The thread to end all threads

I don't play Yu Jing. I like the uprising. Infinity fluff was stagnant. But it was handled poorly. Yu Jing should have kept JSA while NA2 opened, fluffing that the uprising was happening. This would persist until Invincible Army dropped, at which point the fluff would be that the uprising was a success, and then JSA would be unavailable to Yu Jing.

 

I have seen worse threads so...

In any case I have to point out that if the participants want to be helpful avoid interacting with each other when your beliefs contradict and when you agree we have several threads of it already and "how it was handled" is quite nebulous if a poster wants to clarify how they perceive it they should state it at the comments.

 

Another pool! Woohoo.

I put down that I only play yu jing because technically before the uprising I did only play yu Jing. Now I have 2 factions!!

 

Upset with handling and very upset with spoiled fluff (mass graves?!? straight-up copy-paste of historical War Criminal activities?!?).

Not so upset with actual mechanical changes (very little impact to my vanilla YJ lists).

 

I think I am "not OK' with the split itself, the decision of exactly what was split (really, only the ninja, really?), the fictional fluff surrounding the split, the fluff surrounding the new faction, the limited warning (especially in regards to Shikami purchases), and the handling of the backlash.

I am also deeply suspicious of what looks like some hedged bets on the shikami alternate heads and the Japanese status as a mere neutral sectoral. Those LOOK like a company not fully committing to the split and leaving room to reverse it in some way later. Which seems somehow even worse "handling" than fully committing to a contentious decision and trying to actually properly make it work in the first place.

Anyway, that seems sufficiently similar to "not ok" rather than the rather narrow "only the handling was bad".

 

To elaborate on why I voted for only "how it was handled" and not "Uprising itself", I think Uprising makes a ton of sense, and is an exciting development to both the fluff and the game.

I am not ok with how the split was handled. I'm new to this game and started my collection in January. Part of why I chose Yu Jing was access to JSA units, and as there was no reason to believe that I wouldn't be able to use them, around a third of my miniatures are JSA. I started playing Vanilla because of the range of profiles it would let me try. This is now obviously not a great situation to be in within the first few months of getting into a hobby, but I can live with it. What I dislike is the utter lack of sympathy by Corvus Belli, and the hostility of community members (including some Warcors) to the completely valid concerns of Yu Jing players. I've heard multiple assurances that I can just play both factions, when this isn't something that I want to do so early in the hobby. I've explained my disagreement with the use of statistics to justify the loss of profiles, the data even shows that many JSA profiles were regularly used. I've heard that the split will help deal with profile bloat within the faction, when those that we lost were all fairly unique, and we still have things like Zuyong, Wu Ming, and Shang Ji all competing for the same vanilla slot (please don't remove them now). We lost most of our named characters and are left with only 2. And in light of all of this, we've received little real apology from Corvus Belli.

I think what might make the situation much clearer for Corvus Belli and the community is when YJ loses a large percentage of players in the upcoming campaign. ISS regulars will be fine, but aside from the obvious loss of JSA regulars we'll see the loss of Vanilla players who have bought into the new JSA/Ikari and also Vanilla players who are disheartened at the loss of list flexibility.

 

I don't play YuJing, I think the genuine concerns over uprising are few, but important. I would prefer to have actually read the book before making a final judgement, but my (sizable) gut says that a delay in actually pulling the JSA from YuJing until the end of the BoW campaign could have been a bit more dramatic, if not more well received...

 

I am not particularly pleased with the split... as it stood, Yu Jing was an incredibly deep and nuanced interpretation of the usually-Orientalist 'Pan-Asian' trope, the existence of a resistant Japanese minority within the Chinese-origin whole a source of tension that could drive stories at the exact scale on which games of Infinity take place. The split changes that tension, from a below-surface simmer towards an open-war boil, and I feel that to be a bad change to Infinity as a setting.

But no author or game is perfect, sometimes they do things that aren't great, sometimes things only a particular consumer doesn't think are great. The JSA split is a change, there is loss and there is gain, and in the end the world of Infinity remains interesting, it is in no way a fatal blow. Implemented well, my reaction to the split would be mild, a temporary annoyance not a persistent frustration. This was not implemented well... others above have done some excellent breakdowns of issues, abruptness and lack of communication (in terms of responding or even just acknowledging concerns) probably key among them in my mind.

 

Someone wanna poll the spanish side of the forums too?

 

There's a good chance of that poll having considerable cross-pollination.

Haha ha ha. I'll show myself out.

 

A lot of my opinions are well expressed by others, I just think it would have been good to repackage/relaunch the JSA stuff, and definitely to send out something to stores to post by JSA items to explain to new guys that they are a separate faction now.

I'm concerned that this hurts new players and players with low income, and I hope CB takes some notes and handles this a heck of a lot better in future. I don't mind uprising from a purely story perspective, it allows change and growth, that's fine, but from a consumer perspective, it could've been handled a lot better.

 

I voted "not ok with it", because:

• The models lost held a lot of utility and identity, which Yu Jing actually really benefited from
• JSA as part of Yu Jing makes the pan-Asiatic empire much more likely to succeed; having a full blown rebellion means that the notion of a unified Asia is basically dead (ie, so the core conceit of YJ is fucked)
• The actual rebellion could've been handled way better and been a really cool way to give Yu Jing some not evil fluff: it could have been an Uprising, put down/handled such that the manipulating Kempeitai/Japanese elites were dealt with by the Japanese, so that they could integrate fully and then Yu Jing as a whole could become better. That obviously can't happen in the future, because CB would have to go back on their decision, and we've seen how happy they are to admit errors
• Yu Jing is left part abandoned. When the Exrah were Squatted and we shifted to N3, CA got a heap of stuff to compensate for the changes to their roster. While YJ still has 40+ units, there is a lot of profile bloat in them (as someone mentioned above, the JSA profiles were actually pretty distinct, especially from non-JSA units). But CB says no compensation for losing 25% of your faction, not for probably a year at least (oh except for some fucking CBLs, oooOOoohh, so fucking what?!) That's some seriously shitty handling, particularly when the obvious foil for the situation, IA, has been so anticipated for so long.

Gah, I'm getting more annoyed writing it out! It was handled terribly.

 

by all means please make a tread and link here and if somebody wants to translate so much better.

 

Not okay with the handling. The story reason why, I understand. The writing has been on the wall for years. It means changes can happen.

Handling feels bad because Yu Jing got nothing out of this. On top of the wacky and cool stuff , a lot of the JSA models covered gaps and utilitarian. For example, over half of the engineer profiles left with JSA. I don't think any faction would accept that without some coaxing.

More communication on where Yu Jing goes from here would do a lot. A few dossier previews to give something get excited for would help alleviate the feeling of being left holding the bag.

To be frank, the results of Backdoor looks really bad. Disabling access to the faction's one remaining Dire Foe on the heels of Uprising is extremely discouraging. To a faction that was the testbed for getting one of their earliest characters Kerriganed, that is sending some pretty negative, even if unintended, messages.

 

First and foremost, I dislike the way it was handled. Communication was tone deaf and overly concerned with building hype instead of addressing actual player concerns. Worse, they had literally nothing lined up to soften the blow for Yu Jing. This has left me feeling like my faction is in limbo. Yu Jing now has the second fewest profiles of any faction in the game, is out a whole ton of variety in vanilla (including some unique roles that no other unit in the force fills), and basically down to a single sectorial. The background developments (revealed by CB themselves) are also pretty troubling, indicating a further shift for Yu Jing toward being a generic yellow peril villain instead of something more interesting and nuanced.

Second, I'm honestly not okay with the way the Uprising itself was done either. Most sane miniature companies know that touching folks collections, especially with ham-handed meta-plot updates, is a no go for a lot of folks. Forcing me to play to the current metaplot is asinine after I spent money on the books and minis to use them for their original purpose. While I can certainly accept that Uprising has occurred and I'm out over $100 of JSA minis and in possession of a book (Human Sphere) with a bunch of dead space given over to a sub-faction that no longer exists (why bother publishing it in the book if it was going to be invalidated two years later with the split? Do they literally not plan more than a year in advance?).

There are innumerable ways this could have gone better.

They could have treated JSA like Merovingians and Shasvastii and given them a get-you-by list and left the space open in Human Sphere for a sectorial that wasn't going to be invalidated within two years (circumventing the whole problem with forward planning). They could have let Yu Jing retain JSA profiles as loyalist troops. They could literally just moved the meta-plot forward without touching a single existing miniature (while expanding options and creating new NA2 lists with new options). At the very least they could be more communicative and be on the ready with a few profiles to tide Yu Jing over while they wait (like they've done basically every other time they've invalidated old minis).

I feel like they haven't done a thing in response to the community response and that they've been behind the curve on this thing since the first "ENOUGH" image came out. When folks make pessimistic predictions and get proven right at every turn, then you've got a PR issue going on and should be doing more than just generally ignoring the issue and hoping it goes away.

I've disagreed with several things CB has done in the past, and while they've made several positive steps, this whole debacle has me seriously questioning how much more money I'm willing to spend on Infinity after over a decade of passion for the game. As each week passes and CB treat this as if it is just business as usual, I start to find myself caring less and less about the game as a whole. If they don't care about the time and money their players and customers have put in to the game, I don't see much of a reason to stick around.

As is, this has soured me on the game in general for the time being, blunted my will to re-paint my ISS stuff, and had me looking elsewhere for my gaming kicks as of late. Maybe in a year or two, things will turn around and I'll feel like coming back, but I'm just not feeling the buzz from the game that it used to give me and the whole handling of Uprising is culprit #1.

 

At the time of writing this post (01:48GMT), there are:

• 39 people ok with the transition (15, or 38.5%, of which are non-YJ players)
• 55 people are not happy with at least some aspect of the transition (or 58.5% of poll responders are unhappy to some degree; 12, or 21.8% of unhappy are non-YJ players).

While 94 folks are hardly the playerbase as a whole, that's at the very least indicating that it's not, as has been asserted by some folks in other threads, a majority of people (particularly of those who play YJ) that are happy.

 

As I've mentioned elsewhere I thought the basic idea was just fine, but the way it was rolled out was just atrocious. That JSA wants to finally go their own way makes perfect sense fluff-wise, and shaking things up like this from time to time is also nice IMO. But not taking vanilla YJ players' feelings into consideration when a decent chunk of their army disappears - even though it would have been so easy to address their (very valid) concerns just prior to or along with the rebellion's announcement? And then having a CB spokesperson talk about "drinking the tears" of YJ players online? That's the kind of shoddy treatment and public relations failure that some folks are going to remember (and talk about) for a long time. But hey, public relations don't matter in this day and age, right? And CB would also never do something like this to your chosen faction too, right?

 

What a terribly written poll. Twice as many options for one side of the coin, than for the other, conflating at least two seperate questions into one. Done on the subforum of the faction that was "hit" instead of a more general one... talk about skewing the results.