"You must spread Reputation around before yadda yadda yadda..."

Chase variants - One of the Supermen *could* have been a New Guy Night/ FCBD promo. One of the best sculpts in the game and one of the hardest to get.

LE Cardboard - didn't have to be so broken/useless.

Outright Lies - never a good thing. You're only as good as your word.

I agree, the leader always takes a lot of flak, but I'd chalk up people's resentment to a combination of some poorly thought out decisions and the way he communicated.



*shrug*

Among the multitude of other points people are bringing up, I had communicated directly with him (via e-mail) about getting the keyword mistakes on the older (pre-character card) figures corrected. At his request, I had sent him a detailed list of what was wrong with which characters and why, and NOTHING got done with it.

I can't remember the exact words, but I think he called prize support bribes or something and whined about players at tourney's.

I think this was when we started to get cardboard as prize support.

I also remember reading that when asked about the sucky Avengers dials not turning, that he feigned ignorance of the fact and dismissed the gripes outright.

I can't recall how many boosters of Avengers I opened that had that problem in the beginning, and I had to physically trim them inside just to make them turn.

So, he needs no apologetics.
So please don't.

I don't think people are disagreeing with you here, its just that some people are better at it than others and Mark was definitely not very good at it.

Let's be honest Mark didn't really bring anything new to the table. What he saw was a collectable product and he treated it the same as most companies have in the past. He relied on old gimmicks that brought short term gain that usually has negative effects that aren't felt until much later. As mentioned before this has happeend to both the baseball card market and comic book market.

I think where he failed was that he approached it more as a collectable product and less as a game. I think a good brand manager would be able to find the balance between the two without resorting to old marketing gimmicks.

I also never understood why Mark Tuttle decided to use Wizards of the Coast as the standard for what the Heroclix packaging should look like, I often wonder if he used D&D and Star Wars CMGs as game standards as well which is why we got character cards. He was afterall a Wizards of the Coast employee before moving to Wizkids. Wizkids started the CMG market they should have been setting the standards.

To be fair, I think prize support is mostly a form of bribery. There are many stores that can run tournaments fine without prize support, but a great deal more gets terrible turnouts due to lack of prizes or the dreaded "Lame LE".

The JL tournaments got terrible numbers when compared to the Avengers tournaments. This is partly due to the timing (Avengers was Summer and JL was fall), but I am certain that the numbers would have been much higher if we had better starro-slave LEs. (and lets not forget the rampant dishonestly in the old days, where judges received judge prizes based on turnout).

Personally I don't mind this type of bribery system. Players get to come and compete/play, winners and fellowship walks away with a prize, the game stays popular, and stores get a continuous flow of interest which translates into sales.

Everyone wins.

-The Le

Communication goes a loooonnnggg way towards lessening the sting of some of the cost cutting measures.

Absolutely. She was one of the company's strongest assets.

I never had interaction with him, but considering I was one of the few who said "I quit" in response to special powers and the lack of REV and meant it, I suppose I have some issues with the guy.

But I never met him. Seth on the other hand, I met a few times in person, and he always seemed full of himself. Rubbed me the wrong way.

He wouldn't listen to any feeback, and any serious issues brought up to him were met with a "so what" attitude.

That, right there, sums it up perfectly. Imagine a PR person that doesn't do PR, they do marketing. The distinction is very important.

Near the end, she WAS the company's strongest asset. Bar none, period. Rep to her.

I should have prefaced my post by stating that I do agree that he has lack of communication skills and did do some things wrong - but I don't believe that anyone in that position can succeed. It just seems like too large of a tug of war between making $ for the company and pleasing the customer. I was in no way trying to be an apologist for him, I don't know the guy. I play a game where he did some things good for it and did some things bad for it. I also know that no one here can stand on a soap box and start destroying this guy for some things he may have done wrong, when I know that all of us would have made decisions for the game that not everyone would agree with.

Like I said before, if a company has a great game, and things are going good for it I'll give them a pass on some of the bad things. Did it seem like clix was starting to have more and more wrong with it? Yea that's why it is dead now - hopefully when it comes back some of those errors will be taken care of.

I also had no direct interactions with him except a "what's up" when passing at World's last year, mainly because I didn't really care if I talked to him or not. If he dismissed a lot of things like people are saying, then yea he definitely wasn't the guy for the job. Some of these new guys seem to be the exact opposite though.

I totally agree that the communication part is a huge thing. That's what I love so much about Privateer Press, they talk about things. Same thing seems to be happening with the new guys of clix that might be there when it's brought back. Let's hope.

with respect to CuriousLurker...
Can you show us on the clix exactly where he rubbed you?

I was really excited when Jake Theis (sp?) came on as Brand Manager. He seemed to connect to the fan base a bit more.

Yea definitely. Like I said I hope when clix comes back these new guys are around. They seemed to care what we all thought. And if Tuttle wasn't involved in that then that was a big mistake. Anyone who thinks they know the product better than the consumer is doomed.