Understanding fans and developers

This post is going to be a reply to some of the latest posts on Gav Thorpes Mechanical Hamster blog.

Although I hardly believe there is a Warhammer fan who doesn’t know, let me say first that Gav was a prominent employee earlier at Games Workshop before he became a freelance writer. Recently, he wrote about why he did things the way he did them back when he wrote Codex: Chaos Space Marines. This link is a very good read on things one has to think of when writing a rulebook and still not be able to make everybody happy, no matter how hard one tries to make it the best possible publication. As it generated an enormous load of reactions, he wrote a reply to that, too, and finally rounded everything off with a general post on fans.

So far, I have been silent as I think I lack the competence to talk about Chaos. My only experience with my Blood Angels and Chaos is beating their Khorne lists but being beaten by anything else. Either way, I find this quote from Gav’s blog quite remarkable:

Most fans don’t expect perfection, but deep down they want their experience of whatever it is they are fans of to exactly match what they want from it. (…) In the quest for that perfection, fans will break something down into every constituent atom and analyse it piece-by-piece, looking for the flaws.

Of course Gav is right; fans love their hobby and they put a lot of care into it. Yes, there are definitely those fans who will never be satisfied and vent their anger about the tiniest mistake. Fans always thirst for new content, new models, new rules, the shortest release cycles possible and the whole thing for as little money as possible. However, they wouldn’t be very good customers if they didn’t want that, right?

Although a customer can never buy the perfect product, a customer rightly has high expectations. An excellent example to demonstrate this is the Codex: Blood Angels. This Codex currently is available as a freely downloadable PDF from Games Workshop. Neat. Now there are those BA players who like the PDF (it’s quite handy) and those who despise it (GW didn’t think we’re worthy to get a proper Codex!). I belong to the first group of players as I think a PDF has quite a few advantages – it can easily be updated and spread over the world. Current rules, easily available, free of charge – who can’t be happy about that? The only problem with the BA Codex is that it isn’t current – it’s lacking the major strength that its given format could have.

When Warhammer 40’000 5th Edition was released, an update of the BA Codex was made. Somebody at Games Workshop took the time and the effort to get our Codex ready for 5th Edition and even worked the accumulated FAQs from the last page directly into the Codex so you didn’t have to flip to the back of the book anymore. Thank you, Games Workshop!

Unfortunately, that’s only half of the story. Despite the update, Blood Angels Rhinos still have no access and/or fire points, although it’s obvious that they should have some. Whirlwinds are not able to change their missile type between turns as every other Marine Chapter does. Blood Angels Terminators may carry an Assault Canon, but no Cyclone Missile Launcher as every other Chapter does.

Of course, when you are talking to your gaming buddies, there is no problems in letting Blood Angels have all those things. However, when somebody actually takes the time to work FAQs right into the Codex but fails to fix these errors, this really is just getting the job halfway done. Although GW deserves to be thanked for the free Codex and the free update, it also has to face the criticism of customers who see that there’s something wrong.

Making these corrections isn’t something that takes weeks or even days to complete, more like an hour or so. Now even though I am sure all the GW designers and developers have busy and tight schedules, you can’t tell me that nobody has the time to iron out these errors. I understand it’s a very consuming tasks to update a printed book, but updating a PDF with a couple additional lines of text isn’t that hard. Heck, if one doesn’t have the resources to do it, one can even let the fans do it in this new world of modern communication. (Bell of Lost Souls just recently had a post on how the fanbase was used for the makeover of the Warmachine rules.)

Updating the Blood Angels Codex is a three level process:

1) Iron out the errors. (e.g. Rhinos, Whirlwinds, Terminators)
2) Streamline with Vanilla Codex. (e.g. Drop Pods, Stormshields, etc.)
3) Making Blood Angels the latest kick *** Chapter in 5th Edition again (overwork e.g. point values, special characters, Death Company, etc.)

Every fan is absolutely right to ask for level one because it’s about getting the job done. Level two is something that GW could have done after the arrival of the new Vanilla Codex just to say “thank you” to the Blood Angels players, we surely would have honored that. Level three is something we all dream of and that we all know doesn’t happen every day.

So what does that tell us about GW? Either they don’t know or they don’t care. In the first case, there are ways to fix it. Seeing how GW twitters and has a blog with frequent updates gives me hope that they are on the way to take communication with their fans even further. Fans who feel understood will buy even more GW products, that’s for sure.

Basically, it boils down to this: GW employees themselves are huge fans of the hobby and that they put a lot of enthusiasm into it. The person who did the update on the Blood Angel Codex provided a nice and well intended service, no question about that. However, even the biggest fan and most knowledgeable expert isn’t perfect and a single man solution always will be inferior to a well organized collective. This sort of reminds me to world of software where communities of open source software programmers react quicker to threats and have a higher spin of innovation compared to the giant corporations cooking up solutions in shut off labs.

Maybe, Games Workshop shouldn’t be inventing the rules anymore, but rather just manage them. I guess fans and developers understand each other best if they work together. The have the lead and provide the platform, but it’s the fans bringing and testing the ideas. Rules can be downloaded as PDFs for free while in stores wonderful tomes are sold that carry the background story, artwork and painting tips for every army. I think it would be worth a try.