Can Games Workshop do it?

In order for you to get the full scope of what this entry is about, you have to understand where I come from in regards to GW. I'm sure that there are many different paths to the place I stood a month ago as a card carrying member of the 40k refugee club, but I want to talk about how I got there and why I was "done" with 40k.

It all started with a project that I participated in on the Bolter and Chainsword under the Space Wolf forums. We decided that we wanted a proper FAQ for the space wolves and someone (we couldn't know who) had an in to one of the GW rules writers. We worked for months hashing out what questions we wanted to ask, and what the purpose of those questions were. We had moderators from the B&C help us make sure the wording was open and honest and we worked on it for 2 months with over 500 posts logged. In the end we did get a response which was full of one-word answers to questions we had spent a lot of time crafting. The answers were often yes or no, when we had asked for understanding. The worst part of it was that our guy on the inside felt that we had the wrong attitude and that we had written the questions in an aggressive way.

We had spent a lot of time trying to help GW make our game better by showing them what we needed to play better and I felt let down and dissapointed. I felt like the prevailent attitude was one of not having to be accountable for the decisions that were being made about the game that I loved and that I should be grateful for what we do have instead of wanting to see problems fixed.

Perhaps that makes me a little whiny, but I felt that we had been snubbed and brushed off. I also started noticing that GW had a tendency to make decisions that made very little sense to myself and my (admittedly not the whole world) group of gamers and fellow forum members. After a while the little things that started to bug me, started to bug me a lot and I finally found myself doing a Warmachine demo.

Fast forward to last month and I was still the same person (albeit now i'm managing my own store) feeling the same way about how 5th edition was going in some completely random directions for what seemed like no good reason. That was when I found Allesio Salvatore's pod cast about why he made all the changes he did. Listening to it, I felt like Alessio was actually taking the time to connect with gamers and tell them why they did what they did. I decided to order in a few copies of 5th edition and give them a read.

I have to say that I've had some big surprises since then. I realized that some of my favorite rules from other games (true line of sight, PP set up rules) are in this book. I also really like the rules as a whole. On the other side of things, GW has come out with the assault on black reach box set and it is the single most minis GW has ever sold for such a low price. If you break it down in a 40-40-20 split (marines-orks-rulebook) then you can get a dreadnaught ($55), a tac squad ($40), a termi squad ($50) and a commander ($25) for $25 buckaroos.

I really think that with all these things that GW has done I've been getting really excited about 5th edition. I've even decided to order in a bunch of the new stuff they're putting out and we're going to do a Game Day party to boot.

I hope that GW can get out of their slump and I really beleive that if they continue in the direction of customer service, connecting with their fans in a more personal way and making it cheaper and easier to get into the game, they will continue to be the biggest name in miniature wargaming in the world.

If GW can learn, grow and bite the bullet, then the State of the Game is Good +2