I am not sure how funny this particular rant will be but why not give it a go?would you mind telling us in what way Privateer pissed in your cheerios? I think we could all use a good laugh.
In the Beginning there was the page that said "Fuck You"
Straight up first thing privateer press does in their rule books since day one is have their infamous "page whatever the hell it is". A page in which Privateer preemptively rants against their own players before even providing them with any of the rules of the game.
The general gist of the rant is, balance? Fuck it, we just made EVERYTHING super uber powad! Stop crying and man up and just deal with it bitch! They go on and on about "having a pair". Then PS, Fuck you.
Which is a bit of an offensive message really. I mean why don't THEY man up and take responsibility for their rules? Why can't they have a message telling fan boys to "have a pair" and admit that hey, maybe there MIGHT be imperfections in the game and just "deal" with that? No instead they essentially kick start Fan Boy denialism and bullshit by pouring a bunch of "anyone who ever has problems with our game is a weak whiny pussy!" fuel onto the fire.
But you know whatever, I ignored it along with the fluff text.
In the beginning there were also a bunch of problems
And unsurprisingly their product was not actually perfect.
It was nice, especially if you just now came from war hammer fantasy or something crap like that.
But there WERE flaws they did NOT give out the "supa powas" as evenly and effectively as they insisted in their pre-emptive fuck you to potential criticism.
Certain unit's and leaders were crap, certain factions were forced into specific strategies, combos and various elaborate pretzel shapes to compete against even the most basic and simple of strategies from certain other factions.
Some notable problems were...
Cygnar and Kahdor were too good and too easy, Menoth and Cryx had to ignore half their roster and rely on specific builds and tactics to function.
Mechanics were completely useless because in a maybe six turn game taking a 'Jack' out of action for any extended period to repair it (if you rolled well) was about the same as losing it.
The STARTER BOX caster for Kahdor was stupidly over powered able to field some of the highest caster movement and defense in the game, had nice spells and easily the most uber powerful stun nuke AoE "feat" of them all.
Everyone hated Haley's Temporal Barrier because it was really rather good and counter to the "balls to the wall" philosophy of "everyone moves directly towards each other until they all die" that the creators and community wanked to.
Some units and models were just ass. Many players believed that the Cryx defiler had a spray template attack (possibly due to some early misprints in starter rules) and because without it (and it WAS without it) it somewhat sucked as the most expensive to field Cryx arc node.
Often infantry units (not meant to be the focus of the game) were hands down better than Jacks (meant to be the focus of the game) this was problematic.
There was... somewhat of a shortage of unit options. For instance 'Arc Nodes" a very important unit type were thin on the ground and some factions, including the one that was supposed to be the most advanced technomagical power house that invented the things, had a choice of... ONE. This was not abnormal in a lot of unit types and factions, for instance Cryx, about the only faction that might have benefited from the gimped early repair rules, had absolutely zero repair capable units. They DID have a mechanic model, it just couldn't 'do' repair.
But despite all this the game had it's good qualities and you could do fun tactical knock down and throw attacks with Jacks and many units were interesting with fun abilities. While there WERE trap options at the army build level you often found games were won or lost by tactical decisions at the table, and not even predetermined tactical decisions but sometimes even actual adaptive ones!
Also model quality was... eh... some were OK some were terrible, at first it was worse then for a while it improved, then it just stayed at the eh level.
They specifically promised a "heavy metal!" policy where by they would never ever "go plastic" with their minis. I mean hell I didn't care, I don't mind plastic, I thought the promise was sort of dumb and juvenile, but whatever...
Their fluff was fucking abysmal
I know Frank has gone on about the "silent city" that in other fluff is ALSO a 24 hour a day cacophony of super loud industrial undead hammering.
But I stayed away from the obviously poorly written fluff. BUT IT CHASED ME DOWN AND MADE ME PAY ATTENTION.
Because it overflowed into models and units all over the place. The game seems to have pretty much EVERY female some variant of masked and/or chained leather or whip mistress of some form.
The game has a disturbing fetish for "Yarr! Pirates!" so much so that it now has like TWO pirate factions if not more. Don't like pirates? Well that's like one third of all 'neutral' mercenaries ruled out right there, and at least half the models from the undead faction.
They LOVE writing fluff for unique one of a kind mercenary doods. So the game is clogged with fatty deposits of unique one of a kind mercenary doods, most of whom are sucky wastes of space (like the entire mercenary pseudo faction with it's USUALLY stupidly under powered models) but some of whom break the game with their cool unique doodness. Like the stupid dood who is the most (if not only) effective necromancer capable of raising undead on the field AND WHO WILL NOT WORK FOR THE ONLY ACTUAL NECROMANTIC THEMED FACTION IN THE GAME.
The game was rife with this sort of thing. I mean god damnit...
Splat Books Took us nowhere
Splat books provided rather limited numbers of new options. These options largely did not improve the game. Lets look at some elements that were problems and how the splat books dealt with them.
Cygnar and Kahdor were too good and too easy, Menoth and Cryx had to ignore half their roster and rely on specific builds and tactics to function.
Cygnar STAYED easy, Menoth and Cryx STAYED bad and conditional indeed often ignoring entire books worth of new models. Kahdor actually grew more powerful and easy by a small but notable margin, and the neutral Mercenaries got introduced as a faction that was SO INSANELY WEAK (and limited by strange arbitrary unique "sub faction" army list requirements) that they made Menoth and Cryx look like versatile power houses packed with choice.
Mechanics were completely useless
Splat books simply didn't care.
The STARTER BOX caster for Kahdor was stupidly over powered
They never released another caster as stupidly good or toned down the original during the splat book 'era'. They did however release some opposing casters that look like they were "fixes by means of releasing a new model" (Privateers favorite rules "fix" method aside from incredibly long lists of arcane unintuitive and generally bad erratas). And THOSE casters, like Darius, that appeared to be specifically tailored to survive and counter the tactics of that one problematic caster while they didn't entirely manage to do THAT, did however manage to THEMSELVES be seriously problematic casters that made everyone sad.
In the mean time splat books introduced so many new options that synergized insanely well with OP starter box girl that the universe started to implode.
Everyone hated Haley's Temporal Barrier and "Turtling"
So they gave Cygnar new and exciting turtling enhancements, and set their thematic focus on adding new models, options and units that were SPECIFICALLY the ones that worked with Haley and used "dig in" tactics.
Indeed if you DIDN'T like "trenchers" then entire splat books worth of Cygnar options were completely wasted on you. And about 60% of all Cygnar players hated fucking trenchers because they had abysmal models and completely fail fluff (oh hi, we are plate armoured knights, only we are also trench digging world rifle and bayonet war 2 Tommies... yeah...)
Some units and models were just ass.
Privateer had three solutions to this.
1) Do nothing
2) Release an "attachment" unit to fix the problem.
3) Release an entirely new unit with almost identical flavour but different mechanics.
Do nothing was probably one of the BETTER options they ran with. Since options 2 and three alternatively either just created MORE trap options and made them MORE expensive, or in some cases introduced some of the most powerful and confusing bullshit in town (like the Bane Knights everyone hated that arrived at some point to replace Bane Thralls (who were 'bane' themed undead knight thingies...) which was interesting because bane thralls weren't actually all that bad AND they received an attachment model to 'fix' them at the same time AS WELL!).
They pretty much NEVER actually just ended up with the result of an attachment/replacement "fix" that just actually "fixed" anything. And their ideas of which units needed this stuff and how much to provide (see bane thralls and the multi-fix) seemed like the guys writing their rules weren't even talking to each other.
Often infantry units were hands down better than Jacks[/b]
They got even more hands down better. Newer better units got released, units that didn't need them gained various enhancing attachments, and meanwhile new Jacks were thin on the ground and frequently sorta crappy. Things improved slightly with the introduction of rules for jacks to Two Handed Throw and Trample, but... well... not much.
There was... somewhat of a shortage of unit options.
The splat books never really addressed this well. For instance for Cygnar they NEVER released a new arc node (except for that one 'character' jack that was a unique, and was the same unit only with some extra 'character' shit, and worked extra well with Haley just to anger people). And if you were Cygnar and disliked trenchers? Then the splat books had relatively little to say to you besides "fuck you, buy trenchers".
Of the limited options in each book MANY were trap options. Especially for the trap factions like Menoth, Cryx and Mercenaries.
And then there was Hordes
AND so Privateer released A WHOLE NEW GAME. It was the SAME GAME but only with different factions. And it was "separate but fully compatible" with their original game. Which is to say they just released 4 new factions for the original game.
Only... it ISN'T compatible. Because they changed the basic tactical resourcing mechanic of Focus to this fancy new Fury thing in the new rules.
And in the process it massively inflated. Focus uses would run around and "spend" about 6-8 Focus a turn, furry, which was point for point identical had pretty much no functional upper limit to how much you could spend! And the spells, special attacks and units that could use fury and came to the field with fury users? Were they weaker NO they were just as good, if not better!
Indeed Fury users came to the battle with MORE SPELLS, and every single "Warbeast" (aka Jack) could "arc node" it's own spell, and gave it's leader a new spell, and every single leader unit was it's own personal pocket mechanic and could heal every single warbeast, and could make themselves immune to damage by chucking it onto their warbeasts and...etc...
And to rub it in Hordes came to the table with swarms of models that ignored important mechanics like rough terrain and stealth.
And then on top of that they got a points discount on their superior models and fielded more of them.
And then on top of THAT one particular Hordes faction got all the best stuff at the lowest low low prices.
Then these guys ended up in standard tournament play along side everyone else. The only reason they didn't rule the universe being the lack of that one super caster Kahdor had and the fact that the war machine community was kinda slow and a lot of the guys who actually noticed the Hordes disparity apparently left in disgust.
War machine COULD hold up, but it effectively narrowed viable options massively as the only war machine options worth playing became the most cheesy of focus independent infantry heavy and often "Jack free" army lists. Any war machine list that still gave half a shit about Jacks and Focus was basically boned.
Also Hordes brought in more horrendous fluff and shitty factions like the "hurr hurr, orcs loves beer and axes!" troll faction and the like. Not to mention MORE S&M elf girls and MORE torturers with masks and whips.
Ponies, thousands of them!
In a game about giant beasts and steam punky robots and crap... PP released a whole splat book era centered around the innovative idea of introducing CAVALRY. Yes, HORSE (or if you look at the stupid models PONY) riding cavalry.
Man, that sucked balls theme wise. But they gave the cavalry special rules and INSANE stats such that they were faster, stronger, and all round better than Jacks and even some Warbeasts. Some of them (like the ones that ultimately turned up for Horde's most fuck you of all fuck you factions) could (and did) basically kited entire Warmachine armies 5x their points value without injury while the rest of the underpriced fuck you army twiddled their thumbs.
Jacks, even to a limited degree Warbeasts, got another kick in their nuts contrary to the stated intention of the designers and fan boys to focus more heavily on having them.
The Agonizer incident
Then one day a new model came out for hordes. The super elite "evil" but disciplined legionary army with its shiny armoured elephant giants and shiny armored attack dudes (and god damn S&M masked whip gimps everyone pretended didn't stomp on the flavour while simultaneously breaking the upper limits of the Fury mechanic into infinity)...
...THAT organized ruthless killing machine with it's disciplined shield wall formations and vague romanish stylings... Got a tortured bleeding mewling baby elephant thingy staggering around on the field as their new special solo unit.
It was a pretty ugly model with ugly fluff and also ugly mechanics. I for one cared for it not. But many collectors of the faction were deeply offended. It was really not cool man. They felt they had just had their image destroyed (largely imagined through ignoring the abysmal fluff for admittedly good reason). They didn't want to be the creepy freak fielding that model on the table and explaining what and why it was to passing kids at a game store.
The official Privateer Press forums exploded like a burning super nova of hate. Skorne faction collectors were publically quitting the faction, and maybe the entire game, in droves. Fan boys were raging, and doing it in INCREDIBLY offensive ways as they went with the strategically er... brave... decision of vigorously wanking in public over how much they LOVED torturing baby animals. Better yet this was all through the Bush years and more specifically the "justifying American Torture chambers" era in particular. And you KNOW that brought in some even worse sub texts.
The pro-baby-torturing fan boys promised to switch to the faction, bring the Agonizer to every game they ever played again and wank over it in front of the players of all the other factions. That sounded like it would be a great idea for promoting and supporting their game to them. Yeah. Fortunately they DIDN'T DO THAT. And the last time I saw any figures suggesting numbers of collectors of different factions Skorne, already unpopular before the Agonizer, ranked in the absolutely lowest of the low, by far.
Still the pro-baby-torturers given encouragement and not a word of "dudes, just calm down" by the official Privateer forum staff decided to make fun of the anti-baby-torturing "weaklings" by making up a farcical PETA sticker for the Agonizer.
Okay. So far what we have is just a bunch of dissatisfied faction collectors and totally rabid Fan Boys tearing their own game apart and giving it a REALLY bad image.
So Privateer Press sets up a cafe press shop to sell merchandise of the satirical PETA sticker (The fan boys specifically requested badges they could wear to every warmachine/hordes game ever to publically make fun of those who disliked the model for all eternity). They sold mugs and badges and shirts, and they advertised it all on their main web page.
And screw the rest THAT was just fucking disgusting. Privateer decided to just give a big giant "fuck you" to a large swathe of their customers that were somewhat offended at a rather disgusting piece of widely and justly disliked bad fluff inflicting itself on their army. The sheer contempt for sane paying customers reasonable concerns was... uncalled for.
But they really did actually go ahead and do that whole merchandise thing. And as a result even though I wasn't even really all that concerned by the Agonizer itself, I for one never bought another Skorne model.
Perfect without changes, Perfect with changes, Perfect with changes again
So if you asked any Warmachine fan boy, and thanks to the "Grow A Pair" wank philosophy playing the game at all PROMOTED fanboyism as the official attitude towards the game. Well if you asked him the game was PERFECT.
The issues with the game were all NOT A PROBLEM EVERYTHING IS PERFECT SHUT UP AND GROW A PAIR.
The privateeer wrote moutains of "fix" attachments/units etc... and an INCREDIBLE volume of errata.
And if you asked the same fan boys the game was STILL fine ant the known issues and the changes from last time when it was apparently perfect without need for change were all NOT A PROBLEM EVERYTHING IS PERFECT SHUT UP AND GROW A PAIR.
THEN privateer announced that everything WAS NOT PERFECT!!!! So they were doing a rewrite of the whole thing called "Remix" which was basically Warmachine 1.5 and the Fan boys, which up to one micro second before that were defending the perfect inviolate (errated and patched) game declared that the remix was GOING to be perfect.
Privateer promised that the remix would address issues of disused inferior options, known over powered options, known confusing crap like Bane Knights, complexity bloat, and also would put all the rules, errata and junk in ONE CONVENIENT PLACE!
Then remix came out. And it was, surprisingly NOT A PROBLEM EVERYTHING IS PERFECT SHUT UP AND GROW A PAIR.
Only remix WASN'T perfect. (shock) It was a pile of niggling little changes that were largely annoying and achieved nothing. The errata mountain was written into core, which didn't help any because errata mountain was basically MORE senseless, confusing and sometimes outright BAD than the original rules.
As to delivering as promised?
Well. It did nothing for confusing shit like bane knights, yes NOTHING for clarifying the most well known "WTF how does that even work?" rules issues in the game.
It's sum total of weak unit fixing was making mechanic's viable with a house rule that had been loudly suggested since before the first rule book was published. (and also gave mechanics the ability to command a Jack for no fucking reason other than the forum fan boys thought it would be cool, which is weird because it's the most useless and stupid tactical option like EVAR). Aside from that known weak options like the defiler got a little "fuck you it really is this bad" note as their special "tactical advice" side bar brought in with that edition.
Fixing strong options? Well the Khador starter box super caster, who seriously had like 2 major issues that needed fixing (a self buffing mobility spell that also put her defense so high it was almost off the standard RNG and a stun bomb feat of stupid proportions) got, get this, a teeny tiny hint of a nerf to her stun bomb, so tiny frankly it was just short of meaningless in most games. Fan boys hailed her as fixed.
They also hailed Haley's Temporal Barrier turtle thingy as fixed. Which is hilarious because Privateer actually managed to make a change to it that had the REVERSE effect in that it BUFFED casting it while back pedaling and NERFED casting it while advancing mindlessly forward into the jaws of death. Having the direct OPPOSITE effect to what they and their fan boys stated they wanted!
And that was about it for fixing the over powered stuff, Bane Knights, if you could figure out WTF they did, were still stupidly good etc...
The whole "war jacks are useless compared to infantry/cavalry/warbeasts" did NOT get fixed in the slightest.
Complexity only got WORSE with rolled in errata and a few new units. NOTHING got notably simplified or pruned.
And STILL no new fucking arc node for Cygnar.
War Machine 2.0
Remix lived a VERY short era. Everyone had to buy a new core warmachine book, a new core hordes book, and new cards for all their armies.
There was like what was it? ONE splat book for warmachine and hordes each and then BAM! The edition was over.
It seems that Privateer was once again officially announcing that the rules of the game were suddenly no longer "Perfect".
Stated problems that the upcoming 2.0 would fix? Why THE SAME PROBLEMS REMIX DIDN'T ACTUALLY FIX. Yes. ALL of them, even the problems with those two casters WAY BACK FROM THE FIRST RULE BOOK EVER RELEASED. Those would finally be fixed... in 2.0.
Fan boys immediately declared the new edition to definitely going to be perfect.
It came out. New core books for everyone, now new FACTION SPECIFIC books for everyone, new fucking cards for all your fucking armies.
And did it deliver on it's promised fixes?
Lets see, Haley got nerfed into the absolute ground, so yeah they did that. Their "fix" for the Kahdor uber starter caster and one similar stun bomb guy from menoth was... interesting.
They made ongoing effects (like freeze and knock down) such that Jacks could negate them by spending a single focus. This DID handly nerf those two casters. But it was ALSO stated this was done to make Jacks viable options again.
Only problem with that? The number one source of Freezing and knock downs OTHER than those two borked casters? Why JACKS OF COURSE. Over night approximately 1/2 of all Jack special attacks are rendered FUCKING USELESS. This most heavily impacts light weight two fisted jacks that rely on attack bonus over damage, like the already widely considered useless 'heavy' Cryx jacks.
So they made jacks LESS WORTH TAKING. But their goal was the opposite? So what did they do? They remodeled the ENTIRE POINTS / ARMY BUILD SYSTEM. Did they make things with sane points ratings? OH HELL NO. Did they make jacks significantly proportionally cheaper? OH HELL NO. They just took a tiny portion (and it IS tiny) of your army points and labelled it with "must buy a jack". Which ultimately means you must either field ONE cheap jack minimum or forgo some tiny portion of points. Seriously with some army lists you could just forgo the points and totally not notice.
As for the buff the weak nerf the strong business. They actually did a bit of that but more in the traditional Games Workshop insane Russian Roulette nerf/buff cycle with viable options suddenly gimping into obscurity and weird obscure shit suddenly becoming the center of all that is cool.
As for simplifying the game? Well. They DID introduce some pruning, unit leaders were gone, lots of things got some of their abilities pruned (usually in bullshit annoying ways). But then they came back in and added MORE FUCKING UNIT ATTACHEMENTS. So yeah the net result on complexity is basically this. My unit of [Whatever] now no longer has one of its special ability text entries and has no special in built squad leader, but it does have 2-3 unit attachment units all with their own special ability texts and at least 1-2 of those is new with this edition. Simplified MY ASS.
Indeed THIS edition made one of the most STUPID EVER of their magazine mechanics straight up core (I mean it WAS officially core before but being magazine only made it obscure). NOW you can theme your army selections to specific (often gimpy) army lists and then you gained special powas like modified unit stats, whole new special ability text for units, free bonus units, removed unit caps for units you would be insane to field more than the normal limit of, etc...
These special sub faction lists were TERRIBLE. Some gave you some SERIOUS non-abilities. Others gave you stupidly good shit. Some restricted you to the worst model selections in the game, others just rewarded you for taking the very best selections giving you free stuff to boot.
Worse still these utterly SCREWED the "this edition is simpler" goal, now your army stats ARE NO LONGER RELIABLY ON THOSE HANDY CARD THINGIES. Now you have to have your faction specific books handy to reference the small raft of crappy little niggling shit that your sub faction gives you.
Did they fix the biggest issues in the game? I mean HANDS DOWN the biggest problem was the Fury/Focus divide. So did they fix it. OH HELL NO. That's the same as before, Focus is limited, Fury is just short of infinite. Have fun!
They DID introduce a whole new faction. They gave it some unique schticks. Including a bunch of unique shticks they stole from Cryx. WHICH THEY GUTTED IN ORDER TO LOOT UNIQUE SHTICKS FOR THE NEW FACTION. That was nice of them.
The new faction, and many other new models were also ALL PLASTIC. Now I don't care, plastic models are cool with me. But remember way back when? Remember Privateer promised their customers they would NEVER EVAR sell out and go plastic, they were "Heavy Metal Forever Bro!". So I for one think the new plastic models are a HILARIOUS fuck you to any Fan Boy who fell for that one!
The last straw for me was playing a tournament (tournaments games among other things have shortened with every official tournament rules/scenario released from something like 6 turn battles to the death to 3 turn battles to little better than first blood victories by points!).
Struggling with the sheer amount of bullshit changes while fighting an indomitable infinite fury hordes army I was already pissed after three games. I mean I was doing well but every little rules change I encountered had really annoyed me with the sheer "WTF why would they even... who even... why... I just..."
Then one of my Jacks got knocked over and I discover that shields that used to provide all round protection when knocked down? Now they provide NO protection when knocked down.
WHY? Who asked for that change? Where was the problematic complexity or the known explotative uber list running off shield arm Jacks lying on their backs in the middle of the battle field and ruining everyone's day? As far as I could tell the reason and ONLY reason for the change? Change for changes sake. New edition needs to be different, they didn't have the "pair" they tell everyone else to grow so they didn't change shit that mattered, they just stomped on your familiarity with the rules by changing all the shit that DIDN'T matter.
That pissed me. Then and there I decided "Fuck it I'm out." And out I am. I'm open to being convinced otherwise through a free game with a nice guy but I'm not spending another cent, playing some dumb asshole or pro-baby-torture-wanking Fan Boy (almost the only players LEFT locally) or playing in a tournament game (the only ones reliably going locally).
And if that were not enough!!
Privateer has chosen as it's exclusive Australian distributor a couple of stores in Sydney who refuse to reliably sell Privateer products to other stores.
Which means you have to buy all your models from them, or online. This is not a problem except it has lead to local game stores no longer stocking cool stuff on the shelves and in some cases banning the game from their tables because they can't make any money off it.
Thus driving all casual players from the game and leaving us with basically no one other than the same rabid and often disturbing fan boys that survived the whole Agonizer fiasco.
WHO CAN SAVE US FROM GAMES WORKSHOP NOW!!!!????
Well. That was SUPPOSED to be privateers job. As far as I'm concerned their games were basically sold pretty much primarily on the angle that they weren't GW.
Only they are pretty damn insane like GW, write crap rules like GW, have horrible attitudes toward their own customers like GW, have terrible distribution like GW (and incidentally terrible pricing as a result of that distribution), and keep making us buy new rule books like GW (with the addition of making us buy new cards) without actually delivering any BENEFIT for new rule books (like GW) and now even are nerf/buff cycling armies and models, like GW.
They basically ARE GW, and I fucking hate GW. So yeah.
And their remaining fan base are ignorant annoying drooling Fan Boy twats you wouldn't want to be caught hanging around with in public, LIKE GW. I mean hell, the last "friendly" game of 2.0 I played (and may ever play) was with the Privateer Press officially sanctioned local promoter of the game. AND HE DID NOT KNOW THE FUCKING RULES.
THE END.
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