Last weekend I travelled to the Interplanetary and took the chance to attend the various seminars as well as the main tournament which I'll be writing up over the next couple of weeks. Once again we started with the 'round table' - and unlike last year at least there was a table even if it wasn't actually round - which was a mini Q&A session taking pre-selected questions from social media and ad-hoc ones from the crowd. This year there were many shorter questions and answers compared to last. I've tried to write them up as accurately as possible, but beware that these are transcribed from brief notes so there will be embellishment and paraphrasing to help with readability and conciseness. Any inaccuracies are entirely my own, although they do admit to misleading people quite a lot... Our hosts this year were Bostria, Gutier and Alberto and you can find a link to the questions and answers below: http://www.lead-rising.com/2018/08/interplanetary-round-table-2018.html
PanO will be punished...Uprising was just a schoolyard fight...Acontecimento explodes...it is starting to make sense.
Alright, and after waiting for any kind of clear communication from CB about the whole debacle... they deflect blame by trying to pass us the old "vocal minority" malarkey (which is either them lying to us, them lying to themselves, or both), and then tell us it was for our own good. So... when are they hiring a PR person? Because they're really bad at this kind of stuff and appear to be wholly unable to learn at this stage. Also, laughed a bit at PanO possibly getting punished because they didn't cover their tracks well enough. No shit, they blockaded Yu Jing sovereign waters and airspace from inside of Yu Jing territory. They had massive, public support of the JSA separatists beyond just some hush-hush weapon smuggling and backing. They basically invaded Yu Jing territory, killed thousands of Yu Jing troops without any O-12 backing. So yeah, Yu Jing knows PanO was involved despite their "very sneaky tricks" of moving their literal navy in to Yu Jing territory and then basically declaring open war on Yu Jing in the name of keeping Yu Jing out of Japan. I wonder who could be supporting the Japanese... Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm. That's some insight in to the high level games of "cloak" and "dagger" right there. But then, given Yu Jing's apparent ineptitude, maybe getting invaded and blockaded from taking direction action against the Japanese counted as subtle subterfuge in this case. Yu Jing High Command: Kanren, report! Do we have any idea about who was supporting the Japanese? Kanren: We ain't found shit! On the plus side, the extra info about the breadth of the IA is neat. Here's hoping they have a more unique solution for low-cost troops and that Zhanshi aren't meant to be the prominent line troop filler for the list if this is the case.
24. Are there any 'Uprisings' planned to happen in the future? If there were then the CB staff wouldn't say. However, the JSA Uprising was a schoolyard fight compared to what will happen in the future. This period will be looked back on as having been the good times. If CB goes in "all out war" mode, I'm out of infinity. For real. 28. Moran Maasai resculpts? 2025. -__-
On the other side of that coin they also said Yu Jing weren't allowed to go after a small fry like JSA, so going all out war with big fry Pan-O is even less likely. However, a smaller scale game would be a good candidate for all out war stuff.
"However, the JSA Uprising was a schoolyard fight compared to what will happen in the future. This period will be looked back on as having been the good times." I hope CB will tread carefully with the new fluff and changes to the universe / or the way you play the game. If they change too much it might turn to be like "The good old times of uprising, where people have been still playing infinity."
There's little risk of that. Player numbers are doing just fine and will continue to rise. Ask CB about their extremely positive sales growth numbers if you're curious or want perspective. Players who find static storylines and simple rules more reassuring than change and complexity are exciting are probably playing the wrong game. Given the plans to rotate sectorials in/out of direct support and the hints about future storylines, Infinity will see a LOT of change in the near future. That's a good thing for me, and for most of the players I talk to. If it's not such a great thing for you, there are lots of other miniatures games with less dynamic storylines and rulesets.
They're right, you're a vocal minority and that's it. Sales numbers are up, and having personally traveled to events in four different countries this year (six by January) and seen my own metas on two continents grow, I can tell you that their player numbers are way up and everyone not posting gripes on the internet is pretty stoked about the recent narrative. It's not a debacle, and communicating with internet posters who are chicken-little-ing doesn't do much good: people rarely change their minds over the wire. Regarding "lying," I and most others are going to credit a company that produces great product and interesting storylines, and who is pretty transparent about their user data (which they mine really well) over the perspective of some forum posters with complaints who seem to think their opinions are objective truth. And I say this as a forum poster with my own axes to grind (f*%^ing symbiomates and ghazi being broken) who was convinced that I was right until I met up at the Interplanetario and was talked down (kindly) by many of those folks I had been arguing with about the subject here and on the WGC FB group. A reality check does help put things in perspective. I still think those things are broken unto themselves, but I also see that they're not game-breaking because of how diluted they are even within the context of a single list/game. TDLR: Narrative change and changes in support for product lines are not the end of the world. Chill and see how it shakes out.
@Savnock Actually I do like the rules (although I wouldn't mind if some of them got a bit streamlined), I like the fluff so far (but uprising) and I don't see any competition to CB when it comes to quality of miniatures. I also love the sci-fi/anime kind of aesthetic, so I don't think I'm going to drop this game anytime soon. But when in comes to massive changes that are also affecting the way you are playing the game, somehow Rackham comes to my mind. I loved the minis an setting back then. I wouldn't like that kind of dramatic changes to the infinity. The uprising problem raised by vocal minority was mostly not about changes but about how things were handled. This was talked to death, especially in YJ sections so I'm not going to dwell on it. Still I hoped CB have analysed the uprising event. When I only read about unhappy vocal minority, I'm not so optimistic about their conclusions and future changes. Anyway, @Phlyk thnaks fo your hard work.
So NeoTerra gets Shasvastii infiltrations and "brave" IA gets an excuse to perform "peacekeeping" operations ?
@Usashi , respect, well stated and I get where you're coming from. Here's hoping that you find what does come acceptable.
Oh yeah and thanks @Phlyk ! Excellent support and reporting as usual, and I really love reading your blog.
