Randomness XVIII: Ex-Vee-Triple-Eye

[haldir]

1 minute ago, Green Eyed Monsty said:

For a Catholic Nun a string of Prayer Beads would be a logical item for the figure to be holding.

GEM

 

You can see the first male, has the prayer beads, but she has strips of cloth? paper? Since I'm not Catholic or religious of any kind. I have no idea what these are.

[kitchen_wolf]

Bandages.  Nuns were traditionally nurses before it became a modern profession.

[Cranky Dog]

3 hours ago, PaganMegan said:

Heading to Ogunquit on the 8th.

Grump is in a concert.

Ogunquit?

 

Dang, that takes me back. My family vacationed there several times in the 80s, and our neighbors owned a timeshare condo there for ages. It was my first experience with the ocean and real beaches.

[Green Eyed Monsty]

48 minutes ago, kitchen_wolf said:

Bandages.  Nuns were traditionally nurses before it became a modern profession.

Good Call.

GEM

[SparrowMarie]

4 hours ago, haldir said:

 

103 104 here, I'll take your 90+. Thou, this is regular summer weather here. Forecast says 108s later this week. Every time I've seen a forecast & then look at my phone, it's always a couple degrees higher, so 110.

 

We're going to be pushing 100 in the next couple days. I am not looking forward to it.

[sumbloke]

2 hours ago, kitchen_wolf said:

Bandages.  Nuns were traditionally nurses before it became a modern profession.

Yes, the model is called "Sister Nurse".

[Green Eyed Monsty]

19 minutes ago, SparrowMarie said:

 

We're going to be pushing 100 in the next couple days. I am not looking forward to it.

Here in Northern Nevada we are looking at 100 degree plus temps.

Plus, we are getting the full smoke load from the fires in California.

Reno is listed among the top 25 urban areas in the nation for particulate matter.

All brought to us courtesy of our bad neighbor to the west.

GEM

[Inarah]

4 hours ago, haldir said:

So I'm painting some traditional religious types, as one of my adventures has a clergy & these were the only non-threatening, weaponless minis I could find to print off. The nun has what appears to be strips of something in her hands? Anyone know what these exactly are?

 

 

Bandages would be my guess, too but her left hand looks kind of weird like she's holding a  fidget spinner or something. 

 

23 minutes ago, SparrowMarie said:

 

We're going to be pushing 100 in the next couple days. I am not looking forward to it.

 

We just finished a 10 day stretch of 100+ days.  Stay hydrated, plan some small non-cooked meals like sandwiches, and stay in the AC as much as possible.  Expect to feel icky, tired, and even slightly nauseated, especially if you aren't hydrating.  Don't forget your pets. 

 

2 hours ago, Cranky Dog said:

Ogunquit?

 

Dang, that takes me back. My family vacationed there several times in the 80s, and our neighbors owned a timeshare condo there for ages. It was my first experience with the ocean and real beaches.

 

We did too. Would get a cottage (a shack, really) on the beach and live in the sand all week. It was glorious.  I don't want to know what it looks like these days. 

 

I saw Star Wars for the fist time there in the local theatre. 

 

 

 

[haldir]

4 hours ago, kitchen_wolf said:

Bandages.  Nuns were traditionally nurses before it became a modern profession.

 

Thank you very much!

[Mad Jack]

5 hours ago, kitchen_wolf said:

Bandages.  Nuns were traditionally nurses before it became a modern profession.

 

 For a medieval nun, it's definitely bandages* - outside of prayer, that was essentially their function within the Church, serving as nurses. Which at that time would include everything from being an orderly to a nurse practitioner and even an apothecary at times. Nuns knew enough about medicinal herbs and plants that a fair number of them were burned as witches over the centuries.

 

 

*Taking care of lepers was a huge part of their business.

 

 

[Chaoswolf]

[WhiteWulfe]

13 hours ago, PaganMegan said:

That means sales are WAY down.

 

 

12 hours ago, Inarah said:

 

Retailers who were carrying it in this area put most of their models on clearance years ago. 

 

All the distribution issues and how they handled various issues in the community (and that infamous "rule" they had for a long time) probably didn't help.  Supposedly there's a fourth edition coming out, with a much smaller set of miniatures available, and no guarantees your old models will be usable... 

 

The full on reset is something that could possibly bring the game back, or it could bring about too many thoughts on how it reminds people why they moved their focus from GW into other games... 

 

Wow, that's a lot of fluff and puff on their site about the new edition.  I wish them well, but I pretty much disregarded any ideas of getting into the game a while back when it was hard to find neat things I just wanted to paint, let alone contemplate playing...  Nobody had stock, and almost nobody was willing to do custom orders, and their paint being out of stock regularly at places didn't help either. 

[Cygnwulf]

54 minutes ago, WhiteWulfe said:

 

All the distribution issues and how they handled various issues in the community (and that infamous "rule" they had for a long time) probably didn't help.  Supposedly there's a fourth edition coming out, with a much smaller set of miniatures available, and no guarantees your old models will be usable... 

 

The full on reset is something that could possibly bring the game back, or it could bring about too many thoughts on how it reminds people why they moved their focus from GW into other games... 

 

Wow, that's a lot of fluff and puff on their site about the new edition.  I wish them well, but I pretty much disregarded any ideas of getting into the game a while back when it was hard to find neat things I just wanted to paint, let alone contemplate playing...  Nobody had stock, and almost nobody was willing to do custom orders, and their paint being out of stock regularly at places didn't help either. 

 

yeah, when they released MK3 there were a lot of rule problems, particularly with a lot of overlooked units. They responded by putting all the cards and corrected rules up basiclally for free, which kinda burned a lot of retailers who had heavily invested in rulebooks and card decks that nobody was going to buy now because they were out of date.  They follewed this up with a ton of SKU bloat that made the line difficult for retailers to carry without significant investment in inventory money and space.

They moved from metal to injection molded plastic during 2nd edition, but they were doing their injection molding through a couple of third parties. There have been, issues, with a few of them, even to the point that one of them 'lost' the molds and that rendered a chunk of their current product line impossible to re-stock.  
Whil 3d printing might not be quite as cost effective, it does allow for rapidly bootstraping production in the case of an emergency and having multiple manufacturing 'hubs' becomes more feasable.  Could help with overseas shipping (Warmachine never had much of a presence of europe because of the expense of shipping plastic from china to the us, then boxing up with the additional metal parts, and then shipping to europe wasn't very effective even 10 years ago

On top of all of this, through about the first 3 of the last 6 years since the last edition came out (and for several before that) they had really epically bad community engagement and the people trying to smooth things over with the MK3 release were really bad at PR so it alienated a lot of their fanbase.  

Ironically, getting rid of the infamous page 5 rule in mk3 actually upset a lot of the old skook die hards and ran some of them off as well, though I felt that was worth a strong good riddance as that's generally a class of gamer I don't care to associate with anyway.

All that said, there's still a decent core of players out there, the problem is with no retail support they  mostly only play at home or at gaming clubs instead of at game stores, so it makes it hard to get new players in.
The last few years HAVE seen them do good thing.  However, in the past few years, Privateer has done pretty good things with Monsterpocalypse and Riot Quest, and Warcaster did really well on kickstarter and after.   
Reviving warmachine is going to be a hard row to hoe, and they may put off some of their more dedicated Hordes players by rolling that brand into Warmachine and NOT releasing any warlock led factions at the time of the MK4 release. 

The decision to create an Unlimited format and a Prime format is questionable to me.  I realize they're trying not to upset people by making large parts of their collections obsolete while still keeping the game approchable for newcomers, but I anticipate that once they get a few more factions out beyond the 4 they currently are launching, Prime is going to become pretty much the only organized play format with Unlimited mostly only being an occasional thing for old fans, much like how MtG organied games are almost always only in Standard format and you almost have to make special plans with someone to play Unlimited/Legacy.

 

 

I have more thoughts but I've rambled long enough.  I'll summarize as: I actually intend to look into it as I actually have a few local friends who still play, but I'm not yet certian how invested I'll get.

Edited July 27, 2022 by Cygnwulf

[WhiteWulfe]

6 minutes ago, Cygnwulf said:

 

yeah, when they released MK3 there were a lot of rule problems, particularly with a lot of overlooked units. They responded by putting all the cards and corrected rules up basiclally for free, which kinda burned a lot of retailers who had heavily invested in rulebooks and card decks that nobody was going to buy now because they were out of date.  They follewed this up with a ton of SKU bloat that made the line difficult for retailers to carry without significant investment in inventory money and space.

They moved from metal to injection molded plastic during 2nd edition, but they were doing their injection molding through a couple of third parties. There have been, issues, with a few of them, even to the point that one of them 'lost' the molds and that rendered a chunk of their current product line impossible to re-stock.

On top of all of this, through about the first 3 of the last 6 years since the last edition came out (and for several before that) they had really epically bad community engagement and the people trying to smooth things over with the MK3 release were really bad at PR so it alienated a lot of their fanbase.  

Ironically, getting rid of the infamous page 5 rule in mk3 actually upset a lot of the old skook die hards and ran some of them off as well, though I felt that was worth a strong good riddance as that's generally a class of gamer I don't care to associate with anyway.

All that said, there's still a decent core of players out there, the problem is with no retail support they  mostly only play at home or at gaming clubs instead of at game stores, so it makes it hard to get new players in.
The last few years HAVE seen them do good thing.  However, in the past few years, Privateer has done pretty good things with Monsterpocalypse and Riot Quest, and Warcaster did really well on kickstarter and after.   
Reviving warmachine is going to be a hard row to hoe, and they may put off some of their more dedicated Hordes players by rolling that brand into Warmachine and NOT releasing any warlock led factions at the time of the MK4 release. 

The decision to create an Unlimited format and a Prime format is questionable to me.  I realize they're trying not to upset people by making large parts of their collections obsolete while still keeping the game approchable for newcomers, but I anticipate that once they get a few more factions out beyond the 4 they currently are launching, Prime is going to become pretty much the only organized play format with Unlimited mostly only being an occasional thing for old fans, much like how MtG organied games are almost always only in Standard format and you almost have to make special plans with someone to play Unlimited/Legacy.

 

 

I have more thoughts but I've rambled long enough.  I'll summarize as: I actually intend to look into it as I actually have a few local friends who still play, but I'm not yet certian how invested I'll get.

I wish them the best, and I do hope they can turn it around with mk4 - I kind of want newer, shinier, easier to assemble warjacks!  Here's hoping they can pull off an Infinity Code One, significantly reduce the skus retailers have to stock, and their community manager does something along the lines of how Para Bellum Games has been going (ton of engagement for Conquest, and it even has two styles of play) 

 

But man, some of those plastic minis like the starter for Circle, or the mk3 starter box were a royal pain to assemble... 

[Cygnwulf]

42 minutes ago, WhiteWulfe said:

 

But man, some of those plastic minis like the starter for Circle, or the mk3 starter box were a royal pain to assemble... 

Huh, I kinda liked how the starter box werewolves went together, the seams were in easy to hide areas, but the fit was sometimes a little off.
I did pick up the plastic Grolar/Kodiak while it was still available though and it went together great.
I got the Extreme Decimator kit, which had moved to cast resin and metal instead of all metal, and it was basically what I expected for a kit that was originally designed to be all cast metal.  LOTS of pinning to get stuff to stay together...