M3E Major Character Shifts - How did the Player Base react?

[Maogrim]

Greetings!

I got back into the game a few months ago, when M3E wasn't all that new anymore, and it needed a little adjustment to backtrack what had happened to some of the major characters in the story line. 

So Ramos is imprisoned in Vienna and the Machina keyword is mostly gone. Nicodem was killed by Lady Justice and some of his models are gone, so now there seems to be no Zombie-centric master. Nekima overthrew Lilith and got promoted to Nephilim leader. Jakob Lynch left the Neverborn, Misaki abandoned the Outcasts, the Guild fired McCabe, McMourning is Resser-only, and probably some other shifts I don't recall right now.

I'd imagine this must have gad quite the impact on some players' collections and especially on fans of those masters that are now presumably gone for good. And I know that you can technically still play Dead Man's Hand, but it must feel pretty bad if the main storyline considers your favorite mortician dead. 

So I wonder: How did players react? Did some even quit the game? Are you worried for your favorite Master now? 

Looking forward to a healthy discussion without too much salt or finger-pointing.

[ooshawn]

It's tough to say because the lifespan of the game has been mostly under a heavy quarentine. Third edition definitely rendered several crews I had worthless, but the new system heavily rewards thematic crews. It also means you don't have to own a ridiculous amount of the faction in order to play. You can now safely dip your toes in other factions without having to buy the whole faction. It seems like this plays to malifaux original strengths of being the affordable , character driven table top game. I can't say how other players felt about it, but the facebook group for players in my city was like 1-200 people. Nobody has posted in that group for a year so, take that how you will. So far i'm loving vassal games. I've been tempted to try out masters I wouldn't have ever thought in a million years had the opportunity to try 

[Cats Laughing]

TBH I'm probably not the target of this question as I own large portions of most keywords, and have since 1.5.  I'm not super bothered that my Ramos, Lilith, or Collodi aren't useable in tournaments that restrict dead man's hand, though I think it's cool that Wyrd created dead man's hand rules so that I can still use them when my opponent is cool with it.  I think I have a Nicodem in my to be built pile, so he's now at the very bottom of that pile.  I do have a friend who was initially fairly annoyed by the Collodi being dead man's hand, but he doesn't play in tourneys and I'm happy to let him destroy me with Collodi whenever he has time to play, so that issue is solved.

The keyword/faction changes have messed up some of my collections, but not in a huge manner.  I've now got random models that cost an extra soulstone to play if I want to take them, or I need to actually buy the rest of their crew (many of these are "Miss" or Alt Sculpt models).  Stuff like my outcast dip being the "Hamelin" kitten crew, Alt Hannah, and miss Johanna.

Once upon a time, Somer was my dip into Outcast master, so the faction change thing is sometime I've already dealt with.

The one I'm most sad about is McMourning leaving the Guild, and that's entirely because I thought it was pretty funny that he was there.  But even that sadness is theory, as my McMourning is unassembled and my Guild consists of Perdita & Hoffman, which wouldn't really provide good thematic models for McMourning (though McMourning leading constructs and family models would be funny).

[muraki]

On 2/14/2021 at 8:32 AM, Maogrim said:

I'd imagine this must have gad quite the impact on some players' collections and especially on fans of those masters that are now presumably gone for good. And I know that you can technically still play Dead Man's Hand, but it must feel pretty bad if the main storyline considers your favorite mortician dead. 

So I wonder: How did players react? Did some even quit the game? Are you worried for your favorite Master now? 

Looking forward to a healthy discussion without too much salt or finger-pointing.

I was thinking about this separate of this post in a kind of 'is funny we got a re-release of collodi as people still like him / want to get him, but haven't seen similar comments for nico or ramos'.  Course part of that is probably meta.

How did people react?  Its been a while but I feel like during initial M3e the boards were pretty on fire about them disappearing as end of m2e was pretty big on ramos/nico lists... but it was no worse than people upset over masters changing their playstyle or changing / losing factions.  If anything, I think there was more people upset that tannen/graves lost nephilim/woe, or Lynch leaving NB than there were people upset that certain masters disappeared.  Again this is probably meta dependant, but I think most people had 1 m3e change they were upset over (either masters going away, keywords changing from styles they liked in m2e, or models changing faction).  I'm sure some people left when their favorite master disappeared or a model went somewhere they didn't want to play, but just as many prolly found new favorites or traveled to new factions with their favorite masters/models.

For me personally I wasn't upset too much, cause I buy everything + I was already playing lynch / mccabe as primarily Thunders masters.  I also understood that making Thunders more '2-3 dual masters' instead of 5 made sense from a game balance / evened out the factions.  And for the dual masters that stayed... the keyword system is so much smoother than m2e rules that it was a net win (as what? 1/2 the dual faction masters had hiring rules that didn't match the other 1/2?).  I also really really like the keyword system + keyword abilities, as it really makes some cohesive feeling crews, and I wish I was buying in now to the repackaged models as it's definitely easier to get 'what you need to run x'.

I think overall Wyrd did the best they could with a big upgrade change.  Yes some things moved around / got lost, but the did end with factions with similar sized keywords / gave masters unique identities that are expressed via their cards/their keyword abilities.  And models that lost their in faction leader (either due to dual going away, or DMH) most of them went to versatile, so there's still the option of hiring them in at standard cost (like Tanuki/Hinamatsu).

I do kind of miss the guild McMourning tho, not cause it was the best to play (I can prolly count the guild mcmourning games i played on 1 hand) but more that it gave guild another 'one of these things doesn't match the other' masters.  Feel like guild has the most 'guns and swords' masters of the factions and a wild card like McMourning let you throw some of those rules out the window.

[Maogrim]

Thanks for the answers so far!

I'm a bit suprised that there are just so few contributions on something that I thought a majority of the active players would have gone through, but maybe everyone's busy getting in those sweet, sweet Cadmus games on Vassal. 😅 

I remember getting the M2E rules book but the group dissolved basically at that point. McMourning in Guild was a really fun and unique concept. Similarly I found Lynch more unique in Thunders, since a lot of the stuff in his keyword has this gruesome aesthetic that makes you think more of Neverborn. 

Back then I was in the process of assembling a Hamelin crew and really wanted to dig deeper into the spooky children stuff with Stolen and Crooligans, who he could hire via an Upgrade. Also got Killjoy for the easy Rat sacrifice summon. But those options are off the table in ME3, and I've switched factions.

[Maniacal_cackle]

2 minutes ago, Maogrim said:

Thanks for the answers so far!

I'm a bit suprised that there are just so few contributions on something that I thought a majority of the active players would have gone through, but maybe everyone's busy getting in those sweet, sweet Cadmus games on Vassal. 😅 

A bit of it will be survivor's bias - people who are still around and playing/posting are obviously happy enough with the game to stick around.

I was only present during open beta, but there were a fair number of complaints about invalidated crews.

As far as DMH goes, I personally think it is a great way to keep models relevant while dealing with the inevitable 'cycling' that happens with models in these games (though I think most wargames go wayyy overboard on it).

That said, I know there were people who bought new crews just before 3rd edition came out and had their crews invalidated. I think that was the worst one.

 

[Adran]

From the announcement of M3 there were complaints about invalid collections. Some were true, others were more about they couldn't play their favourite list, and actually they did still have valid crews. 

Some of those players have stayed, I  imagine others have left, but they probably aren't going to post. I would imagine in part its because it isn't that large an investment to return to a playable list in all cases. 

Personally I wasn't too worried, partially because I have a large enough collection that nothing was invalid, and I know that my local players aren't going to object to using dead mans hands in club games if that was what I wanted and there was probably a bigger change between the first 2 editions, so I am not un-used to it. I am surprised at how few events have allowed DMH, when there were a large number of people that had said they intended to allow it in their events. 

I think Dead mans hand was an experiment by Wyrd to see partially how the fans react to cycling out masters. I'm not sure if it was a success or a failure, but I'm not entirely sure what they were hoping for. 

[Math Mathonwy]

I used to have valid, good crews for twenty Masters across six Factions. Now I have still the six for Bayou, but others have dropped to a total of four across two Factions (with one being Zoraida for NB). In order to get the other Masters up to speed, I would need to buy heaps of models including quite a few useless duplicates due to how the packaging changed. Unless they were killed off, that is.

Needless to say, my Malifaux spending plummeted massively and I'm super reluctant in picking up new Masters since they might be randomly killed off. I spend quite a lot of time painting my minis but my main motivation is getting them to the field and I am still super salty about the whole thing.

And the exact same thing happened to others in my group as well (who don't post here anymore).

[Harlekin]

I (really) came to Malifaux with M3E. I only owned 1 and a half crews, before and didn't plan to invest more. Mainly because the whole game was a real pain to get into; I got my M2E rahter late with a Pedita crew and while I one a few games, I most of the time didn't really understand what was going on on the other side of the table as my buddies were into Malifaux for a long time, had huge collections and knew all their stuff by heart. As a beginner, I didn't enjoy late M2E, there where just too many things to keep an eye on. 

When M3E finally arrived, I planned to invest a little as I liked the idea of the game, the setting, and especially how the encounters and scoring was decided. I was lucky enough to be able to buy a few crews of those rage-quitters who come with every edition change. After a few more games, I was hooked and totally on fire (and I still hope that I don't have ever to sum up the - most likely - literally thousands of Euros I spent on Malifaux). 

Compared to other games where I reluctantly invested during edition changes the secondary for Malifaux was rather small. It only took me about a few months to have seen most of the offers around (and buy quite some of it). So, I guess that most players weren't bothered too much about the disappearing of a few masters and still are enjoying Malifaux. 
I'd say, that's at least for some part because of how the game deals with encounter set-up and crew choice: most 'competitive' players still can easily build competitve lists, and most 'casual' playing groups don't care a lot about DMH or not, anyways. I guess I don't know any single player who wouldn't be okay with the opponent picking his favorite DMH crew during a casual game.

Of course, this is mainly a local perspective from German perspective and might be hugely different to the experiences others had with edition changes but at least for Germany (or Europe) I am pretty sure that not this many people gave up on M3E. But compared to other games, offers on secondary market didn't increase as much as I was hoping for and this market soon came back to normal. Compared to edition changes in WarmaHordes and even Guild Ball, it was very short-termed and almost non-existent. 
It's a good enough indicator for me, not sure if it helps you finding any relevant clues for your question.

[Maogrim]

Oh, I was more looking to find answers regarding psychological and emotional impact. I for one am more interested in the aesthetic, the setting and the characters than the actual mechanics. 

Still market changes are an interesting data point to find out what might have happened to the player base. Speaking about Warmachine and Hordes: Are they dead? Something seems to have happened but I have no clue what. Age of Sigmar seems to be doing quite well, though I know a few people who were pretty upset about the end of the old WHFB setting. 

I hope Jakob is not the next on the chopping block, from a lore perspective. Nekima wants his head, and Youko pointed the new Oyabun's attention towards the goings-on in the Honeypot...

PS: I'm German too, but I have no idea how Malifaux is doing hierzulande, to be honest. I'm in the process of establishing a mini gaming group of 4 people, but the pandemic makes it hard to keep people interested.

 

[Harlekin]

9 minutes ago, Maogrim said:

Oh, I was more looking to find answers regarding psychological and emotional impact. I for one am more interested in the aesthetic, the setting and the characters than the actual mechanics. 

Well, besides individual perspectives and experiences comparison to other (similar) systems usually is my way to go when I want to grasp the bigger picture. 

11 minutes ago, Maogrim said:

I hope Jakob is not the next on the chopping block, from a lore perspective. Nekima wants his head, and Youko pointed the new Oyabun's attention towards the goings-on in the Honeypot...

I consider this rather unlikely considering Hungering Darkness being one of the big players. Plus, we should most likely have another 5+ years before the next edition change

12 minutes ago, Maogrim said:

PS: I'm German too, but I have no idea how Malifaux is doing hierzulande, to be honest. I'm in the process of establishing a mini gaming group of 4 people, but the pandemic makes it hard to keep people interested.

I try to keep some loose contacts within the German community and I'd say the German community is klein aber fein and surprisingly stable for one of the niche systems. 

[ooshawn]

 I am kinda salty that these online tournaments are restricting Deadman's hand characters. 

[Maniacal_cackle]

33 minutes ago, ooshawn said:

 I am kinda salty that these online tournaments are restricting Deadman's hand characters. 

They're pretty open to feedback, maybe next time the series will include DMH.

[Cats Laughing]

18 hours ago, Maogrim said:

Speaking about Warmachine and Hordes: Are they dead?

 

Not dead, and there's an online community running leagues and such, but it is dead in many stores (before the pandemic).  Many gamers don't like massive change and will use an edition change to branch out to other games they might have had an interest in but didn't feel they had time for due to their previous 'main' game.  Some of these gamers will find their way back to the edition-changed game, but sometimes the changes (or things after the edition change) will put them off for longer/forever.

Warmahordes has an issue of size and complexity that makes getting back into it very hard. I mean at some point during 2nd it had over 150 warcaster/warlocks (effectively masters) across the 11+ factions, and they've only been adding since then.  With all of the ways to instantly lose via assassination or certain scenario plays you need to keep up on things or you fall massively behind. There's also a bit of spam X in the game, which becomes very very expensive when X is nerfed or eclipsed by Y.

 

Malifaux is pushing similar issues (fewer Masters/Factions, but more complex base rules), but does have the benefit of alternating single (or two at most) activations and the slower scenario scoring that allows you to not feel as blasted in the face by a better player (at least in early turns, by end of turn 3+ you might already know you've lost due to scenario scoring).  Malifaux is also cheaper to play, so it doesn't feel as bad to put down $150 for a new crew and take time to get up to speed or need to make changes/buy additions to face the new power crew.

 

To respond to your psychological/emotional question, I was pretty psyched by the announcement of M3E (I've always loved the theme/background), but that also comes from a place where I had been somewhat disconnected from the end of M2E (helped with wave 4 beta, but was doing other games as primarily then and put game on back burner), so the announcement of M3E was a great chance to get back in.  If I'm still super into playing M3E when M4E gets announced, I might have a different reaction, but I'm a bit of a butterfly gamer so we'll see.  The changes to the rules/faction alignments/etc... do just feel like story progression to me, and I might have a more negative reaction if it was a favored character who died/was removed from the game.  Nothing feels like a betrayal of the background, even if some characters come of worse than others in the story or end up leaving behind a faction (that was probably always secondary to them).

[Mangod]

2 hours ago, Cats Laughing said:

Warmahordes has an issue of size and complexity that makes getting back into it very hard. I mean at some point during 2nd it had over 150 warcaster/warlocks (effectively masters) across the 11+ factions, and they've only been adding since then. 

No joke, I checked the PP WarmaHordes webstore, and Cygnar alone has 20 different Warcasters; I can't even begin to imagine the headache that trying to balance all of them must be.

Probably the reason Ten Thunders lost half their Dual Faction Masters, to be honest; balancing McCabe, Yan Lo, Mei Feng, Lynch, Misaki and the Brewmaster both in Thunders, and in Guild/Ressers/Arcanists/etc, must have been really annoying.

[Kharnage]

I know that for the Texas meta, the arrival of the third edition breathed new life and hype into the game. M2e was stagnating with the same couple Nico or Lilith players stomping tournaments and participation was dropping. But once 3rd edition hit obviously our hierarchy got shaken up and now me and other players are more into it than we'd ever been. The rules are cleaner and feel better. Watching beaters go "oops haha max+min, so 9 damage" was painful. Putting 52 wounds of Flesh Constructs on the table for less than half your stones before Nicodem summoned more was lame. And figuring out timings, while annoying now, was damn impossible then. 

As for aesthetics, I liked the Lich King and Lady Justice, so that was gonna hurt to watch either way. I am of course excited that Nekima took her sister down, even if only for the moment, and McMourning showing his true Resser colors makes sense to me. I didn't care for Collodi and hated playing into him so watching him get chaired made me feel only joy. 

Overall, M3e has been a big win for me. 

[Cats Laughing]

18 minutes ago, Mangod said:

No joke, I checked the PP WarmaHordes webstore, and Cygnar alone has 20 different Warcasters; I can't even begin to imagine the headache that trying to balance all of them must be.

Probably the reason Ten Thunders lost half their Dual Faction Masters, to be honest; balancing McCabe, Yan Lo, Mei Feng, Lynch, Misaki and the Brewmaster both in Thunders, and in Guild/Ressers/Arcanists/etc, must have been really annoying.

Yes, too much diversity in list building (which includes dual faction masters or masters that can hire too much out of keyword, like Zoraida or Levy in 1.5) is very hard to balance.  More combo mean more chances to create balance problems.

 

This is a reason PP has gone hard into themes (sort of similar to Malifaux keywords), where you get so much benefit from staying in theme that PP doesn't really need to playtest (except at a cursory level) out-of-theme combos. 

Translating their themes into Malifaux terms: Imagine if the OOK tax was just a straight 12 ss cost for the game (not per model), and taking any non-versatile OOK models turned off your Master's "if this model is the leader" ability, then add onto that you're limited to 2 OOK Versatile models(one of which has to be a minion to be able to have 2) if you want to avoid the 12ss tax and the loss of the leader ability. 

That's effectively how PP chose to deal with their overly large collection of models and trying to playtest the millions of combos that are available outside of themes.

[Regelridderen]

On 2/16/2021 at 9:41 AM, Maogrim said:

Thanks for the answers so far!

I'm a bit suprised that there are just so few contributions on something that I thought a majority of the active players would have gone through,

I think, most people were won over by M3E being a vast improvement on M2E. That all-star list were getting phased out in favour of keywords, etc. Also from what I’ve seen, most tournaments seem to have allowed DMH, so the loss wasn’t all that great. The changes in dual masters were probably felt harder ie. Lynch leaving Neverborn, McMurder escaping Guild etc. Etc.

But there’s been plenty of whining over the ‘lost’ masters, plenty ofpeople preferred a more sheananigany ‘Lilith over her berserker sister.