Because it’s easy to to get your hands on it.

I was hoping for a few harder-hitting questions considering how much heat Gav has taken over the years for the masses of poorly-conceived and unbalanced rules and codices he foisted on the 40k community. In our local club having Thorpe write your army’ss codex was for years called “Getting Gav’d.” Maybe his work improved after I left near the end of 3rd ed 40k, but as a dedicated Eldar player I struggled mightily with the stinker we wrote, and I’ll never have much respect for his abilities as a game designer. I like his fiction just fine, but I think he’ll do better to concentrate on prose rather than game dev for his future.

Making no personal attack on Gav whatsoever, I have noticed a trend in GW staff interviews.

When asked, they almost universally state that they have only ever played GW games, own only one or two forces, and very often haven’t even tried the full GW range of games. It is only after leaving GW that they seem to open their eyes and say “hey, there are other games out there! And they do things differently!”

This is very surprising to me. I don’t work for GW - I don’t even really like GW much - but over the years I have at least tried every GW game and tested out almost every army. It seems to me that their developers should have at least done as much. Who is doing the playtesting anyways?

I would also think that the developers would want to try out, or at least read, every game on the market. Some market research might put an end to GW being so far out of the loop as to what the players want, and so far behind the times on rules.

They also seem to always say that they don’t think rules are so important, they frequently lose at their own games, and balance and tactics aren’t their strong points.

Perhaps GW should push all their developers into writing their background and recruit all the math-hammer gamers on the forums into their rules department.

As I said, this is just my observation, and I have no problem with developers more interested in stories and painting than rules. But GW has spent so long trying to revitalize their market with gimmicks and staff restructuring, and the number one complaint I hear about their games is the rules. I notice many will even buckle down and pay the prices they ask for some nice miniatures if only the rules were any good.

I would love to see GW go so far as to become a story, art, and hobby center and license out its IP to more calculating rules teams to make wargames, computer games, and role-playing games that are both interesting in plot and satisfying tactical challenges.

Ah well, I guess it is all just part of the puzzle.