When did Warhammer go from being a game about making themed armies in cool campaigns into being a sweatlord tournament game where people whine about balance and how your models must be Games Workshop approved with the right weapons and no kitbashing? What even happened to campaign play?
>>97195868When it reached a whiff of mainstream success.
>>97195868People will turn any multi-player activity competitive. Even fucking Pokémon and Splatoon have sweatlord-dominated metas at serious levels of play.
The seeds were sown around 5th-7th
>>97195868see >>97195936 but it truly started in 8th with the "wider audience"
Nothing I could say is more than a feeling, but I don't think the ritual seppuku of Warmahordes helped; all the Page 5 weirdos had to latch on to some way they could still pretend that Daddy really did love them, he was just busy.
>>97195868By the mid 90s "competitive" players were already pushing hard for a tournament. Watch this 1996 video with Andy Chambers in a convention, and note the mindset of the audience asking questions:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw5NfJlRrcQThis is one of the reasond 3rd became so heavily streamlined and dumbed down compared to 2nd ed.The problem has always been the loudest players, not GW. They just gave people what they asked for.
>>97195868Tourneyfagging was always a thing, but the old team were much more into scenario and narrative play so it never got much design focus. Regardless, everyone whined about balance because GW were always shit at it.The modeling shit is presumably a knock on effect of the Chapterhouse debacle.
>>97195868I actually solved this earlier today. Someone posted a meme image in a capeshit thread on /tv/ proving capeshit comics are dying by showing a store doing a closing down sale with endless shelves full of unsold western comics, while the manga and warhammer product shelves were stripped bare, and it hit me that that's the reason why: the audience GW are catering to now isn't wargamers, it's capeshitter refugees. That's why their pushing the "T-sport" angle(because capeshitters are almost universally also computer gamers or CCG players and love that shit), that's why we've gone from a setting designed to encourage creativity to a saturday morning cartoon where big named characters in flashy outfits monologue while they punch each other, and that's why the design of the models has degraded - they saw that the kind of subhuman normie-casual perfromative nerds who love comics and the MCU were fleeing their previous enshittified hobbies and realized they could position even a shareholder-friendly hypersanitized version of their IPs as being the "edgy alternative" and capture all of the kind of despicable creature that unironically buys Funkos. An entire customerbase of the biggest paypigs ever to walk the earth.Sure the rot had set in long before that as >>97195936 points out, but it was Rowntree and the process that began with >>97195942 that metastacised the cancer.
>>97196184>T-sportI just threw up a little in my mouth
>>97196184You're not wrong about the videogame and TCG mindset being the problem, but your muh capeshit/muh manga argument is stupid. Literal contrarian NPC tourist bsWarhammer, both WHFB and 40k always had a big dose of "saturday morning cartoon where big named characters in flashy outfits monologue while they punch each other", just like a lot of popular manga/anime> a setting designed to encourage creativitylol, the number one concern has always been to sell minis
>>97196365They didn’t call some of the older editions herohammer for nothing.
>>97196403Not usually named Heroes or Special Characters like now though. Just that HQ units were powerful.You used to need permission to use named HQs
>>97196184Warhammer has always been capeshit
>>97195868The whole tournament thing and catering to those sweaty waacfags is the worst thing to ever happen to 40K. Its just meta chasing bullshit now.
>>97196418>You used to need permission to use named HQsMaybe in sweaty tourney-like games with randos in GW stores.Among friends, there was no way that after spending money in a mini you weren't going to use it.
