Meat for Meta: No Answer to the Haterade

This maelstrom is mostly benign; with rumors, price hike rage, and casual vs. competitive, just silly fragments in a tapestry of general interest. Something though has happened since 6th edition changing the ways people discuss Warhammer 40k and Games Workshop in particular. It is hard to pin-point the exact why, a confluence of factors are certainly at play. It is like death by a million cuts, but GW seems to have hit a tipping point. You can easily wrap yourself up in the stock crash story, but stocks rise and fall and looking at only at the short-term isn’t financially prudent in any way.

What it did bring out was self-described GW hobbyists applauding their possible financial ruin. I have been playing and covering GW for a long time and have seen this sort of behavior before, but never had I seen the discourse so one-sided. The voices of reason or at the very least logical thought processes have left the building. Vitriol towards GW had always seemed like 60/40 ratio against, but now anywhere you go online it looks more like 90/10.

For simplicity call it the Yelpification of the wargaming community. Every experience, every story, ever rumor is either a one star or five-star affair never anything in between. Worse, the five-star reviews are guaranteed to be dead on arrival, drowned out by all the bad ones. This black and white view of everything GW does is devastating. Imagine if you are starting out with the game, and you go to any large forum, wouldn’t you quit the game right there and then?

They hug forums giving into every impulse to bash the game they once loved. These are the players who haven't bought a model since 3ed edition, to the competitive tools who just can't understand 6th edition. At this point it doesn’t matter their exact reasons for not playing, but they all cannot help, but poison the well for everyone else.They might play other games and claiming to be better than Warhammer, but deep down want nothing more, but to play the version of Warhammer that won’t ever return.

They bring misery, never understanding why people would still give money to a company betraying them on a daily basis. They won’t ever be pleased and GW rightfully should ignore them. The big dilemma is GW bashing is almost a career path as this point. The largest discussion sites might moderate you for attacking a random person by name, but if you hate GW in any nebulous terms, no problem. This only creates a community driven by who trolls the most and has the time to always respond back. So, while wargaming expands by leaps and bounds the resentment towards the GW is never quenched.

The third part to this equation, is where have the GW defenders gone? At first glance you'd think they've completely disappeared. In reality, they simply moved to safer pastures. Personally, in the last year I have joined five Facebook community pages promoting the hobby, sure there is sometimes the obligatory WTH GW thread, but the discussion is always intelligent and sometimes thought-provoking. Then their are small forums, catering to niches within the community, like painting, narrative games, or podcasts. This laser focus speaks to players tired of the next GW F’uped how thread. While the 40k community may seem to have contracted it has grown in other ways.

Taken altogether, you can understand the mass negativity currently permeating the hobby. The players who love the game and the Internet have fled to protective manufactorums of happy thoughts, instead of fighting the rising hate tide. This is all dangerous to GW and they are the only ones who can change it, because even their most ardent fans have fled the barricades.