The thing is, actually connecting with the community would have headed off this mistake from the get. I don't know why they aren't talking to anyone in the actual community; nobody was asking for this. This isn't the first time they've run into errors for not talking to the community. I'm guessing it won't be the last. They seem to only engage with the community when they can guarantee a hugbox.
This is what I was thinking about for core ────────────────────────────────────────────────── 5 BOLT (Multispectral Visor L1) MULTI Sniper Rifle ( ) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (1.5 | 31) BOLT Boarding Shotgun, Drop Bears / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 22) BOLT Combi Rifle, Light Shotgun / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 23) BLOCKER (Hacker) Adhesive Launcher, Nanopulser, Flash Pulse / MULTI Pistol, PARA CC Weapon(-6). (0.5 | 21) BLADE FTO Boarding Shotgun / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 21) 2 SWC | 118 Points Open in Infinity Army with this as a complementary Haris ────────────────────────────────────────────────── 3 1 BOLT Spitfire / Pistol, CC Weapon. (1.5 | 27) BOLT (Hacker, Killer Hacking Device) Boarding Shotgun, E/M Mines ( ) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 25) BLADE FTO (Engineer, Tactical Awareness) Submachine Gun, D-Charges ( | GizmoKit) / Pistol, CC Weapon. (0 | 24) 1.5 SWC | 76 Points Open in Infinity Army
I beg to differ. Distribution of profiles among the sectorials doesn't differ from any other distrbution of new profiles among sectorials. From my POV, I now know I'll be buying the Haqq REF box (being a QK player, among all the other Haqq factions I play), but there is no incentive for me to buy the Nomad REF box (Corregidor being the only Nomad force I play, and they got nothing in the REF box), unless Reinforcements turn up to be wildly popular in my local meta - and it doesn't look like it would be the case (absolute proof: since the release of the Reinforcements rules, I've been able to score literally one game under these rules). Would it be better if CB took the approach of "the models / profiles will be also available for specific armies" from the get-go? Certainly. But they apparently decided Reinforcements were the next best invention since the invention of sliced bread, and that REF boxes will be selling on their own. They were wrong, but hey, hindsight is always 20/20.
Again, that is literally their job. When was the last time you saw any company ask and even use the suggestions of customers? Especially one that didn't go badly because they took some peoples suggestions and didn't others who then got so hurt they ranted about how the company is awful. Then the rest who got their suggestion now think they are entitled to more? They even said in the blog they limited the REF because customers didn't want bloat!
Dear Corvus Belli, Give me my Reinforcement Azra'il in my normal Sectorial List you cowards! Signed, QK Please. I want to shotgun someone. Joking aside, I do love that you posted the changes along with your reasoning. Thank you for that. It makes stuff way more palatable. Good job!
To your point, since this change I have seen at least 2 posts from people annoyed that they have added the bloat to Vanilla, and several others who are on the fence about it.
Sometimes to just get your job done you MUST ignore criticism or you get nothing done. I've been in marketing for many years and companies keep trying to fuck themselves over with what they think is good marketing vs. what IS good marketing. And while the customer might have what seems like a good idea to them for a product, they have no idea that their idea will double the cost, can't be shipped, or any number of back end things they have no clue about. People make comments about X should be changed in the game! But I don't feel like play testing to see if X even works!
Customer: there is too much bloat!! CB: Ok, these new models will be very restricted to REF only. Customer: NO!! We need these added to vanilla and sectorials now or we won't buy them CB: Ok, they are now available in vanilla and sectorials. Customer: NO! there is too much bloat!! this is why my companies don't design games based on customer criticism.
The solution is so crazy. Stop adding new profiles and go back and fix the stuff that exists. Instead of releasing new profiles and new models release models for existing profiles that don't have one! It's so crazy! They released a half baked game mode to try and sell models, it didn't work. The other solution is to add said models to their sectorials and NOT to Vanilla. Vanilla doesn't need to get everything.
Well as stated earlier, new stuff just sells better. It's just the way it is. But I can agree about it should have been Vanilla OR sectorals. Not both. But really, when you think about it. A lot of the new REF troops are really not that great in Vanilla anyway. So does it matter? The only ones I can even see playing in vanilla are the Marspider, Haetae, Dokkaebi, Nightshade, and maybe the Dawon. All of those are not uber powerful on their own. And what really is bloat? It's it really that much truble to scroll on the army list a bit more?
It's more about making it hard to onramp new players. "Yea, so you see this faction, you have 340 different profile choices, good luck"
Good point but I don't see it as unsurmountable. I also steer them towards a sectoral so that they can concentrate their collection at first.
Thats already a lot ;-) Kulak CoC for Nomads are maybe of good use currently we have SMG and HRL so you have to prox a bit. But I also think they should spread the boxes a bit more between sectorials, like they did with Nomads (sadly nothing for CJC). I am happy with WB but I would also like to see Hwarang in IA, Sulyong as a replacement for Bao and Doekkaebi in all three
If you really want to get into it. It's a lot for new players, it's adding extra SKUs that now I have to worry about stocking, or not, and it's usually just adding yet another random thing to the faction. On top of that we still have profiles that want to be multiples that are only represented by 1-2 models. It's a mess. Then there are the host of absolute trap profiles and units out there...
Yup. And since you, the new player, don’t have yet a clue about sectorials, let me also make boxes that have units across different sectorials. Now, to CB defense, it got much better (e.g. sectorial focused 2 army boxes), but there are still too many boxes that sectorial wise have minis that don’t match (mainly seen in Code One boosters). Alternatively, they are targeting more than ever the whales (of which I’m a proud member) that just keep on buying because they got burned by cheaping out once (not rushing on the Bolts, Tik and Uhlan), and still regret it to this day
You forgot PanO Blades...I will keep beating this drum: Tactical Awareness. Tactical Awareness was previously only available on TAGs or Gunnar for Vanilla. Linkable Engineer. Also new for Vanilla. Great to duo with the Bulleteer, Tik, or Squalo Mark 1 or 2. Forward Deploying +8 Engineer option. Another forward deploying specialist that is unhackable. Works great to support a Pathfinder: Suicide a Pathfinder to clean the midfield, then fix it with the Engineer. IMO, they add so much to Vanilla PanO. And they are availability 2. EDIT: Of course, the funny thing is I will probably use my Defiance Uma or Aida as a proxy for them.
So far I haven't seen many reasonable people complain about Reinforcement profiles being added to factions other than that they weren't necessarily added to the factions in need. Generally people respond well to new releases (and less well to when a small subset of factions other than their own keeps getting new releases after new releases while your faction is out in the cold) Another risk with listening to customer feedback is not understanding customer feedback and making decisions on imagined information. As in this case; if new releases of units with limited design focus and released for, and designed for, specific factions is seen by the company as bloat to be curated out of main content stream, but dumping Samsa and Diggers on all vanilla and a bunch of sectorials isn't, then the problem is this latter case - they just haven't understood the feedback generated. When people complain about bloat, most often they mean that we need a spring cleaning done to address one of or both: 1. The number of mercenaries shared among factions -> it's time to remove Diggers, Libertos, Knauf, Armand, etc from most factions, and as that will create a faction balance shortfall due to a bunch of these mercs being much better than what a lot of factions have in their role/points class, we will also need a balance pass. 2. The number of pointless and disappointing loadouts (especially true for older unit designs) -> no one likes a plain combi profile; almost any unit should be able to be reduced to four or fewer options that's focused on what job the unit is about
