This thread has had some spirited word play. seems as if everyone has an opionion and some quite nasty things are being thrown around. Lets take a deep breath and calm down.After all it is just a game.WK has left a lot of us in the cold.No one enjoyed the game more than me, and I do feel somewhat betrayed. But as this thread has pointed out no ONE thing led to the demise of this game, it was multitude(if you look at all the opinions posted here).I just hope the next incarnation is half as good as the last.

extruder,
I doubt very much that any future incarnation of MK from Wk will resemble our game in anything but name and story-line.
Much as I would like to be wrong I believe that the MK clickable miniatures collection that we have now is all that we will ever have to use in our future games. Personally I will continue to play it as long as I have an oponent (perhaps not so frequently).

I think that WK missed the point totally and tried to retain ownership and force the direction of a game that many people had taken to their hearts because of what it was at conception and early production. Later developments both game-wise and relationship-wise cost them players and their loyalty.

Some of my friends (Xanathon amongst them) were such keen players and supporters of the game that it is a crying shame that they feel so negative now.

Mismanagement is the reason that Mk has been axed, from misguided (not malicious) changes to the game-play to poor customer relations interfacing, the company are responsible.

I do wish them well in whatever they go on to do, but I sincerely doubt that they will ever again hit the spot so perfectly as they did with MK Alpha.
But if they do, I hope that they have learned how to manage its growth in a way that will not deteriorate into the mass disappointment that will mar the memory of an awesome game for so many people.

Oh I agree orc mage. The days of the dial are done I belive it will be with cards ala Pirates, or magic.Thats a shame to because half the fun of MK were the figures. I may have a solonavi sign here but the way to my heart is Draconum.

WizKids Killed Mage Knight in the Tower with the Candle Stick (Bwa..ha..ha!).

(shows mustang the card on my hand of the TOWER)

I roll a six and make a mad dash to Fen Swamps.

Kossak Darmdringer with the Blade of Dominance in the Fen Swamp

I've been around since mage knight started, I'm sorry to see it go. I've pretty much sold everything except a few pieces like Podo, Trueshot and some others. D&D is my new game now. All the best to everyone. Majoris.

Personally I don't think the playtesters are to blame. Even if they were given a full year to playtest and it came out this bad for so many releases, WK is still to blame for being the company that chose those individuals. So 1 week, 1 year, it doesn't matter.
HOWEVER, I happen to suspect that overall, WK made good choices in their playtesters. So the fault? Not listening to, or perhaps not understanding, the feedback they gave. I think they were actually looking for different feedback than the playtesters gave, which means miscommunication with or misleading playtesters, either one of these bad...

I believe it was mismanagement from the top. I'm pretty sure too many yes men were involved in the office environment. I personally became ill of hearing certain individuals up north tell the grass-roots Warlords how things were when it seemed they had NO CLUE as to what reality was. Perhaps in their gaming stores in Washington State things were as they claimed, but that didn't cut it in San Antonio or Austin, TX, & it made WK seem clueless. Really really clueless.

I could go on and on. I can salvage enough great memories from the game to basically play how I want with friends from now on. AT the end of the day, the fact that there are so many disagreements here as to the cause, I think it safe to consider there is no ONE cause. Just repeated mistakes... repeated again and again and again... Fool me once WK, shame on you... fool me twice.... well, y'all know the rest.

Tal(shame on me!)Wyrmkin

Well kossack was easy to demolish, tezla's shade with a solonavi that could change planes just as fast as him, or anything.

Squash his support with your force and then just wait for that last 1 in 6 chance of an instant win.

Well kossack was easy to demolish, tezla's shade with a solonavi that could change planes just as fast as him, or anything.

Squash his support with your force and then just wait for that last 1 in 6 chance of an instant win.

i've been a player since the beginning of MK, i stumbled into my local store and picked up a few boxes in place of the pokemon i went to buy.

I was hard pressed to find an opponent so i left. A few years later my friend was like ooo mini's get me some. I found a group of players in teh basement there and started playing for about a year. They stopped showing up and came back to the game around the time that minions was released. Still endeared to the game i went on for a few months before phasing out.

Lastly i came back to the game with the release of 2.0. IMO the set did have alot of #### to sift through but it was like all the old sets, something to start you with. DR was fantastic, however C/MC and B/MB were broken. Sorc was my favorite yet. Simple rules once you tried to master them.

The game, IMO, died due to the retirement, the broken game mechanics at times. (Kbow Kamakaze, C/MC, Blade of Dominance, BoL, and many more)

What was good and needed for gameplay was retirement. All new super cheese could emerge with magic enhance from Rebellion. Imagine Steam Maulers hitting AoE for 5 damage. Not fun to be catching magic shells of lead. I will always love this game, but WK has gotten lazy on the fiction in this game as well.

Its clear to me - All of the above. Too many releases too close together, for a agme that only really uses a few at a time. Too many rules changes, game went from simple to complicated. Too much concearn about what you could do in a tourney instead of what you could do on the dining room table with a few friends. Too many strange players using big words and "cool-sounding abbreviations".
If it had been kept simple, only 1, maybe 2 releases a year, and possibly being avilable in more places than just in hobby stores. Lets face it, not many people go to the hobby stores, mainly people with pocket protect.... never mind, but you know Im right.
Slow it down, keep it simple, let everyone buy/compete/collect on an even basis, maybe some adds on TV, and some boosters in K-mart, and the game would still be alive.
I will miss mage knights terribly. I started an ebay business selling mage knights, and it was he best job I ever had. Now its crashed, and I cant find squat to easily buy and resell. I gotta go flip burgers now.
And puhleeeze, no flak about selling on ebay. Every product has a secondary market, and not only guys with a hobby store have a right to sell mage knights, (or pinch LEs).
Nexus really hit the bottom of the barrel. They could have just said "we give up" with this TOTAL lack of thought put into this product. I have never seen ANY product with such a low resale value - EVER! I could not make a penny on nexus, even if I got cases for $50.
I will keep selling MK as D&D alternatives since the mage knight sculpts are so very very nice. But the days of getting even $10 for a good figure are over. As soon as my regular customers have completed thier collections, I will be done with mage knights as a main seller.
Risk, Monopoly, Stratego, even checkers and chess games will still be selling LONG after MK is forgotten. Why? Simple, never change, sold in stores everywhere - bottom line.
Its been a fun ride, I enjoyed it - good bye to all, and see some of you in the next great game to live a shortened life.

After all that has been said about the game in a larger sense, I'd like to focus on the local scene we had. We did fair to good until our local game store closed up in spring 2003. Attendance was already down to a few players, but that was the death knell. That fall another game store opened but they never had any MK tournaments scheduled until summer 2004. That drew a couple out of towners as well as a friend and myself, but that wasn't enough to sustain MK in a store that had much more popular game lines taking up time slots on the schedule. The second fading away was fatal.

The closest venue out of our area scheduling tournaments was a bit under 100 miles away and that venue ran phony tournaments. Apparently WizKids shut the flow of prize support to them, so at least that was good but there was nothing closer. Venues over 100 miles away weren't all that active or else their time slots were inconvenient for long days of gaming and travel. Finally the gas prices got too ridiculous to even think about going as who wants to play a few games while spending $30 for gas and a light meal? It was cheaper to buy the LE's being released on eBay and enjoy the day at home doing something else!

The old saying about all politics being local could easily be paraphrased into all gaming being local. Every single venue that faded out and every play group that disappeared had it's own timelines and reasons. There's a ton of 'em! Too bad it wasn't a ton of reasons why the game succeeded and we still had the CMG that got the whole thing going in a big way.

In the end, I still like the collecting aspect and all I need now is a complete set of Dracs and Solos from Nexus to wrap up the series for these factions. Even with no gaming going on other than the occasional match with a friend, I still enjoy the figures. There was nothing like it before. Hopefully we'll never see the horror story of how a successful out-of-the-gate game dies again.

Wyvern

In my area(southern NJ)there were five venues supporting MK.By early 2005 it was down to one! You could show up and nobody else came.It got to the point where it just wasn't worth the effort.

My last (and only 2nd overall) tourney I went to, the store owner had to buy a booster and play just so we could have 4 players. That was all for mage knights in this small town usa.

Wow, my account's still valid, I was a little surprised. I haven't played in a year or two, but I've been on the boat from the beginning, and here's the sad tale of Mage Knight.

1. Release. A time of solid gold, the dial is ingenious and new, the idea is great.

2. Buildup to Whirlwind. The tournament scene starts to form, and the game is awash in players.

3. High Water Mark. Around the Sinister expansion, Dungeons is coming out and neat, things are generally going okay. Some of the steam is gone, but the players seem happy.

4. Problems Ahead. WizKids starts meddling with the golden goose. Big rule changes are implemented with little rhyme or reason, ignoring player feedback. The tournament program starts sprouting bizarre regulations that the Warlords are told to implement. Players start to trickle away.

5. 'Hey, remember all those figures you paid hundreds of bucks for? They're worthless!' Mage Knight 2.0 is released. At first WizKids tries to claim that the old figures will be compatible, but that falls apart in short order when it gets out that all new figures will be in new factions, save Draconum and Solonavi. The mass exodus begins. The Mage Knight scene in my town, which had been rather sickly, dies at this point. I let my Warlord status expire; there's nobody to run tournaments for anyways.

6. 'Um, yeah, we SAID they'd be compatible...' WizKids tosses the last shovel of dirt on the original game by declaring all of the sets invalid for tournament play.

7. Descent to Oblivion. More expansions come out, collectively gather dust and go on discount sale.