MK4 & What It Means Going Forward...

Oh...hey...it's another one of those verbal explosion rambling thoughts blogs that I tend to write every now and then...

Prefacing all of this to say that I'm just giving some perspective on my experiences, what I've seen / read, and maybe asking an honest question or three. I'm certainly not saying how I feel is the "right" way or only acceptable way. 

People invest a lot, both financially & emotionally, into a game like Warmachine. Afternoons & evenings spent around the table with friends rolling dice can be an important escape from the world around us, from work, from worries, from whatever might be wearing us down in some other aspect of life.

As such, people have strong opinions and social media gives us all an instantaneous outlet to unleash them. The small, but vocal minority of people who are angered by the changes coming in MK4 are readily evident of that.

People are angry & they're making their voice heard. They have every right to be upset. I guess I just don't understand the mindset, but not for the reason you're probably assuming.

Let's say that tomorrow PP decides they're done. Screw wargames and board games. Matt Wilson wakes up tomorrow and says his heart is telling him to draw / paint My Little Pony vs GoBots fan art to sell at county fairs. He scraps the plans for MK4, closes the doors to PP, opens up Photoshop, & gets to work on his new dream.

There's no more PP. There's no more updates. There's no more new models.

Does that mean you can't still play the game you love? 

There are active communities around games / editions that have long been dumped by their publishers. Both 40K 2nd Edition & Mordheim continue to this day; kept alive by fans who love them. Hell, I've seen people commenting 6 months ago that they still play Warmachine MK2 because they hated all the changes in MK3.

Before we had any idea what MK4 was even coming, much less that hills would be included, Donna & I made a hill to start tossing into our games every so often, because we'd seen an old MK2 batrep and thought, "heh...that looks fun".

Now, obviously if you're a heavily-invested, hardcore competitive gamer, changes like this potentially affect you differently. I want to note though that by heavily-invested, hardcore competitive gamer, I'm talking about people who travel to the big cons to play in the major tournaments. 

From what I've seen, this isn't a very large number of people. Based on the lists, pics, & videos covering the major tournaments, I'd wager that it's around 100 - 200 people or so max. Honestly, I'm shooting higher than I actually think it is just for the sake of argument. 

So, if you & your friends hate everything about MK4 and there's no chance you're going to play it, why not just keep enjoying MK3? What's stopping you from playing it? Your meta decides what you play, right? If your meta is dedicated to MK3 and wants no part of MK4, then why not just keep playing MK3? 

I get the impression there are a lot more people who play in local Steamroller tournaments or casual play. If you're playing casual, changes in MK4 should have no bearing on you. If your meta enjoys local Steamrollers and you all love MK3, run your own Steamrollers.

Another issue I've seen is people who are upset that they've bought a full FA of models that they've enjoyed playing for 10 years that will now not be fully available as 10-man units are being dropped down to 5-man units, etc. 

I saw someone else ask in a comment on FB & I'll re-ask it here in my own bastardized wording (can't remember exactly how they worded it), "how much do you honestly expect to get out of a model after buying it?" If you bought a model and played it "by the rules" for years and now those rules change, you have 2 options. One is to play what you want as noted above. Keep playing the old rules that let you still use every single model you have. The second is to understand that as things change, older purchases may not be 100% valid in the new rules, but if you aren't having to toss out $1000 worth of models you just bought last month, is it really that egregious of a change? That is to ask, if you paid $15 for model and played many games with it for 4 years, did you not get your money's worth from it? Not to mention, all of those old models will still be available to play in Unlimited. 

I could see if you literally bought a ton of models in the last 2 months...which Donna & I may have done exactly that...

This is what we have that's not built / primed / painted. About 1/4 of it was bought at really steep discounts, but the majority of it was bought for between 75% - 100% of MSRP; bought directly from PP's store, a handful of other online game stores, or bought NIB from another gamer.

We started playing the game just over 1 year ago. All of this was bought in the last 12 months. This isn't including what we have built / primed:

Or the 4 armies with 2 Brawlmachine lists each worth of models we have built / painted that we play with currently.

Does the fact that these old models / lists / armies maybe won't be as competitive against newer stuff (something that hasn't been proven yet anyway) mean that I should be mad that I spent the money on them? 

Not the way I see it.

For one thing, I have a wealth of models to enjoy building & painting. Hell, if nothing else, as these old models are no longer made, they'll increase in value...and no, I don't mean monetarily or that I'd look to sell them. I've given away quite a few models, but never once looked to make money off of them. I mean that the fact that they'll be limited makes me appreciate them more. 

Hell, I spent months working on how-to videos for power attacks that are now invalid and have to be remade to align with the new rules. I was SO close to being done with them, but got delayed thanks to covid shredding my throat & voice for weeks. I could be pissed about that...or I could see it as an opportunity to take the lessons I learned making those videos to make the final ones even better. It'll certainly be easier to make them after having stumbled my way through learning video editing as I was making the first batch.

As for Donna & I, we plan to each pick up a new army box for MK4 when they're available. We also plan to keep all of our old models / armies. We plan to play MK4. We ran through a few turns last night with our old models just trying out some of the changes and we enjoyed it. Depending on how we feel, we'll probably also toss in a game with old rules every now and then. 

Maybe not.

Only time will tell.

The past few days have had a ton of knee jerk reactions. Some are based solely on assumptions without having seen the final stats / rules or played a game. Some are complete misinformation: saw a number of people claiming that PP was going to sell their STLs for you to print at home, something staff from PP has very specifically said they are not going to do.

One of the changes that upset a number of people was the removal of physical cards. Given our situation with Donna's eyesight, screens are either a literal pain or completely undoable for her. Since I already make our own cards with larger print, the lack of cards doesn't affect us, but I can see why it would bother others. So, I offered to put the cards I've made online for free as well as make a pledge to make cards for the new models / units that I'll put online for free downloading / printing. 

That prompted the app developer to comment that while there wouldn't be a card database website, the app would in fact allow for output / printing. The lack of outputting / printing from the app was an assumption that I and others had falsely made. Again, without waiting to see what was actually going to be produced / how it'd all work, I jumped to a conclusion.

A few months back, I wrote a bit about the negativity I was seeing online around the game. I noted then how many people claimed that PP was as good as done & would be out of business any day now. They said that PP gave up on anything new for Warmachine and only cared about Monsterpocalypse, Warcaster, etc. In truth, it seems like they were working on new stuff for Warmachine for years and things they were testing out in those games were part of Warmachine's development.

Is MK4 going to be good for Warmachine? Is it going to be good for Privateer Press? I want to believe the answer is "yes" to both of those. 

As I mentioned above, only time will tell, but driven by my love of the game & appreciation for the work PP has put into it, I plan to do my best to help promote it and share it with others.