Consider that you buy sculpted miniatures from CB but that the free rules for their use are subject to change.
You pay for the rules with every miniature. And it will be easy to not make this - exclusive! - miniatures obsolet.
Saying something wrong a million times won't turn it into something right. You're paying for a miniature. That's what in the box. That's it.
Please do not mix concepts. Systemic obsolescence is not a lever that a hobby can use, unless you are GW and can endure the loss of customers while attracting new ones non-stop due to having presence in all media. While CB is moving steadily in that direction with the addition of the animated series, it is still a niche product compared with GW, and has been brandishing "best metal miniatures on the market" as their main attractive for a long time. Making those miniatures mere paperweights will cost clients, present and future, and is not something that can be easily summed up as "we planned it like so" without looking like someone who just tripped with his own feet and claimed that it was totally intended. You could say that only inelastic products can be made intentionally short-lived.
You can experiment with planned obsolescence on an elastic market with high competition only so much. Systemic obsolescence coupled with unobservable quality is a model that has to rely on word of mouth and the perception of quality in advance. And that in turn is heavily dependent on the good will of customers, which is steadily being burned. There is also the fact that CB can't really force the obsolescence. People playing in their living room may just decide to stay on N4 and play with their StarCo and Varuna, no longer participating in organised play. Some never started. Local communities may house rule the obsolete sectorials, or just proxy a lot. Which will fragment the scene additionally. So I have a lot of doubts in this model they seem to be transitioning to and while I don't want to tell Carlos Belli how to run the company, this is affecting my behaviour as a customer.
Thats very short sighted. I expected more from you. Its not that CB has some people that are happy to do rules for free (oh okay maybe they are happy, but they will got paid for it (to make the rules and army, not beeing happy, that is more a side effect I guess). Where did the money came from? I am sure you will figure it out. Oh and please try to not use so much exaggerations - that will make your posts look a bit childish.
This is my backup plan to N5. While I am not affected by the sectorial and miniature culling as others, depending on how N5 plays, I will keep my N4 rulebook. I liked the streamlined playstyle of N4. It kept the game smooth and focused on the combat between players. From what we have seen with N5, it seems CB has added more rules, thickening it back to N3 levels perhaps. While I looked forward to a polished game--which to me I thought was just adding a few rules to rebalance the game--if it becomes a cluster of new rules that still need further clarification on their use, then I think CB's aim has become off target. The simple game mechanic of " + " is for own troopers and " - " is for enemy troopers made the game far easier to remember and play during the heat of the battle. With the addition of extra rules e.g., Warhorse to counter the increase of BS-3, I think, could Corvus Belli just not added the rules in the first place? I am interested in doing a battel report using whatever trooper profiles in N5, but remove all the extra skills and equipment that influences the profile, just to see how balanced each trooper profile really is. They way I understand it, the game is about what selection of troopers a player chooses to accomplish a mission. Having equipment should offer an advantage to deal with a combat situation or assist with accomplishing a mission objective. Skills allow a trooper to behave in the battlefield more order efficient. I am keen to play N5 and learn how it works, but if I find it too clunky, then I may just keep to N4 rules, with a slight change by using the N5 weapon profiles.
... I remember the legend about how Pathfinder was born from Dungeons and Dragons... We mentioned this example in local chat in discussion about N4 and N5 a day or two ago.
At this point I'm committed to updating NCA myself if CB won't do it, to give my fellow players something fun to try, but my local scene has switched over to Trench Crusade which is honestly a lot of fun so odds are I won't get to play that much N5 anyway. On the bright side, that system is miniature agnostic so CB can't stop me using my Squalo anymore!
I’m not mixing concepts though, to my knowledge. Products become obsolete through developments of technologies and are replaced is systemic obsolescence. I couldn’t give away n2 starter boxes of aleph or JSA in my community so I ended up having to throw them away when I was moving. No one wanted the old sculpts locally ( I know there are people who consider the older sculpts more characterful and prefer them but they tend to to be a passionate minority) cause CAD sculpts for both factions existed and anyone interested in playing them wanted the new minis. There’s systemic obsolescence in sectorial design. Older sectorials just don’t match up as well as newer ones until they get an aggressive rework/revamp that comes with a whole new model line. It’s not intentional (to my knowledge) of CB being malicious. It seems that they are unable to balance the game at the scale that it’s at. The sectorial revamp that was supposed to happen with n4 for the older sectorials. We waited for a delayed release of them and they just released like they were in N3. The fireteam revamp where specific fireteams were supposed to get fluff based skills like the morat team getting terrain (jungle). They never did it. For whatever reason. There’s a finite amount of labor that they can do while staying within their budget as a company. And it seems that this new system they’re trying out of capping sectorials at 3 is in an effort to minimize the inevitable obsolescence of their product over time.
I’m not here to say that anyone is wrong in their beliefs on this specific topic. How long do you expect to get a return out of a product that you pay for? There are video servers that are down and make those games unplayable without community effort. There are tv shows that were produced that are no longer on the streaming services that made them and can never be seen again without illegally downloading them. There are movies made that publishers haven’t taken the time to modern their media format so unless you have a VCR you can’t watch them.
Thanks, on my side I can't say that I was expecting anything relevant from you, and you didn't disappoint... :) You know what's childish? Thinking that just because you bought a miniature, CB owes you forever, should support that particular mini and its rules forever, and that if they don't, you are entitiled to go on a whiny crusade. You bought a miniature (and a cardboard box, if you want to be precise). That's not an exaggeration, that's a very basic fact. I am sure you will figure out...
Having a product others don't want because there is a more desirable option is not per se obsolescence. I think the main disagreement here would be where the "system" part is located, since, to me, it looks like CB is trying to impose a fast-rotation system kinda like Magic TG, while until now it was mere negative incentives to play the old sectorials (one or two updated profiles, all the rest as is for years... USARf is the best example, with some new profiles and others that weren't modified in more than 10 years) thanks to the re-released and new ones being one stair step over the old ones (the height of such step would vary). As you mention, the communities take over and ignore the company that made the product first. This is a problem for most wargames, since it means less people to play with and a plethora of variations on the last published version, even if one is dominant; in the case of Infinity, we are talking at this moment 1286 players (global) who have participated in one or more ITS events this season, with less than 300 in USA or Spain... Even considering an equal number of regular players not involved in the ITS system (like myself for the last few years, aside from the last 9 months or so that I merely stopped playing in wait for N5) I'm quite worried about the game's future.
This is a very interesting topic , by the way. First of all the push of art into oblivion due to rights mismanagement and tax avoidance shenanigans is something I find abhorrent and I completely subscribe to the stance of some jurisdictions, that if something is not commercially available, keeping or distributing it for free should be perfectly legal. And I do have a working VHS. Now back to miniatures. The "new" part in CB's approach is essentially using rules obsolescence and lore development to encourage miniature sales, believing that sufficient number of clients tie rules to models, even if that is not formally so. I'm using "" for new, because GW has been doing the same for years, relying on its dominant market presence to carry it. Xargoth explained well why this carries risks, including to us, as players, even when we are not directly impacted by this rules cycling. But I do believe that the players (or the clients, more broadly) are more. With annual 4 mil revenue, as it was mentioned in some Spanish newspaper, it's obvious we're not looking at 2500 clients. Rather we see that the ITS is not all that popular. Which to be frank, also hints towards this rules-manipulation-for-sales not being that great of an idea. But we will see, we don't have the numbers CB has and we sure as hell do not have the goals that they have. It is interesting, however, why many players tie rules to miniatures so much?! Even when it is to their detriment. Is this some Games Workshop Stockholm syndrome that is going on here? Fennecs are just normal fusiliers with a gasmask. CB seems to believe that more people will buy fennecs than "fusilier with gasmask". And more people will buy griffins than "orc with a backpack". I guess they have done their market research on that and it is so. But why? And how much more people indeed?
I see your GW hater boner is up and ready , but this specific phenomenon is much more widepsread. If you have a concrete game rule tied to a certain representation form that makes them bound together and therefore very jarring to use the established representation of rules to represent a different set of rules. This was present in Warmachine (you don't just interchange Exemplar Errants and Exemplar Knights, even though both of them are bucket helmeted plate armored foot knights), in Firestorm Planetfall and even in non-miniature mediums like videogames (change the SC2 terran marine to look like a zegling and see how that works out) or mindtheater like D&D (if some one wears plate armor than it means that they should be hard to hit with weapons) etc. TL;DR This is just the basic human mentality of boxes and categories. PS: If we shouldn't tie rules to miniatures then why buy anything CB made in the first place? As Child9 said we "only" pay for the miniature and they are made form crap metal, so why bother at all? Just use what ever one fancies! .... Oh yeah that would make any game unplayable mess of chaos and instant death to the whole system . So it's best to avoid that, from both userbase and company POV.
Yeah. The concept of fast rotation is also interesting cause obviously it costs more to make miniatures than cards. So the life span of the product has to be different. I think all successful miniature companies are trying to figure it out and none have a great answer. Hurdle 1 is not die as a game. Hurdle 2 which the remaining companies fail at and then die is, how do you deal with growth once you’re a certain size. I asked this question in a discord but I’m curious what everyone’s answer here will be. My local meta hates Kosmoflot and wishes Kosmoflot just became vanilla Ariadna. With USARF being the smallest sectorial in the new edition, it can be perceived that it got the least amount of attention and is on the chopping block. So with these ideas stated i want to know: if CB were to get rid of Kosmoflot and make it vanilla, with it being the faction’s newest sectorial, and kept one of the 2 sectorials that got chopped, would you be okay with it? Question 2. If USARF is the next faction to get chopped and they get chopped in 2-3 years to make room for one of the Ariadna sectorials to comeback, would you have preferred they get chopped at the beginning of N5 or is it better to chop them later? most of the people I grew up with in Alaska collect 40k. None of them have ever played a game, know how to play, have ever finished painting a single mini. There’s definitely a lot of people who buy a product without ever using it cause the act of purchasing it feels good to them. Or any other wide variety of options for why someone would buy a mini but not compete in an ITS event. I wonder if there are more people buying the product than people who are interested in competitive play. But that question is impossible to analyze with data without breaking many laws and being a real weirdo.
For me, it makes sense Kosmoflot becoming Vanilla Ariadna. The excuse to create Kosmo was, we mix the best from all sectorials to get a Special Forces sectorial. With the trim of N5 vanillas, that role could be assumed perfectly by vanilla Ariadna, you also have a curated selection of troops from all sectorials and vanilla have access to fireteams. Many Ariadna players i know and talk with, dont like Kosmo, they say "It doesnt looks, feels or plays like anything Ariadnan"
Using everything from lego toys to historicals sure would. But the difference between fennecs and normal fusiliers is a gasmask. And the lore difference is that they basically got dumped on the planet where you need the gasmask, so they had to adapt to the sucky environment. This is nowhere near "marines and zerglings" level of difference and is actually way smaller than the trendy little jackets that Kaldstrom units were having. But those counted as the same unit, of course. Someone in the nethers of the CB headquarters has figured out that giving the fusiliers covid protection and naming them after a cute animal will fly better than giving them warm clothes and not renaming them. And I really want to understand why. I think this may tie to the previous question. Do such collectors go "oooh, these are all new units, I don't have those" instead of "eh, new fusiliers, I've yet to unpack the old ones, better grab something new"? What makes the weird people who buy boxes and never open them tick? And how many are them? We also know that people who buy the products for painting or for other games (i.e. 5 parsecs) exist and those are also an important bunch, but they would pick only based on looks. So the naming trick does nothing to them. Sadly we can't get that data without being weirdos (or worse) either.
