I got's me Stompy I did.

Say it with a bad cockney accent.

I finally picked up the beast. I'm only a few months behind the eightball.

It's not a bad kit. I would say I've spent about 3 hours on it and I'm 90% finished. The torso is a bear to assemble. There's no support until you have the whole thing assembled so the panels have a tendency to move. Otherwise the kit goes together fairly well.

The instructions are what one would expect from Games Workshop (i.e. next to useless). There are definitely a slew of kitbash options with the trukk and the battlewagon. It's nice that GW is offering a cohesive, yet still cobbled together, look for the orks.

I'm going vanilla on this one though. This was more in the way of getting a feel for the kit. I'm going to wait to build another until the upgrade sprues are available in August. I'm really curious as to whether they are making a left CCW available, like the picture from WD350. The one with the death roller attached.

I'm hoping to start painting it this weekend. If I do I'll post WIP pictures on Segmentum.

That is all.

Segmentum

The Segmentum St. Louis forum is open for posting. If you're a Games Workshop fan in the St. Louis area you should head over there and check it out. And sign up. And post. So far only two of us have. We need more activity.

Real Life

I was going to post part two of my previous line of thought in a timely manner. Then reality stepped in and said NO!

So I'll finish it sometime in the next two weeks. Maybe. I've lost my impetus.

Is anyone going to Diecon this weekend? Is anyone going to Siegeworld at the end of the month? Has anyone signed up for the Segmentum St. Louis forums? Does anyone read this?

That is all.

Off Topic

I said this blog would be mostly about Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. That mostly means I can spew about what I'm going to and my many, many reader (that's deliberate) may not feel inclined to rant about me going off topic.

I have played MMO's for years. I played some Ultima Online when I lived in the hinterlands of Northeastern Lower Michigan(which is an accepted means of describing where you live in that state. Right after holding up your hand and pointing). Then I quit for a while. Then World of Warcraft came out. I played the beta. Then quit. Then moved. Then signed back up. Then played for a year. Then quit for a year. Then got a new job. Then the assholes (I say that with all due friendship and respect) I worked with dragged me back in. And I haven't been able to get out since.

As far as MMO's go, WOW is the best overall game on the market. If more than 3 people read this blog I would have just started a flame war in my comment sections. I'm not saying that it does everything right. There are many games that do certain things better. The problem is they focus on doing that one thing better to the detriment of all the other elements that go into the game. (I'm talking about you Warhammer Online and Age of Conan.) There is also the fact that may companies are considering anything less than 1 million subscribers a failure. Which, when people are handing you 15 dollars a month isn't exactly true.

That being said, WOW is getting old and is starting to show some wear and tear. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the WOW Killer is coming soon.

Before I put the name of the game I feel is wielding the knife out there and open myself to the torrents of hate that would spew forth if more than .5 people read this blog I'm going to define what WOW Killer means.

First, let's ignore the global 11 million subscribers for WOW. There are some strange subscription options available in Asia that may or may not throw those numbers out of proportion. Last time I checked there were about 6 million subscribers to WOW in the US and Europe. There may be more. The 6 million may be North America numbers. And I did just lump Canada and Mexico into the US two sentences ago. I'm a bad person. Most people define the WOW Killer as the game that steals all those subscribers and leaves Blizzard with a suddenly barren serverscape.

That definition is moronic. I have other words for it but I'm trying to be nice and somewhat inoffensive.

My definition of WOW Killer is a game that pulls somewhere between 30 to 60 percent of WOW subscribers away from the game and keeps them away. On top of that the game attracts enough other people that the subscription numbers eventually surpass the number of WOW subscribers. Obviously the more people they steal from WOW the easier that second part becomes.

Here's what the WOW Killer needs to do.

1. RELEASE WHEN IT'S DONE: That is the most important part. The argument that WOW had to go through about 6 months of fine tuning before it was an approximation of what it is today doesn't matter. WOW wasn't competing against the 1 ton gorilla. It is the 1 ton gorilla. People don't want to pay to play in your beta. They will take their one month free and then go back to their comfort zone. I'm not saying the game has to be perfect at launch either. Or that it will never be patched or added to. But certain technical problems MUST be hammered out before hand. A memory leak associated with the most popular brand of videocard is a really, really bad business decision. I also understand that with pressure from every corporate entity that has purchased your company in the 3 to 5 years you've been working on the game this is much harder than it sounds. If at all possible try not to get bought out by EA.

On a side note; do you know why it's easy to pick on EA? Not just because they are behemoth, but because every bad thing said about them is true. The bad things may also be downplayed to a certain extent. Also, they don't care. Most of will buy Madden in August when it releases.

2. ACCESSIBILITY: Whatever faults WOW has it's easy to start playing. It runs on damn near every computer out there. The controls are easy to grasp. If another game is going to knock WOW from its pedestal it will need to be all of the above.

3. FUN ALL THE WAY THROUGH: As a specific example, Warhammer Online was an excruciating failure with this. It was not fun to level a character. I'll be honest and say I never made it to the endgame but from what I've seen and read that doesn't look that fun either. Your customers have to be tricked into thinking the grind isn't so grindy. Like Scott Jennings said on his blog, if people are playing your game and thinking playing WOW will be more fun, you're in trouble.

4. IP: Warcraft was an IP known only to gamers. It was successful because the MMO appealed to people who weren't traditionally gamers. If a game is going to match WOW in subscription base it's going to have to reach out to people who don't traditionally game/play MMO's. The easiest way to do that is through an established, almost invasive, IP.

If you've made it this far I suspect you're curious as to which game I think can compete with and eventually topple WOW.

Hint. It has Star in the title.
Hint 2. It doesn't have Wars in the title.
Hint 3. Nor the word Gate in the title.

I feel that if Cryptic continues to follow the course that they have been, at least from what I've seen on their website and various gaming news sites, Star Trek Online will be the WOW Killer. And in the next day or two I'll even explain my reasons why. But I should be working instead of typing right now.

Delays

I don't have much to put up for now. With Adepticon over I'm hoping to talk with the Segmentum guys over the next couple of weeks and start organizing things. Right now the gaming community in STL is broken into a bunch of small circles that may or may not want to deal with each other. There are a few of us who cross groups but not enough right now. That needs to change. Hopefully I'll have more and better things to say in the next couple of weeks. Until then I'm going to keep painting horses. They all have saddles now!

Community? Pshaw!

When Games Workshop posted the US tournament schedule I was worried. The Baltimore, Chicago, and Vegas GT's weren't there. I thought it was oversight. GW wouldn't be so stupid as to remove those tournaments without making announcements. People plan ahead for those things. They schedule around them. A lot of people start figuring their army for the next GT before the current one is finished.

I have a tendency to underestimate the stupidity of people.

That said, I can accept GW foisting off community events on the community. It frees them up to ignore veterans and focus on hooking the young and stupid. What bothers me is that they haven't standardized a set of requirements for the abominations that they are calling Grand Tournaments.

Living in the Midwest I feel especially hosed. Adpeticon is great. It is, without a doubt, better than the Chicago GT was. Especially after they split Games Day and the tournament and still charged $125 bucks. That's a lot to shell out to not get any type of convention. But I can't make it to Adepticon. I would have made it to the GT. Except they don't have one. I'm not going to something that doesn't require a painted army. I can do that for free at any of the local hobby shops. To the guys running the Big Waaggh in Memphis, and everyone else running a circuit tournament, grow a damn spine and make people paint their models.

Tournaments are veteran events. I know quite a few veterans who don't love to paint but always painted their tournament armies. I also know a lot of veterans who didn't like to paint and wouldn't. The nice thing about the GT and anything that requires painting is I don't have to worry about playing them.

I don't have all my stuff painted. Actually, that's an understatement. I don't have 98% of my stuff painted. That's mostly because my previous situation allowed me to buy willy-nilly and I had a serious case of new army syndrome for two years. I have time now and I'm catching up. That said, I never felt that the requirement to have a painted army for a tournament was especially onerous. It also motivated me to sit down and focus on getting at least ONE army done.

There are other problems with GW right now. Has anyone visited their community blog? It's been almost two months since they updated it. I think things have occurred in those 2 months with the hobby and events in general. I could be wrong. Or maybe they just don't feel like communicating right now. Or maybe they're half-assing it like they do a great many things.

Also, does anyone else miss the summer campaigns? I always looked forward to those. Until five years ago, I lived in Northern Michigan and finding games was well beyond challenging. The summer campaigns were a reason for people to dust their models off. People could compete with everyone in the hobby, not just their circle, or their shop, or the person who lived seventy miles a way and might or might not be able to scrape the time together for a casual game, but had a reason to compete if their were "global" implications.

In the past nine months I've seen GW shift from leaning heavily towards encouraging new players while trying to nurture a veteran community, to focusing entirely on new players while telling veterans and the player community to go find your own sandbox to play in. That seems shortsighted to me. Collecting toy soldiers really isn't that fun without people to play against. If GW consistently alienates the veterans and the established community eventually there won't be the people needed to encourage others to play, to show them how, to show that the game is fun and enjoyable. At that point it won't matter how many new players they recruit. They'll buy a few models, play a few games, and then wander away to the next new shiny.

The models and the game are what get people started. The community is what keeps them playing for years to come.

In the Beginning...

This blog, like almost everything else I do, was meant to be started 3 months ago. I'm a gamer. That's how I roll.


This site will be mostly about Warhammer and Warhammer 40k. At one point, my intentions were to ignore LOTR almost entirely but the upcoming War of the Ring expansion might make that game almost palatable so I'm withholding judgment on that matter.


GW took our shop away. I've heard their reasons and I'm sure they made sense from their perspective. I'm looking at it from the point of view of someone whose plastic-crack dealer has up and gone. Now I need to find a new place to get plastic-crack, and use plastic-crack.


There are some of us trying to get a club up and running. We don't want the St Louis hobby to die. We want GW to come back someday. But they didn't pick my name. I wanted to call the club, you guessed it, Arch-Fiends. We're going with Segmentum St. Louis. The forum is up. It's empty, but it's up.


Adepticon is just over the horizon, the only tournament worth anything in the Midwest since the brainiacs at GW US Headquarters decided to nix their own Grand Tournaments. That upcoming event is why this hasn't gone up until now and why the Segmentum page is barren and desolate. We've all been pretending that we're working on our armies. What we've been doing is procrastinating until 2 weeks out. Which in my case ended up for the best since my team just fell apart.


What that means is this page will probably see an update at least once a week, maybe, probably, for the forseeable future. It also means that things will probably get moving with Segmentum as well.


I'll probably focus more on Warhammer Fantasy with this. I enjoy 40k. But I suspect the Segmentum forum will be heavy into 40k. Fantasy is the first game I played and it's still the game I love. I'll try to post rumors but without a shop I don't really have an inside source right now. I'll work on it. I'm going to try not to simply repost what others are saying already. I may comment on it though. Once we get things up and moving I'll be posting events that the club is running. Also, there will be a little bit of self-advertisement when I show pics of what I'm working on.


Without an Adepticon army to work on I think I'm going to get one of my Fantasy armies painted. Most likely my Chaos Cavalry Calvacade.


That's all.