How game companies hurt themselves

[Disciple of Sakura]

1 hour ago, kristof65 said:

At least with Reaper, if you can attend Reapercon, or know someone who is, you can go Boneyard shopping.   

I'll be really bummed if they discontinue that portion of ReaperCon. 

I don't think Reapercon is ever going to be in the cards for me.

[kristof65]

2 minutes ago, Disciple of Sakura said:

I don't think Reapercon is ever going to be in the cards for me.

I've only managed to make it twice in the last 12 years.  My point was that at least there is still currently an option, even if it's not an easy one. 

[Disciple of Sakura]

I'm just glad that the custom Christmas presents that I made for my gaming group a few years back were ordered and completed just before they discontinued the Boneyard, because I wouldn't have been able to complete them without those individual pieces.

[TheAuldGrump]

I am now warning people to avoid using the Mantic digital store - they still have not retrieved any of my downloads, and have managed to screw up every single one of their site updates.

 

AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.

 

Once, I can see happening, twice is stretching things.

 

This is the third time.

 

Do not buy downloads from them.

 

The Auld Grump

[Unruly]

On 9/11/2019 at 10:00 AM, Corsair said:

Sadly, FFG is trying to cut their own throats right now by revamping the XWing game. I am debating about just dumping my stuff instead of buying into the new game change.

 

After looking into it more, I'm thinking that a lot of people may be overreacting with it. A lot of the distaste seems to stem solely from the price, and yea, I get that it's expensive. But I think that, in the long run, it's a good thing. Original X-Wing had a lot of bloat and rules contradictions/exceptions hitting it.

 

Not to mention the way that balance had shifted so much throughout the years because there was no way to easily fix things once they were out in the wild. Like how the A-Wing was overly expensive for what it was, so they had to print out a new modification card that's sole purpose was to reduce its cost. The only way to get it was to buy the Rebel Aces pack, which included 3 of them(two extra and one for the A-Wing in the kit). So you had to spend $30-40 just to make one ship type viable for competitive play, and even to make them half decent for casual play.

 

So $50 to make 90% of your ships for a single faction viable in the new edition really seems like small potatoes in comparison to $30 to make 3 of a single ship viable.

 

Now, I haven't actually played 2.0 yet, but I'm hoping to remedy that in the near future. And since I used a webpage to build my lists anyways I'm not bothered by having to use their app to do it now. Not to mention that by not printing the point costs and upgrade slots on the cards and relying on the app they can make balance adjustments as needed by increasing or decreasing costs on the fly. And for those who don't want to use the app, they do have printable points/upgrades lists on their website that are updated as changes are made.

 

So I'm actually starting to reserve judgement on if 2.0 was truly FFG shooting themselves in the foot or if it's a lot of overreaction on the part of the players.

[Kangaroorex]

Concerning x-wing:  is the conversion kit a bunch of cards or physical modifications to the ships?  I ask because if they are playing the same game of model modification, there are alternatives...

 

We used to play warhammer with differs t color dice standing in for pieces (I was not a rich college student) and later we used mage knight standins (I got 4 shipping boxes of mage knight for 50 bucks).  Point is an x-wing looks like an x-wing.  If you have the correct rules for the minis manoeuvres, what it looks like on the field doesn't really matter.

 

Of course if they messed with the cards and tokens it becomes much more difficult to proxie.  Just as obviously I know little about the game other than the ships are pretty and expensive 

Edited September 13, 2019 by Kangaroorex

[Unruly]

2 hours ago, Kangaroorex said:

Concerning x-wing:  is the conversion kit a bunch of cards or physical modifications to the ships?  I ask because if they are playing the same game of model modification, there are alternatives...

 

We used to play warhammer with differs t color dice standing in for pieces (I was not a rich college student) and later we used mage knight standins (I got 4 shipping boxes of mage knight for 50 bucks).  Point is an x-wing looks like an x-wing.  If you have the correct rules for the minis manoeuvres, what it looks like on the field doesn't really matter.

 

Of course if they messed with the cards and tokens it becomes much more difficult to proxie.  Just as obviously I know little about the game other than the ships are pretty and expensive 

 

They use the same actual minis in 2.0, but all the cardboard bits are new and some ships didn't translate between factions(Slave 1 can't be fielded by Empire anymore). There's no overlap in the cardboard because of how the rules were changed to fix all the issues with exceptions that had cropped up over 6 years of constantly bolting new stuff to the same old framework. So the conversion kit is a big box of new cardboard to replace all the old. And you need to buy the new core set to get the new tokens, because token rules changed and now some of the tokens have a "face up/face down" state.

 

I mean, some minis did get updated, like how the X-Wings have moveable wings so you can physically represent them being open/closed with the new models, but the old models are still 100% legal if you've got the new cardboard for them. And there's no sign of that changing, because, as you said, an X-Wing is an X-Wing so long as you've got the cardboard bits to back it up.

[Corsair]

@Unruly thanks for clearing up some things. Let us know how the new rules play!

[TheAuldGrump]

On 9/12/2019 at 10:12 PM, TheAuldGrump said:

I am now warning people to avoid using the Mantic digital store - they still have not retrieved any of my downloads, and have managed to screw up every single one of their site updates.

 

AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.

 

Once, I can see happening, twice is stretching things.

 

This is the third time.

 

Do not buy downloads from them.

 

The Auld Grump

I am an e-mail pack rat.

 

As a result, I still had the order numbers for about 80% of my missing downloads.

 

And a lot of people are having problems placing orders, right now.

 

The Auld Grump

[kristof65]

On 8/16/2019 at 8:20 PM, Zink said:

I recently bought a set of rules called Renegade Scout from Nordic Weasel to try out with them. Barely glanced at the rules and don't know when I'll try them

I finally pulled the trigger and bought this last night.  

Can't comment on the rules themselves yet, but the layout of the main PDF annoys me.  Who puts a page number on the cover, and a Table of Contents on the inside of the front cover? 

[Doug Sundseth]

21 minutes ago, kristof65 said:

Can't comment on the rules themselves yet, but the layout of the main PDF annoys me.  Who puts a page number on the cover, and a Table of Contents on the inside of the front cover? 

 

Some of this is probably down to the inexperience of the layout person and some due to a difference in use cases between a PDF used as an electronic file and one used (or intended for use) as a paper book.

 

A few comments based on some years of doing layout:

• Including the Front Cover in the page numbering scheme means that the number at the bottom of the page matches the page number shown in the header. I've gone to starting the page numbering with the cover page for this exact reason.
• To start the numbering on a different page, you have to do that explicitly, which is easier in some page-layout suites than others.
• If there's a chance that the book will be printed, you almost certainly want the first page of text to be an odd-numbered page, because that's what the software is designed to support (for L-to-R reading languages, anyway). So if you number the IFC, you probably also want the Front Cover included in the numbering.
• Showing the page number on the cover is more likely to be inexperience. (With a paper book, you definitely wouldn't want this, because it doesn't contribute to the graphical design.) So you would normally suppress the footer that has the page number, but that's not necessarily an obvious process.
• Putting the ToC on the IFC is a reasonable choice. It was uncommon with paper books, because for them the cover was typically printed separately and there was too much chance of a change to the text signatures could cause a late change to the ToC, but when it's all one file, there's not much reason to move the ToC back. And if you have a single-page ToC, you can start the body of the book on page 3 (a right page) without wasting pages.
• If you are printing the book, you need to consider signature lengths (which are powers of 4, but can vary depending on the printing scheme). Sometimes this would result in being one page beyond a signature boundary, so there's an incentive to reduce the text length so that you don't have to pay to print an extra sig.

[ratsmitglied]

9 hours ago, kristof65 said:

I finally pulled the trigger and bought this last night.  

Can't comment on the rules themselves yet, but the layout of the main PDF annoys me.  Who puts a page number on the cover, and a Table of Contents on the inside of the front cover? 

Someone who used MS Word to do the layout and didn't understand how to make it work properly (i.e. 99% of people who use MS Word)

 

OR what @Doug Sundseth said

[Club]

On 8/16/2019 at 10:22 AM, Kangaroorex said:

There is a certain amount of fanbase issues here too.  my favorite example is the new edition of shadowrun.  That ruleset is terrible.  I don't mean its a bad game, I mean the actual ruleset editing was horrible.  Before the book even hit the market it needed 18 pages of errata to correct known errors in the base book.  Catalyst is actually considering releasing a softcover errata book to cover those errors, missing tables and missing rules.  Even knowing that, every copy brought to gencon was purchased along with most of the 'collector's editions' (wrap a faux leather skin on a standard book and charge and additional 60%)  I do not understand why you would buy this.  Its not like the previous edition was unplayable, it just wasn't new and shiny. 

 

I am agreeing, while thinking that 1) a lot of the rules are subjective, which is a good thing for some groups and horrible for others, and 2) There is a lot of system mastery needed to play at a basic level. I'm not talking "No called shots unless you've studied those pages", but rather much closer to "No casual players, I'm not in the mood to baby you along."

 

I was hoping for shadowrun 5.5, just fixing some of the rough patches in the last edition. Not what we got.

[TheAuldGrump]

On 9/12/2019 at 10:12 PM, TheAuldGrump said:

I am now warning people to avoid using the Mantic digital store - they still have not retrieved any of my downloads, and have managed to screw up every single one of their site updates.

 

AVOID. AVOID. AVOID.

 

Once, I can see happening, twice is stretching things.

 

This is the third time.

 

Do not buy downloads from them.

 

The Auld Grump

It appears that the root of the problem - both times - is that I was registered on Mantic Digital via Kickstarter - and their service provider did not supply the names and e-mails of those that came in from Kickstarter when Mantic took it in house.

 

*EDIT* Oh, yeah - kinda important - Mantic sent me all the missing files via Dropbox.

 

Feeling a bit less irritated.

 

The Auld Grump

Edited September 20, 2019 by TheAuldGrump

[Unruly]

3 hours ago, TheAuldGrump said:

It appears that the root of the problem - both times - is that I was registered on Mantic Digital via Kickstarter - and their service provider did not supply the names and e-mails of those that came in from Kickstarter when Mantic took it in house.

 

*EDIT* Oh, yeah - kinda important - Mantic sent me all the missing files via Dropbox.

 

Feeling a bit less irritated.

 

The Auld Grump

 

I'm still waiting for FGG to transfer all the digital purchases from their old site to the new site, so that I can access everything together. As it is, they're keeping a copy of the old site up and running just so people still have access to their downloads.