Over Explanation: The Death of the 40k Sandbox

[TheTrans]

The Yarrik topic got locked as it certainly had veered, but it made me think about the 40k 'setting' as we're seeing it.

I got a post in there before it was nixed, but it made me sort of think.

So I feel at least a decent amount of us on this forum got into the hobby pre-8th which I feel we may have seen the increase in GWs (at least from a lore perspective) downward spiral. 

This is all subjective rah rah rah etc, but I feel GW constantly nowadays is constantly filling in more gaps of the setting, shining light in all the dark corners were our imaginations did a lot of heavy lifting which to me constantly tightens up the known bounds of setting and makes it feel smaller and smaller. 

We have that then linked that every new campaign book and model are 'current', we're not seeing them spew out long dead models into the main game line, nor reference any historical matters, its all now, at the new minute to midnight, where primarchs fight. 

 

Obviously the Primarchs don't help stuff either, we know if they, or a new plastic model, fight, no one will die, there won't be a death as everything is current, here and now. Then when everything is set around this big ole biffs, it sort of makes everything else feel irrelevant. 

I know in older editions of the game we also had a current setting, but there was so much 'non-current' stuff flapping around in it, it didn't feel like you needed an army in the current setting, as everything 'big' in the lore etc was generally already done and passed, (look for instance at Gaunts Ghosts, Eisenhorn, Black Legion books, all the Imperial Armours etc, where the authors were allowed to make their own little area off the beaten path that could exist in perpetuity). 

I honestly don't know where this post is leading, it will probably just come across as grog-nardism but the flippant writing off of "Oh yeah nah, the Steel Legion are all depleted (on a planet that has always been lauded as being inexhaustible in both manpower and manafacturing might) just paint your Krieg a different colour, lol." just kind of sucked a little and to me at least sort of shows a glimpse toward the current powers that be's thoughts on fluff at GW (yes we know fluff and art etc have always been to sell models, but it just felt significantly less flippant and :cuss:ty back in he day, not to mention canonically 'killing' those models in the new setting, that you're being pushed very hard to 'keep up with', and having legends factoring in on top of that).

As while I feel the older stagnant style didn't have a whole lot of movement, it did create a broad, all encompassing sandbox in where any epoch or timeframe felt relevant and explorable and there was always a space for 'your guys'.

Where as now with it shifting to a narrative that is generally hyper focused on the 'now' it just shrinks the setting into a (questionably written at times) Named Plastic Character showdown that has no wiggle room for 'before' or random area of the galaxy.

Has anyone less old and whiney than me found any benefits to the setting moving aside from avoiding the stagnant sandbox we used to have?  

[Evil Eye]

Honestly I hate the move from sandbox to space soap opera and everything that came with it. Specifically the transition to a "live service" style game and the ensuing shift from a hobby you can engage with at your own pace to a FOMO driven mad dash to use your models before another "Whoops, your favourite character was awarded a new necktie for their bravery in yet another anticlimactic duel, and so they're now on a considerably larger scenic base! Also your second favourite character died off screen and is no longer game legal, sorry!" rugpull.

 

I would actually go as far as to say the entire "living system" thing should never have been accepted by the community as it allowed GW to psyop the player base into handing over any agency they once had over the game.

 

Regarding fluff specifically I 100% agree. The shift from "This is the Imperium, some bits are like this, but it's so big we couldn't possibly describe it all, go nuts" to "This is the Imperium, it's like this, every single aspect has been (poorly) explained* is a damn shame. And absolutely, lifting the lid on mysteries that were supposed to remain mysterious was a massive mistake. See the Terminus Decree...

[Felix Antipodes]

I’m a have your cake and eat it type of guy.  I really miss those side trips into the Imperium’s past we used to get (vale Imperial Armour, etc) and those page or two in a codex where they would give a heap of tidbits about past triumphs and/or tragedies of the subject faction.

 

I also was one of those who used to bleat about the non-advancement of the setting (especially after they nerfed the results of the 13th Black Crusade campaign - yes, I’m old).  I’ve since been living in a pain-glove for that particular sin.  The problem isn’t that they did advance it, it’s that they have done nothing with it.  Worse, they have used it to throttle the game, making it a continual möbius strip of battles that come and go but are never resolved.  All while junking their older models into ‘legends’ so they can resell us newer, shinier stuff.

 

There was a lot of hype about the future direction of the storyline after a couple of big names were added to the design team.  I’m not seeing any improvement myself.  I can’t even see their influence.  Yes, I know it takes time because they are always working on the next thing but (imho) they have had more than enough.  If this is their best then bring back Matt Ward.  At least he made it interesting before he was metaphorically run out of town on a rail by some fans.

 

GW has always been a balancing act between the suits trying to keep the company in the black and the creatives putting out the games.  I feel that balance has shifted, and not for the better.

[sitnam]

1 hour ago, TheTrans said:

Has anyone less old and whiney than me found any benefits to the setting moving aside from avoiding the stagnant sandbox we used to have?  

 

I'm not sure how every one else is, but my own sandbox narrative is in my own corner of the (vast) 40k galaxy. Besides my Nihilakh Necrons, all my armies are homebrews occupying this area of space (Even homebrews for armies I don't and probably will never collect). Stuff like the Great Rift has definitely affected my mini-setting, but honestly the idea of a blighted Imperium Nihilus has benefited me narratively. The fates of primarchs and epic characters simply don't matter for My Dudes

 

I just don't find the meta-narrative has mattered that much to my storytelling. It's still a big galaxy for players to tell their own stories.

 

I'd say even BL has plenty of recent books in recent years that fit this sandbox vibe. Elemental Council, Brooks' Ork and Alpha Legion stories, Lords of Excess, etc. None of those stories, as much as I like them, seem to matter on a galactic scale. And that's a good thing

 

I'll also caveat that I don't play anything but the ultra-rare game of Kill Team. I collect, paint, read novels, and occasionally write homebrew

Edited March 23 by sitnam

[Marshal Rohr]

The mobafication of the hobby is part of a larger trend across all hobbies, where disconnected business majors and financial groups have snapped up these relatively modest but reliable streams of cash (modest for investors) that feed on professional adults (grown up nerds or the parents of young kids) incomes. Simultaneously, the hobby has moved “online” and been absorbed into the wider internet content mill and culture wars. It’s just the continuous en(redacted)ification of modern life. We got Krieg in plastic, but they look nothing like the forge world models because some sculptor had to “make it their own” and then pass a committee review. Jes Goodwin wanted to reinvent the Space Marine, and product designers wanted something fresh so we got things like the Desolator monstrosity instead of that new marine with a heavy bolter or lascannon.  
 

This institutional decay has impacted Bethesda, Creative Assembly, BioWare, Bungie, Atomic Mass, Wizards, and on and on and on and it won’t stop because some of the things coming out are cool or fun and we are bored and we all have the fatal flaw of loving our hobby. It’s never going to go back, and more and more online only engagement will bring in the worst humans possible and we will be forever bombarded with terrible takes from people who never owned a 2nd Edition Codex or never mailed in a battle report from a global campaign and ask questions on reddit instead of reading books or watch Valrak get hyped about some character they have no historical concept for. 
 

The Steel Legion debacle and new Heresy options apocalypse all get handwaved aside as “just house rule it” or “no one is taking your models” but the game design has reached the point where they are removing things from product lines and rules. You can make up your own rules for Acid Bolters or Assault Cannons or Special Characters, and that’s fine. They used to exist 10 months ago, but now we just gotta move on. In 36 months there will be less options and you gotta do the house rules again, and people will say “what’s an acid shell” and you’ve gotta tell them it was a unique flavor item from two editions ago. When you pull out your Steel Legion to use whatever monstrosity datasheet soup 11th creates you gotta deal with the people who don’t like oldhammer. You can’t even play Elysians anymore outside of a handful of units. Theyre not coming back because that corporate decay has mandated that everything must have a corresponding model in production. They don’t get any new lore because the writers are tasked with making new lore for the season pass books, and the codexes are just copy pastes of the edits of the edits of the edits of the 4th Edition Codex lore anyway. 
 

Something like Warhammer can’t exist anymore. It has to have every thing purposefully crafted for product. Black Library barely releases anything now, everything is saved up for quarterly targets and what you do get is hit or miss because when a setting has lost as much soul as Warhammer has, the writers don’t know where to take the stories. They try and write a book that feels good but at the end it’s just another generic scifi novel. There’s no more Night Lord trilogies coming. No more Scars. No more Double Eagle. 
 

All that is left for us to do is just write my little fanfics about my little toys and read the stuff that inspired me in the first place. At least the heresy kits and the new 40K stuff actually looks sick. Ill have to wade through another WarCom article where I’m told the Emperor actually hated space ships so battlefleet gothic won’t get a new release, or all space marines now worship the emperor, or the Elysians actually turned to chaos and got eaten by piranha just to get to the news about the new models. Then I can go to reddit looking for a cool scheme and see a four hundred reply thread of people well ackchullying each other incorrectly because not a single one of them owns a codex before finding a very nice scheme to modify. 

Moving the story forward or keeping it the same isn’t actually the problem, the problem is the people doing it and the fans engaging with it and that’s not unique to Warhammer. I don’t know how they can unshag this sheep but I sincerely hope they figure it out before Cavill’s show brings in the final wave of the modern audience. 

[grailkeeper]

One aspect of this is in computer games. I've played a lot of 40k computer games. Almost every model in the games is a direct copy of models from the game. This is supposed to be a universe of infinite variety and potential. Having every guardsman look like a cadian is one thing, but having every ork or chaos cultist look the same drastically reduces the scale of the universe. Perhaps a slightly different take to the storyline complaint, but again it reduces the sandbox part of 40k, which is one of my favourite aspects.

 

 

On a modelling front the models are a lot harder to convert now. It used to be that most models were head, legs, torso, arms and maybe a few other bits. It made mixing and matching a lot easier, if poses were a bit less dynamic. Now all you can do easily are headswaps. Anything more advanced takes a lot more effort. I used to love seeing loads of different regiments etc. 

Edited March 23 by grailkeeper

[Antarius]

Interesting topic that (at least in my mind) touches on lots of other related topics. I'll try to refrain from writing an entire novel (but, alas, I will probably fail) and I'll try to keep from rambling too much and going off on too many tangents (but again, I'm not likely to succeed). I'll also try to see if I can keep from stating my own preferences as objective reality, but I'm sure you know how that's going to work out...

 

Anyway, I started back in 2nd edition and I've been bemoaning the move from setting to storyline since at least the return of Guilliman, so I've gone through a lot of different stages of grief/nerdrage and I've sort of come out on the other side, in that I've decided that hoping for GW to do what I want is a fool's game and the only one who can steer my hobby in the direction I want it to go is myself. So I've given up on getting annoyed at what models they do/don't produce and trying to read the tea leaves on why they are/aren't doing this and whether they are out to annoy me personally. GW is not my friend and it never has been, it's just a company who wants to sell me things and that's it; they don't owe me anything and I don't owe them anything, so, I just do what I like and ignore everything else.
It's not perfect, of course, but I find that it serves me well enough and honestly, there's always been a lot of griping and entitlement in this hobby for as long as I can remember, so it's just nice to have freed myself from all of that. It's a change of perspective that has made my hobby much more enjoyable and the frustrations I feel much more bearable.
So that's my advice to everybody and that's the constructive part of my post over with; it's likely going to get a lot more whiney from now on, so if you just want the zen master spiel, you cna stop reading here 

First off, I think GW simply doesn't write good lore anymore and I'm not sure they really can. Not because there was a golden age of nostalgia or because the people they've got today aren't as good as the old guys or as invested in the hobby. I think it's just an inevitable shift that happens once a franchise has run on (and on) for long enough.
To take a sort of relevant little detour, I just happened to read the "Eye of Terror" codex the other day and I was struck by two things: how little nostalgia I felt for (almost) all the models and how surprisingly awesome all the lore bits were (even the ones where I could clearly see things that I thought could've been written better). So why was that? I'm not sure, but I think it's a couple of things, among which I'm pretty sure these points are part of the explanation:
- There was still places to go and people to see/invent, without having to tie everything directly to models (this is the obvious one and I guess we've just got to chalk that up to capitalism)
- The people who were writing this were still somewhat figuring it out as they went along. That doesn't mean everything they did was genius, but it means that the things they thought were coolest got built upon and lots of threads were left dangling, which provided inspiration for the rest of us and made the universe feel bigger
- The setting wasn't quite as codified back then and (and this is the big one), the writers weren't lifelong warhammer fans, they were fans of all sorts of stuff. They weren't uniquely creative, it's just that they "stole" from everywhere, whereas today, warhammer writers seem to just steal from warhammer.
You see this in other forms of art too, an example would be "retro" acts trying to sound exactly like metal bands did in '87 right down to wearing the same clothes. The problem, of course, is that it always begs the question "why wouldn't I just listen to the originals?" and the answer is always "of course you would, they're much better because they're the originals" and I think the reason is mostly that those originals had a wider net of things they stole from, rather than some intrinsic spark of genius.

- What's left for them now is to keep filling out all the "gaps" and "loose threads", which is very unlikely to be awesome, simply because that's not how fiction works. Think of how cool "The Clone Wars" sounded when it was just an off-hand reference about Darth Vader's future and contrast it with the reality of the prequels. That's at the heart of the "overexplanation" problem, even if it's not the entire problem.

- I've grown older and more jaded and I already know pretty much what the grim darkness of the far future is all about, so when I see them going back to Armaggedon I just yawn and shake my head and mutter about "kids these days", rather than get excited. This is a part of the explanation of course, but honestly I think it might be a smaller part of the big picture than I used to think.
There are probably plenty of other points, but these are the ones that I've thought about lately.

Secondly, I feel like we as a community have relegated everything to GW and that's why everything seems "dictated" by GW these days. I know GW have done a lot to make it so and it's not a defence of them as much as it's an indictment of us and the world we live in, but it's still a problem that isn't going away no matter how much we blame GW.
It's not like it was perfect back in the day either, as back in 5th, my group used to moan endlessly about the balance of the game and the general state of the hobby, but they were never willing to actually do something about it. It's still something that seems to have been exacerbated a lot by the increased rate of releases, FAQs and the rise of the "tournament play as the official way to play" approach.
It's not that I don't understand why a lot of this has happened and why people find it hard to break away from it, but the thing is, it's still absolute poison to the creative side of the hobby (and, I would argue, to the game side as well but that's another topic for another day). As long as people insist that things will only be accepted as "real" in both game and lore if it has the "current" stamp from GW, how do we expect either game or lore to open up even slightly from "and this season is all about X, but not Y and certainly not something outside the current focus of the game/lore"?
I mean, it's obviously more obvious on the game side of things, where you have people stating that Legends are unusable because (they think) everyone else refuse to accept them or that people will obviously refuse to play against a kill team that's one day over the "sell by" date etc., but of course it bleeds into the way we approach the lore too. Not least because GW seems to insist on writing their lore this way (the prime example would be named characters doing all the moving and shaking, making the galaxy feel a lot smaller and more repetitive), but there's really no reason why we have to do it this way.
We can create other characters, storylines, scenarios, places etc. with literally the stroke of a pen and while I agree that GW has moved away from encouraging that (or at least they don't encourage it as much in practice anymore), nothing is stopping us from writing our own lore within the greater sandbox of the setting. Sure, we won't get an "official" stamp from GW and sure, some rivet counter might say "ackchually the captain of the fifth company is called so-and-so and he has a different colour hat and he uses a power sword, not a power axe" but that's part and parcel of being creative in a shared universe.

Finally (for now) the setting has just run out of steam, to some degree. It can't be new and exciting all the time, because it's not new anymore, not by a long shot. Sure, there can be another war for Armageddon or another Tyranid hive fleet (it might even get a new name and a new colour scheme) and we might get a new model with a new name (which, to be fair to GW, they actually do a bunch of every year), but the fundamentals are going to remain the same and, ironically, moving the storyline forward exacerbates this, rather than solves it, because the setting can't actually change all that much as long as it's bound to a specific game with specific models. Just see how much people complain about the removal of options, even when that removal is mostly in their own minds - now imagine that removal was more substantial, say, the actual removal of an army or a regiment from the game and the lore, which is the logical endpoint of actually moving the storyline forward.
We don't even have to come up with hypotheticals, to see this. They actually did something that would have been a major shake-up of both game and lore, if that had been possible. They destroyed Cadia and that would have been an extremely ballsy move, but course, due to the nature of things, they couldn't actually let it have any real impact.
Why do you think eveybody and their mother in the IG/AM are still Cadians? Imagine the rage if they had said "okay, Cadia is done and dusted, better repaint your armies or buy new ones, if you want to keep playing this game - oh and now Abaddon is headed for Terra, so don't get too attached to any of your imperial armies or characters either" (the latter being the message that everybody would certainly have gotten, even if they didn't say it out loud).

The thing is, you can absolutely move the storyline forward like that in books or movies - or even video games - but I just don't think you can do it in a game like this, simply because you're going to step on too many toes and alienate too many customers. That's why, for all the complaining about stagnation, the old way was a lot more flexible and that's also why the storyline might "move" but it's not actually going to ever move.

 

I've already outlined what I think is the solution, as I simply don't think GW is in a position to solve this problem (nor do I think they care, nor am I even sure I think they ought to care - in any case, waiting for them to change is a fool's game). 

Edited March 23 by Antarius

[Lay]

I believe the main reason for the shift from setting to ongoing narrative is the way we consume fiction. Every new novel or campaign that adds to the setting will find itself on a wiki page, a lore youtube video, or a dedicated reddit thread or (yuck) even a google AI summary. Things are picked apart and analyzed almost as fast as they come out. I feel like there's just less incentive to discuss the intricacies of the setting because someone else has already done it for you. 

So the only way to have any kind of buzz and genuine speculation is the introduction of new, evolving plot lines.

[Vassakov]

I think this is a genuinely fascinating topic because it cuts across so many different things that have changed over the past decade or so - but I don't think, personally, they're all for the worse. Or even that a majority are. I would say the crucial dates are 2012/13 and 2017/18 - specifically the Chapterhouse lawsuit resolution and then the launches of AoS and 8th Edition, which were significant changes for both 40k and the Fantasy side of GW's offering. Of course, since then we've seen the Old World return, with entirely new factions, and Horus Heresy significantly expanded. In terms of overall options and ways to engage with the hobby, we've never had it so good - and that's just the models to say nothing of the videogames, animations, novels and overall presence of Warhammer these days. Back in my day, you had Dawn of War and you liked it and that was basically it. (Editors note: We don't talk about Fire Warrior for PS2.)

 

But before I go further, I just want to reflect personally - I started with the original "Battle Games in Middle Earth" in 2002 and then jumped onto 40k a year or so later. I still have the first Space Marine I painted (as a Space Wolf) in the loft, next to the stuff I painted last week, as a reminder of how far I've come, and how much more there is to learn. I started a club at my high school, and then a club outside of it which persisted for years after I went to uni (and, as an old White Dwarf article said, "discovered beer and girls... but [your] minis are still there years later.") Got back into it in about 2019, and although my Wolves have sat unloved mostly since my return to the hobby in around 2019, I started a Sisters army with the new launch box that Christmas, then added a Grey Knights army, reinforced the Daemons I had lying around and finally, off the back of AoD and Heresy 2.0 started a Word Bearers army with a determined view that it would work - as much as is reasonably possible - in 30k and 40k. My justification for this - it's the 6th Company of the Chapter of the Baleful Stars, who reinforced themselves following the Shadow Crusade and set out for the Siege of Terra, only to discover Lorgar's banishment and withdraw to plague the Imperium from the Eye for the next 10,000 years - which is why they've got a whole load of Heresy era stuff for when I want it. Or why, in the Heresy, we've got rather more tentacles and claws than might be expected for Marines. 

 

I've got a 3rd party "not-Lorgar" (he doubles as an Abbadon proxy), a variety of characters that are usable as different options, a very nasty Apothecary who is magnetised to go onto either a 32 or 40mm base depending on if he's sticking Tacticals together in Heresy, or my Warband's resident Daemon-Medic who does Bile shaped things in 40k. I've got plastic Contemptors which have been converted to have horns, tails, talons and other gribbly bits - and they make good Helbrutes. Possessed? Gal Vorbak? I mean, I've got both and they're basically the same thing - so now I've got 5 of the FW ones and 10 converted Possessed to have more Heresy appropriate bits. Despoilers - Legionnaires. Raptors are Assault Marines, and my Ashen Circle have magnetised arms so that in the 41st Millenium they can grow Lightning Claws and fight as Warp Talons. Yes, if I want to play in a tournament I can't use the Sicarans or Leviathans, but I've got Forgefiends and Obliterators. And the Fellblade is godawful on 40k boards, but it's still cool as heck for casual games. And it's a blast in Crusade. As is the rest of the stuff.

 

But if I want to go to a GT and take CSM, I have to play with the rules set out by GW and the TO - that is, I'm afraid a price of entry in the way that any organised play exists. You pays your money and you takes your chances as they say. 

 

That having been said... I've take my Word Bearers to numerous UKTC events, RTTs, a regional narrative Heresy event and two Throne of Skulls doubles events at Warhammer World. The army is a mess of 40k and 30k bits, kitbashed galore and judiciously uses the good old "Counts As" rules - but everything is consistent and explained to my opponent at the outset. Anyone want to have a guess at how many issues I've had across all those events?

 

1 - I happened to end up on table 2 at round 2 of a GT and my army had the 30k Land Raider in it, because it's a nicer model and very on theme. And part way through turn 2, a judge wanders over from the station and, entirely unprompted, says "That's not the right Land Raider model, so if your opponent complains we'll ask you to remove it." This is despite the fact that I'd queried it previously and used it at about 3 previous GTs with no issues, no opponent had ever commented and my opponent at the time looked embarrassed that the judge was even saying anything. Then about two minutes later my opponent asked me to remove it... because he'd just shot two squads of Haywire Scourges at it. C'est la vie, I guess .

 

Otherwise, I've only ever had positive comments, or "your army looks cool", or "So what do you really think of Erebus?" Not one actual human has ever "well acktually that's a Contemptor not a Helbrute so you can't use it." Which brings me to my second point.

 

2. The "terminally online" crowd isn't reflective of actually engaging with "the hobby." I think this is a bit of a reflection of nerd culture in general, and the overall deterioration of media literacy, but GW is perhaps uniquely ill-suited to engaging with what Arbitor Ian described as the "wikification of culture" or the need to try and account for, and explain everything - and if it is ambiguous, unexplained or not 100% consistent then that's a "plothole" or "bad writing." Honestly, CinemaSins has so much to answer for.

 

But that doesn't work with 40k - the setting is an inconsistent mess with loose threads and contradictory elements entirely by design. Because it's not a story (although there might be stories) and there's no grand, overarching narrative - stuff happens because the studio thinks it'd be cool, or they've got new models to sell, or someone fancies having a crack at telling a particular story. Without wishing to be rude, lets take the Siege of Vraks books, which are usually the gold standard of "Lore Books" - and I don't disagree. But Vraks was invented for those books. Didn't really exist before. And the World Eaters and Death Guard were there because someone at FW had designed those kits, and GW needed some narrative to pop them in. And they were in a phase of doing random Inquisition stuff, so we got a cool Inquisitor there (and an earlier one for the Anphelian Project.) 

 

It's basically the same with say, Vigilus or the 500 Worlds - someone designed a cool new CSM Character, so he gets a backstory and campaign to take part in. And while we're at it, let's fold in the new Calgar model we've got. And then Titus needs something to fight, we're redoing the C'tan shards so lets have one in Ultramar with this Necron character for them. The lore justifies the new models - never the other way round. 

 

So then we get to the other bit - stuff being taken away. And this sucks, no doubt about it. But let's not pretend that this is a) something that is a recent development and b) on all accounts worse. So, controversy time - GW removing existing units from Codexes is not new at all. Just in Space Marines, characters have come and gone from Codicies all over the place - I'm a Wolves player, so Njal has been in and out, we had Wulfen from the 13th Company then lost them, wargear has been all over the place, and what a Wolf Guard unit does has changed so many times it's hilarious. Sisters were basically AWOL after Codex Witch Hunters was discontinued until their return in 2019, as was the Inquisition as anything even approaching a coherent force. Xenos factions aren't immune either - 3rd Edition deleted the Squats, Necrons got a total reimagining which deleted stuff like Pariahs and changed Wraiths to the extent that the old models weren't really usable. Nids have had stuff come and go, mostly old FW bits but some models have, again, changed so radically that the old versions are basically unusable - the plastic updates of the Hive Tyrant or Biovore for example. As Battlestar Galactica put it... "all this has happened before, and it will all happen again." 

 

But - in the olden days, if stuff went it was just gone. Kaput. What's that? In current 40k, a lot of stuff - even OOP kits - have Legends rules. You can still use them in your games - James Workshop is not thieving them from you. Yeah, sure, you can't run them at an event but I bet 90% of people just looking for a game probably won't care, unless they are actively prepping for an event - but so many people seem to treat it as a total taboo when - and I hate to break this to people - most 40k players are just looking for a bit of fun rolling dice with their toy soldiers. 

 

I'd also contend that the modern approach to the rules of the game is, generally, better. Certainly the balancing and semi-digital updates are, at least where I'm concerned, a better way of doing things. Certainly the eras when armies languished entirely ignored or were left broken are (mostly*) long gone, and that can only be a good thing. There are also more factions than ever, and yes - whilst some things aren't currently directly supported by models (various Guard regiments) the third party and proxy spaces have you well covered. And most people - in my experience - just do not care, or will compliment on your cool army. There are things that aren't quite as good - I know that the 3.5 Chaos Codex will probably never be bettered, but the vast majority of armies have, in 10th Ed, a number of ways to run them and be pretty good. Sure, the ultra optimised tournament lists trend towards homogenity... but again, that is the product of playing competitively. If you're playing with friends.... you're probably not using Triptide or double Wraithknights or the Titus/Bladeguard/Wardens brick o'doom or 4 C'tan and TSK. And if you are... once is probably fine.

 

Finally, the setting - yes, the fact that it seems to be the same groups of characters is a bit wearisome, although we've also just had 3 brand new Xenos characters, plus the first ever Iron Warriors character, and updates to characters like Huron who have been broadly absent for a long while. For every Calgar or Ultramarine meme, there is other stuff happening. Heck, we got Corsairs in plastic - there are three (4 if you count the alt build of the Vyper) units for them, and two characters. That's - compared to where Aelderi were even five years ago - utterly nuts. There are loads of different warzones to play in, and more books than ever. I find the comment about "we'll never have another Night Lords trilogy" baffling - yes, that's a masterpiece but in the past few years we've had The Infinite and the Divine, Day of Ascension, Void Exile and Elemental Council - four different authors, four very different stories looking at different parts of the setting. I just don't accept that the best days are behind at all. 

* There are of course exceptions that prove the rule, the current state of the Sisters of Silence being the most obvious and egregious recent example. On the other hand, they seem to be slowly redoing everything so I suspect they'll be back.

Edited March 23 by Vassakov

[Marshal Rohr]

3 hours ago, Vassakov said:

I think this is a genuinely fascinating topic because it cuts across so many different things that have changed over the past decade or so - but I don't think, personally, they're all for the worse. Or even that a majority are. I would say the crucial dates are 2012/13 and 2017/18 - specifically the Chapterhouse lawsuit resolution and then the launches of AoS and 8th Edition, which were significant changes for both 40k and the Fantasy side of GW's offering. Of course, since then we've seen the Old World return, with entirely new factions, and Horus Heresy significantly expanded. In terms of overall options and ways to engage with the hobby, we've never had it so good - and that's just the models to say nothing of the videogames, animations, novels and overall presence of Warhammer these days. Back in my day, you had Dawn of War and you liked it and that was basically it. (Editors note: We don't talk about Fire Warrior for PS2.)

 

But before I go further, I just want to reflect personally - I started with the original "Battle Games in Middle Earth" in 2002 and then jumped onto 40k a year or so later. I still have the first Space Marine I painted (as a Space Wolf) in the loft, next to the stuff I painted last week, as a reminder of how far I've come, and how much more there is to learn. I started a club at my high school, and then a club outside of it which persisted for years after I went to uni (and, as an old White Dwarf article said, "discovered beer and girls... but [your] minis are still there years later.") Got back into it in about 2019, and although my Wolves have sat unloved mostly since my return to the hobby in around 2019, I started a Sisters army with the new launch box that Christmas, then added a Grey Knights army, reinforced the Daemons I had lying around and finally, off the back of AoD and Heresy 2.0 started a Word Bearers army with a determined view that it would work - as much as is reasonably possible - in 30k and 40k. My justification for this - it's the 6th Company of the Chapter of the Baleful Stars, who reinforced themselves following the Shadow Crusade and set out for the Siege of Terra, only to discover Lorgar's banishment and withdraw to plague the Imperium from the Eye for the next 10,000 years - which is why they've got a whole load of Heresy era stuff for when I want it. Or why, in the Heresy, we've got rather more tentacles and claws than might be expected for Marines. 

 

I've got a 3rd party "not-Lorgar" (he doubles as an Abbadon proxy), a variety of characters that are usable as different options, a very nasty Apothecary who is magnetised to go onto either a 32 or 40mm base depending on if he's sticking Tacticals together in Heresy, or my Warband's resident Daemon-Medic who does Bile shaped things in 40k. I've got plastic Contemptors which have been converted to have horns, tails, talons and other gribbly bits - and they make good Helbrutes. Possessed? Gal Vorbak? I mean, I've got both and they're basically the same thing - so now I've got 5 of the FW ones and 10 converted Possessed to have more Heresy appropriate bits. Despoilers - Legionnaires. Raptors are Assault Marines, and my Ashen Circle have magnetised arms so that in the 41st Millenium they can grow Lightning Claws and fight as Warp Talons. Yes, if I want to play in a tournament I can't use the Sicarans or Leviathans, but I've got Forgefiends and Obliterators. And the Fellblade is godawful on 40k boards, but it's still cool as heck for casual games. And it's a blast in Crusade. As is the rest of the stuff.

 

But if I want to go to a GT and take CSM, I have to play with the rules set out by GW and the TO - that is, I'm afraid a price of entry in the way that any organised play exists. You pays your money and you takes your chances as they say. 

 

That having been said... I've take my Word Bearers to numerous UKTC events, RTTs, a regional narrative Heresy event and two Throne of Skulls doubles events at Warhammer World. The army is a mess of 40k and 30k bits, kitbashed galore and judiciously uses the good old "Counts As" rules - but everything is consistent and explained to my opponent at the outset. Anyone want to have a guess at how many issues I've had across all those events?

 

1 - I happened to end up on table 2 at round 2 of a GT and my army had the 30k Land Raider in it, because it's a nicer model and very on theme. And part way through turn 2, a judge wanders over from the station and, entirely unprompted, says "That's not the right Land Raider model, so if your opponent complains we'll ask you to remove it." This is despite the fact that I'd queried it previously and used it at about 3 previous GTs with no issues, no opponent had ever commented and my opponent at the time looked embarrassed that the judge was even saying anything. Then about two minutes later my opponent asked me to remove it... because he'd just shot two squads of Haywire Scourges at it. C'est la vie, I guess .

 

Otherwise, I've only ever had positive comments, or "your army looks cool", or "So what do you really think of Erebus?" Not one actual human has ever "well acktually that's a Contemptor not a Helbrute so you can't use it." Which brings me to my second point.

 

2. The "terminally online" crowd isn't reflective of actually engaging with "the hobby." I think this is a bit of a reflection of nerd culture in general, and the overall deterioration of media literacy, but GW is perhaps uniquely ill-suited to engaging with what Arbitor Ian described as the "wikification of culture" or the need to try and account for, and explain everything - and if it is ambiguous, unexplained or not 100% consistent then that's a "plothole" or "bad writing." Honestly, CinemaSins has so much to answer for.

 

But that doesn't work with 40k - the setting is an inconsistent mess with loose threads and contradictory elements entirely by design. Because it's not a story (although there might be stories) and there's no grand, overarching narrative - stuff happens because the studio thinks it'd be cool, or they've got new models to sell, or someone fancies having a crack at telling a particular story. Without wishing to be rude, lets take the Siege of Vraks books, which are usually the gold standard of "Lore Books" - and I don't disagree. But Vraks was invented for those books. Didn't really exist before. And the World Eaters and Death Guard were there because someone at FW had designed those kits, and GW needed some narrative to pop them in. And they were in a phase of doing random Inquisition stuff, so we got a cool Inquisitor there (and an earlier one for the Anphelian Project.) 

 

It's basically the same with say, Vigilus or the 500 Worlds - someone designed a cool new CSM Character, so he gets a backstory and campaign to take part in. And while we're at it, let's fold in the new Calgar model we've got. And then Titus needs something to fight, we're redoing the C'tan shards so lets have one in Ultramar with this Necron character for them. The lore justifies the new models - never the other way round. 

 

So then we get to the other bit - stuff being taken away. And this sucks, no doubt about it. But let's not pretend that this is a) something that is a recent development and b) on all accounts worse. So, controversy time - GW removing existing units from Codexes is not new at all. Just in Space Marines, characters have come and gone from Codicies all over the place - I'm a Wolves player, so Njal has been in and out, we had Wulfen from the 13th Company then lost them, wargear has been all over the place, and what a Wolf Guard unit does has changed so many times it's hilarious. Sisters were basically AWOL after Codex Witch Hunters was discontinued until their return in 2019, as was the Inquisition as anything even approaching a coherent force. Xenos factions aren't immune either - 3rd Edition deleted the Squats, Necrons got a total reimagining which deleted stuff like Pariahs and changed Wraiths to the extent that the old models weren't really usable. Nids have had stuff come and go, mostly old FW bits but some models have, again, changed so radically that the old versions are basically unusable - the plastic updates of the Hive Tyrant or Biovore for example. As Battlestar Galactica put it... "all this has happened before, and it will all happen again." 

 

But - in the olden days, if stuff went it was just gone. Kaput. What's that? In current 40k, a lot of stuff - even OOP kits - have Legends rules. You can still use them in your games - James Workshop is not thieving them from you. Yeah, sure, you can't run them at an event but I bet 90% of people just looking for a game probably won't care, unless they are actively prepping for an event - but so many people seem to treat it as a total taboo when - and I hate to break this to people - most 40k players are just looking for a bit of fun rolling dice with their toy soldiers. 

 

I'd also contend that the modern approach to the rules of the game is, generally, better. Certainly the balancing and semi-digital updates are, at least where I'm concerned, a better way of doing things. Certainly the eras when armies languished entirely ignored or were left broken are (mostly*) long gone, and that can only be a good thing. There are also more factions than ever, and yes - whilst some things aren't currently directly supported by models (various Guard regiments) the third party and proxy spaces have you well covered. And most people - in my experience - just do not care, or will compliment on your cool army. There are things that aren't quite as good - I know that the 3.5 Chaos Codex will probably never be bettered, but the vast majority of armies have, in 10th Ed, a number of ways to run them and be pretty good. Sure, the ultra optimised tournament lists trend towards homogenity... but again, that is the product of playing competitively. If you're playing with friends.... you're probably not using Triptide or double Wraithknights or the Titus/Bladeguard/Wardens brick o'doom or 4 C'tan and TSK. And if you are... once is probably fine.

 

Finally, the setting - yes, the fact that it seems to be the same groups of characters is a bit wearisome, although we've also just had 3 brand new Xenos characters, plus the first ever Iron Warriors character, and updates to characters like Huron who have been broadly absent for a long while. For every Calgar or Ultramarine meme, there is other stuff happening. Heck, we got Corsairs in plastic - there are three (4 if you count the alt build of the Vyper) units for them, and two characters. That's - compared to where Aelderi were even five years ago - utterly nuts. There are loads of different warzones to play in, and more books than ever. I find the comment about "we'll never have another Night Lords trilogy" baffling - yes, that's a masterpiece but in the past few years we've had The Infinite and the Divine, Day of Ascension, Void Exile and Elemental Council - four different authors, four very different stories looking at different parts of the setting. I just don't accept that the best days are behind at all. 

* There are of course exceptions that prove the rule, the current state of the Sisters of Silence being the most obvious and egregious recent example. On the other hand, they seem to be slowly redoing everything so I suspect they'll be back.

You touched on something that really bothers me, specifically about the communication solely through marketing. They ARE redoing things, but they never make any effort to assuage fans worry. The rumors about the game that cannot be mentioned here won’t be addressed until release, and they’re pretty anxiety inducing rumors. Will Steel Legion or Sister of Silence ever get another release? Maybe and most definitely, respectively, way down the road but we will never be allowed to know that because in the popular wisdom of business you can’t tell a customer what’s coming so they buy what’s releasing now even though that entirely ignores the demographic of people not buying at all and may move on. Instead of, I don’t know, saying Steel Legion is one of the Kill Teams coming in the next five years so buy your chimeras now while you have cash to burn. 

[Vassakov]

11 hours ago, Marshal Rohr said:

You touched on something that really bothers me, specifically about the communication solely through marketing. They ARE redoing things, but they never make any effort to assuage fans worry. The rumors about the game that cannot be mentioned here won’t be addressed until release, and they’re pretty anxiety inducing rumors. Will Steel Legion or Sister of Silence ever get another release? Maybe and most definitely, respectively, way down the road but we will never be allowed to know that because in the popular wisdom of business you can’t tell a customer what’s coming so they buy what’s releasing now even though that entirely ignores the demographic of people not buying at all and may move on. Instead of, I don’t know, saying Steel Legion is one of the Kill Teams coming in the next five years so buy your chimeras now while you have cash to burn. 

 

I mean, again - this is not new. Back in the days before WarComm or whatever, GW's communication as to what was coming was almost exclusively via White Dwarf, and you might get a month or twos "preview" of what was coming - or may a tiny cut out of something slightly further out. But between 2002 and 2008 I don't think there was anything at all for Dark Eldar or Necrons. Sure, they were "there" but they weren't on the radar until they were.

 

On "fans worry" - well, as our venerable CM Valrak says - rumours are rumours and shouldn't be believed. It clearly isn't a good idea, at all, in any conceivable way, to start confirming or denying way every random rumour, theory or "whisper from the warp" - and the moment you start denying stuff, then anything undenied will be taken as fact.

 

It's also worth reiterating that the terminally online amongst us are basically a rounding error in GWs overall business model. Valrak, again as an example, has under 300k subscribers and averages 35-45k views on his videos - it's good, but it's not even a significant minority of the playerbase. TGA has fewer than 20k members, and BnC - which has been going since basically the dawn of the internet - has just over 50k. Starting to respond formally to what is being rumoured, discussed or circulated here, to a tiny minority of the playerbase who - lets face it - are probably in it for the long haul anyway - would be terrible, terrible business practice. 

Edited March 24 by Vassakov

[Marshal Rohr]

That’s not entirely true, do you remember their twitch channel pre-Covid? The Dunc and Peach videos? Wade doing Voxcast? They hit a really good stride for like two years and then the new manager took over marketing, drove the talent out, and murdered the vibe with a chainsaw. 
 

Edit: There’s a misconception what Games Workshop does right now is the absolute max level of what they can do and stay profitable, and that’s probably true for the product releases since they are releasing at breakneck pace. I don’t think that’s true for the lore, I think they’re content blasting like video games do and while that might work for fortnite skins and cod merch it’s negatively impacting the lore. The launch box for 10th was Tyranids, they’re about to restart the cycle with Orks, and they only just recently wrapped up the 9th Edition plotline and it didn’t really have any impact. They’re poorly managing the non-physical content and it makes the game feel bleh. 

Edited March 24 by Marshal Rohr

[Blissful Brushes]

I find it really sad to be honest. I’ve never been big on the actual game side itself, but I started out with LoTR when I was about 8 or so when the magazine (like combat patrol) came out in the early 2000s and moved into 40k & HH.

 

Filling in the blanks is one of the things that removes the magic from the setting, a bit like pointing out the plot holes in Harry Potter.

 

Its also one of the biggest reasons why my main army is Luna Wolves, a company that isn’t mentioned anywhere in the books and they do their own thing, I have my own lore and for me it means I can ignore the progression of a timeline that restricts my own story telling ability.

 

the shifts in modelling are entirely around attracting new hobbyists, getting them to buy 1 of each box and then moving on to a new new release. Which is why they look really good with 1 squad and crap with 2 squads unless you’re quite accomplished with your modelling abilities 

[Lexington]

20 hours ago, Vassakov said:

But that doesn't work with 40k - the setting is an inconsistent mess with loose threads and contradictory elements entirely by design. Because it's not a story (although there might be stories) and there's no grand, overarching narrative - stuff happens because the studio thinks it'd be cool, or they've got new models to sell, or someone fancies having a crack at telling a particular story.

 

I'm kind of a tired old nag on this anymore, but I think it's pretty clear that 40K did have a grand, overarching narrative. To quote, well, me:
 

On 4/27/2024 at 10:37 AM, Lexington said:

Agreed in the larger sense, but I actually take issue with the idea that 40K has a “story” now, and the suggestion that it didn’t before.

 

Stories have arcs. They have setups and payoffs. They have beginnings, middles and, importantly, ends. They have little guideposts to tell you where you are. In that sense, 40K has had an overarching story since at least 2nd Edition. It’s a Biblical one, or a Tolkienien one, however you want to refer to it - the Great War of Gods (Heresy), leading to the Time of Mortals (The Age of the Imperium), and finally the Great Reckoning (End Times!) as the awesome figures from the past return to finish the battle. 40K took place right there at the transition point between the second and third arcs, because as soon as you fully hit the End Times, things have to, you know, end. Being right there, between the age of mundane and immortal threats, has a great frisson, setting up an ending that was never coming, but always felt like something portentous. Even when you knew the trick they’re playing, it was a lot of fun.

 

8th Ed/Dark Imperium blew that up. The “end” wasn’t an end, and instead just the herald of a new normal that’s got no real drama to it. There’s no more feeling of the large, the apocalyptic, the coming end because what 40K doesn’t have anymore is a story. What it has is a plot - a set of events that move forward, but not towards anything besides more plot, more releases, more “epic events” that end right back at the status quo, because they’re crafted around miniatures sales. There’s no tension and no excitement. Just more product. A lot goes on, as the song says, but nothing happens, and it doesn’t feel like anything is going to happen. I think that’s at the root of a lot of this malaise.

[phandaal]

On 3/22/2026 at 10:22 PM, sitnam said:

I'm not sure how every one else is, but my own sandbox narrative is in my own corner of the (vast) 40k galaxy. Besides my Nihilakh Necrons, all my armies are homebrews occupying this area of space (Even homebrews for armies I don't and probably will never collect).

 

This how I approach it as well. Considering the gigantic Imperium is still just 1 million worlds in a galaxy of 100,000 million stars, there is functionally unlimited room to roam in head canon. The lore is what it is, and while I increasingly find less interest in the modern stuff, it does not make me enjoy the universe as I see it any less. If it works for me, it becomes part of the stories I build in miniature and on the tabletop. If not, it doesn't.

 

When I saw that thing from GW about the Steel Legion, I just had a sensible chuckle to myself and then disregarded it. Why even bother thinking about it? It will change the instant someone at GW decides it needs to, and then we will get a brief description of how "actually here is what happened." Yeah, OK. 

 

In my opinion, this is a great way to approach modern lore for any franchise in the era of "whatever, this is what we want to do and the old stuff was bad anyway." Just disregard and move on, not out of the fandom, but into a view of the lore that still makes you happy.

 

Semi-on topic side note:

 

Spoiler

Right now there is a blow-up in the AoS community over GW potentially doing a massive "advancement" to their lore that reworks the whole universe. They seem shocked and appalled that such a thing could happen to them, because they are happy with and invested in things as they are right now. Having seen it happen first to WFB and then 40k, I am just watching from the sidelines like "you thought YOUR setting was safe huh?" 

[Antarius]

I think a lot of it is also that they're not really able to actually do things, unless they're prepared to take stuff away. You can't have a story, especially not one of big conflicts, where you can only ever add stuff.
I said it elsewhere, but not here (at least I don't think so), but imagine LotR but the heroes can't actually destroy the ring and Boromir can't actually die. Kinda hard to get a satisfying narrative or character arc that way.

[alfred_the_great]

I don’t know how to phrase this, but the ability of *that* guy from the corner of your store to go online and demand answers from the internet really doesn’t help. 
 

the internet has enabled a mindset (in many places) of *needing* to know, everything, all the time, and for it to be *right*. 
 

I see this all the time in posts here where the only possible way of playing this universe is highly tuned match play, because of a probable minority not engaging in any other game play. 
 

at the end of the day, they’re your models - play as you want!

[dalmer]

I haven't played since 3rd edition, when I played in the competitive scene in a not-too-far-from-home range.  Enjoy tournaments for the camaraderie and seeing folks' wonderful paint jobs/etc. but I'd say 99% of the time I was playing locally in an active gaming group.  Of course, my kids weren't that old at the time, I had more free time, job advancement wasn't bad as to crunching my time, so on and so forth.

 

I recently was lucky enough to retire.  My kids are now 30 and 25 and both play somewhat, so want me to get back in.  First shock for me:  what do you mean all my Space Marines are now null and void?  Ummmm... I have legit over 20k points of Astartes firstborn.  Ack, that's a tough pill to swallow.

 

I'd love to find a gaming group where the narrative existed and things were... how can I put this?  Less about the competitive meta.  It blew me away when I heard that codices and army lists and such were nerfed or boosted based upon how those armies were doing in the tournament/competitive scene.  "Every army should be viable" seems like it's turning me off more to jumping back in.  That and all the strategy cards and all that... 

 

I'd love a sandbox area again.  I'd love a gaming group that is like the folks that are posting on this forum thread.  I just don't know with all the rapid-fire changes coming down from GW if that's gonna happen.  

 

But maybe I've dated myself as an old curmudgeon by typing this.

 

Going on the OP's thoughts, I don't mind the setting/narrative.  I can always work that in or leave it out... gives me ideas either way.  

[Antarius]

5 hours ago, dalmer said:

I haven't played since 3rd edition, when I played in the competitive scene in a not-too-far-from-home range.  Enjoy tournaments for the camaraderie and seeing folks' wonderful paint jobs/etc. but I'd say 99% of the time I was playing locally in an active gaming group.  Of course, my kids weren't that old at the time, I had more free time, job advancement wasn't bad as to crunching my time, so on and so forth.

 

I recently was lucky enough to retire.  My kids are now 30 and 25 and both play somewhat, so want me to get back in.  First shock for me:  what do you mean all my Space Marines are now null and void?  Ummmm... I have legit over 20k points of Astartes firstborn.  Ack, that's a tough pill to swallow.

 

I'd love to find a gaming group where the narrative existed and things were... how can I put this?  Less about the competitive meta.  It blew me away when I heard that codices and army lists and such were nerfed or boosted based upon how those armies were doing in the tournament/competitive scene.  "Every army should be viable" seems like it's turning me off more to jumping back in.  That and all the strategy cards and all that... 

 

I'd love a sandbox area again.  I'd love a gaming group that is like the folks that are posting on this forum thread.  I just don't know with all the rapid-fire changes coming down from GW if that's gonna happen.  

 

But maybe I've dated myself as an old curmudgeon by typing this.

 

Going on the OP's thoughts, I don't mind the setting/narrative.  I can always work that in or leave it out... gives me ideas either way.  

I get the feeling, but please don't be discouraged by the current state of the game. Just like the lore, you can always do what you want, you just need to find a couple of likeminded people 

I know 2nd edition is going through a bit of a renaissance (at least on youtube), so I think it should be possible to find people willing to play 3rd (or 4th, my personal favorite). If your kids want to play with you, they probably won't mind what edition it is.

 

Also, your minis may be "outdated", but really, there's no such things as outdated minis. You can always use them with the "Legends" rules (the terminally online will tell you that's no good, but I've yet to meet anyone offline who had a problem with them) or you can just use them as stand-ins for newer units. So dust off all those marines (and perhaps show us some pictures - it must be an impressive sight to see them all lined up for battle) and set about purging the unclean!

[DemonGSides]

15 hours ago, alfred_the_great said:

I see this all the time in posts here where the only possible way of playing this universe is highly tuned match play, because of a probable minority not engaging in any other game play. 

 

We've got one guy (Headless Cross) that posts routinely about competitive gaming in this way. Where are you seeing all these posts on this forum that exist SOLELY to say that hyper competitive is the only way to play?

 

Like sure, on reddit, you get that (and that's mostly because the competitive subreddit is the only one that isn't just memes and recursive jokes), but this site is extremely casual in its discussion of the game. Most posts you'll get about the actual gameplay of modern 10th is people shouting about how bad it is.

 

People discuss effectiveness and stuff, sure, especially in the Unit of the Week threads (though those are slowly dying too).  But I don't see much competitive discussion on here at all.  It's pretty chill around here except for the rage hate that some people have for modern 40k gameplay and lore.

[alfred_the_great]

7 hours ago, DemonGSides said:

 

We've got one guy (Headless Cross) that posts routinely about competitive gaming in this way. Where are you seeing all these posts on this forum that exist SOLELY to say that hyper competitive is the only way to play?

 

Like sure, on reddit, you get that (and that's mostly because the competitive subreddit is the only one that isn't just memes and recursive jokes), but this site is extremely casual in its discussion of the game. Most posts you'll get about the actual gameplay of modern 10th is people shouting about how bad it is.

 

People discuss effectiveness and stuff, sure, especially in the Unit of the Week threads (though those are slowly dying too).  But I don't see much competitive discussion on here at all.  It's pretty chill around here except for the rage hate that some people have for modern 40k gameplay and lore.

I’ve lost count of the number of threads on here bemoaning stuff going to legends because it means they can’t play in their local meta. Why? Because their environment is such that games are broadly played with strangers on a pick up basis, and the only “socially acceptable” way of doing that is via match play structures. 

[Antarius]

18 hours ago, DemonGSides said:

 

We've got one guy (Headless Cross) that posts routinely about competitive gaming in this way. Where are you seeing all these posts on this forum that exist SOLELY to say that hyper competitive is the only way to play?

I think you're misreading the post you're responding to. He didn't say anything about people "SOLELY" saying this at all. While I absolutely don't think you're doing it on purpose, this reading moves the goalposts quite a bit and I think you're going to get your signals crossed, so I just wanted to point that out.

Headless Cross aside, I definitely recall seeing lots of posts being sad about how this or that model or unit is unusable (either because of having Legends rules, moving out of rotation in the future, or just because the rules for them are perceived as bad). I also recall being told off on several occasions for saying that you can choose not to play Matched Play (apparently this is derogatory to the people who can only ever play pickup games, because noone at a pickup game will ever allow you to use a Legends unit, for example). It's certainly not all that's going on on these forums, but it is a thing.

There's a lot of discussion about playstyles and so on (which I think is a good thing and definitely something that has broadened my own horizons, even if it hasn't changed how I personally approach the game), something that wouldn't happen if there weren't different playstyles and approaches. One such approach does seem to be to be perpetually sad about the state of the game but not feel able to change it - and that's where I feel obligated to point out that playing that way is actually optional.

[DemonGSides]

15 hours ago, alfred_the_great said:

I’ve lost count of the number of threads on here bemoaning stuff going to legends because it means they can’t play in their local meta. Why? Because their environment is such that games are broadly played with strangers on a pick up basis, and the only “socially acceptable” way of doing that is via match play structures. 

 

Those people aren't even playing; they never attempted tko use their legends stuff in their local meta. I've had this same argument in those threads; nothing stops you from using Legends and if you just mention it up top, most people aren't going to care. If you try to step into the tournament scene with such a unit, you're going to run afoul of rules but most pickup games aren't going to care. Discord and other social media has made finding the 'right game' extremely easy.  The people claiming that matched play is the only thing available out there are wrong or lying.

 

4 hours ago, Antarius said:

I think you're misreading the post you're responding to. He didn't say anything about people "SOLELY" saying this at all. While I absolutely don't think you're doing it on purpose, this reading moves the goalposts quite a bit and I think you're going to get your signals crossed, so I just wanted to point that out.

 

Not really. They even responded to me with an explanation of what they mean. There really isn't much competitive discussion on these boards; people like headless are routinely beat up by people on here for using competitive language (somewhat rightfully, I might add. There's not much nuance when you come in from the top rope calling something useless trash).  There's not even many threads outside of the faction specific sub fora that even talk about competitive lists. 

 

This place is, for all intents and purposes, mostly a hobby website. Which is good!  I don't always want to talk razor thin margins. Sometimes I just want to see cool models and chat about the game. The issue is that there's a contingent of people that will be negative no matter what you're talking about with the modern game, and it makes discussion hostile and pointless. They get moderator back-up who proudly claim how little they play of the modern game while dismissing both the game and the people talking about the game positively.

4 hours ago, Antarius said:

Headless Cross aside, I definitely recall seeing lots of posts being sad about how this or that model or unit is unusable (either because of having Legends rules, moving out of rotation in the future, or just because the rules for them are perceived as bad). I also recall being told off on several occasions for saying that you can choose not to play Matched Play (apparently this is derogatory to the people who can only ever play pickup games, because noone at a pickup game will ever allow you to use a Legends unit, for example). It's certainly not all that's going on on these forums, but it is a thing.

 

These aren't competitive players bemoaning such things, and they aren't casual players because of the reasons you gave. They aren't really players at that point, they're just grumbling. Like a peanut gallery.  And I think giving them any real notion of time or thought is worthless and basically feeding the trolls.  They haven't tried to play because if they did, they'd realize that they are wrong about pick up games, or worse, they're too lazy to put the effort into organizing their own game.  It's a thing in the same sense of flat earth is a 'thing'; purely made up by some people who have convinced themselves of something.

 

4 hours ago, Antarius said:

There's a lot of discussion about playstyles and so on (which I think is a good thing and definitely something that has broadened my own horizons, even if it hasn't changed how I personally approach the game), something that wouldn't happen if there weren't different playstyles and approaches. One such approach does seem to be to be perpetually sad about the state of the game but not feel able to change it - and that's where I feel obligated to point out that playing that way is actually optional.

 

I agree fully, which is why when people shut down discussion of 10th because it's a 'garbage fire' I think it's silly. I also think that acting like the whims of the whiners is the baseline is worth pushing back against. 10th is a fine edition, better than 9th and probably better than post index 8th (I didn't play much 8th what with the whole global pandemic). It's leagues better than the insanity of 7th. If someone says they don't care for the play style, carry on there's nothing to argue with. But there's a propensity on these boards for people (not you but some people) to act like 10th is especially heinous edition and I think that's silly. 

Edited March 26 by DemonGSides

[Grotsmasha]

Caveat: I haven't read all the posts, but I believe a big contributing factor to GW NEEDING to shine the light in every corner is to establish what is THEIR IP from 3rd party entities.

[phandaal]

On 3/24/2026 at 11:05 AM, phandaal said:

When I saw that thing from GW about the Steel Legion, I just had a sensible chuckle to myself and then disregarded it. Why even bother thinking about it? It will change the instant someone at GW decides it needs to

 

Yesterday's reveal that Steel Legion are in fact NOT GONE is exactly what I was talking about here. Although even I was not expecting them to go quite that fast. 

 

Remember this - they will do it again!