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Games Workshop At 40: How They Brought D&D To Britain
An anonymous reader writes: Following on the fortieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons last year, another formative influence on modern gaming is celebrating its fortieth birthday: Games Workshop. Playing at the World covers the story of how the founders, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (not the other Steve Jackson), started out as subscribers to the 1960s British gaming zine Albion playing Diplomacy by mail and (in Ian's case) publishing silly cartoons. When Albion folded at the beginning of 1975, Livingstone and Jackson formed Games Workshop with its own zine Owl & Weasel as a way to bring "progressive games" (as in "progressive rock") to the UK. Shortly thereafter, when they discovered Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy and role-playing games became their focus. After Owl & Weasel grew up into White Dwarf in 1977, its famous "Fiend Factory" column ended up populating the D&D Fiend Folio. And in the 1980s, of course, they brought us Warhammer and their retail stories brought stylish miniatures to many a needful gamer. Happy birthday to Games Workshop!
Or after a decade of neglect, releasing Space Hulk 3rd edition, only to release 4th edition 5 years later, but making the sets incompatible, and offering no way for people who supported them with the 3rd edition to upgrade, making it orphaned to expansions.
Fuck them to the bowels of hell. Such arrogance to their customers.
Don't even get me started with what they did with Blood Bowl.
Ugh!
And now they say their business model is collectible models, not games, as an excuse for putting out low-quality rules in order to sell their over-priced models.
Yes, I love and play the games (WHFB a lot, 40K a bit) but Games Workshop stopped being a company worthy of their customers respect more than a decade ago. Sure they were obnoxious years before that as well, but 2004 was when they lost all grasp on the reality of who and what they are.
I've never heard of it costing you a win. To compete in a tournament your miniatures must be painted with at least 3 colours each to qualify. At most tournaments though there is a prize given for painting but the tournament overall winner is usually a straight win / loss calculation.
Painting
All models must be painted to a 3 color minimum. We count primer as a color. If you have any models that are not painted to a 3 color minimum, you will be ineligible for prize support at the end of the event. We will use a Paint Rubric for judging paint. No basing requirement.
As a tournament runner(40k, not fantasy battle but we do that too) we award prizes to the best painted armies and have a category of Renaissance man which is basically jack of all trades that we award prizes to. You can win the tourney with three color painted models, but you'd not win the other two awards that are possible. We also try to not give the same person more than one award since we want to give more people prizes.
There is also the Golden Demon, which is the companies painting contest.
Now, my army is rather ill painted compared to many of the tournament player we host, but I get more comments about it's paint simply because it's huge(several hundred individually painted models of all sizes).
I am not employed, paid, compensated, nor associated with games workshop other than through running games at Origins and Adeptacon, I merely bring our red carts and run games.
Actually, you are about a year and a half to two out of date with some of your assertions:
The leadership HAS changed. For example, the CEO was ousted, and the senior legal counsel, responsible for the excessive, almost scientology-like IP protection, went out the hard way back in august 2013. Since then, the climate HAS changed: There have been more licenses for computer games based on their IP, mod makers no longer get instant threatening C&D letters. I've made some tilesets for 40k/Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/Deathwatch use, and I actually got a very polite mail about 8 months ago, essentially saying they didn't mind, as long as I didn't try to make money from it. A WH fantasy mod for the Total War series has, to my knowledge, not been harassed after the senior legal counsel was fired, despite Creative Assembly having received a license for Warhammer Fantasy.
Right now, GW ARE changing: For example, the new Warhammer Fantasy that is in the works is apparently going back to older roots, with less hard restrictions on units, instead going back to the old percentage allocations(At least x% points on troops, at most y% points on characters, that kind of thing), as well as going towards more skirmish type(I wonder if they finally dumped Nigel fucking Stillmann, the chief asshole behind the move to put as many and as large units as possible on the table... A bit like how Gav Thorpe and Ian Pickstock helped fuck up WH40k 3rd ed and onwards...)
Also, in terms of models, what it looks like, according to some people who are in the pipeline, is that GW are changing focus towards Forge World, and possibly even customized miniatures, and possibly just selling cad files etc for basic troops.