Heroscape--Off to the House that Garfield Built Hot

Hasbro sucks donkey balls when it comes to distributing stuff. I used to collect the Star Wars figures they started back in 1995. For the longest time, I couldn't find any around here and when they did finally start hitting the shelves with regularity all the snoots would take the good figures leaving shelf after shelf of R2's (at the time). They're handling of the Starting Lineup figures wasn't much better (I was trying to get the REd Wings but usually ended up paying inflated comic book shop prices). It seems they still haven't figured out that if figure X is popular, that they can sell cases of figure X. Sure it will drive down the prices of the secondary market, but they don't get any of the money from the secondary market (other than the initial sale).

Anyways back to Star Wars, if a friend and I didn't camp Toys R Us at midnight, I wouldn't have gotten any of the PHantom Menace figures except Jar Jar.

I never played heroscape, but you are entirely right that it gave me a warm feeling when I saw it on wal-mart's toy shelves next to the shovelware crap. It was great to think when I saw the copy of Marro's revenge on clearance that it was possible some mother would buy it for their kids, and that kid, instead of getting the same fucking bullshit massmarket crap he/she hated, was getting a great game he/she could really get into and look forward to playing.

My brother-in-law went to GenCon (as he usually does) last year, and he said that Wizards was booed when they officially announced D&D 4.0. I'd say that that speaks volumes to how people think Wizards is being run right now.

--Mike L.

Hey ken, I'm getting "You are not authorised to view this resource" when clicking on the link to read the WotC/AH article. Any clues on why?

Typo in the URL. All better now.

This may date me, but I remember when 2.0 was going to be the end/all be all for D&D. Guess they can't leave things well enough alone.

Whoops...thanks for catching my slack, Uba.

You got me up on my soap box with this one.

WotC seems to have a very narrow, limited business model for developing their games based on the collectible concept and they can't seem to break out of it. Just look at their handling of D&D. First they came out with a new system (3.0) but with some problems. Instead further testing and getting it right the first time, they went ahead and released the system and lots of accessories for it. Then came the revised game (3.5) to fix the problems and guess what? Throw out the old stuff, you gotta buy the updated system and all the new accessories. And if you havent paid much attention, there is a massive amount of accessories and ancillary material out there for sale. Apparently, they're now at a point where the revised game accessory market is saturated and past its peak, because now they're coming out with version 4.0. Time to throw out your old books and buy the new system and all the new accessories. But wait a few months, they'll revise the new system so that you have to buy that too.

They've done the same with the A&A minis, too. In 2007 after several series of minis, they decided to fix the problems noted in previous releases by revising the rules, the stats, the maps, and the minis just enough to make the old series somewhat obsolete. Of course it was all in the name of improving the game, which they can't seem to get right the first time.

I just have to wonder what the problem really is with WotC. It seems that they only know the business model for MtG and think they can force that model on the rest of their lines. It appears that they believe they can throw anything out on the market, exploit it with wave after wave of accessory/expansion products, fix or revise the product later, then exploit it again with wave after wave of new accessory products. Maybe that works for cards, but I know a lot of people who aren't too pleased how that model is translating to other games.

That may be why the rest of the AH games are gone. WotC couldn't force them into the collectible model. And why Risk is still around because with the different themed versions, it kinda does fit the model.

That said, since Heroscape does fit the collectible model (maybe thats why Hasbro moved it to WotC?), it may have a shot at long life You just have to worry though that they'll screw around with a system that works in an effort to "fix" it all so they can come out with a new replacement version to exploit all over again.

Bill N.

I think the thing that broke the camel's back for me was the Ships game. I bought the whole set and enough to paint sister ships on my own. Especially since they hinted at the beginning that they may not do sister ships....So what do they do in the first set.....Sister ships. Now, If I could just get the cards, I'd be happy but I doubt they would do that. Bah....

I love how WotC is already tinkering with the game. They don't like how big figures work, so the pack that was to come at the same time as swamp terrain has been nixed. They're going to repaint the glacier set as desert. Genious, we'll be able to buy the same product over again only in different colors.

I'm very leary of the plans to move the line towards hobby shops. I like paying Walmart and Target's prices. I buy multiple copies of everything except unique figures. If I have to start paying hobby shop prices, I don't know that I'll be able to continue purchasing like that. The last wave presented a crisis for me because a comic shop was the only local resource and they wanted $12.99 (msrp, I know)per pack. That wave had 2 unique packs and 2 commons, so buying my usual 3 of each common, 1 of each unique would have cost me an extra $24 plus tax over walmart or target.

The sad part is when I play Heroscape, it's almost always with six or more people so I need to buy multiple sets just to keep the maps large and varied. This weekend we just had a 4000 point war, marro (with hive) and orcs (with a few big friends) vs. knights and elves in the castle in the woods.

I think we need to accept that the game is about to jump the shark.

That being said we can't really complain - it lasted a lot longer than I thought it would.

I just want to put out there that this sounds SHIT HOT. My kids are too little to game right now, but oh my, game we shall.

I guess it's no surprise that Wizards is like this, since all of the people who were there when Wizards started life as an RPG accessory maker are long gone. All most of the people over there know about is the collectible market.

And the Brand.

Don't forget the Brand.

You see this sort of thing in the consumer goods market with Clorox and Pledge; try to expand the brand name with new and varied products while trying to maintain brand dominance with the core products.

If you consider M:TG and Pokemon to be the primary sources of brand identity at Wizards with D&D in third place, that only makes sense. To keep the brand fresh and in the public eye, periodic updates are expected. A&A minis' problems aren't really problems at all; the updates keep the brand out there and make the core audience buy new stuff.

To dovetail a thread, GW apparently is bowing to the brand altar heavily, even to the point of jettisoning profitable reintroduced lines such as Talisman.

What branding does do, however, is lock employees into "how do I expand XXX's market?" instead of "how do I diversify?" It's the reverse conglomerate thought process, and if you're part of the M:TG team, hey that's great. But don't expect real innovation from them, and for God's sake, don't expect them to actually support products that have been handed to them that don't fit their product model (see: Avalon Hill). Another bad thing is that branding makes companies jettison product lines that may not be growing as fast as others but still provides nice, steady income. (See: Hasbro with the MicroProse acquisition.)

Don't expect new innovations from such companies, however.

Does it show that I used to work for a company that was heavily into branding?

--Mike L.

Damn, you had to go mention MicroProse...I miss thier pseudo-simulations (they tried to simulate stuff but more of an emphasis on fun and not the grind of certain things)

Mmmmmm....Microprose.

Original Silent Service, FTW!!!!

mtlawson wrote:

Except that a certain percentage of the core audience is fed up and won't buy into the new stuff (like me) or have decided to move on to Flames of War or something similar where you pay more but get what you want and know its gonna be a quality product.

Bill N.

Oh Microprose...I was a big fan of Gunship 2000 when I was a kid. It had its own mission builder and everything, plus you could watch replays of your mission from different angles, including the missile cam!

Yeah, I know, Bill. Same with D&D; there's still a decent amount of people who play 1st and 2nd Editions. I'm sure the same will happen to 3.0/3.5 people, too.

Either way, it's probably still more money than what WotC would have gotten if they'd have left 3.0/3.5 alone. It generates buzz and media presence and a bump in sales. That's all WotC is after, anyway.

--Mike L.

I bought a complete set of the ships (except for the Italians) and enough to have sister ships. They said that they weren't going to release sister ships for a while. So what do they end up doing in set 2? Bastards. I might some of the new ships but I'd like to find a different rule set to use with them.

Mike L. wrote:

Yeah, I know. It's the way most companies work. The boss sees that your division made X dollars last year so expects X+Y dollars from you this year. So the easy way to make money is to throw out lots of new products. And in the gaming community, novelty IS the name of the game. Once a game has saturated the market the only growth comes from new games. So I don't blame WotC necessarily for doing what they do. Just the way they do it. They push the new product at us and expect that we'll hungrily eat it up like mindless zombies whether its good or not.

Bill N.

PS.....And so far we have. I feel like such a crack whore.

Bill N.

Now you're making me feel old...I was a fan of the original Gunship when I was a kid. COMMODORE 64 FTW~!

PS.....And so far we have. I feel like such a crack whore.

Can a lizard BE a crack whore?

Now you're making me feel old...I was a fan of the original Gunship when I was a kid. COMMODORE 64 FTW~!

Come on, Ken. Where's the old Vic 20? Or the TI-994/A?

--Mike L.

Mike L. wrote:

I think the TI-94/A is down in my parent's basement on the "garage sale stuff" table. Was a lot of fun to play around on, but I also learned I would never be a programmer. I tried to create a simple wargame on it, but never could get all the subroutines to work right let alone the whole thing.

-- Bill "Crack Iguana" N.

Oh man, BASIC made so many sloppy spaghetti-code programmers that it should be put on trial and executed (no pun intended).

I remember just writing subroutines that went off to other subroutines. I'd number stuff in the 100s because I would forget to code stuff all the time and would just slip some extra lines in.

All this to create a Lazer Tag game where a Spade tried to shoot a heart with a line of colored exclamation marks.

Yeah, I'm guilty of writing spaghetti code from time to time. Of course, when I'm writing a shell or perl script on the fly to crunch some data, I'm not interested in how elegant the code is. Particularly when I have to get service restored in about an hour.

--Mike L.

Hmm. Java=Euro, Perl=Ameritrash??

I'm just hoping for another year or 2 of expansions and at least 4 sets of Marvel expansions.

HS seems like such a hard thing to screw up.... I hope they don't.

From the posts and replies on heroscapers.com, WotC is at least saying the right things...

Java = broken (memory leaks out the wazoo). At least that was the case with the versions of Java I used to tinker with before I worked almost exclusively with POSIX/KSH and Perl. At least I get an occasional C program thrown my way these days.

--Mike L.

That's quite a distortion. Wizards held a seminar on what 4.0 would entail, and plenty of people went to it and were excited about it.

Was the seminar when 4.0 was announced, or was it at another event? From what he described, it was a dog-and-pony show when 4.0 was announced, not a seminar.

--Mike L.

It looks like Heroscape has been cut off at the knees- still alive, but laying on the plastic hex tile floor and bleeding badly. Oh, it will live for a while, but I suspect the glory days are gone.

As Mr skeletor said, Heroscape lasted longer than I thought it would.

The good thing is before it dies at least another Wave or three will come out, as well as maybe "The Forgotten Forest" in beautiful autumn colors sans bridge, road, or guard. How will they explain that pine trees don't turn orange and yellow in the fall?

It has been a great run, and I have bought plenty of Waves and Master Sets to keep me busy in my waning years. Plenty. Hell, I can even sell some unopened sets in 10 years to help finance my living in a rest home...