Leaving

[Renko]

Hi everyone
Just to advise I’ve decided to withdraw from all Warlord official forums and Facebook groups. The reason being that I have been banned or threatened with bans from the Warlord Admins because I have been critical of some of their products, particularly the quality of playtesting and proofreading on SPQR and Cruel Seas, both of which were released and then needed major FAQs immediately. The actual wording being “Continued trolling across all groups. Continued breaching of the rules will result in blanket banning across all groups/pages and denial of entry to any newly formed groups”. So basically, any further comments I make on their forums or groups there is a sword hanging over me, and I have to toe the line or else. I’m not prepared to do that. Companies should be open to criticism where it is justified and should be mature enough to accept when they make mistakes and correct them, not try to shut down criticism. Noone is perfect and no rules set will survive contact with the scrutiny of public release, but there has been a clear pattern recently of lack of quality control.
To be clear I like Warlord. Every staff member I have met has been polite and helpful, and they do some great “stuff”. The problems seem to relate to whoever is running the web \ Admin role who remain anonymous and therefore unaccountable. This does not effect the facebook pages I run, specifically the Blood Red Skies Ready Room and the sister site The Cruel Seas Dock Office, which are and will always remain independent and supportive of the games.
Cheers

[Sergei S]

I do somewhat agree on prod quality sometimes. There is not much to leave, this forum is barely alive.

[Mark]

One would have thought concerns over the quality of published work a Company produces would be taken seriously and improved for future releases. Not threaten customers who point out the failings. Cruel Seas deserved to be ridiculed for the mess it was. Though the rules are conceptually sound the execution was not. The amended rules book should have been given away free to those who supported the game and bought the flawed first printing.

[Sergei S]

Well, that is obviously not going to happen. Warlord seems to be bent on releasing half baked products and not supporting them after. Threatening customer with ban from forums for critisism is an indicator that company has no idea what they are doing.

[invisible officer]

Hmm, I would not call Cruel sea half baked or a mess.

It is far from a perfect set of rules but it works.

The main problem of rule writing is that you get blind for bad wordings. What is obvious for you and your team may be a big ? for others.
Playtesting helps just a bit.

I understand that the Warlord teams get angry reading harsh critics.
I can assure you that they do a lot of checks before publishing. I had no hand in Cruel Sea but in some BA campaign ones. I have no idea how often I had to read the last, not yet printed. New wordings. Many many hours of unpaid work.
But I know, someone will xxxx about it.

[Sergei S]

It is not a complaint about wording, more about some rules being put in supplemented texts instead of rules structure, hence are hard to locate. I am rather for rigidly structured dry rules text, without the fluff.

[invisible officer]

That’s caused by the same problem, the author and his group know the rules.

No problem for a reader with an eidetic memory.;-)

The fluff comes partly from Osprey. The books have to look modern. Today imprints think that sells better. If you compare the modern Osprey books with the older they are more “fluffy”.

For that reason the BA ones have the extra texts about weapons or persons that are not needed for playing.

[Walter Hard]

Pretty much agree with everything above. Invisible Officer, i would fine all the fluff less bothersome if it didn’t seem like the rules writers devoted as much or more attention to it than to the rules themselves (their main effort seems to have gone into the models, which are quite impressive). The spelling and grammar issues don’t help. But so many hair-pullers, like their ignorance of what “semi-automatic” means, and s description of Crew Hits that begins “No shooting this activation” (the damaged vessel has just been fired on, so it’s obviously not currently active — yup, no shooting!). Argh.

[Author]

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