Goatboy’s Warhammer 40K: How Should GW Support the Community
Goatboy here talking about the current state of matched play 40K – and what GW should do to support the community.
I wonder what GW’s end game is with the whole – GW Events, sponsored Matched Play, and just the overall state of the game. I ask this as someone that has been involved with GW games from the recent batch of fully sponsored GW event, to the decade of dry times when GW looked away from competitive dice throwing competitions, to the truly ancient days of ‘ArdBoyz GW events.
The Olden Times – ‘Ard Boyz
I remember back in the day when GW would give local stores prize support to help sell their game. You would normally get X amount of “product” to give away each month as a method to push their dice-minded warfare onto pre-mousepad, green-painted tabletops. It was a good system, as usually we had a few stores close enough to allow for a player to come with a rough list and win some things to help facilitate a new army.
This reward from GW was one of the major factors of building up a lot of players’ collections back in the day. It became a little race to see how many neat things you could get by throwing down with your insane “Lash of Submission” Chaos Space Marines and plasma templates of doom. Heck, this all started building into the other big “push” by GW into the competitive scene – the Ard Boyz tournament.
I have mixed feelings about Ard Boyz just due to the nature of how it affected the competitive scene. In some ways it was pretty toxic, with a push for your meanest armies even if they hit the table in bare plastic. Naked to the ravages of the hobbyist and the sugar coating of Contrast paint. We all know how “money” can change people when it comes to competitive aspects, and while it was great when you won some free stuff, it didn’t come without a cost.
‘Ard boyz prizes from back in the day…
Then GW Left the Event Scene for a Decade
Of course that cost was GW leaving the scene for a while and leaving it to the hands of a bunch of tournament organizers. This was era of the rise of the big events like Adepticon, NOVA, and LVO. A lot of what they did was great too. Especially the push to “expand” the winners circle by adding in best of armies and other fun things. This move away by GW also helped kill an annoying aspect of the game where someone could hurt your score by saying you just weren’t that fun to play against. Those soft scores were always a rough one as you still had to compete with the other score of having a decent-looking army too.
How Can GW Increase its Event Presence?
But enough waxing poetic about the past. What do we want GW to even do? I have enjoyed all the GW events I have gone to lately. Beyond my own frustration of some of the hotel costs they were well-run events and what I felt were in the right vein of a good competitive time. I still think there should be more of a push to get games to finish to a natural conclusion, but that is another fight I don’t know how worth it is to have.
Help the Local FLGSs
*** Quick update – again I get informed GW has sent out a ton of material for events – so they are doing a lot to help grow the scene locally – not just nationally. These packets and just support in general is one of the better ways to grow an event scene and help seed their bigger events. ***
I think if I could be truthful with myself is I would like GW to go back to supporting the local scene. They need to seed their official GW ideas of a valuable competitive scene locally. Sure this could mean a push away from non GW miniatures. But if they want to shape and grow the Matched Play experience, they should put the effort into giving something back to the local community at the FLGS level in exchange for that control. This means just giving some support so local stores could run “cheaper” GW events, and more of them.
GW could easily create “plastic” trophies to give out to stores if they wanted. Small things and even stuff like a cool coin would be helpful. Looking at providing some unique FLGS League only miniatures that stores could give out would be another awesome addition. Just start with the bottom to support what GW envisions for Matched Play and then let it grow from there. This way you can seed people going to their own events or those they sponsor and support.
The Local Scene is critically important to the growth and health of the hobby.
This makes me think this is the plan just with how my own interactions at GW events are. This return to “Thursday Night Dice Fight” would be an interesting one too. If their new App that will most assuredly be coming with 10th could support things like Leagues and small events it could be a big boon to trying to validate this hobby into something more than just the major event focussed scene we have now.
While the big events are important too.
What do you want GW to do with the competitive scene? What do you think they should try to do to control it? Should they just go back to being plastic peddlers who make some rules for the models to smash against each other? I always feel if you make rules, you should care about how those rules work in the real-world community. GW has done a lot better with that than recently they have in the past. It still brings some hope to see some old farm-like system to get people excited to move up in the ranks.
What what you like to see GW do to support the community?
