wonder why mini production stopped?

all well and good and I am not saying companies shouldnt release updates. 2e is a valid and useful update to ACTA imo, I used Gw as an example though of where they are getting faster and faster between £30 books that have minor changes but force them to redo all the army books too. you know when they updating too fast when they havent even updated all the previous army books, as said space wolves was in the 90s sometime, and still hasnt seen a release.
 
Burger said:
But it bears no resemblance whatsoever, to Armageddon, SFOS, rules supplements or S&P articles (except 2e preview articles of course!)... it has new beam rules, new AF, totally changed shadows and vorlons and many more dramatic changes. I'm not saying that it was just to cash in, I'm just saying that it is most certainly not a drawing together of all the rules supplements either!

Sorry, I didn't mean it that literally.

Basically, 1e was sprawling, and needed tidying up into one new rules set. Doing a new edition also allows you to include all the ideas that you have come up with since the game's release, but might fundamentally shake a previous edition.
 
Tzarevitch said:
:x
OK I have stayed silent on this long enough and please excuse me if I offend anyone unintentionally but I have seen similar threads pop up on other game boards every time a gaming company has the temerity to try and release an update.
....

Tzarevitch

This is why America is great, we are entitled to opinions.

I'm fully aware that it costs money to run a company. And I support those companies by buying their products. However, when a company goes about releasing $200+ of books that I have to get with every update to stay current with the other people playing, I'm just not happy about it. And its not like I'm buying the starter set and being done with it. I get the core books, the supplements, the miniatures. i would hope that the $1000+ investment I've made helps the company, considering I'm just one player. I've been playing World of Warcraft since beta, but I have spent more on DnD 3.5 in the past year than I have on WoW. Not to mention, I get FAR more play out of Warcraft than I do DnD, since it is easier to sit down and grind for an hour than it is to get a dozen friends to come over. And 4.0 is supposed to be released soon? You have to be kidding...
 
l33tpenguin said:
Tzarevitch said:
:x
OK I have stayed silent on this long enough and please excuse me if I offend anyone unintentionally but I have seen similar threads pop up on other game boards every time a gaming company has the temerity to try and release an update.
....

Tzarevitch

This is why America is great, we are entitled to opinions.

I'm fully aware that it costs money to run a company. And I support those companies by buying their products. However, when a company goes about releasing $200+ of books that I have to get with every update to stay current with the other people playing, I'm just not happy about it. And its not like I'm buying the starter set and being done with it. I get the core books, the supplements, the miniatures. i would hope that the $1000+ investment I've made helps the company, considering I'm just one player. I've been playing World of Warcraft since beta, but I have spent more on DnD 3.5 in the past year than I have on WoW. Not to mention, I get FAR more play out of Warcraft than I do DnD, since it is easier to sit down and grind for an hour than it is to get a dozen friends to come over. And 4.0 is supposed to be released soon? You have to be kidding...

The reason I disagree with that argument is it is illogical. It has been 8 years since D&D 3e, the last reall full update. $200 in books over 8 years is $25/year, $2 and change per month. That is far less than WoW. (By the way I play WoW too and I enjoy both WoW and tabletop.) You would have to have spent a lot more to get worse value than WoW over the same time period and WoW updates its rules with a patch every few months in stead of on a multi-yearly basis like tabletop games.

A shorter time period between re-issues like maybe 2 years or less may be unreasonable, but 8 years?

Tzarevitch
 
Its been over a grand in the last two years since I updated to 3.5

Books, minis, supplements, etc. Thankfully, the minis will endure. The vast armies of little plastic people I have can represent whatever I choose.

Blizzard doesn't charge for their constant updates (only the constant server time)

I guess I wouldn't feel so cheated if I got the amount of game time out of DnD that I do with WoW. *sigh*

I think that my gripe is that 3.0 and 3.5 are almost similar. They are, in my opinion, too similar to warrent the update. 90% of the material is the same.

WOTC is raking in money. Its not like they NEED to make more by releasing an updated rules set for everyone to buy so they can stay current.

I'm not going to get into the cost per player... Blizzard is spending vast amounts of cash keeping their servers online. Mass production of hard backed books is a triffle compared to constant server maintence and purchase of bandwidth to support its 10? + million member community.

I'm more than happy to continue to support a company by buying up their products. I'd just rather not buy up a product I basically already have. I'll get new sourcebooks, tons more minis. I'd drop Blizzard in a heartbeat if they started charging everytime the updated a zone.

I have the same issue with movies. Dear god, why is there 8 different editions of Lord of the Rings? Lets not mention Star Wars...
 
Something like 12 years ago I played maybe five of GW's games and was interested in some of the others, the support till then had been great with lots of additions and improvements, rather than outright changes.

Within the space of about a year they outright scrapped several of them, rendered 90%+ of the models for one of them obsolete and changed the rules for most of the survivors to something unrecognizable to me, I just gave up on them completely at the time (and didn't get back into the hobby till a couple years ago, this time with warmachine, then to a few others).

Looking from the outside in over the last few years I've seen a completey different focus in GW- that of iterating the game, books and models repeatedly to drive sales, whilst simplifying the army lists and rules to try to appeal to the broadest possible audience, seemingly at the expense of any kind of balance or depth. I think basically the accountants and investors are in control over there and have been for some time.

Its this experience that drives a little nagging voice of doubt and fear at the back of my mind whenever I see another company doing anything that seems vaguely familiar, even if they don't actually deserve it and I suspect I'm not entirely alone. :wink:
 
Well I think that the main reason were just what they said. That the costs have inceased to much to keep producing them.

And Mongoose does not seem to be alone. I read this posted by one of the Silent Death guys:

I wanted to give everyone a weeks notice on a rather major price increase. ICE has been absorbing price increases on the Silent Death miniatures for years. We could do that as we only sold them direct. About the middle of last year the costs had increased to the point that we could not sell them through distribution except at a loss in any case.

The root cause of these cost increases is the price of metal. The cost of the mix we use has nearly quadrupled in the last 5 years with the bulk of the increases happening in the last 2-3 years. Anyone buying miniatures in today's market is painfully aware of that fact as it is reflected in the prices you see.

We were hit with another price increase on our last order, which is arriving tomorrow, and we might very well get further increases every 60 days or so for a while.

As a consequence we will be raising the prices on the blisters by approximately 50% on April 16th so you have a week to place orders at the old prices.

The recent miniatures released for Operation Dry Dock II will see a smaller increase, but still substantial.

This is a very steep price increase, but we have to do it in order to continue to make them available now and in the future. Unless things get totally out of hand with metal prices we do not intend to do another price increase for some time. Further, this increase will bring the ships back into distribution, although they will not be sold in blisters except via special orders direct to stores. The full line of miniatures is in stock and ready to go.

I for one hope that the huge number of orders during the sale indicated to MGP that the interest in ACTA is still strong and that they will be back with plastic miniatures next year!
 
It's worth noting that Privateer also had to increase prices late last year, and actually posted a PDF showing the changes in metal prices and how they related to PP's production. It's hitting everyone hard.
 
A Tzarevitch:
DnD is no biggie. They can really update the rules and rerelease new books all they want. As the books themselves say: they are only a guide. It's up to the DM to set the real rules.

But for WHF, the way they are doing it is not good for the players (though the company must just LOVE the inflow of cash). They redo the main rulebook and release it. Then they redo an army list or 2 and release them. and then another army list or 2. And by the time every army list has been updated (and I will admit that I like most of the updates), they are releasing a completely new main rulebook yet again.
This makes it extremely hard for me to play at all because my Lizardmen are always one of the last three army lists to be redone and the new main rulebook always invalidates at least some of my army's core abilities.

So while a company has every right to update the rules and release new books/minis/counters/whatever, some of them are doing it in a manner very harmful to the game.
 
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