I was heavily into Mk2 warmahordes competitively but locally nobody is really playing anymore, even after Mk3 dropped. The only people still playing are the super hardcore guys who go to every convention. Some newbies picked up the new boxes for Jr. Leagues but attendance is dropping off hard. It seems like after the initial burst people realized it was basically the same game so all it really did was alienate the people who were into it to begin with, and all the people who quit Mk2 just kinda dropped off again. Locally it seems everyone wants to play guild ball because the pace is faster and it's way cheaper to play.
Like, Templecon is coming up and it looks like events are still open. That was definitely not the case a couple years ago.
I feel like literally everything else PP has made has lost them money because nobody wants to play it and the fluff isn't strong enough to make people get into it for its own sake. Under city, Level 5, and especially the fucking Warmachine video game seemed like they just drained them financially and I'm watching them flail about trying to turn a profit. There isn't even a warmahordes thread active now.
Pic unrelated.
Andrew Davis
Bump
Anthony Ward
>Warmachine video game
W-was it shit? I'd be surprised if the fanbase wouldn't have supported it.
> the fluff isn't strong enough to make people get into it for its own sake
That's a bummer. I was never into the setting but it sucks to hear that no one else was either.
Ian Gonzalez
It was unadulterated garbage. Most players were backing it for the minis and it ate up most of their budget to produce them.
Aiden Parker
Ooof that's fucking rough. A good videogame will do a lot to bring people into the world. The fact that they got a shit one...ooof.
Liam Cook
I only play against my buddies so the local meta doesn't really matter to me, but the Mk.3 stuff looked to be picked up well at my LGS. And with it only being an edition change its not like there was much new released to change up the game. There isn't a slew of new releases for the community to gobble up and try out, so most people will already have what they want/need for their faction, unless their bandwagoning onto the next new hotness.
Personally I like the lore, I only wish they fit in more into the books. The last few books seemed rather light IMO. Kinda sucks as a Skorne player too, with Vintear out of the picture, the faction doesn't have any interesting grand goal, their just jobber bad guys at this point.
But I still think PP has good ideas where it counts. The new starter boxes are awesome, the only flaw being the plastic the minis are made from. But otherwise, cheap, with dice, tokens, a battle matt, the minis are faction colored, and best of all a complete mini rulebook (as far as I can tell). The box is even good enough to use to carry it all around in.
Warroom is also a pretty sweet app. Too bad about the actual game, it runs like shit on my laptop so i never gave it much of a try. But the only reason it was started was because (IIRC) the developer modeled jacks for a tech demo, it went viral, and PP kick started it.
Michael Harris
I dunno, my local groups have actually grown lately. Mark 3 brought in a lot of people who want to bash heads in with giant robots/ warbeasts.
Jaxon Bailey
The base setting, Iron Kingdoms, is fucking great. Like, every D&D or fantasy setting always sets out with this idea of making things different, but always failing or just making it stupid.
IK has a setting where everything is distinctly different while at the same time still feeling like high fantasy. It's world building is incredible, and it's got all those little details to make the setting feel really good.
Problem is, the war game fiction barely shows any of that. Mk2 was pretty famous for it's fiction being formulaic to the extreme, with not a lot that was really interesting happening. Mk1's fiction was a lot better, it varied itself more, and they focused more on telling a solid story then introducing the new warnouns of the book.
Mk3 is supposed to be pulling away from talking about the fluff based on releases, so it might see a return to better formed fiction.
Nicholas Roberts
War Room is a tragedy, man. When a single dude can design a better system in his free time, you know you've failed as a software dev.
Fuck, it's written in Unity. Fucking Unity. And at release, WR2 was fucking larger than Hearthstone on IPad. A reference program with practically no animation had a larger filesize than a full fledged game.
It's PDF reader is an abortion as well, which is hilarious.
Andrew Stewart
I hear yah. For me personally the art style just rubbed me the wrong way and I got some tonal issues with the wargame.
I do hope that the quality of those stories does go back to former glory and the game keeps alive. I have a buddy who likes the setting more than I do so I hope a good videogame can get me into it more.
Carter Miller
The biggest problem PP has is that none of them are businessmen, and they are absolutely fucking terrible at hiring third party anything.
War Room, their new plastics, the videogame, fuck, hell, you can even point to their preview videos, all of them have had major issues and problems, and it's pretty clear that they have no ability to judge outside talent.
Aaron Stewart
>Is Privateer Press dying? No, it's not.
>I was heavily into Mk2 warmahordes competitively but locally nobody is really playing anymore, even after Mk3 dropped. The only people still playing are the super hardcore guys who go to every convention. Some newbies picked up the new boxes for Jr. Leagues but attendance is dropping off hard. It seems like after the initial burst people realized it was basically the same game so all it really did was alienate the people who were into it to begin with, and all the people who quit Mk2 just kinda dropped off again. Locally it seems everyone wants to play guild ball because the pace is faster and it's way cheaper to play.
This sounds just like the Warhammer vs Warmachine stories from my local stores like ten years ago. "It's new, it's different, it's cheaper, the old guard is dead!" There's still product shortages, so someone's buying, and I assume they're playing too.
>Like, Templecon is coming up and it looks like events are still open. That was definitely not the case a couple years ago.
A couple years ago it was scheduled during the winter and not the same month as GenCon.
>I feel like literally everything else PP has made has lost them money because nobody wants to play it and the fluff isn't strong enough to make people get into it for its own sake.
This part's dead on though. RIP Shadow Sun Syndicate.
Connor Wood
The steam installer is so broken it doesn't even put the .exe to run it on your system. I'm not even fucking kidding.
Landon Adams
From a programming side I'm sure there re issues that make it shit. I like it mainly because from a user perspective I can get access to all the faction rules cheaply and easily. It runs fine on my phone, and i've killed plenty of time just browsing though other factions rules to see what fun combos are out there etc.
Joseph Bell
There's more people than ever before playing the game at my LGS. Just a few days ago a pair of guys disillusioned with Games Workshop strolled in and asked about it. Me and the owner took them through a demo battlebox game and they seemed pretty into it.
Christian Lopez
the new stories are just as bad and take the story nowhere it hasn't already been. Flashpoint is the first new mk3 fluff for instance : A peace treaty is signed only for cygnar to restart the war a few weeks later just to establish how badass the new king was. Even though there's no way cygnar has recovered from any of their losses.
Kevin Morris
>Is Privateer Press dying?
I don't think Mk3 was the massive, explosive success they were hoping - the release was bungled in several ways and balance feels all over the place right now - but no, they aren't dying. Stock keeps selling out here, so they obviously still have customers.
Ian Mitchell
The entire planet the Warmachine and Hordes universes are set in would be completely devoid of life several times over if we go by the casualty numbers stated by different writers in all released books to date.
Like, this was two years ago when someone counted that the entire Cygnaran population would be dead three times over due to war casualties.
Joseph Rogers
This.
They bungled Mk3 in a lot of ways, but it fundamentally fixed a lot of the problems that were limiting the growth of the game in Mk2. We had a healthy group around here in Mk2, and with Mk3 we've seen record turnouts just about every week since it started with no signs of it letting off.
Lots of wasted potential in Mk3, but it's still growing.
The real test is going to be how they handle evolving the game from here, since they're set up to allow more easy changes to the game over time than in Mk1/Mk2.
Lucas Miller
Also, for all of the stuff they bungled, enforcing the online retailer policy shortly before Mk3 hit was genius, and will probably be what makes them a competitor in the market for the next several years.
Angel Rodriguez
idk, Im still really disenchanted from the roll out. I just cant get excited for anything in mkiii
I think it just created different problems.
Cameron Reyes
Non-WMH-player here, what were the >problems that were limiting the growth of the game in Mk2 ? Serious question, I'm curious.
Mason Bell
Accumulated balance and rules cruft.
Especially some of the stuff that came out mid/late Mk2 was unpleasant enough to turn off a lot of players, and the meta had evolved into a point that one of the dominant builds (heavy infantry spam) was, in addition to being unfun to play against, a horrible slog.
And then battle boar/splatter boar spam was even worse, but it was only legal to play for two weeks, so you don't hear about it (although a local guy who is a big tournament *organizer* was at the point of quitting because of it).
Isaac Brown
There was a lot of problems with the base systems.
Fury, for example, was easily the better system on the table. It allowed you to do shit with your beasts and your warlock at the same time, and it's downside, frenzing, basically never came up with a good player.
Focus, on the other hand, was incredibly limiting 90% of the time, and was almost always worse. However, in the places where it was better, it was insanely better. There was a real issue in that even the support type, squishy casters could become incredibly difficult to kill, while the actual tough casters could make themselves all by invincible.
This wasn't the end all, be all for balance(Warmachine was generally regarded as slightly better in Mk2 when you accounted for everything), but it was one example of the issues Mk2 had at the base level.
