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Wag
 
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| Their attitude toward staff is appalling- but then just like the Imperial Guard there's always more "Cannon Fodder" wanting that 50% discount and spending their entire wage on product. I must admit - I quite like the product, the models are mostly well sculpted,the backgrounds are good, and the rules are fairly simple and playable,I hate wargaming though- so I was never interested in playing, which made for interesting times when I worked for them ( the number of stroppy kids armies that got nuked from orbit or eaten by a Chaos storm). They love older gamers, as long as they have kids- especially kids who are about to enter their target age range- or are top level tournament players or model makers (consider the age of most tournament/Golden Demon winners, no kids there!) because they set a standard that can be used to promote the product.
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Champion
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theres a games workshop movie?
____________________________________As the old robot saying goes "does not compute"
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Apprentice
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| well i for hope that it is all true, and they go down quicker then a 10 doller crack whore close to fix time. i have worked for GW, and been told that it is an honour to do my hobby for a living, even though the wages ment i couldnt pay my rent as they were so low. and seen the way they took the photos people sent in of costumes they had made and used them as the punchlines for internal memos. and how they refer to keeping and getting hold of younger players, in a sort of pedo grooming way. i remember when games days was in London and it included all type of RPG and LRP stuff why did i leave such a wonderful company, I was told my services were no longer required, which just so happened to be after my boss found out i was putting together a squat army, which is the best way to upset the GW managers (you are not even allowed to mention them at meetings) go into a store and ask the manager that you want some,they get really pissed by it. but we all know that they wont go down, they will just release another set of brightly coloured space marines for the children to nag there parents to buy, and hay presto another year in the black.
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Champion
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they are just releasing appocolypse a 'big' battle game where the idea is to have basicly as many big tanks as you can so they sell them in packs of 2 or 3. Kids come in get a few greate way to sell masses of tanks and 6 months 1 year down the line there will be little or no support for the game.
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Eos: Sornasian: Gregory Patell; Burning Salamander; Fingers  Club Secretary Heroes and Heroines LARP
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Knight
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| Worked for GW for four and a half years, I can't say it was a non stop thrill ride, much of my direct management in the early days were twats (and I suspect suffered in the recent cull.) Somtimes it was bad and there are always problems when your work life, main hobby and social life coincide so totally as it can do, espechially when one works at HQ and everyone lives within 15 minutes walk and the pubs are in less than five. I was made redundant during the purge of all keytimers and it was a pain, but meh, them's the breaks. I'd seen it comming, got a nice redundancy cheque and a fuckload of models to sell on ebay. However I've not enjoyed a job since (quite the opposite.) I met some amazing people including my closest friend, and it was through GW I got into LARP of which there were plenty of fans in the company. I also was introduced to tabletop RP and other wargames (Starship Troopers Battletech, Babylon 5, Warmachine.) and played a fair few games in Warhammer World after hours. I've lost interest in wargaming since, but I still adore the fluff, background, novels, art books and the like. I rather hope the company doesn't go down, for one I believe their stuff is the best out there and for a second they are British and I'm not going to bash the company for it's own sake like I've heard plenty of other ex staffers who are bitter because they either fucked up or have taken the result of bad business managment (that took place way above their heads) personally.
___________________________________________________________ SINergy: Denton Mandell, Captain Drake Alexandrovich Musaveni
SGUK: Maj Richard Calvin (RN)
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Heroic Knight
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I suppose this whole thread comes down to my barely-mentioned comparison between the LT and GW. "What?" I hear you say, "Are you seriously trying to speak out in favour of Games Workshop by comparing it towards that hated abomination that we only call a LARP system because we're too unoriginal to think up epithets for it?"
Yes, now shut up and keep reading:
The comparisons begin in the depths of history when both our decadent past-times were very small hobbies inhabitied by small communities of nutters who possessed a far-too-long-distance relationship with soap. Both Games Workshop and the Lorien Trust worked tirelessly to change the image of their hobby and thereby grow the market by promoting themselves and their near neighbours, as well as encouraging their fanbases to re-integrate into normal society in order to promote the image that rational people can do this hobby to and abstinace from bathing was merely a life choice, not an entry requirement.
And thus it became true that the respective hobbies became sufficiently normal and widespread that it was capable of sustaining competition and these former champions of the hobby in general are being ostricised because they now want to keep a share of that market for themselves rather than altruisticly turning over their player base to the friends that have rapidly turned into lively opponents, intent on swiping the money. Perhaps the world would have been a different place if they had stuck to their original hippy ways, but I imagine that if we really could step into that alternative world that we'd get the same vacant stares when asking about our hobby-company-of-choice as we would from asking the new Ipod generation whether we could borrow their Betamax.
Now to the pain point and I've kept the two companies in parallel so far, so here we go. When first entering, you will be greeted by a large crowd of hooting crazies who will jabber incessantly about something you barely have a chance at understanding yet, but on the off-chance that you get a word in edgeways will rapidly ostracize you on the basis of your choice of entry point. This will frequently be a relief, but it often leaves you feeling insecure about your decision of where to start, depending on the stereotypes that have been arbitrarily attached to you. Then you come to realise that much of the support structure that keeps things running has been recruited from that same pool of hooting crazies and no matter how many noble folks there are working to make things right from the inside, sheer percentages mean that a fair share of those inside will be overenthusiastic Napoleons with inferiority complexes: thus proving the adage that scum floats to the top.
Then comes the cruch-point where you realise that company isn't aiming its product at you. In fact, those who look closer see that it never really was, they were just similar enough to it enjoy it at the time. For some people this appears to work a miraculous transformation and all the fun they once thought they had had turns to dust and the bitterness of emo tears in their mouth as they realise at last that the whole thing hadn't been arranged solely for their benefit. In the Games Workshop case if you can't get your old friends to play your old games with the same old minatures you used to use then maybe you didn't actuallty have any friends and its thats what hurts more than the company's supposed betrayal.
In fact, kids who look closely will eventually appreciate one of the core truths of mass marketing in that there is nobody in existence who precisely matches the target demographic, you just hope there are enough people who mesh with parts of it to keep it selling to them on those points, like the middle shape in one of those diagrams with the circles where the overlaps are all different colours and everything rapidly becomes unreadable if you try to use more than three.
I know that GW comes under a fair score of complaints from people on this forum for the previous transgressions of trying to make it interesting for kids or making the minatures out of non-brain-destroying materials, but as far as alternative hobbies getting complaints I don't really notice many people walking up and ranting about how their favourite fetish magazine about pineapples stuck up women's bums doesn't cater to their perverted longings any more. Nor how having wandered up to a more suitable banana-based fetish mag, complain about how the editors of Mr. Pineapple's Upward Adventures betrayed them by catering to the insipid pineapple crowd who should all just get over it and love bananas instead.
Faced with the realisation that one is no longer into pineapples, people seem merely to enjoy the fact that the women are leather-clad and showing most of their interesting parts, before moving on to more suitable magazines instead of ranting incessantaly on any available forum about how pinapples are not the one true way to masturbate and anyone who even thinks they are is a small-minded pygmy cocktard. And lets face it, if rampant perverts can be that mature about it then why can't we... unless we really have moved back into the days of socially maladjusted soap-dodgers with Finnish-style leather-and-beating urges?
You may be wondering why I am defending Games Workshop when I have displayed no clear connection to the subject, or more likely you're wondering why I'm doing it using an analogy involving pineapple porn mags. On the latter front I'm as baffled as you are and franky the thought of it is leaving me a little ill, so I'll leave that one at the door and get on with the actual point of this rant. I'm defending Games Workshop because I know people who do it and enjoy it and I know people who don't enjoy it so don't do it, but none of whom betray exceptionally sub-human characteristics. Therefore it becomes obvious that the two varieties of human can live in peace with one annother without being required to hate the source of each other's power, much the same way as we can continue to live in the presence of Pineapple-perverts, albeit that we do so more comfortably when we don't know who they are. I defend Games Workshop because I see the same variety of self-defined onanists bleating off at the LT for identical feelings of fictional betrayal, sulky rejection and an imaginary personal insult that the reaction of anyone currently involved would be "huh, what?" in a way that utterly demeans the importance of the well calculated plot that they are certain was orchestrated to push them from the system.
In short: it may be well laced with malingering dickholes, but I really don't appreciate being insulted and looked down on because I have fun at something you lot feel yourselves superior to and yet excluded from due to some evil conspiracy. Sure, dance on the grave all you want but sniggering and wanking at every slight sign that something might push it towards the grave at some time in the future does nothing more than highlight your own insecurities.
I pre-emptively apologise to everyone who feels insulted by this post. Except you: you know who you are.
Oh... and last I checked, Games Workshop is still going strong.
Dave 2 / Man in Blue
LT - Artfiel Macenion Duvall, Knight of Celestial
EOS - Weeping Boar, War Sayer of the Mystwalker Tribe Maelstrom - Tal Rufen, Quicksilver Trading Riftworld - Cpl Caplin San Angelo, 48th Assault Recon
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Apprentice
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Heroic Knight
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Man in Blue (1/4/2008)
Oh... and last I checked, Games Workshop is still going strong.Hmmm, I wouldn't be so sure about that to be honest.. look at their share price (at roughly its lowest point for 5 years), and take a lok at their financial reports (the last two years has shown a drop in profit from the previous year) And, their CEO resigned not that long ago.. Doesn't look too good for them at the moment.
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