargaming items without having you to bloat the rules book with special rules over special rules. The units themselves tell their history and combat/defense style at a glance of their dice and changes. - The magic system is integrated into the game elegantly without making it just “an special ability” like other games do. - An infinity game at tournament level of two very veteran players can take 1 hour 45 minutes. A 250 points game of Warcrow of two beginners players takes around 1 hour. Let that sink in, it is extremely easy to sit down and play. And do it fast. And have FUN while doing so. - But even if it is so easy to learn, the game punishes bad desitions, and rewards clever positions, cunning ideas and daring schemes. It has deep. And a easy to learn but deep game is not easy to find around. Infinity for example has deep, but it is clearly not easy to learn, and is one of the mayor battles of Infinity to get new players. - The miniatures are freaking awesome. They have go for a more “Warcraft meets Confrontation meets the Witcher” as an aesthetic choice. And if you have been exposed to bot games you will see how the Baronies of Alahan, Cynwäll, Nilfgaars and Stormwind are coalescing into the Hegemony of Embersig. And the North Tribes are a mixture of Ogrimmar, Skeelige, and Behemoth. How can anyone look at these miniatures and not see how freaking cool they’re? https://warsen.al/cdn/shop/files/unnamed_6.jpg?v=1730733625&width=1200 TLDR : Game is good, game is fast, game is fun. Try the game. PD: you do not have to waste money, go to your friendly Warcor and ask for a demo. And I am sure the time you spent, when spent with friends, is a well-spent time.
It's recorded and uploaded to Youtube, you wanna watch? But is in spanish, sorry for you. But im sure you can find plenty of videos in your mother language of people playing warcrow adventures on TableTop Simulator
I’ve not played N4 for a little while and it’s now looking like I’ll be unable to play N5 unless I can convince my player group to return. I’m still relatively excited though. As salty as I am over certain things (as I’ve mentioned ad nauseam) I am intrigued by what may be coming up in the new game. Honestly haven’t gone near Warcrow yet. Not due to any dislike of it, just generally I play more sci fi games and historical over fantasy. Love the look though. As a Warcraft player the minis really do give me nostalgia. When it’s time for a fantasy game I’m sure it’ll get given a go.
but this is the first time they’ve ever done anything like this. It’s a small Spanish company. And I would look at Privateer Press’s series of missteps to counter the 40k example. Privateer Press refused to invalidate previous purchases by getting rid of profiles. They couldn’t handle/balance the game at a certain point. Their solutions became more and more extreme until the game is where it’s at now. Also this is a much more philosophical question that I’m asking (I do not have an answer to it.) what obligation does any company have to armies that are purchased used? Merovingia hasn’t been buyable from CB for a long time. Acon and NCA went away a few years ago? When you buy a used a product from a different retailer, it no longer has company warranties. I used to work at an outdoor retailer (winter clothes in Alaska) and all the companies we carried had “life time” warranties on their products. But the spokes people for all those companies individually told us they would respect those warranties for 5-10 years after product purchase. So at what point is a games company no longer obligated to support a specific product in your guy’s eyes?
Personally, I'd rather wonder about the meaning of the current business model in the world of games, which aims for an almost endless expansion of the catalog, then cuts in the catalog and then expands again, with reskins, reboots, etc. in between.
Sure, stick a link to the video up with some sort of verification that it you and I'll apologise in full.
They are still playtesting for Corvus, but thank you for telling me what the people I know are doing because you heard about it online. Amazing really. The rest of the post is actually useful, but that brutal condescension kinda takes away from it
Volunteer playtesters that keep playtesting weekly a game for months that they find it mid? I presumed they were one of those that left, given what you described. Do their lack of passion for the game reflects on their feedback? Passionate players play more, after all, and this usually leads to be able to find faster the oddities and edges that need to be filed to obtain an smooth product. Of course, professionals Q&A testers who do it for a living are a different altogether category. But that’s a 40 hour work schedule with professional methodology we are talking about then. If that’s the case I do salute their commitment for a task they are finding mid joy on it. But all of that doesn’t matter, as I was indeed too quick to make a presumption. Apologies for having confused your personal acquitances with those who left the playtest instead of those who are still on the fray in the making of a great game and product. Nevertheless you were looking for other opinions. You have mine in my previous post and I am thankful you find it useful. I am a nobody on the internet, but still it is a honest to god opinion on the game. If you want to know more about the game or what to discuss some detail or mechanic of it, I will love to talk about it with you. And I am sure that there are others that will do. You can always jump to the Warcrow Discord to find them.
That's an interesting question. On one hand, you can say that the miniature is the product. The game is a completely separate thing, which requires this product for a small part of its events, and is just convenient for casual play, but you can play with other miniatures, or over TTS etc. Additionally, CB has sold miniatures with no connection to the game itself, such as the bootleg TAG pilots. Thus you can claim there is no reasonable expectation for maintaining a profile in the game. However, most of the customers do not think so, and this is what matters, essentially. They are predominantly players and buy the miniatures to get the best experience with the game. Which for many, from what we have seen, means as little proxying as possible. And now CB has introduced something that resembles planned obsolescence. If we trust a bit of theory, then this means higher emphasis on the customers demand for quality and more importance of word-of-mouth between customers for deciding on a purchase. We'll see if this turns out to hold true, as life often insists on not being as neat as some differential equations in a paper, but it sounds logical and checks out on paper. Note, that whether someone purchases something new or used doesn't complicate anything much. If there is planned obsolescence involved, he should have already calculated the depreciation due to the shorter lifespan, if he buys used. If this practice is not involved, it doesn't matter.
Strictly speaking, none. However, a miniatures wargame can only really sell with two value points- artistic merit of miniatures and the value of the game. We've seen with Bootleg that Infinity can't keep sales going on art alone. That means the rules have to be good enough for the asking price, and a long "service life" is a big part of that. As Infinity doesn't charge extra for the rules it has some value over most of its competitors, but it still costs $300 AUD approximately to get started. If it's even remotely a possibility a new player won't get at least a few years out of play from that investment as sold (not as proxies!), only the richest people I know would even give it a look-in. So the question becomes not what obligation does the business have to support its products, but how much they can get away with before their customers can't be stuffed dealing with inferior service. Given tabletop wargaming is a luxury product and there's a fair bit of competition, it's probably not much- heaven help all the smaller developers if GW cuts costs enough to find mass market appeal.
Fair enough that does appear to be you, I apologise for doubting you. Watched through the video a bit and it seems like you were enjoying the game.
Pretty much this is my line of thinking. I invested big in Privateer Press and Warmachine and I am now stuck with two full ranges which were not only discontinued from further production, they were removed from the game lore wise. So, no new developments there, and they are not tournament legal with new formats, only in their own legacy formats, which, surprise, no one wants to run in my local area - they technically are useful by "legacy" rules, but those rules will not be updated and game is not balanced around them. They are a stop gap measure to appease, because Privateer Press cut 13/15th of a catalogue in their one fell swoop. I am now stuck with tens of thousands of dollars (Warmachine was not a cheap product) of dust gatherers, which at best I can play once in a blue moon, after pigs fly, if I convince new players to play against my "legacy" army. As such, I am extremely hesitant to invest even a single further cent into Infinity untill more information is provided on the question of army and profile cuts. I already have all of USARF and I have almost all of MO. I made it out relatively unscathed for now, but my buddy lost all his armies - funnily enough, he played NeoTerra, Varuna and Acontecimento. He already bailed on the hobby and from around seventy players in our community, he is not alone, who got burned. He just got burned to cinders. The threat of losing entire ranges is immense. And as Infinity is a long term, time consuming and expensive investment, I know exactly one person, who can whale for a whole new army from a pocket money on the spot. Most players scrape by and buy a little bit at a time, a blister here, a box in two months, a tag in another three months. Which means that, by and large, you feel that investing in a product which can be invalidated at the half waypoint of collecting is a bad investment, and as a result, you look at another alternatives - and boy howdy they exist in spades.
Wait, so assuming he has minis for all those sectorials he has decided to bail from the game entirely even though the vast majority of the minis he has will still be usable in multiple N5 PanO lists? That's even before you take into account the ability to proxy?
You can not fight against people who are doing whatever is possible to self-hurt their own interests. Like those people who filmed themselves burning their thousands of dollars Warhammer Fantasy Dark Elf Army when Age of Sigmar was deployed. If, instead of going blind by outrage, they would just simply move on into the “old-hammer” community movement they would have enjoy decades of gaming in the system of their choice… and now with Warhammer The Old World they would have find themselves with a clean system with lots of players momentum behind. With Infinity is even more obvious they’re going against their self interest. As: A) the 90% of their collection range does still exist on the N5 line as their own profile. B) this game is the most proxy friendly ever and it is expected you’re going to proxy, specially at a new army launch. C) those Sectorials seemingly are going to get a “legacy” treatment with n5 rules format D) nothing prevents someone to make a tournament that allows “legacy” armies. And even if you go to the minutae of the ITS document not allowing it specifically, just make yourself that an extra of the tournament. I sincerely doubt CB is going to forbid you to do so. I myself have played ITS tournaments with extras or additions or modifications that went against the ITS document. And even if that is the case, just make the tournament without ITS ranking!!! E) And eventually they’re going to comeback. Maybe not in the very exact form they were originally. Maybe they’re merged with another sectorial, maybe they fuse together into a “Varunacimiento”. Maybe new models are released as “skins” for your current army as “acontecimiento is the jungle skin for Kestrel”. But they will come back. God damnit, even SQUADS got back into 40k after decades of being “eaten by tyranids” just being now called Demiurges. And even Chaos Dwarves are supported in the Old World by legacy after decades.
Yes. To him, it is already not worth it. He lost Auxilia, he lost Dragoes, Uhlans, Hexas, and more than that he lost his favourite identity in game. We all play games for different reasons, he was much more invested in the feel, lore and look of an army than in the crunch of an army. He already sold his army and moved on.
That is wild. Just writing off all the time and money you've invested in a hobby becuse things aren't exactly the way you'd like. I personally can't understand that mindset, like why not just adapt to new circumstances?
While I agree on the rest of points. Stop saying this. That is not true, CB never said that. They talked about releasing pdfs for playing N4. But these armies are gone. They won't get any treatment to be played with N5 rules.
