Michaelc wrote:
All I'm saying is IMO the evidence suggests the SBG has been negatively impacted far more by GW's growing ineptitude than by the launch of WotRs and it's subsequent failure (generally attributable to that same ineptitude.)
Not really... The evidence supports that the release of WoTR killed off most of the LoTR hobby at the time.
At the GW store I went to, there were always at least some people there for LoTR, after WoTR was released, they had a short 3 game tournament, after which, I didn't see any of the players for ~ a year, when I did, the person told me that they had liked the rules for WoTR, but the balance was so bad that it wasn't worth playing...
One of the issues I saw immediately in WoTR was in the "hard to kill", "very hard to kill", and "extremely hard to kill" tables... The "hard to kill" and "very hard to kill" tables were almost laughable. Trolls, and other normal monsters were awful in WoTR, in contrast to SBG where they can potentially be great, while, the extremely hard to kill models were just ridiculous... A dragon was able to easily kill an entire 750 point army (saying that points value because i never played it at a higher points value; was trying it for fun... in 3 games, it killed 3, 750 point armies without even getting a wound counter, against Mordor, Dwarves, and Isengard) without even going down half the wound table, sometimes not taking wounds at all, while the rest of the army didn't need to do anything.
Some of the heroes, Druzhag, wraiths, etc, were far too powerful for their points, because of their effects, Druzhag could summon spiders behind whatever his formation is about to get into combat with, which are then guaranteed a rear charge for their +1 to wound special rule.
The next tournament they held, I was the only person who showed up out of the 6 or so that had registered.
At that point, the lotr model section of the store was shrinking, and it was rare to see anyone in the store for lotr, though before the release of WoTR, there were almost always LOTR players when I went in.
Reading some of the other posts here it seems that it wasn't an isolated incident.
Somewhere around 70% of the player base left within 3-4 months of the release of WoTR (can't confirm it, but that is what I heard from sources that are generally reliable)...
The idea that WoTR did not contribute to SBG's decline is just as silly as the idea that WoTR was the only reason for it's decline, but it was a huge part of it.
Sure, they released WoTR to revamp SBG, but it did the opposite once the even semi-competitive players started abusing the broken aspects of the game, which wasn't even difficult to do... It wasn't like you even needed special tactics or cheesy tricks to break the game. Certain models were just way too strong for the points.
That said, the game only had 3 major problems: the hard to kill tables, magic, and points values. If those 3 things were adjusted, the game would be fine, but the fact that you are completely zoned out of certain models if you just want to have a fun game is just as frustrating as having to play against those models.
They stopped focusing on WoTR a long time before Hobbit was released, and were actually putting quite a bit of emphasis on SBG with unit profile releases and scenarios.
jscottbowman wrote:
One point I am curious about, at the time of the LOTR price hikes and reduced figures per box... what was happening at that time to WFB and 40K (I dont play either)? Did their pricing go up at the same time? Was it a general GW price hike or just aimed at LOTR?
Yes, WFB and 40k prices also went up.
Though attributing the player-base drop to price hikes would be silly. A lot of people already had enough models of a particular army for WoTR, (they had actually tried it at reasonably high points values) yet they stopped playing anyway, despite having played SBG consistently for years.