by Peter Atkinson

Why bother?  Why get fired up over previews and reveals when we don’t know the full picture yet?  If you don’t care about speculation, and you just want to sit back and let it lap over you – more power to you.  I’m not here to try and convince you that you should care (at all) – it’s more a matter of explaining my own mindset on leaks and reveals, which I think some other people share, but which I haven’t really seen articulated.  I do think there are two polarized mindsets when it comes to how we experience and enjoy the drip-feed stage, so my goal today is to help people who don’t enjoy speculating and extrapolating to understand why others of us do – even if you personally find it exasperating at times.

I certainly don’t expect everyone reading this to be on the same page as me.  It’s more about sharing a perspective on why we think about these releases in the way that we do, because it seems to have a few people completely bewildered.

Why we do it

When I read a preview, my mind starts whirring.  Can’t help it.  I can’t consume WH passively – that’s why I’m more invested in a living wargame than in boardgames.  I’m living the life, thinking about it when I’m not playing it and that’s where I get real value from the hobby.

For context, one of my main joys in the hobby is writing interesting and competitive Lists.  It’s why we have the Listbuilding Challenge as a signature series on the blog, and why you won’t catch me running a netlist – you might as well tell me to let another man wear my underpants as to let him write my army list for me. 

“Build, Paint, Play” goes the marketing mantra.  Well I would argue that you can add a 4^th string to the miniature wargaming hobby – “Think About”.   When I’m out for a run, or having a quiet moment at work, sometimes my mind does go to my hobby and it’s one of the little pleasures I get from it.  Maybe you’re thinking about ideas for a paint scheme but in my case, it’s more likely to be a list idea, something I could have done differently in the last game I played or how I can craft a win condition against a problem in the meta with the tools my armies have.

In this context, thinking about how the game will shake out over coming months – and how my armies will interact with that – is the heartbeat of how people like me enjoy the hobby.  We enjoy chewing it over, looking back and looking forward, and for someone else to tell us that we shouldn’t think that way is just a form of gaslighting.  Actively reflecting on the game, and our armies, is how we enjoy the hobby.

There’s also the small matter that this is the main way we’re able to enjoy the hobby at all right now. Don’t know about your neck of the woods, but 3rd Edition is completely dead around here right now. As dead as the Tasmanian Tiger. As dead as the phoneline in North Melbourne’s membership sales office. As dead as your BOC collection, and my Greenskinz, and my Gitmob, and my Bonesplitterz. GW are drip-feeding these reveals for a reason, and that reason is to fire up a reaction.

Having an opinion on what they’ve given us is not unreasonable. What would be unreasonable is presenting those opinions as fact, or on the other hand, expecting everybody’s reaction to be identical. When you put this stuff out there, you can’t demand nothing but relentless adulation like we’re all living in The Lego Movie.

Somebody’s favourite army is going to end up bottom of the pile. There’s shaping up to winners and losers, haves and have nots and people are going to react accordingly. Be a bit weird if we didn’t.

Rebuttals

So that’s the mindset – when people ask “What’s the point?”, well that’s the point.  We enjoy the mental challenge of the game and we care about our armies – prognosticating about the shape of the former and the prospects of the latter tickles the right parts of our brains.

There are a few more specific counterpoints that come up often in this space, so I’d like to explore them next, and make a few rebuttals where appropriate.

“We don’t know the full picture”

Correct, and we don’t need to.  Trying to fit the pieces together and fill in the blanks is part of the stimulation.  We actively enjoy that puzzle.

What I do find really interesting here is that this only ever gets thrown around when people take a reveal badly – it’s rarely or never used in an attempt to shut down or silence someone who thinks a reveal looks good, even though it’s logically the exact same thing. 

For example, I thought the Ogors reveal was woeful and the Giants reveal was top-drawer.  I was vocal about both online.  It was only the former that copped pushback, and I could have told you in advance that would be the case – my predictions about the early 4^th Edition meta might prove to be wide of the mark, but predictions about how people will react to these opinions hit the bullseye every time.  Say you think something looks crap, and out will come the chorus.  Say you think the same thing looks awesome – based on exactly the same level of information – and those same people will offer no pushback whatsoever. 

Truth is, in a lot of cases it’s a bad faith argument.  They’re not concerned with the level of information you’re working on, they’re simply tone policing, quod est demonstrandum.  And nobody has the right to tone-police your opinions on a Warhammer reveal – I’ve been doing this for years so it’s water off a duck’s back to me, but if it’s silencing other people who feel they can’t have an opinion on their hobby, then that’s a tremendous shame.

“We don’t know points yet”

A close relative of the point above, this one is actually a very valid criticism.  There aren’t many units and armies that can’t be rescued by having cheap enough points to blast through their mediocre rules with sheer efficiency – if you’ve got a bad reveal, points could yet come riding to the rescue.

But that’s OK.  I’d argue that this is more of a reason to be cautious about your opinions on how your army is projecting, rather than a reason not to give it any consideration at all.  There’s a whole spectrum of tentative conclusions you can draw from these reveals, one of which is “Underwhelming, but could be salvageable if points are right”.  That’s exactly where I’d put Kragnos for example.  It doesn’t have to lurch straight from “broken” to “unplayable” with no room for qualitative verdicts in-between. 

One other point I’d make here is that GW have trained us all to know that points will change and be flexed a lot more rapidly than rules.  Rules are (partially) known and points are not, so I’d rather be in the position of having a great set of rules to work with (and let’s just see where the points land), than having lacklustre rules and praying for points to get me out of a hole.  Again, I think that’s a pretty rational and reasonable reaction to what we’ve been shown, and what we haven’t – it’s the idea that we don’t know points so we should just chuck in the towel entirely that strikes me as being the more extreme position to take.

“This is just clickbait”

Question: if I was doing this to desperately grub for maximum clicks, do you seriously think I’d have Bonesplitterz (still) as one of my most commonly-used keyword tags?

If I was just here to stir the pot there’s plenty of easier ways to do that, including writing about Warhammer 40K instead, as well as constantly telling GW that the sun shines out of their backsides to get free promotional copies.  We write about this game because we care about it, we’ve got a lot of experience in it and we’ve got something to say.  So I’m afraid you’re going to need a better argument than that one.

“Whinging is a waste of time”

You’ll hear this about reveals, but also other similar spheres of the hobby: for example if you get a dud Battletome, or you’ve had to play against an army with comically broken rules.  And it is utter bollocks.

Let me take you back to the early days of Age of Sigmar (I’ve been along for the whole journey), when the game didn’t even have points.  Where would the game be today if we all just passively accept whatever GW pushes at us?  We’d still be playing a “game” with no points that barely functions as a game at all.  We could make a similar point about plenty of changes in this game over the years, big and small.  Taking a more recent example, remember the outrage over DOK’s 3 VP battle tactics?  How we as a community replied with a collective “Nope”?  How some events started dropping battle tactics entirely, since the win condition was directly skewed towards this army for no good reason whatsoever?  You can just as easily call the reaction to that ridiculous decision “whinging” if you like, but if you do, the truth is we whinged that shit right out of the game.

Now, there are as many opinions on this game as there are players, so GW can’t possibly go in every direction at once.  Not every online comment is going to lead directly to action by the dev team – that would be insane.  But we’re all participants in an ongoing conversation, where groundswell or consensus can and does lead to measurable outcomes.

Whinging is obviously a perjorative term, again deployed in most cases not to defeat your arguments but to shut down your right to an opinion.  You can call it whinging, complaining, criticism, feedback, whatever you like – but the reality is, it can and does work. 

In conclusion

If you don’t see jumping on reveals as a good use of your mental energy, I can’t disagree with you.  It’s an especially futile pursuit in what is essentially a futile hobby.  We’re spending our money (and lives) buying and thinking about overpriced plastic toys and at the end of the day, it’s only worth thinking about if you enjoy thinking about it. 

And that’s the thing – a lot of us do.  We enjoy reading between the lines, we enjoy thinking ahead to how the game might flow and we enjoy daydreaming about future glory.  If you feel like the reveals are showing us Haves and Have Nots, there’s a good chance you’re correct, and it’s ok to not be delighted when your own favourite armies land amongst the Have Nots.

And something important here is that voicing your opinion is cathartic in its own right – even if your own feedback never leads to action by GW, it’s important to get it off your chest, add to the conversation and that’s what lets you move on from there.  Never let the tone police make you feel like you can’t have an opinion – it’s your hobby too.

If you’d like to help us continue our work, we’d love to have your support. All Patreon Tiers include Discord access, exclusive articles and regular contests. Our Tiers are priced to be within everyone’s reach, so please click here to join us today!