Questions about future support for Deadmans Hand And Changing factions

[LeperColony]

1 hour ago, Math Mathonwy said:

We did lose a player from the gaming group who had only Lilith and was thoroughly disgusted but so it goes, I guess.

If it's your gaming group, why not just allow DMH in your official events (if any)? 

[GrendelsPRGuy]

I just want to throw my 2 cents into the ring, I played neverborn in M2E.  I got into the game because of Jakob Lynch, and branched out to love Collodi, Lillith and Pandora.  I owned every single Neverborn model and had most of them painted.  I had stopped playing due to other reasons by the time M3E was announced, and seeing that 3/4 of my main-stay masters were gone or changed into a new faction I promptly listed them on eBay and resolved if I come back to the game I'd simply try something new.

 

Months later, time for release?  I just ordered my Brine & Bones pack, and some Resurrectionists stuff.  I'm excited to play the game again and I even have a brand new faction to collect, paint, and fall in love with.  

So may I suggest... instead of having a toddler sized breakdown, take the change as an opportunity and learn to love something new.

Edit: I want to make it clear to OP, i really do respect his decision to learn and adjust his outlook based on what people have discussed here.  The toddler sized breakdown comment is more for the guy who is quite obviously having a tantrum.

[Math Mathonwy]

9 hours ago, Paddywhack said:

It sure seemed like they had less chatter overall than other forums and faction masters, even the new ones. That is just my observation though and could be wrong. Proxying was expected during the beta due to all the new models, so i know the new masters did get some love. 

Proxying is naturally expected but it's still an additional hassle and there's quite a bit of hassle already in beta testing what with the rules and profiles constantly changing (and being foreign to begin with). I know our group never touched the new Masters in our testing. And there certainly were some less-played Gremlin Masters that were talked about very little, for example.

I tested Collodi in the beta a bit, for what its worth.

9 hours ago, LeperColony said:

If it's your gaming group, why not just allow DMH in your official events (if any)? 

Sure. I tend to travel to tournaments quite a bit though including international travel. If I wanted to discuss this issue with my local gaming group, I wouldn't be doing it here  

9 hours ago, GrendelsPRGuy said:

I just want to throw my 2 cents into the ring, I played neverborn in M2E.  I got into the game because of Jakob Lynch, and branched out to love Collodi, Lillith and Pandora.  I owned every single Neverborn model and had most of them painted.  I had stopped playing due to other reasons by the time M3E was announced, and seeing that 3/4 of my main-stay masters were gone or changed into a new faction I promptly listed them on eBay and resolved if I come back to the game I'd simply try something new.

 

Months later, time for release?  I just ordered my Brine & Bones pack, and some Resurrectionists stuff.  I'm excited to play the game again and I even have a brand new faction to collect, paint, and fall in love with.  

So may I suggest... instead of having a toddler sized breakdown, take the change as an opportunity and learn to love something new.

Edit: I want to make it clear to OP, i really do respect his decision to learn and adjust his outlook based on what people have discussed here.  The toddler sized breakdown comment is more for the guy who is quite obviously having a tantrum.

Why be so mean? Even my toddler knows that if someone is indeed throwing a tantrum, being mean to them is not the correct response  

Some people have differing approaches to their painted minis for example. Some spend a lot of time painting them and get attached to them. Some others sell freely their painted stuff. Just because you're happy with your minis getting invalidated and buying new ones doesn't mean that everyone is the same. People have differing points of emphasis in this hobby of ours.

 

On a different note, I really, really enjoyed Collodi's theme and loved the models. I think that the puppets were some of the most iconic Wyrd minis and they were superb quality-wise. Now, I realize that you can play a Puppet crew without Collodi but Henchman crews aren't quite up to par, IME. I think losing Collodi was a real shame - Nico, Ramos, and Lilith still have their themes well-represented by other Masters, I feel, but Collodi not so much.

[Yew Arcane]

17 hours ago, Math Mathonwy said:

On a different note, I really, really enjoyed Collodi's theme and loved the models. I think that the puppets were some of the most iconic Wyrd minis and they were superb quality-wise. Now, I realize that you can play a Puppet crew without Collodi but Henchman crews aren't quite up to par, IME. I think losing Collodi was a real shame - Nico, Ramos, and Lilith still have their themes well-represented by other Masters, I feel, but Collodi not so much.

I'm ignoring the rest of your statement because it's getting obnoxious. And I'm going to address this. Hinamatsu is probably one of the /best/ choices to have as a henchman leader, full stop. Qi and Gong gives access to leverage and a lot of lure, as well as some pretty effective anti-schemers, and puppet is a huge keyword that gives access to all of the effigies. And Hinamatsu with 3 actions? Move 6 with a +2 on your charge. In melee Hina gets 4 melee attack actions with a 2/3/4 damage track and with the right luck (or cards in hand) You can literally double your attack action. Armor +2 is nothing to scoff at either. So you're actively incorrect about the henchman leader, which means you have plenty. Sure, it's not puppetmastery, but.... It's better than par.

[phloog]

Some blasphemy:  I don't find the fiction to be all that good or interesting, and certainly not good enough to sacrifice or significantly shift gameplay based solely on it.

Wyrd is a game company..I buy regular old books for my fiction.

SO...If a model is overpowered or broken, do the game design thing and fix it.  Don't create some fictional reason to eliminate it, causing loyal customers to lose their investment in your product.

NO models should be removed.

 

[solkan]

 

18 minutes ago, phloog said:

SO...If a model is overpowered or broken, do the game design thing and fix it.  Don't create some fictional reason to eliminate it, causing loyal customers to lose their investment in your product.

You have the cause and the effect backwards.

At the end of M2E, the story events including things like the new Governor General voiding the mercenary laws; Ramos getting put in prison, Lilith getting put in Magic Prison; etc.  That story stuff wasn't the cause for the designers scrapping the Mercenary system, reorganizing the keywords, and knocking a bunch of models out that they didn't have a good redesign for.  That stuff was put in so that Wyrd could point to the new addition to the Malifaux description of "story driven" as reinforcing the fact that the game and the setting are going to change.

But not every story event results in a meaningful model change.  Take note of the fact that The Judge in Guild got shot and died, and got replaced by a new hire with the exact same stats and abilities.  How amazing does the Guild HR department have to be for that to happen?  The more practical explanation is that The Judge model design was kept because for whatever reason it was deemed "fine the way it is."

In contrast, look at Ryle and the beta version of Melissa K.O.R.E.  That certainly looks like the design "slot" Ryle was in got redesigned, Ryle got retired, and the result was the new model Melissa K.O.R.E.  

18 minutes ago, phloog said:

NO models should be removed.

Counter point:  25 years of Games Workshop edition changes says it's commercially viable for designers to remove characters and models when the edition changes.

To be slightly less Godwin about it, here's a list of all of the ways someone can claim that they lost models in M3E:

• Removal of the Mercenary hiring system
• Sometimes radical reorganization of keywords
• The sometimes radical model redesigns so that some keyword models can't be used the same way as in M2.
• Reorganization of the various totem models
• Elimination of the various hiring-related upgrades
• Faction reorganization
• Indefinite DMH status for various models

Which ones of those do you accept as "the game design thing to do"?What I expect is that most of the models that ended up in DMH were models that they wanted to redesign but didn't have the time to do well.  So they were left with the choices:

- Remove the models from the game until complete.

- Do a partial redesign and grey-list the models.

because not doing anything really isn't a option.  In other words, they're an old project management saying that comes down various ways of saying "On time; on budget; perfect.  Choose two." and they had to choose 'in budget' and 'on schedule', and then do the best they could for the redesigns.  

Disclaimer:  One of the reasons why I'm not upset about all of this -right now-, is that I was in the beta and got to be upset about it several months ago.  I may have submitted my feedback concerning the idea by accusing various a developer of doing something comparable to eating babies at the time.  But the evidence was destroyed, and I apologized about the comment.

So I, personally, am going to understand if someone decides to go find something else to do for a year.  Just don't leave with the mistaken impression that the changes were done because some Wyrd employee convinced another Wyrd employee to publish a sequence of stories.

[Yew Arcane]

12 hours ago, phloog said:

NO models should be removed.

 

You're not wrong. And they haven't been removed. They have rules and are in the game in a technical aspect.