Re: [GZG] GW and Re: Artillery considerations (was: Re: Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi!)

Well, I figure I have some perspective to come out of lurk here, and it
gives me something to talk about besides Full Thrust fighter rules when
I do so for once. ;)

I help run something called the Online Blood Bowl League.  It's been
around for about thirteen years or so, I've personally been a part of it
for almost ten.  It's been some years since Blood Bowl has been sold as
one of GW's main lines, but ultimately a lot of what I see said here
seems to apply.  GW thinks nothing of pretty much completely changing
the rules around, and hang the loyal people who've bought the previous
ones and play them fairly religiously.	While it's true that when we're
playing online, we're not buying models to do it, and we've been around
long enough without the models that very few teams any more bother to
show even the slightest hint of respect for GW's canon histories (one of
the league commissioners is fond of making whole teams of various races
based on different anime series), we're still playing the game. 

However, we're playing third edition Blood Bowl, and when fourth edition
came out, we didn't like it.  We decided to stay with 3rd.  Then some
monstrosity called the Living Rulebook came out, which basically was
advertised as "you can download this for free and it's a living,
breathing set of rules that we can rebalance easily if we need to."  In
practice, this has come out more like "we're going to change this
whenever we feel like it, and one version of the rulebook may not even
be all that recognizable in the next."	Don't get me started on the
game's use of cards, then not using cards, now using cards a handicap,
then aging rules that went away quickly because everyone hated them,
nerfing wizards so that the last thing that can reliably stop one-turn
scoring wood elves without ripping the entire team to shreds goes away,
and so on...

About the only solace to this is, we're now not the only abandoned
league out there.  For the last few years another large online league
(called FUMBBL, I don't think it's an acronym for anything) came along
and modelled an entire help-you-play-the-game client based on one of the
Living Rulebook versions from a few years ago.	(The OLBBL's system is
more generic where you use IRC dice bots to help emulate the rules,
FUMBBL's has more of it hard-coded into the interface.	Ergo, you could
play FUMBBL's rules on the OLBBL's client, but not vice versa.)  They
came up during the bigger internet boom, so this wound up being very
popular and at any given time they have hundreds of people active; as
opposed to OLBBL's couple dozen or so at the outside.  Then GW decided
to update the Living Rulebook so that even FUMBBL's rules can't be
recognized in the current version.  This is a bigger deal for them due
to how much their interface is married to that ruleset; we could
theoretically change over any time we wanted to, we just don't want to
because we like what we've got better than what GW's been coming out
with.  However, the end result is much the same:  FUMBBL's now playing
"yesterday's rules" just like us, and GW doesn't care a bit.

So... yeah, a lot of this stuff I see said about GW does not ring to me
like it's stuff that only happened years ago and they've gotten all
better now.  Same stuff, different year.

E

-----Original Message-----
>From: Ryan Fisk <ryan.fisk@gmail.com>
>Sent: Jul 9, 2008 11:02 AM
>To: gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu
>Subject: Re: [GZG] GW and Re: Artillery considerations (was: Re: Help
me,	 Obi-Wan Kenobi!)
>
>On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 6:47 PM, John Tailby <john_tailby@xtra.co.nz>
wrote:
>
>> I find it really funny how the orginal request "what is the current
40k game
>> like?" has generated a huge storm about people's bad experiences 10+
years
>> ago with the game that bares little relationship to the current
version.
>
>Nonsense, I played 40K from the Rogue Trader days and my wife has been
>involved since 2nd Edition, the last time we were involved with 40K
>was last November and I was very nearly an outrider at one time (and
>two of my good friends were outriders).  The concerns raised here, in
>the vast majority, STILL apply to GW.	They aren't evil, but they are
>_not_ loyal to their customers (or their fans or their outriders).
>Just wait, play long enough and they will do it to you too.  I expect
>that in a few years you too will join the ex-GW player support group.
>
>Til then, have fun, but don't try to tell us that things are
>different, all it takes is thumbing through a White Dwarf to see they
>haven't changed (see any squats?).  If GW changed, they would get a
>TON of old players back, rather than providing a steady pool of
>recruits for other games (or, unfortunately, no games in some cases).
>
>And I'm the guy who LOVES their settings and listens to Death Metal. 
:-)
>(I have both my original Realms of Chaos books signed by the members
>of Bolt Thrower)
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_Thrower
>
>-- 
>Ryan Fisk
>
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>Gzg-l@vermouth.csua.berkeley.edu
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