2 hours ago, Wiredin said:

re: mechwarrior:

unlike X-wing everything was blind pack, so you could spend $100+ to add 3 or 4 of the new mechs (packs were $10-15 a piece I think) and you draw nothing but junk. I don't think I pulled one Atlas the whole time I played (biggest baddest mech in the game). For $100 in X-wing 2.0 land, I don't have to worry about blind pulls. I get everything I originally had to be as viable as they are now...and I get a new core with all the fancy parts.

I played Mech Warrior in high school - the blind packs were $10 each, and I was in a group of four guys that would all buy together and then sort out in inequities by trading. This worked OK in terms of player collections, but it was basically impossible to put together a useful faction army without spending obscene money as a group. I eventually peaced out because one guy was intolerable, and swore off blind expansion games ever again. This is one of the reasons I bought hard into X-Wing: I get exactly the units I want, and I don’t have to worry about pulling another the equivalent of an academy pilot while searching for Countess Ryad.

I actually ended up with all our MechWarrior figures, literally hundreds, which have gathered dust in a closet for over a decade. I’m afraid to look at how many terrible, useless mechs are in there, honestly. If I did, I could back-calculate how much money I wasted on that game.

I played Basic D&D, then Advanced D&D, then AD&D 2nd Edition, then (where'd the A go?) D&D 3.0 and 3.5, then 4e, and now 5th Edition. We mixed stuff between basic and advanced, then it all got cleaned up into 2nd edition, then everything got swept away for 3rd edition, which got revised only 3 years later, which then became 4e only 4 years after that, where everything was incompatible, which then became 5th edition, where everything had to be thrown away again. I own 5 different versions of the classic Tomb of Horrors adventure. I've had campaigns transition from one ruleset to another in mid-stream. I've had editions with conversion rules, and editions where they just said "it's better if you rebuild from scratch instead of trying to convert."

The only Games Workshop product I've stayed in long enough to deal with editions is Blood Bowl, which I've played since '93. For most of that time, new editions were just new rules pdfs to memorize, but with this latest edition they changed the scale. Not only do old minis look silly (2017 Dwarfs are taller than my 1993 Orcs), but the spaces on the board are larger, which means the old passing template (basically a range ruler) is the wrong size. There's no conversion kit. There's no "just buy the range ruler and new board" option. There's a $100 box set full of stuff I don't need except that range ruler. They sell $35 game boards, but they don't come with the new ruler. Thanks, GW!

I tried going from Classic 90's Battletech to the Clix MechWarrior in 2001 or so. Didn't take. Wasted a lot of money and never got back into old Battletech.

I played Magic from '93 to '05. Lots of edition changes. New rules. Cards that no longer did what it said on the card. Wasn't too harsh, since they had a set schedule and you knew how much life you were getting out of the cards, but I know some people who quit in a huff over minor rules changes. Heck, I knew a guy who played in Alpha when they forgot to print Circle of Protection: Black who quit when Beta came out and they added it back in. He loved the Black magic spells and thought it was intentional theming that Black magic was too powerful to hold out with a circle of protection.

I was excited for 4th Edition D&D because 3.5 was struggling under its own weight. I'm one of the weirdos who liked it (a lot), but even I was happy to see 5th Edition come along to clean up what had become an unplayable mess of contradictions by the time you hit Epic levels. I was always excited to see what broken combos had been squashed in the latest Blood Bowl rules (which had 4 or 5 iterations since I started), and I'm really looking forward to X-Wing 2.0.

It is the nature of exception-based rule systems that eventually there are too many exceptions and you need to rework the basic rules to incorporate all the cool new ideas you've had over the past 5 or 6 years, and throw out the bad ideas you've had over the past 5 or 6 years and make a new system that is an improvement on the old. I've been expecting this ever since Reinforce came over from Epic and was immune to Palob, Janson, Homing Missile, etc. That's a rule that needed to be absorbed into the core rules and made more widely available, but also made interactive with all the other abilities in the game. That's exactly what new editions are for, and I can't wait!

5 minutes ago, PaulRuddSays said:

I played Mech Warrior in high school - the blind packs were $10 each, and I was in a group of four guys that would all buy together and then sort out in inequities by trading. This worked OK in terms of player collections, but it was basically impossible to put together a useful faction army without spending obscene money as a group. I eventually peaced out because one guy was intolerable, and swore off blind expansion games ever again. This is one of the reasons I bought hard into X-Wing: I get exactly the units I want, and I don’t have to worry about pulling another the equivalent of an academy pilot while searching for Countess Ryad.

I actually ended up with all our MechWarrior figures, literally hundreds, which have gathered dust in a closet for over a decade. I’m afraid to look at how many terrible, useless mechs are in there, honestly. If I did, I could back-calculate how much money I wasted on that game.

Agromechs... Agromechs everywhere!

Just now, Wiredin said:

Agromechs... Agromechs everywhere!

I was going to say that initially, but then I realized it wouldn’t translate because ‘agro’ sounds good!

I only brought into Warhammer by a small amount, but never really liked the game play so never had to worry about future changes. Kept my Goblins and Orcs. Refuse to buy GW products.

Warmachine was fun, then Mk2 appeared and it was less fun and what is it now MK3? where it's so broken that it's balanced! so I'm told. I sold off my WM refusing to ever play it again.

Was and still am a big fan of SAGA, haven't made the jump to V2 as our player base is so small and we have all the previous books and boards etc. so no real point in upgrading.

Imperial Assault not yet into a 2nd edition, but units and characters have had an overhaul or so I'm told, just can't keep up with the Jones', got fed up with the power creep.

X-wing, despite the odd thing is an awesome game and as I only really picked up the ships that I want to play I can easily convert my entire force to V2, just it's going to cost a good $300 odd for two upgrade packs a core set and Saw's Renagades plus a couple extra sets to upgrade the loose ships that are not covered by the amount in the conversion box...B-wings! add two more B-wings into that thar box!

So on the whole not a massive cost.

3 minutes ago, PaulRuddSays said:

I was going to say that initially, but then I realized it wouldn’t translate because ‘agro’ sounds good!

The one that always made me mad when I pulled it.. and it's because I swear I had more of them than Agromechs was that Wolf mech that had the gattling gun for a center torso. what a useless pile of crap.

Game edition changes are more or less painful depending on how you approach the game.

Examples...

Warhammer Fantasy/Warhammer 40k... If you're a mostly casual player who plays one faction and mostly ignores the tournament meta, instead taking a variety of units, an edition change means a rulebook, an army book and a few tweaks to your army. If you're a tournament player, you'll need more rule books to cover all possible unit options and will likely be replacing your entire army multiple times throughout any edition just to keep up with meta shifts.

Magic the Gathering... MtG hasn't really had editions, per se, but they do have cards rotating in and out of legality all the time. In that sense, it's almost as if there is a new edition of the game every year that locks out half the legal card pool. If you're a casual player, this can largely be ignored as you'll just play with your friends however you want. If you're a tournament player, you'll have to constantly chase new cards to stay relevant.

Etc, etc. I don't feel like typing more.

My point is that if you're a casual player, edition changes are mostly painless and open up new options. If you're a tournament player, edition changes can be painful because it generally means you "have to" buy a ton of new stuff to maintain your position at the top of whichever meta you care about.

To tie this back to X-Wing... I remember when Triple Jumpmasters were the new thing. I bought one because it looked cool and I wanted to see the upgrade cards. Two of my friends immediately bought three each and played the meta lists for a month or so before moving on. Fast forward to today, and I, the casual player, am fine with my reasonable collection which can be updated with a single upgrade box. My two competitive friends are complaining that one upgrade box won't cover them... despite the fact that those Jumpmasters have sat unused on their shelves since that one month of heavy play. The pain level of an edition change is much lower for me because I have a reasonable and varied collection of units. They both have the spammy results of purchases always chasing meta shifts.

1 hour ago, ficklegreendice said:

in warhammer fantasy, they had a really annoying habit of screwing over your unit selection. I remember high elf players getting livid when their all Calvary armies got gutted because their Silver Helm knights moved from Core (no unit limit in the army) to Special (hard unit cap) where there already existed an elite Calvary unit that the Silver Helms now directly competed with and remained strictly inferior to

That’s not even the worst thing they did to High Elves. In 3rd Ed High Elf armies revolved around Dragonkin, of which you could have five including a champion. You then mounted your army general and mage on dragons too if you had any sense, so you had seven dragon riders at £20 a pop. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Would be today, but these are 1987 prices. Then they shift to 4th, and the only dragon rider available is a named hero. Amazingly I kept playing through that...

10 minutes ago, Major Tom said:

That’s not even the worst thing they did to High Elves. In 3rd Ed High Elf armies revolved around Dragonkin, of which you could have five including a champion. You then mounted your army general and mage on dragons too if you had any sense, so you had seven dragon riders at £20 a pop. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Would be today, but these are 1987 prices. Then they shift to 4th, and the only dragon rider available is a named hero. Amazingly I kept playing through that...

High Elves were always a weird case. It seemed like every edition something ridiculous was added to them, that had to be nerfed or taken away in the next edition... Or “balanced” in some wonky way. In 6th they were given some crazy magic resistance, and the ability to destroy magic/runic items and suck away enemy caster dice. To “balance” this, the high elves had to let some drunk fool select their army’s general.

Fantasy was full of stupidity like that, in almost every edition. Orc and Goblins were a prime example, being the only army where the player was against an opponent AND his own army at the same time. And then there was 7th edition Demons...

46 minutes ago, skotothalamos said:

It is the nature of exception-based rule systems that eventually there are too many exceptions and you need to rework the basic rules to incorporate all the cool new ideas you've had over the past 5 or 6 years, and throw out the bad ideas you've had over the past 5 or 6 years and make a new system that is an improvement on the old.

That is a really good description of edition changes.

11 minutes ago, It’s One Of Ours said:

High Elves were always a weird case. It seemed like every edition something ridiculous was added to them, that had to be nerfed or taken away in the next edition... Or “balanced” in some wonky way. In 6th they were given some crazy magic resistance, and the ability to destroy magic/runic items and suck away enemy caster dice. To “balance” this, the high elves had to let some drunk fool select their army’s general.

Fantasy was full of stupidity like that, in almost every edition. Orc and Goblins were a prime example, being the only army where the player was against an opponent AND his own army at the same time. And then there was 7th edition Demons...

Oh no you made me remember the high elf intrigue at the court rule

Because nothing's better than painting a target on your already high priority mages or exposed prince magic bow prince on a flying eagle at complete random

Really made one question the effort anyone put into these rules, and therefore the "value" of spending $ on new editions

But yeah, that was just Warhammer in a nutshell. ******* with our unit composition to force sales, though, was GW in nutshell

(Vaul's unmaking was the ****, though . Except against quite a few Lords that were still utter monsters with a great weapon...LOT of chaos where I played)

As someone who hasn't really been into into tabletop gaming much outside of X-wing and Armada (I guess I've got a near-complete Tannhauser collection sitting around too), I have always found these stories about the horrors of Games Workshop, random blister distribution, and just the vast expense and pain of playing miniatures/wargaming in general to be quite fascinating. it all sounds quite horrific

9 minutes ago, Effenhoog said:

As someone who hasn't really been into into tabletop gaming much outside of X-wing and Armada (I guess I've got a near-complete Tannhauser collection sitting around too), I have always found these stories about the horrors of Games Workshop, random blister distribution, and just the vast expense and pain of playing miniatures/wargaming in general to be quite fascinating. it all sounds quite horrific

Man , we could tell you stories for ages

Like how in fantasy your units were arranged in squares (like phalanxes) and they were given bonuses for how many ranks deep they were. The bonus capped at 4 so you wanted 5 ranks (last one was an ablative rank for inveitable loses)

But units could be routed and run down long before they lost all their men and there were also bonuses for flanking, so you couldn't just stuff a bunch of units into a mega blob

Basically meant you ran optimal 5 men by 5 men squares. So, 25 models a unit.

How many models in a box of spearmen? 16 ?

31 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

(Vaul's unmaking was the ****, though . Except against quite a few Lords that were still utter monsters with a great weapon...LOT of chaos where I played)

I loathed Vaul’s Unmaking. But not as much as I despised the 7th ed Demon army.

I would like to add in that as a Skaven player, 4 ranks weren’t where I stopped... I ran 5 by 8 deep in my clanrat hordes, specifically so it took longer to get rid of the rank bonus (and Skaven Leadership bonus). And it also gave me plenty of clanrats to chew through with my weaponry, as I abused the **** out of their ability fire into combat. If I killed 1 knight, and 4 rats, I was coming out ahead!

Oh yeah... 1 box was 20 clanrats, and all 30 of my stormvermin were metal.

wait, the daemons of chaos?

those motherlovers what kept popping up randomly on the table?

I don't think anyone played them before I left. sec let's do a quick google and...oh

"Well, with the release of the 8th edition army book, those days are effectively over. Daemons are one of the trickiest armies to play now simply due to the amount of randomness thrown into the new book. The first big change comes from the Reign of Chaos table which is consulted when you roll for winds of magic. The effects of this table can help you for the turn (giving you an upgrade to your Ward Save, bombing enemy units, or giving you free lesser daemons or heralds) or extremely cripple you (docking your ward save or destroying your own units). The other one is the inclusion of Daemonic Gifts which are all random and disallows the use of core rulebook magic items except banners, though you may swap out your roll for a magic weapon. Daemons haven't been made bad per say, but they have become quite unpredictable for both the player and the opponent; and with the possibility of hindering your own units by random chance, their competitive strength has now become questionable."

...oh...

and I thought turrets were bad

23 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

Basically meant you ran optimal 5 men by 5 men squares. So, 25 models a unit.

How many models in a box of spearmen? 16 ?

Yeah because the boxes were made for an previous edition were 4 wide was enough (so 16 the minimum model count)

1 hour ago, Wiredin said:

The one that always made me mad when I pulled it.. and it's because I swear I had more of them than Agromechs was that Wolf mech that had the gattling gun for a center torso. what a useless pile of crap.

Legionnaire, and if you were a wolves player, it wasn't the worst. I miss my 2+2 AP artillery... And my trike squadrons. I still have all my stuff and tons of tournament LEs. Kinda mad I didn't sell them when I could. Should still... 2.0 made me quit completely, I was to young to be able to afford getting a full army set again. MechWarrior 2.0 didn't help much and only just killed the game in my area. The power creep and the pilots made everyone bow out.

11 minutes ago, ficklegreendice said:

wait, the daemons of chaos?

those motherlovers what kept popping up randomly on the table?

I don't think anyone played them before I left. sec let's do a quick google and...oh

"Well, with the release of the 8th edition army book, those days are effectively over. Daemons are one of the trickiest armies to play now simply due to the amount of randomness thrown into the new book. The first big change comes from the Reign of Chaos table which is consulted when you roll for winds of magic. The effects of this table can help you for the turn (giving you an upgrade to your Ward Save, bombing enemy units, or giving you free lesser daemons or heralds) or extremely cripple you (docking your ward save or destroying your own units). The other one is the inclusion of Daemonic Gifts which are all random and disallows the use of core rulebook magic items except banners, though you may swap out your roll for a magic weapon. Daemons haven't been made bad per say, but they have become quite unpredictable for both the player and the opponent; and with the possibility of hindering your own units by random chance, their competitive strength has now become questionable."

...oh...

and I thought turrets were bad

In 7th ed, they were the “I-Win” army. They could be beaten, but it was a ridiculous uphill battle akin to 4 Sheathipede Fen Raus with a 4-die primary. They outfought, outlasted, outmaneuvered, or outmagicked anything, depending on which god(s) were bein chosen. And to top it off, they lost combat and took damage like undead, but to a much more forgivable degree. They were so awful that the (last?) Grand Tournament the year after their release had 7 demon armies in the top 10, and the highest placing non-demon army was Empire (3rd place).

When asked why they were made so powerful, the writer allegedly answered in person something along the lines of “it would have been a shame if they weren’t.”

3 minutes ago, Hujoe Bigs said:

Legionnaire, and if you were a wolves player, it wasn't the worst. I miss my 2+2 AP artillery... And my trike squadrons. I still have all my stuff and tons of tournament LEs. Kinda mad I didn't sell them when I could. Should still... 2.0 made me quit completely, I was to young to be able to afford getting a full army set again. MechWarrior 2.0 didn't help much and only just killed the game in my area. The power creep and the pilots made everyone bow out.

yea, thats what happened here too. lasted I think 1-2 expansion cycles. but we all ditched before that 3 legged thing showed up.

I have been through a few edition changes. I think x.wing 2.0 will be the most expensive I have encountered personally but I’m still extremely excited for it and believe FFG is doing it’s best to keep players and bring back old players. 1.0 was not worth playing for me.

I try to keep my collections modest and enjoy the challenge of playing units that are thought of as underpowered. So in destiny I almost made a net positive selling off my legendaries.

I also trade games often and roll investments from one game to the next. I tend to get bored of things at the peak of their popularity and that helps with trading and avoiding the worst of the edition shifts.

My x-wing collection has grown and shrunk over years. I converted lots of board games into extra core sets and ships. And now I’m selling off my excess ships to match the conversion kit numbers. Making new players and keeping my investments running.

given I no longer have to collect everything to get the generic upgrades I’m selling off all my scum. It’s cool stuff but I don’t have to have it.

Interesting topic.

I have been into various types of table top gaming since about 1984 and have gone through quite of few of these sort of "New Edition" moves.

Without going into too many specifics in general the outcome of new editions is almost always the same.

1. Outcry. No matter what anyone ever does, the initial reaction from the vocal minority is a complete breakdown of civil conversation, typically driven by outrage over the whole thing. People simply always find fault with whatever approach is used and they are not particularly nice about it. Simultaneously the defenders come out in grove on the opposite spectrum, crapping on the old edition, and defending whatever the new thing like no wrong could ever be done by the designers/publishers.

2. Fabricated or Real depreciation of the game. Typically either stories of a games imminent demise are made up or they are actual real, but a new edition is a risk because in introducing it a publisher effectively kills the old game, if the new one is not as good, the outcome can be disastrous. Even if its not however, the "tale" of it being terrible can actually effect the community and act almost as a kind of self fulfilling prophecy.

3. Endurance: Eventually the new edition edition endures and typically happens regardless of whether or not the game is actually successful, this is usually because 2nd edition tend to be better funded, riding on the success of the 1st and publishers are very reluctant to accept failure so good or bad game, it will get the "this is better" treatment from the developer and will be marketed and pushed hard win or lose.

In the end however a good game will be successful, a bad one won't be. Gamers are a finicky and bitchy bunch, but they are gamers and the old field of dreams proverb "if you build it they will come" applies. A good game will always find a community and a bad one no matter the hype or full court press by the publisher will fail, the harder its pushed the more spectacular the failure.

So by example I would say some of the big success have been games like Warhammer 40k. It really had a rough ride for a long time with a lot of mediocre to terrible editions, but the current edition has been really well received and despite all the insistence by the community that the game was doomed, its currently seeing an entirely new golden age. There are more people playing 40k right now than I have seen in over a decade, its second only to X-Wing right now.

An example of one of the more spectacular failures was 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. I have literally in my 30 years of gaming never seen a company take a auto-win franchise like D&D and fail so spectacularly, to the point that it not only almost sunk the franchise but the companies it was associated with. It failed so bad it gave birth to what is now one of the biggest competitors for the top spot in role-playing (Paizo's Pathfinder). Universally hated by the community, its failure was predicted long before it went to the presses and despite an enormous effort by Wizard of the Coast pushing it like it was solid gold, even trying to relaunch it with a sub-edition called "Essentials" it is without question one of the miserable failures in role-playing history. Strangely however, 5th edition D&D is probably one of the greatest recovery stories in role-playing as well worth a mention.

There are plenty of examples but I think from a standpoint of statistics, new editions of a game have a better record of being successful, than not, but that is mostly just an eyeball observation, not sure how accurate that actually is.

1 hour ago, ficklegreendice said:

Really made one question the effort anyone put into these rules,

Well, remember. Games Workshop is a model company, not a game company. ?

My thoughts:

1) CCG's: I don't have much of an issue with M:TG. I played heavily starting around the Mirage block, through the Onslaught block. Got out of it for a few years, came back with the Innistrad block (which I really liked), and kept playing until end of the Theros block. At that point, my budget for cardboard crack dried up.

Most of the time, I played draft, so I didn't really care about constructed formats or "the meta". Even better, with the EDH format, I can put almost all of my cards to use in some way.

Other CCG's came and went, like Doomtown, L5R, even Hercules and Xena (loved both of them!). Again, this didn't really bother me. Doomtown especially had an afterlife, I was playing it years after the original run ended.

2) D&D: I started playing with the original boxed set, with the d20 you had to use a white crayon on to get the numbers to show and with the "Keep on the Borderlands" module. Liked AD&D, 2nd ed. not so much, but loved 3.0/3.5. I ran a 3.0/3.5 hybrid campaign from 2002 to the present (been dormant for a few years due to my original group all moving out of town or going through divorce). Then came the disaster of 4th ed. I played it once, in a Dark Sun campaign. The only way I could put up with it was to think of it as a completely separate game that had nothing to do with D&D. Now I mostly play Pathfinder, which other friends are running.

Again, no big problems with edition changes. I could play any edition I like, have all the books and PDF's I need, and am free to reject abortions like 4th ed with no downside.

(Continued below)

(Continued from above)

But then there are

3) Tabletop miniatures: Oh, here we go. I pretty much agree with every negative post about GW that has been posted, or ever will be posted. I began with 3rd ed, which I liked a lot. I eventually built up SEVEN armies, including a practically complete DIY Space Marines BATTLE COMPANY. However, I was unaware at the time of GW's practice of changing rules to push its latest plastic crack, the while destroying any semblance of game balance, game enjoyment or respect for its customers. So when 3.5 came out, I was not thrilled. I absolutely hated what they did to CSM's, so quit running my World Eaters, and never completed my Thousand Sons. Then came 4th ed, which I liked even less, although I did like some of the Space Marines options. At 5th ed, I was fed up and cut back my play time almost to nothing.

When 6th ed dropped, that was the last straw. No more 40K for me. Whatever 40K stuff I have will eventually be sold.

I also had a WHFB Tomb Kings army. Which was ruined by Age of Suck-More.

I got into X-Wing in large part because I was SO disgusted with GW, and thought X-Wing was everything I was looking for and everything GW was NOT.

Now, X-Wing 2.0. And I feel like I'm being GW'd again. And I have little confidence that there won't be a 3.0 in the near future, and for the same reasons there's a 2.0: wave after wave produced, apparently WITHOUT adequate beta testing by players who know how to produce the most broken OP lists possible, and without a long-range plan to keep the game balanced and playable for its existing customer base.

V. 2.0 MAY get rid of some EXISTING problems with the game. The new core set and conversion kits MAY provide a lot of value for the money. A $100,000 Rolls Royce also provides a lot of value for the money. Doesn't mean I'm about to shell out $$$ for either. If it turns out that I can trade for the six Y-Wing, five K-Wing, and multiple other Rebel ships I have (let alone the various Imperial and Scum ships I have and play with occasionally), I may feel less negative about the change. But based on experience, I'm not optimistic.

My two experiences are 40k (various editions) and Batman (v1 to v2 like X-Wing)

40k, looking back, was and is abysmal. Others have covered it in detail, so I won't drone on. But this change? Way better. No way would I be able to stay playing decent 40k lists for just £133 on release (core and 3 conversion kits from where I buy from)

Batman is still a pretty tiny game, despite going for nearly as long as X-Wing. And has not been pushed into the spotlight like other games. When they updated to v2 at the end of last year, you basically didn't have to buy anything. Rulebooks were PDFs on the site so no book purchases. All the rules for the old character cards got updated in the rules so they were still usable. And even models that got updated, the old ones can still be used. BUT, the game is tiny, the company that makes it is tiny, and I'm sure WB are rinsing them for license costs, so they really couldn't afford to redo the game in the same way GW or FFG can.

I still like playing Batman, and it was nice that they didn't fleece us for anything new really, but I wasn't that excited for the update. And in the end, the changes haven't really improved the game that much.

Yes X-Wing will cost more over a hundred to update, but I am HYPED and everything sounds like great improvements on the rules and game.