31 years of worldbuilding, tabletop content, books, fluff, personalities and strategies destroyed in less than a year

Because a lack of marketing mixed with a series of cockups in rules and a lot of other corporate stuff, Fantasy wasn't selling as well and was mostly being played by an insular group. Insular groups of players become cancer real fast because they like feeling special and the easiest way to do that is to shit on other groups.

This makes a vicious cycle where the corporation sees that fantasy isn't selling, so directs less resources to it, which causes fantasy to stop selling. GW in the past 10 years under Kirby were complete fucking asshats who didn't know how to use intellectual property with a map and a flashlight.

People had 31 years to enjoy it and only now that it's gone is anyone proclaiming their undying love for it and claiming it was a masterpiece of a setting.

It was never really toxic, at least not on the scale of how it became in the End Times. By late '14 or early '15 a lot of older fans of it stopped playing and moved on. I heard about it a lot on here, and most of the people I knew personally who played it quit and/or moved to 40k.

I'm not a fan of elitist bullshit or saying the oldfags are always right, but in their absence a lot of brand new players came in, and sadly a lot of them were retards. Coupled with a storyline that was only getting more mindbogglingly shitty by the day, this really fucked whatever was left of the WHFB community up and tore it apart.

I play Sigmar and I still couldn't tell you what the story is.

Literally no-one at my local store played it anymore. And it's a pretty popular store. I know that's not definitive evidence but it seemed to me like pretty pretty good justification for a reboot.

I have no idea why they needed to literally destroy the story and game world.
They could've just drastically redone the rules like they're doing with 40k, and it would've been fine.
The worst part is that they replaced what was supposed to be a regiment based, chess-like game of maneuvering and outflanking with blocks of infantry into a 40k-esque skirmish game.
They replaced it with a completely different kind of game.
No one played WHFB because the rules were shit and the barrier to entry was too high, and now no one plays AoS because why would you play it when 40k exists? I have yet to see or hear of anyone playing a single game of AoS, ever, and my LGS is large and active.
Meanwhile, all the WHFB players just switched over to Kings of War.
Seems to me that GW just handed their player base to another company while destroying an entire game system and nuking decades worth for fluff for no reason whatsoever.

Sigmar's apparently shot up to 35% of their profits.
Someone out there is buying it.

It's heavily streamlined, more marketed, and reaching a new generation of tabletop players.

I hate what GW did to WHFB, I hate where the fluff went, I hate that everything fans had loved and everything GW's old staff had made in that 30 year span was gone and killed off in the most insulting and undignified way possible, but I will give AoS this: it's easier to get into and it's making them money.

If it works, it works.

My local GW doesn't even have AoS in their store windows anymore. I was hanging around there during the AoS release events and literally nobody showed up. Within the last months there have literally been more Battlefleet Gothic and Warmaster games than AoS.

What infuriates me most is that 8th edition 40k shows you can revamp the rules WITHOUT completely destroying the old setting.
Why is that a lesson that GW needed to learn? Why isn't it a natural thought to keep your already established lore in place rather than try to replace so much with something that can never, ever hope to truly replace it?

Dubs speaks the truth.

It was just unfavourable in general.
It wasn't fluid, it wasn't flexible- it lacked an easy entry point and was frankly a bit dated.
Sci-fi minis like Marines and Tau at least had some modernity about them. Fantasy stuff was (perceptually) stuck in the 80's.

Plus Fantasy players were generally older and grumpy.

The funny thing is, I really like AoS but I hate GW for creating it because the reason they did it was so fucking shitty. They nuked the Old World so that they could add Fantasy Space Marines to the setting and change the names of everything to make them more copyright friendly. Anything good or interesting that came out of Age of Sigmar was secondary to these two goals.

I actually like the Stormcast Eternals but let's not kid ourselves, they exist to be Warhammer Fantasy Space Marines.

>chess-like

No. Don't drag in good games to your casual mini trash. WHFB was good by miniature wargame standards, but chess has more depth in a few moves than your game does in several games.

>why WAS FB community regarded as so toxic?

It wasn't, that's just GW shills trying to project their concerns.

GW hasn't cared about their settings and lore at all for a while now, past and present. They didn't understand why players like the old FB lore and apparently hated it themselves since any player complaints about the nosedive-into-hell direction that the End Times took the setting was met with them making it even more retarded and awful, like when players complained Archaon was a shitty character in his 8th ed revision, so GW made him a demigod and even more integral to the story. Of course lore in a tabletop wargame is just the sideline shit that isn't necessarily vital at the end of the day, but a lot of people were really invested in it obviously, and what brings my piss to a boil more than their setting-rape is that they not only didn't know why people cared about the setting, but the fact that they didn't give a shit if people liked it and they didn't like it themselves, shitting on all the work their past employees put into it.

If a setting revamp was a MUST, I could see myself being a bit more accepting of it if it was done in a good, sensible, and respectful way, but it wasn't. End Times climbed onto the gaming table and took a fat fucking dump over the minis, and the setting that people put hard work into crafting and making something out of was gone along with all of those implications for its armies and gaming scene.

Hmm, honest question - if, instead of End Times-ing the setting, they'd instead added the Stormcast Eternals as a new faction, would that be alright? I mean, I can only imagine the levels of butthurt on forums and such when it happened...

Grog here.

Around fifth edition, you could build an army on the cheap. Units of 15-20 models were viable and you could build a force over time. When I was making minimum wage in 2001, I was able to put together a vampire counts army over time and with minimal difficulty. I even had a Blood Dragon commander riding a winged nightmare. Shit was fucking cash.

Then, as GW began to pump up the prices on models while pumping up the unit size, things RAPIDLY escalated. It took me a year and a half to put together 2000 points of high elves in 2009.

So go fuck yourself. Warhammer Fantasy cratered because GW tried to use it as a cash cow and people left. I was there from the height of the games popularity to it's nadir and that's what happened. Now please quit with your inane, faggy mouth noise.

IIRC Order Daemons were a thing in the earliest editions, and Stormcast Eternals are essentially just that in practice. So I personally wouldn't have minded that at all.

People would have been (rightfully) upset but I think after a while they'd have begrudgingly accepted it so long as the setting wasn't completely wiped out.

they learned a lot of good lessons from AoS.
If you look at the rules as well you'll see that the bits that carried over from AoS are mainly the better bits, while avoiding some of the worst bits.

Also, Kirby vs Roundtree.
Can't say how much this affected the rules and fluff development but by all the gods can you see it in how the release has been handled.
Full release with points, multiple modes of play, etc.
Discussion of rules and their reasoning for those developments well ahead of the release.
Having a new units as the flagship, but being sure to keep the old armies engaged fully.

>tfw I remember when a box of 20 troops was $20 US

The only thing worse than WHFB grognards? Chess spergs.

>31 years of worldbuilding and the setting was just a shitty mix of rip-off themes
Good

>he's still this salty
It's been 2 years, user. You have to let it go.

>Why is that a lesson that GW needed to learn? Why isn't it a natural thought to keep your already established lore in place rather than try to replace so much with something that can never, ever hope to truly replace it?
GW's management wanted an explanation for the decline of Fantasy that didn't make them seem incompetent. So they ignored the actual reasons - the price gouging, the lack of support, the lack of marketing, and the decision to focus on the modelling aspect of the hobby rather than gaming - and decided it must be the lore.

Since 40k is their best seller, they decided to ditch all of Fantasy's lore and replace it with a crappy 40k knockoff.

This is what happens when you take a company out of the hands of the people who built it and let all the decisions be made by people with the special kind of incompetence that only becomes possible with a degree in Business Studies.

Never. I loved the Fantasy lore when I was a kid. I am never going to stop being bitter about them discontinuing Fantasy. Refusing to make more of the models is one thing, but ending it with 'rocks fall, everyone dies' is just a slap in the face.

The hobbit trilogy comes to mind.
Now shut up and go into the Drakwald.

Because few people played it. And those that did were some of the most waac fag got some ever.

I mean during like 2014 whfrg had its own general because they made the threads horrible

How long until this happens in 40k?
7th went crazy with people buying 3 riptides, now imagine having to buy 3 $50 boxes for a single unit.

Oh please. They would have whined like every release.

They complained about demigryphs

>tfw I wanted to get into WHFB so started building up an Ogre army
>Less than a year later it gets killed off

I like Demigryphs.

>Has there ever been a more colossal fuckup in tabletop history
Gygax hiring Lorraine Williams

I am more attached to the world of warhammer, but the whole TSR situation takes the cake for fuckups in tabletop history.

Most of whfbg did not.

Mostly because they could use cheap models

What is this, 2015?

Give it until 40k gets the fantasy treatment and then it'll be 2015.

Old crap had to make room for something new and wonderful!

Ogre bull stand-ins?

What really angers me is tat they had literally no reason to kill an IP to make way for another.

Just make a new game. There's no need to destroy something that after 30 years could literally sustain itself

I personally don't have anything against stormcasts in particular, but fuck me those helmets and hammers are beyond stupid

>Warhammer rpg responsible for 90% of the fluff
>Aos gets its own rpg

Fuck off mate.

Supporting two games is expensive.
Supporting four as you say is suicide.
Unless they wanted to make it like a Mordheim or Necromunda game with separate rules. It's not like bases matter in AoS so I can't fathom why not use that to lure people into the money sink that was Fantasy.

It was all about trademarking. They couldn't trademark a lot of WHFB stuff because it was so generically named.

They just art deco Romans with a hammer fetish

What is the fourth game?

The three games they have out right now are:
Age of Sigmar.
40k.
The Hobbit.
Add the theoretical Fantasy and shit goes off the deep end.

The hammers are just the Sigmarite Warhammer that's been around in WHFB since at least Mordheim. Even the helmets aren't really out of WHFB aesthetic, and the proportions and armor of the actual Sigmarine are in line with the mass-produced Chaos Warrior look of (IIRC) 6th, 7th and 8th editions of Warhammer Fantasy. The Chaos Warriors before that might have been technically worse but were certainly way more interesting models. Compare it to this piece of Karl Kopinski art, who's many people's fave Warhammer artist.It's not the same artist, but is it incomparable in design? I think only in its departures from historical/traditional armor and that was quite Empire-exclusive within WHFB, other factions didn't adhere to it.

The real problem is in how its put across, and honestly I'm not sure that's so much a problem with the art/model as the viewer. I don't know. I nope'd out of WHFB a good few years before the End Times and Age of Sigmar but Warhammer to me always had this horrendous overblown Gothic fatalism pervading every drop of the setting. Everything was exaggerated, everything was horrific: it was like you were living out a revenge tragedy, right? Just look at this list:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenge_tragedy#Generic_conventions

Age of Sigmar isn't that anymore and I think it's more complicated than just "it can never be that" too.

>The hobbit
>a game

The hobbit game died when thet third movie went out
I never saw a single person play it, in all GW stores i went to

Just treat Fantasy and AoS as complementary gimes like 40k and 30k

It's not rocket science

It's still a more or less supported system that Europe keeps afloat.
Also evil has the best factions to play as
That the Hobbit movies give people cancer is another matter entirely.

I am from Europe, still never saw a single person play it

the old lord of the ring game,now that was some good shit

What about being a sex slave to elves?

It wasn't. More like hardcore tournament tryhards, and it wasn't limited to WHFB, 40k and WMH had the same thing. People got massively buttblasted about the latter End Times books and literal blowing up of their fave setting, and there's (manufactured at least partly, not sure how much) a meme that "you killed WHFB because you didn't buy enough" that AOS shills liked to repeat. (It was also a question of old models and rules, Wood Elves sold lots once they got updated near the end)

That it was user, that it was.
I hold little hope for them fixing it come MESBG or whatever it'll be called

>31 years
>Kislev, Araby, the border princes, Estilea, Tilea, Cathay, Ind, Nippon, Hobgoblin khanate, and the chaos dwarves were never real factions
I know the chaos dwarfs had a book in 3rd ed or something, but it seems lacking.

They barely exploited half the potential really
Always wanted a separate Kislev army

I have the Chaos Dwarf book, it is mainly a collection of White Dwarf articles, it is very clearly one man (Rick Priestley)'s hobby-horse that he's managed to force through the GW system.

I vaguely remember a booklet kislev rulebook, and I think a very slim binded one.

>BBEG
Ugh.

Big Business Executive Guy.