Fixing What's Not Broken Hot

Well at least Magic isn't broken - for now. MaRo still has that on his list... and I am the proud owner of a Lotus Cobra card.

I was thinking about getting into Heroclix, but now - not a chance. Sticking with Magic and other games up my alley like the Black Industries version of Talisman I got for $20 AUS at a FLGS sale.

I guarantee you that this is a cost-saving measure. They may have contracted with a different manufacturer that doesn't (or can't) do the bases in the old style, or they may have run some numbers and determined that there was a cheaper way to do it. Or it could just be a function of reusing the D&D figures.

I don't really play HEROSCAPE much anymore, but I don't really see it as being that big of a deal...I wouldn't even notice, I don't think. It's not like the game has changed, just a minor visual aspect.

I don't really see the issue with the Heroscape miniature bases. Unless they are the wrong size for the existing components, it's a non-issue. This is nowhere near as disruptive as changing the backs of the L5R and Jyhad cards, which forced people to spend a lot on card sleeves. As for D&D 4E, I'm personally not interested in it, but I see the business angle. Open license was spreading around the money too much, and Wizards wasn't getting enough of it for their own D&D products. By re-booting with 4E and without the open license, they were going to take back D&D as their own private cash cow, hopefully also raking in money from the miniatures.

A better example of disruptive change would be Seventh Sea. I don't know what the issue was exactly, because I wasn't playing it, but suddenly everybody I knew who did play was complaining, and in less than a year, they all stopped.

Wizards Of The Coast sucks ass. I despise them. Everything they do turns to shit, including M:TG.

Examples?
*They got Heroscape, fucked it up, blamed the market, then cannibalized DnD minis to "appeal to a broader market".
*M:TG had an online component, people paid up to play it and get "virtual cards", and then they cancelled it because it was getting to be as popular as the card game.
*Star Wars Miniatures was fine until they added so many complexities and power creep problems that only those with unlimited billfolds could afford to be competitive.
*SWM:Starship Battles was a clusterfuck that wasn't playtested at all, has shitty rules to begin with, and has no redeeming value. Then they lost the license to Star Wars. Go figure!!?!?!
*D&D has been bastardized, changed, and mutilated over each revision, with the sole objective of forcing long-time players to relearn the game every iteration so that they'll buy new sourcebooks. Then they went the minis route and turned a RPG into a CMG. Way to go, dickheads.

Fuck 'em as a corporation. Rape 'em with a broomstick and snap that shit off so, as a company, it's found lying face down in a pool of blood with it's fingers halfway up its ass trying to de-impale them.

I'll never spend another solitary dime on any WotC product, ever.

It's simple: WotC corporately doesn't care. They just don't. Everything about HS since the WotC handoff/takeover has been about the cheap. My recollection is Wave 9 was already designed, so no new work went into that. Wave 10 was reprints. The third master set has (I think) a smallish amount of terrain and uses the preexisting D&D license and minis. The subsequent boosters repurpose D&D minis. There was the proposed desert set that had repainted glaciers. And on and on. We can all vetch or we can (a) adapt to smaller horizons and/or (b) be thankful that we ended up with a lot more stuff (two master sets and nine or ten booster waves) than a lot of games get.

I don't understand the complaints about D&D. Just stick to one edition.

I like D&D 4E. Sure it put the logistics on the board and the powers have made the players somewhat homogeneous, but so far everyone I've DM'd for seem to enjoy the experience. It's a different kind of RPG experience, but it does still have value. And so far it's has been a very successful re-branding.

Iron Shadow was the set that killed 7th Sea. One of the problems with the game was a set of power rares from the base set that commanded fairly strong prices on ebay - nothing like MtG prices but $10-$20 for a 7th Sea rare was kind of steep, especially when you needed three of each in the deck. So they decided to make them fixed cards in Iron Shadow, which was supposed to be the new base set. They also changed the text on a lot of the cards iirc and really janked a few of them. They also introduced a new card format that wasn't very popular - again the aesthetic thing. On top of that - and this I think was the real kick in the ass - something like half the set was new material. Instead of the base set being cards from the previous base set plus a mix of stuff from expansions, they treated it like a giant expansion. That meant that anyone who had been playing for a long time had to buy copies of a pile of stuff that they'd already have just to get the new stuff. A lot of folks just walked away. It was a tragic end to a great, great game. One more expansion and it was over.

The change in base size compared to that cf is absolutely nothing.

A better example of disruptive change would be Seventh Sea.

I was thinking BATTLES OF WESTEROS.

Eh? Magic Online is still going strong. Also, most of the people who play seriously do most/all of their testing/practicing online. You end up with people buying the same cards twice, once virtually and once in real life. I seriously doubt Magic Online is hurting the sales of physical magic cards at all.

The beef that I have is that there are multiple standard legal tournament staple cards that are selling for upwards of $50. It isn't uncommon for a standard deck right now to cost more than $1,000. Granted, the majority of magic revenue probably comes from casual players, but I can't believe that this is a good thing. It is effectively pricing out some of their customers who want to be able to play and win at Friday Night Magic and other sanctioned events.

HOLY SHIT. This is EXACTLY what WWE Raw Deal did with Survivor Series 3. That game died like a little over a year later.

Oh Ken B. What has become out of you?

He has been selling plasma so that he can afford more booster packs.

Here's the Wave D2 preview on Heroscapers:

http://www.heroscapers.com/community/blog.php? s=cc59fb1745c22364df8c91b174771ba3&b=1213

Multiple editions fracture the player base and make it difficult to impossible to get new material for discontinued editions. And even if you play only with a single group, it's often the case that some or most of the members of that group want to switch to the new edition.

GW seems to have this down to a fine science, what with the umpteenth edition of Warhammer coming out next month! :o

Heroscape was frakked the moment WotC got their hands on it. This latest little change doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point. I'm glad I got off the Heroscape train. No regrets.

I can't help but call this off as nerd rage. The game is the same. I've felt that it's been a little dead in the water since WotC picked it up, but at the same time, I can't complain because the game is living on (which looked doubtful for awhile). The bases are new. Big deal.

Well, it's more of a big deal if they don't fit on the fortress ladders. Do they or not?

I can't blame Matt for being fucking perturbed by this. It's like that last straw sort of thing. There are so many corners being cut on HeroScape now it's hex-shaped.

What? I thought that it was always hex-shaped. Oh, wait, you're Hex Sinister... this is a trap, right?

MAHAHAHAH. Shellhead, you fool. You will never escape my trap! *dinosaur cackle*

Well, I went and checked and Truth is saying they'll fit on the ladders. Still kinda lame though.

Yeah, but Matt is the antithesis of a nerd, so it's just rage. The issue is that WOTC has completely abandoned the original concept of Heroscape and simply bastardized D&D minis to work with Heroscape terrain. The designers are mad. The playtesters are mad. It's a load of crap, man.

My biggest bitch about Heroscape is not that D&D stuff is available, it's that the "classic" stuff is gone forever now. The whole idea of Heroscape was that factions from all over the universe were summoned to fight in the Valkyrie war, and now it's just D&D with heroscape rules. That's bullshit.

How come Matt is not a nerd?

As a one-time HUGE Heroscape fan, this base change is just one more shitty move WotC has done to screw what I considered one of the finest dice rolling, hex-building, figure collecting games in many a year. I for one gave up on Heroscape as soon as it became Dungeonscape a while back. Sorry, I like my toy figures to include cowboys, robots, and aliens from another world.
I could forgive "Gizzards of the Roast" for the price jump, but never, NEVER will I forgive them for going balls to the wall with DnD as the replacement for regular Heroscape. They may not know it yet, but this game has hit rock bottom, and all the mouth to mouth that "Truth" can give to it will only prolong the dying gasps of this once-fantastic game.
Don't get me wrong, this game will live on, but only among hard-core loyal fans like me (who have multiple tubs of vintage Heroscape goodies stored away) who will continue to play the classic game for years to come - it still has a certain charm and draw that brings out the kid in 30-50 year old gamers... especially when that handful of dice cracks against the dice tower and a bunch of Blastrons are surprisingly slaughtered by a few puny Snipers.

I give this game 18 months at the most before it croaks. 24 months if they come up with another decent expansion that includes terrain that can be used by both Dungeonscape AND classic Heroscape.

But I ain't sad...hey, even Rome eventually fell.

I'm 100% with volnon.

From what I've seen, the figures will still fit on the ladder. Yeah, the new figs look different and don't match your old ones. That isn't the death of the game. As pretty much everyone else has said, the D&D theme is the death of the game, not the size of the fucking bases.

Yeah, I'll never forget the way my scrotum tingled the first time I saw those sexy, beveled, bigger-than-an-inch bases. OH WAIT. I never gave a shit about the bases, and I don't give a shit about this. The new D&D figures are at least as high-quality as previous Heroscape figures - better-quality than some of the middle Waves, even - and that's really all that counts for the eye-pop factor. (The palette for the new bases matches the old one remarkably well anyhow.)

It's puzzling that WotC didn't simply re-brand it as Heroscape: D&D (ala Marvel Heroscape). But all the D&D fantasy stuff still merges seamlessly with the larger Heroscape universe, and I have a hard time believing that WotC are the reason that the game seems to be circling the drain now. Who's to say that the game wasn't running out of steam before WotC picked it up? The "breadth over depth" approach to the system's development could only have been sustainable for so long anyway. At least the D&D release has introduced a few new kinks to the game.

Well, I hate to sound shallow, but this change just makes it easier for me to not buy any D&D Heroscape. Yes, it's purely an aesthetic thing, but with each wave costing $50-$100 (with doubles), I don't need minis that will make me feel off when I look at them. I'll probably still get the older reprints when they come out though.

Wait wait, MTGO is offline? How did that happen!?

Schwieg: Matt's not a nerd because he isn't one. He's more of the "jock" type that just happens to be in the graphic arts. He's the guy who knocks out Gencon-dwellers who run their cocksuckers at him. He's just not "that" kind of gamer, that's all. Great, nice guy though, and a good friend.

Volnon: I'm saying 1 more wave after D2 and that's that.

SoH12: Bollocks. The D&D sculpts are inferior to all but the worst Heroscape sculpts. The painting is also inferior. I agree that it's not the bases, per se, it's the fact that Whizzers of the Coke just change shit up on their fanbase, and they apparently seem to believe that "new" sales will result from these changes, when in reality it is the fanbase keeping sales going. The last wave I bought was Wave 9, and that's the last I ever will.

Stormcrow: Nah, that was a snafu. I was told by someone who was truly eliciting nerd rage that MTGO was changing or closing, and I remember how truly fucked off he was. That was where I got that from, my bad.

I agree about the D&D mini's. They are pretty cheap, and really only use some of them when I have too. But I don't care much about the presentation of the field, I'd rather just print out cardstock prints of the monsters. My players usually bring some top notch mini's for their characters.

This reminds me of Wizards deciding to change the bases on their Star Wars Minis with one of the waves. They started with circular bases and then they switched to a square base that said "Star Wars" on it. Those figures look out of place. And that's about the time I stopped playing. But that wasn't the killer. The killer was the thing that kills most collectible games...the power creep. It seemed like the figures were fairly balanced and then at some point they decided to throw that out the window....

Ah well....

Nerd rage. Heroscape bases that make it so I can use more minis with D&D is great. The original bases look stupid anyway. It is a bummer that Heroscape seems to have fallen by the wayside, but at least Wizards is trying to do something with it, unlike how it was just shoved in a corner and totally forgotten about for a while till it was passed onto Wizards. Or are we all pretending that Hasbro didn't already throw HS over a cliff?

Also, if you hate on 4E and haven't really played it, you're a special sort of nerd raging fool. I have yet to speak with anyone who hates on "new editions being a scam to sell books" who still only plays basic. You might prefer an earlier edition, but newer editions are pretty different rule sets (especially in the case of 4e) that don't mean jack shit to your ability to enjoy an older edition. The argument that it means they stop making books for older editions is either you talking out your ass or you are insanely rich and somehow have all of the crazy amount of books that have come out. Plus with OGL still going strong, there is plenty of third party support for 3e.

Also, there are a lot of (earlier especially) D&D minis that look terrible, but there are plenty that look way better than the HS figs. I'd say that they are pretty much on par with one another these days if not new D&D sets being even better overall.

What I mean, regarding D&D, is that instead of coming out with a bunch of modules and scenarios like they did way, way back when I played D&D a bit, they now come out with these big sets of books that rewrite the rules just enough to make you relearn it. That's bullshit. Just expand on what you have and don't 're-edition' it.

I think getting into the minis market was the smart thing to do, but they should've simply offered it as a SEPARATE entity, like "D&D Heroes Miniatures Game" or something, allowing for use in standard AD&D rules, but as a separate entity rather than shifting everything over in that direction.

That's just my opinion, so take it for what it's worth, and that's not much.

I think they did do that during 3e. I recall a miniatures hardback book so you could simply play skirmish games if you didn't want to role-play.

I dig what they did with D&D Heroscape. Without Hasbro passing it over to WotC, it would be dead already...or have we forgotten the looooong drought before Hasbro handed it over?

So I say either enjoy the fact that there's new Heroscape at all--'cause there wouldn't have been without this move--or simply pretend that it did die and be happy with what ya got.

Bitching about changing bases IS nerd rage. Except for Star Wars Minis with those square, elevated bases with "Star Wars" on them. And not because I hate change, but because those bases looked retarded and completely out of place.

I don't have a problem with DND changing under WOTC's watch because DND has always changed. If you look at the white books, ODND, they look very little like 1e ADND. 2e ADND, while not as radical a change as 3e and then 4e, still had a enough different and we still had to keep buying books to keep up. None of that first 15-20 years was Wizards.

Now, do I have a problem with 4e? Yes. It's too fiddly. Hell, I've been a crazed 3.x player since its release and even though I'm not playing DND now, if I ever go back it'll be my old red box/blue box Basic DND. Less bookkeeping, character creation is fast(er), and it's got all that DND goodness I loved as a kid.

As for Heroscape, it's too bad if the original concept is gone. It was full of awesome. But then I haven't played it for years, and I haven't bought a booster for about that long. So I can't boo and hiss when it goes away because I wasn't giving it my dollars to help keep it going. The mini base changing is a non-issue to me, and who knows, maybe I'll buy this set to get my younger kids into the DND universe so when the time comes that they're old enough to play the real DND game...

See, that's my main bitch about the bastardization of Heroscape, right there. If people want to play Heroscape, they play Heroscape. If they want to play D&D minis, they play that. The fact that they've taken Heroscape into a market segment between the two just seems like profit-mongering, and there's no real impetus for D&D guys to move over to Heroscape just as only the die-hard Heroscapers will want to get into D&DScape. They should have left it well enough alone and come up with new, classic units, or at WORST simply continuously reprinted the old stuff, even if it meant a price increase.

I'd have loved to get reprints of Wave 4, for example, and I'd have paid 16.99 for it, a 30&#xis;h increase in price. I know I'm not alone in this, and there's always new people getting into the game, so why bastardize it and use it as an entree into getting people to play D&D?

Hey JJJJS, pick up that Master Set for DnD. Your kids will likely dig that whole 4-scenario quest with the cool narrative parts you can read them. I think it's a pretty great intro, actually.

Coming from someone who playes neither HeroScape nor D&D, I don't really understand the outrage. Seems like a pretty ingenious move for WotC to me. They get to sell minis to D&D players (and from what I understand, 4E is more minis focused than previous edetions) but can keep the costs down by attaching a simplified, already successful rules set and selling it by the truckload to the 10 year olds at WalMart/Target as a gateway into the D&D world. Everybody wins. Besides, how pissed would you be if you got the D&D Heroscape starter for your BDay as a kid, collected a few expansions, then when you got into real D&D in your teens/twenties, you find out that the minis they've been selling you won't fit on their dungeon tiles?

Damn lack of edit!

Besides, how much longer could HeroScape keep the expansions interesting? Again, I don't play the game, but I've seen cowboys, aliens, zombies, vampires, civil/revolutionary war (can't remember which it was), elves, orcs and all shapes and sizes of dragons and robots? Seriously, what AT base have they not already covered? I just hope the majority of the older stuff doesn't go OOP (which it may already have) because it seems like a game I'd want to play with my kids someday, but can't really justify the expense ATM.

Automatic Teller Machine?

Ass To Mouth?

Asynchronous Transfer Mode?

Besides, how much longer could HeroScape keep the expansions interesting? Again, I don't play the game, but I've seen cowboys, aliens, zombies, vampires, civil/revolutionary war (can't remember which it was), elves, orcs and all shapes and sizes of dragons and robots? Seriously, what AT base have they not already covered?
The story behind Heroscape was Ragnarok has begun and Valkyries were calling to Valhalla the greatest warriors in the universe, past, present, and future. That's what made Heroscape awesome. You had American Revolutionary soldiers facing off against skeletal dragons against people like Agent Smith in The Matrix. Everything was possible. You want samurai to go up against post apocalyptic mutants? You got it. Dinosaur riding goblins vs. 101st Airborne? Go for it. Werewolves vs. amazon warrior women vs. Giant kill-bots? Yep. The possibilities were endless.

Unfortunately, I think that could have proven its undoing as well. It's a lot of chaos to contain and setting up the pieces takes a long time. You have to like building the board as much as playing the game and have the time to do it and play. Sometimes, you have to like the building more because some scenarios in the book are over quickly if you play with the basic rules. That also makes teaching the game hard because 20 min.+ building the board followed by ~10 min. play can come off as very disatisfying. I can see the age group it was marketed to finding it boring while older age groups would take one look at the box and think "children's toy".

Pirates. How the hell am I supposed to have an epic ninjas vs pirates throwdown without the pirates?

Are there pirates in D&D? If so, then damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Are there really no pirates? Well that's just fucking criminal.

Nerd rage... love that term. NOT! I guess anytime someone doesn't like something about their hobby it's "nerd rage".
Like:
Oh, oh, my favorite kind of car just got weird new lug nuts (who cares...must be nerd rage!).
Oh,oh, my favorite author is writing a book in the first person, not second (who cares...must be nerd rage!).
Oh, oh, my favorite comic hero got an ugly new costume (who cares...must be nerd rage!).

See, you can call it nerd rage if you want to belittle someone really caring about a particular thing they like about a hobby, but that is not fair. It is simply that someone with unique interests cares enough about something to get pissed about an abrupt and perhaps poorly planned change.

Now anyone know of some really good pirates in the correct scale I can glue onto "authentic" Heroscape One bases to use in my next game?!

Yeah, we used to have a Weapons and Warriors: Pirate Battle set that'd fit the bill. At least ten pirates per side - a captain and handful of buccaneers each. Unpainted, but they're in blue and yellow plastic that wouldn't be too tough to touch up and I'm pretty sure they're the right size.

Hey, several posts by Heroscape devs one Heroscapers.com have stated that the dnd heroscape figures use the existing scuplt molds, but the plastic and paint process that the old Heroscape figures have used. So.....there you go. I did notice the cards are thinner.

Seriously though, what has WoTC really changed about the game (other then DnD theme) that has been so bad? People just love to hate on WoTC.

"[...] if you want to belittle someone really caring about a particular thing they like [...]"

I thought this was what this site is really about.

...
"[...]Oh, oh, my favorite comic hero got an ugly new costume (who cares...must be nerd rage!).[...]"

Sounds like the definition of nerd rage to me.

That pirate's yellow thing scares me.

Try <u>here</u> for 24mm figures.

"That pirate's yellow thing scares me."

Reminds me of S. Clay Wilson's 'Head First':

http://www.undergroundcomixart.com/drawings/main.php?g2_itemId=3091

...
"[...] if you want to belittle someone really caring about a particular thing they like [...]"

I thought this was what this site is really about.

Good point! Arrrrr! I've been busted!

TNT, I appreciate the 'Matt's not a nerd' support, but unfortunately, I'm a total nerd. Big-time. I'm a 40-year-old man who just got a great deal on an OOP Warhammer dragon last week on eBay, and I spent more than 50 hours in two weeks finishing Red Dead Redemption because my family is out of town for the summer. I can debate the difference between a science fiction RPG like Blue Planet and fantasy-in-space like Fading Suns. I was recently ecstatic to find out that I could use Netflix Instant Streaming to watch full seasons of Babylon 5. I'm ex-military, and I've been thrown out of a half-dozen bars for brawling (sometimes while very drunk, sometimes not), but I'm still 100%, died-in-the-wool nerd.

I completely dig that some people are cool with the change in the bases. But I once used die-cut molds to cast 200 HeroScape bases, which I then painted to match and rebased a couple hundred Mage Knight figures. I've even rebased DDM miniatures to match HeroScape. And then Wizards goes and rebases the HeroScape miniatures with smaller bases so that they're about the same size as the original DDM miniatures, which already existed. Maybe I'm just more visual than some people, but when I play a game that is almost entirely based on visual appeal, I want it to match.

On the other hand, they do fit on the ladders. The base change doesn't actually change anything about the game play. If the visuals aren't important, this is a non-issue. It's important to me, though, and it's important to other people, and it's an example of fixing what wasn't broken, and ignoring the fans.

Also, 4e blows.

Clearly, the main issue here is that Matt is playing 3rd edition D%D with his family and not 2nd edition AD&D. I think that's ground for an abuse charge in 9 states.

Also, 4e blows.

WTF, man, I've happened upon a couple threads today that I'm glad I missed out on earlier.

Heroscape bases changing? I'm a huge Heroscape fan, and I could give a flying fuck. Sounds like a good idea to me. Now, what I DIDN'T like was the complete elimination of any new "classic" Heroscape products, but I'm also perfectly happy to have a complete collection of Classic Heroscape and not have to worry about buying any new stuff.

I definitely wouldn't worry about MaRo, I think he's our greatest hope for making sure Magic DOESN'T die, and is a better designer than Garfield even. I dunno what Lotus Cobra has to do with anything: in terms of power, it's far from broken. In terms of the terrible, terrible decision to make it a mythic rare to sell more boxes of cards: yeah, that sucked, and is a terrible direction Magic is going in. Much moreso than ever before.

Buh-WAH? I hope at some point you realized you were on crack when you wrote this. Magic Online was never cancelled, not even remotely. And I think they'd have absolutely no problem with it getting as popular as the card game.

I think Lotus Cobra is stupid, and luckily, it isn't that big of a deal in Type I.....in any event, I hate conditional cards