After reading through the 24 pages of this post, I went from "utterly pissed" too.. well, something a little calmer. I haven´t been around in this forum for quite a while, and right now I wish I would have stayed away. Still, some random thoughts about it all:
To quote the blog: " We'll continue to support it in S&P, sure, but if there is sufficient demand, we will continue with book releases as well"
IF there is sufficient demand... sounds a little like what happened to Mighty Armies, line discontinued, some S&P support, but ultimately sold off to another manufacturer. Sure, ACTA is on a whole different level than MA, but then that game at least still has miniatures... no outsourcing because of the strict license agreement. Didn´t WB make AOG destroy their leftover stock when the licence ran out? I guess that goes to show how serious they are about the whole thing...
I agree with the "no new shiny, no new players" comments made above. The game will not be played forever, and it won´t experience any noticable growth on counters alone. In our gaming group we have maybe 90% of all available fleets in a rather playable size, all owned by hardcore fans of the series, so the game will be continued for a while here, and maybe dusted off every once in a while in the coming years.
But the B5 franchise itself isn´t getting any younger, so getting new players into the game was getting more and more difficult with potential players not having seen the series, and now there won´t be any more eye-candy to get them interested in the first place. That´s dissapointing, to say the least.
I was planing to add the full ACTA range to my little online shop as soon as the promised solutions to the distributing were felt - not quite the solution I was hoping for, I might add.
I think what annoys me the most is the fact that there was what looked like a promising future for the game - yearly supplements, rapid-prototyped miniatures; there was talk about coming TLT ships. Now, these things won´t come. Sure, I suppose supplements will come out every once in a while, as long as the sales pay off for the working hours put into the books (with the internal printing facility, MGP can luckily adjust their production values to the demand pretty easily, I guess).
But there has also been talk about a new counter set for a long, long time, and that also never showed up. As others have mentioned before, such a set is not only absolutely vital to the survival of the game, but also has to be of superior quality when compared to the last counters to be interesting.
Getting B5 miniatures through my distributor has always been very difficult, and the casting quality just wasn´t what it was supposed to be - so I´m thinking that maybe B5 realy HAS had it´s run, that maybe it is time for it to make room for something new, while it leads a background life on the tables of the true fans of the game, supported by the odd supplement.
Still, I hate seeing my favourite game going down the drain. Really, of all the games I knew, ACTA was among the few which I thought had really found their niche and could hold out against GW and the current problems on the miniatures games market. Guess I was wrong after all...
So, what´s next? A new game based on the rules set? Maybe a cooperation with GZG, a joined Call to Arms/Full Thrust game? MGP publishing the rules, GZG taking care of the miniatures? No, GZG wouldn´t be able to keep up with the demand. It´s all well selling the odd FT fleet to some random customer around the world, but ACTA really has built up a massive, if slightly scattered, fanbase.
So maybe that´s part of the problem? Maybe CTA has just outgrown itself, has become to heavy to bear by MGP alone? Or to put it less poetic: It would have become too expensive too replace the crappy moulds and reorganize the distribution channels to make CTA miniatures available on the required scale and in the desired quality.
After all I´ve read, MGP has put a lot of money into their miniatures games and lost big time; all the preparations for new miniatures and games, the whole prepaint thing including the prototypes for BFE and the planned SST Evo, sure didn´t come for free.
So, why is it that, even knowing all these things, I still feel pretty disapointed?
So, now there are a couple of ships and fighters which cannot be represented on the tabletop because they have neither miniature nor counter. And some of those which actually have miniatures don´t make it to the distributors (including my Rivas). That sucks.
Funny, just last week I talked my local gaming club into doing a big ACTA game again, after not having been able to get the players together for quite a while. It will be Centauri and Crusade era EA attacking a station protected by Narn and Brakiri, with each player bringing along 8 War level points worth of ships. The Station will be represented by the massive old, original BSG Basestar model (guess it will be a Vree station after all), and we players are really looking forward to this game.
Still, I can´t tell how much enthusiasm will be left to ever repeat something like this, or to ever play an ACTA campaign (so cool rules, so little time).
Well, I warned you it would be pretty random thoughts! :roll:
I just discovered MGP by searchig for WWII naval games (VaS came up) and as I was looking into the entire website/forum, I thought maybe that I would consider SST and ACTA also. I play several Games Workshop games and I am constantly looking for something other than GW. I consistently prove my bad luck and here is another fine example. I finally find some good competition for GW and a company I would rather give my money to and bam - see ya.
