But then, why did MK falter, therefore leading to its coming demise ?

If WK introduced 2.0 to make a simpler game appealing to the casual gamer then why didn't the game skyrocket after the introduction of 2.0 ? Seriously, marketing to the larger mass of casual players has to have a higher revenue generating potential then selling to the smaller cadre of serious gamers ?

Bottomline, there are many factors at play here. As I've mentioned in this thread and others. Until someone from WK or Topps comes in and says, "this is why the game was not successful", then we are just grabbing at straws.

Bottomline, it's a shame because a game I truely enjoy to play in a competitive environment is fading away.

Steve

Here are a few items of note on my feelings about lack of focus on the part of WK regarding MK2.0:

1) I don't blame the game designers for their creative thinking and development of new and imaginative concepts....even the "over the top" ideas they had. Theory is great, and now then it falls to the playtesters to "break" the new ideas in actual gameplay.

2) Playtesting missed it many times in 2.0! I don't know who they are, what they did, or what they had to work with. You can't have designers be the playtesters, as they are somewhat biased in nature. GLARING EXAMPLE: Styrene which allowed auto-damage/kills without any kind of attack roll or an action to trigger it. We figured it out with Storm Maul that just giving damage and passing your turn was stupid and abused. We then figured out that suicide triggering Spirit Armor and/or K-Bow was screwed up and abused. No more suicide. Then we saw a domain like Death just eliminating figures for the heck of it was stupid and not meant for competitive play. Actually, I think the option of having something like that to throw a twist into a game is ok, but not for games that mean something. Then we see Death Throes and we're back to massive damage from a push or suicide. WTF??????? Didn't we learn something within the past year? How could it be missed AGAIN?

3) Quality Control issues. It was one thing in 1.0 when sometimes the gray square looked black or vice versa..or red looked orange, etc. Those could be easily clarified and stuff can happen with printing. However in 2.0, we have a defense of 5 instead of 15. We have printing problems on the inner and outer dial. Heck, sometimes we just had figures that didn't have a value printed......or one figure with 2 different point costs....depending on which one you got. Wrong factions or sub-factions.

Printing process throwing off colors is one thing....irritating but can be dealt with. There is just a lack of attention to detail, care, or quality control when the issue is one of "text" issues on the dials. Somebody is paid to check this stuff...how can it be missed. It wasn't that the screw up was with one figure or a small batch of that figure. It was throughout the entire print run. What a lack of urgency on proofing..... Sets were released a little too quickly, so perhaps we could have added a little more time for proofing the dials, etc.

4) At the places I "bought figures" (nowhere to really play), there was no additional advertising. The same window sticker looking MK ads that they had since Lancers era, were the only advertising I saw. Nothing new.....just faded out ####. There was no advertising......lucky if they even put out a poster of the figures that came with a case. Just nothing to promote the game.....no cool displays, no nothing worth mentioning.

5) NOW FOR THE MOST GLARING EXAMPLE OF LACK OF CARE ON THE PART OF WK'S, FOR MAGE KNIGHT (just sums it up for me):

Drum roll................

That cool Elven Lords LE mount (Mountain Warbird) that NOT ONE ELVEN LORDS FIGURE/RIDER COULD USE!!! Wasn't possible, Isn't possible, never will be possible.

Where do these people come from and what drugs are they taking (or not taking) to just miss something like this. Its just stupid, stupid, stupid.

Perfect example of a lack of care or attention to detail...I don't mind dumb people because they can't help it. But stupid people irritate the #### out of me, because they actually know better, but do something stupid anyway.

It just still chaps my hide.:mad:

Isn't that what this whole thread is about? ;)

Honestly, I don't think it's one thing. I think everything mentioned here probably had some bearing, even if minor.

As for my specific point, while that was the goal, the added complexity was a turn-off for some of those players. Just because you target some changes at a market, doesn't mean there isn't a barrier that makes it hard to gain those players.

Playtesters can only do so much.

With the limited time given to playtest a set, and the lack of responsiveness to playtester feedback.. things were going to slip through the cracks.

You try to break every relic/spell in a set in under 7 days. Good luck on that. :p

I agree with you Ku. They simply didn't give playtesters enough time to do what needed to be done.

Not to beat a dead horse, but if they did allow the playtesters to playtest long enough the problems likely would not have been an issue.

Agreed! Point Made. Point Taken. Point Scored.;)

Perhaps my on-going rant above makes it appear that when I'm saying some of those things, it is all directed at playtesting. It's not, I was only referring to the one part or my list of "stuff". Actually, I appreciate the people that take the time to do this kind of thing......I never did it, and just think how fast the game would have sunk if Ol' ChaimWitz was a playtester......sheesh.

When 2.0 came out, we not many would have realized the effect of Storm Maul "could" be, if combo'd in a manner that you couldn't get near it to shut it down....The point cost made it somewhat prohibitive, especially if it had to be on a figure with an equal or higher point total. That wasn't the case in the beginning.

I will say this though. Just the comment about the 7 days to "break" it speaks volumes to me. That's just NOT enough time, especially if you are having to do it in your spare time. Its another example of not allowing the time to MAKE SURE its as good as we can get it.

I guess I always envisioned guys in lab coats with clipboards watching through mirrored glass, watching the playtesters and making notes as things are discovered. That there is actual interaction between the designers, rules creators, etc. and the lab rat playtesters locked in a germ free room, while its being developed and tweaked.

I believe I may have been misguided on this point.:p

My point on playtesting was with the unforeseen issues with storm maul, Spirit armor/suicide, etc. once they were fixed, we missed Death Throes....it just seemed like we weren't noticing some of the obvious issues that had to be rectified in the recent past.

7 days.....sheesh. It took God how many days to create the universe? We all know that playtesting MK is much harder and playtesters should have been allowed more time to really "test" it. God couldn't have "broken" the Sorcery spells in 7 in just days!;)

Attention youngsters:

The above statements should serve as prime examples of why an education is so important.

Stay in school and learn to use Grammar and SpellCheck functions when available.:eek:

I think it outrageous that you should so victimise the poster that you refer to with this unasked for attack on their literary expertise.
I demand that you apologise to yourself immediately and promise to never so undermine the confidence of one of our less well educated members again. :p

Lets face it we (the players) killed the game it had problems to be sure but WE stopped playing the game .WE stopped buying boosters and WE stopped going to clubs, venues,whatever.Some of us still enjoy the game it is fun! But with no other players to play what can you do ?

As hard as it is sometimes, every once in a while tough love is the only way to go.;)

Orc Mage, this seems to be addressing my earlier post, so please let me clarify:

1. I'm going to preface this by saying that there is a difference in my mind between "Uber Players" and Competitive Players, with acknowledgements to DBlizzard. All competitive players are NOT crybabies when they lose; I didn't mean to imply that this was the case. If I offended anyone, I apologize. My comments were based on my own experience at the three venues in my area that frequently held Mage Knight tournaments. What happened here, I believe happened a lot of other places, and the combined effect was the low turnout for AP games in the last two years. That's what I was referring to in my prior post -- the loss of old players and the lack of new players to take their place.

What's the difference between an Uber Player and a Competitive one? It's stuff like you noted -- the sharing of strategy tips, and being a good sport when you win as well as when you lose. Competitive players will share tips aout their strategies ad ask you aout yours; Uber Players do not. Competitive players are good sports; Uber Players are not.

2. Uber Players do not want a level battlefield. The Uber Players build cheese, use it over and over until someone beats it, then build new cheese and sell off the pieces from the former cheese army to players who think that by using this cheese they will have the same success as the Uber Players. Of course, by this time the counter to the cheese is known, and so the players do not actually win against the new cheese of the week. Uber Players tour all the area venues and collect the same prize over and over again so they can sell them at a high mark-up to players who want to build the armies to which they keep losing. Winning a prize isn't good enough for Uber Players; they must win all of them, all of the time. This kind of play does not reflect a competitive spirit, and it does drive down the competitive spirit of potential new players who don't see the sense of playing a game against that kind of player.

Again, this is not a trait of all competitive players, but there were certainly enough Uber Players in my area to kill the game at two venues and cripple attendace at the third. What happened here has happened elsewhere, and that's what I think has hurt Mage Knight so completely.

3. All good gamers -- not just the competitive ones -- want a level battlefield. However, I disagree with your definition of "level." It's not just how well you play on the mat; it's also how well you build your army.

Getting "hosed" by a domain or a single combo means that your opponent built an army that, for that game anyway, got the better of yours. Domain cards and combos are part of army building, and army building is a major skill in a strategy-based game like Mage Knight. If you had played the right domain card, you might have hosed the opponent just as easily.

(It should also be noted that the domain cards that Uber Players complain about when they have to face them are the same ones that are in their army builds to use against someone else.)

The truly level battlefield would mean everyone has access to the same materials when they build their armies, which isn't likely because not everyone buys a case of figures. But the next best thing is to give everyone access to all of the information about all of the materials that could be used in a game. The WK site and these Realms give this information to anyone with a computer (which still isn't everyone who might play Mage Knight) -- so IMHO 2.0 is no more or less inherently unfair than 1.0 was. There were just so many more options in 2.0 that even an unschooled player might happen to pick something that trumps you.

Personally, I hate cheese armies more than anything else in either version of the game. I don't like to play folks who throw auto hit/damage relics on their figures, or who play relics that prohibit entire categories of attacks. But when I build my army, I expect that I may have to face them. So I plan accordingly.

BTW: It sounds like you favor tactics over equipment, too, and I totally respect that. I bet we'd have a lot of fun gaming with each other.


I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at here. What makes you think a home game can't be competitive, or that a tourney game can't be both competitive and cheese-free?

(I have my own reasons why I did not bought any boosters since MK 2.0, nothing that someone hasn't mentionned before on MKRealms)

That is not what I want to say here.

One thing that has always been obvious, to me, as a "player-at-home", is the importance of the tournament scene, tournament players, tournament everything... on forum discussion (even here in France where we are so few players).

I wonder if the tournament scene had that big an impact on MK, on game design, marketting strategies ect.

Reading you all, that maybe part of the explanation.

Someone mentionned Warmachine and Confrontation. As well as Warhammer, and 40K.

Forums about those games are as active as those about MK, probably more. But tournament issues are very rare on those forums.

Because, I think, those games are not designed with Tournaments in mind, most players don't play them in tournaments, don't build their armies with the last most effective combo in mind...

And I think that is what keeps their players gaming.

Yes, it was the players who killed MK. Why couldn't they have just accepted WK's word that there was nothing wrong with the game? That all their concerns and lack of fun was just them being stupid? :rolleyes:

It's our fault for not buying into a game that was faulty, making us dislike it more and more?


We're not going to hear someone from WK say "this is what killed the game" Come on, these are the same guys that still say MK is one of the most sucessful games on the market today in their press releases. They're in total denial. I bet they could read this entire thread and still refuse to understand what they did wrong.

While the "uber" players were a major problem, the excessive "style" players were a bigger one. The constant complaints about not being able to field a truly competitive single-faction or theme army gave the game a bad reputation that was thoroughly undeserved, as well as creating an image that there were problems that needed to be corrected.
No one at the venue I play at has ever had any trouble making highly effective theme armies. We play them against "uber" armies, we play them against other theme armies, and we have battles that come down to a single critical roll, or tactical choice.
Sure, some figures are better than others. And some factions needed certain sets to fully exploit their nastiest combinations. But you can build theme armies that crush ulta-competitive "power" armies in less than 15 minutes.
Just because you can't make a competitive army of wood golems (or oak warriors and oak mages) doesn't mean the game is "broken".
Indeed, if you now CAN make a competitive army of oak warriors and oak mages it doesn't mean the game is broken! (I haven't tried, but with spell books and relics, who knows?)

I am really getting sick of all of you people that keep blaming the demise of MK on the players. OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE!!!!

For every game there are there are extreme players. Magic the Gathering has them, Warhammer has them, Warmachine has them, etc.

Players are not the cause of a game failing.

Yes a lot of Mage Knight players stopped playing and purchasing the games. What caused these players to stop buying the product and stop playing the game?

THE INEPTITUDE OF THE COMPANY PRODUCING THE GAME!!!!!!!!!!

As long as players are still happy with the game they will continue to play the game, but when the game starts dropping in its quality level they move on.

All WK had to do was to keep the initial mindset of what made Mage Knight so successful and keep the game at the quality level it was in its heyday. They failed miserably. Again due to ineptitude. For those of you that don't know the meaning of the word ineptitude it roughly means lack of intelligence.

WizKids have been treating Mage Knight almost as an afterthought for so long that the game failed simply because they failed to put the proper time into the game.

The playtesters had one week to find problems in the game. Most playtesters for other companies have one month to do this.

WizKids needs to shoulder the blame for the demise of WK. They pushed the players and Envoys away from the game that they finally decided to end the misery.