White Dwarf Magazine has been around for years and has kept hobbyists informed for the last 40 years, but has the internet finally surpassed them?
Games Workshop has done everything it can to sell the most products to the largest group of people. They made the first commercial war-gaming mass combat system, and are the titan in the tabletop hobby world.
That being said, the digital age may have caught up to some of their practices, worst yet, they may have had a lot to do with it themselves.
White Dwarf & the Internet
As time has gone on, we’ve noticed a trend between all White Dwarf Magazines. With all of the rumors and previews swimming around the internet these days, most of the “meat” of White Dwarf gets spoiled early.
On top of that, by the time White Dwarf comes out, most of the new release “ads” inside are already outdated
For example, the huge Ork spread in November’s White Dwarf Magazine structure includes roughly:
- 142 pages total
- 31 pages of ads.
- 16 pages of gift guides
The other 100(ish) pages have:
- written bat reps.
- painting articles.
- gold demon features,
- readers’ painted minis
Basically, there’s nothing in the White Dwarf that isn’t online already. Plus they stopped showing what is coming later in the month new release wise years ago, in order to spoil it on Warhammer Community.
Lets be real here folks, the rest of the previews from the White Dwarf are leaked into a thread somewhere, there’s only about 900,000 painting videos/articles on the internet already (and they’re free), and you can watch a battle report on YouTube every day for the rest of your life and never run out.
Interviews with designers? GW streams them on Twitch already, and Golden Demons are on their own website even. Don’t even get us started on painting tutorials, yes Peachy and Duncan get it done, but again there are a million other folks out there who are doing the very same thing all day, every day.
About the only thing, you can’t get online from the White Dwarf are exclusive new rules (unless they are leaked) and the Blanchistu features.
Bottom line: the White Dwarf is worked on by a team of writers for content that’s not new. Maybe they could devote their manpower to something people actually want.
Focus the Manpower on Game Rules
From the beginning of 8th edition, we were promised a dynamic rules set that made every unit a good option. We are still waiting on that. With all of the FAQs dropping left and right, the game has become in a lot of folks opinion a bloated game of chasing the latest FAQ carrot evey four months.
Hotfixes are happening so common it’s making people’s heads spin. Not even a week after the Space Wolves codex came out, GW announced that they needed to fix something. Space Wolves players now have a codex with the entire warlord trait table incorrect.
As a general rule of thumb, new codex releases help as they make an entire army relevant again. It lets people explore the secret tricks the army has to offer. But then the game settles back down into what the meta was before.
Basically what we’re saying is that 8th edition isn’t bad, but it has so much more potential.
Hypothetically, if GW took those writers for White Dwarf and gave them the task of writing relevant rules and more in-depth playtesting, the game could be more stable and balanced.
If their work, though very well done, and presented to us each month is becoming redundant, why not shift them to a place where they really can make a difference, and make 40k great again?
Rushed development work resulting in FAQs as it’s a sign that they didn’t explore every possibility of a broken combo in-game.
For instance, Robin Cruddace made a quick day one tournament house rule at Nova Open because Juice showed him in the invitational how the Fly rule really worked versus how they may have intended it at Nova open. His opponent actually agreed with him as well. All of this played out live on-stream and really put the exclamation point on just how far things have gone awry for the game since 8th dropped only a year prior.
One month later the main rules have once again been errataed and you know how the fly rule works now in with respects to charging in Warhammer 40k.
Now the Orks codex dropped and some of us are scratching our heads as to the wording on some things like a currently legal 1+ sv on Meganobz for starters.
Let’s make 40k great again Games Workshop, are you with us?
How do you feel about White Dwarf compared to the capabilities of the internet? Do you think GW should devote more manpower to writing rules and stats for balancing the game?
Let us know in the comments of our Facebook Hobby Group.
About the Author: Rob Baer
