All the FAQs are gone

For reals.

GW updated their website, and now all the Errata/FAQs are gone.

I'm having a really, really boring day so thought I'd try to investigate further, and called Customer Services to ask where they were.

I was told very clearly that the FAQs are "not available" and that they "maybe added to the website at some point in the future, however there are no set plans to do so at the moment".

As I'm involved in running the Pompey Pillage this year I've asked them to get a definite ruling on whether this will happen, and whether that means the FAQs are legal (albeit unavailable) rules or not. I am awaiting a call back on that one.
(Also sent email to see who else I can set on the task)

This is quite incredible. And just in general I do not like the website at all.

It will be interesting to see what you get back from them...

Guess they really are a model company, not a rules company.

I've emailed Customer Service about it this morning as soon as I saw it (no response yet), but I did get a "Thanks" back from my contact in the dev studio when I emailed him about the FAQs/Erratas being missing and how that's a problem for players.

EDIT: Looks like someone got a response about the FAQs before I did:

GW Customer Service wrote:

Thanks for writing in to us! We are aware that the new web store launched without the Errata/ FAQ articles. This is only temporary and these FAQ's will be made available again in the very near future. However, at this time I don’t have a time or date available. Should you have any other questions, then please give us a call at 1-800-394-4263.

Sorry for the confusion, but I hope this helps.

According to a comment on Faeit212 someone e-mailed them and got the following reply:

Thanks for writing in to us! We are aware that the new web store launched without the Errata/ FAQ articles. This is only temporary and these FAQ's will be made available again in the very near future. However, at this time I don’t have a time or date available. Should you have any other questions, then please give us a call at 1-800-394-4263.

Sorry for the confusion, but I hope this helps

EDIT - Further info on BoLS. Apparently the FAQ's are being updated.

Believe it when you see it folks...

I am sure most of the Dark City has seen the new GW website. I was most curious about the missing FAQs page. Well my facebook feed answered that with a post from the Bell of Lost Souls:

After the Errata and FAQ articles were removed from the GW website following the update, I sent GW (UK) an email asking what had happened to them. I got this response this morning:

"...
Thanks for the email regarding the FAQs on the new website.

Currently the FaQ's are not available on the website, as the design team are taking this opportunity to fully update all the FAQ and Errata articles. This is only temporary and these FAQ's will be made available again in the very near future.
..."
So apparently we should be getting a full update for ALL FAQ and Errata articles soon, straight from the horse's mouth.

What do you think this means? I'm hoping they address a lot of issues the game is having. Maybe they realized after dramatic drop in sales and the rising popularity for competitive games from Fantasy Flight and Privateer Press, that GW will finally take an initiative to be inclusive of competitive players.

What this means to me is:
Proper play testing
Removal of Battle Brothers. (Allies remain. But no more Battle Brothers)
Change to the Grimoire

The reason behind the removal of Battle Brothers and change to Grimoire. It will stop many deathstar lists. It would hurt screamerstar, seerstar (a bit), Super friends, Beaststar a bit(if you take jetseer w/ Shard) just to name a few.

What is your hope and dreams?

I wouldn't get your hopes up for any actual changes. They just haven't done a proper FAQ for best part of a year no so there's a lot of stuff to answer.

Of course, there's no reason they couldn't have done a new FAQ whilst the old one was still on the site...

I have no hopes or dreams in this regard. The old FAQ's were upgraded in April and September of each year, so I expected them to all be updated sometime this month anyway. That they weren't ready in time for the new site launch, or somebody simply forgot them, just stuns me.

When it first came to light that they weren't included, I immediately thought of Jervis' recent article about players creating their own balance within the game. But I didn't really think that the FAQ's would just be gone, that would be too much. Now I am wondering if they are being delayed a bit because of this rumoured 6.5/7.0 rulebook sometime this summer and the need to mesh with that?

They are just lazy in building a proper website. The FAQs and Errata are currently missing because the webdesign implemented an unfinished page, thus the options are not there. I highly doubt that they will redo any of the FAQs although it might be a good opportunity for them since they're down anyways.

In terms of game design I'll point you to the recent article in the white dwarf, where Jervis Johnsson talks about gaming groups and stuff. It's basically a 2 page write up of how awesome and useful gaming groups are for house rules and stuff. Long story short, he wants the players to choose the rule-set they like best from the bazillion options published by GW. For example you don't like escalation?! you don't play escalation. You don't like allies?! Don't use them and so on.

Between the lines this means that GW will / has already stopped playtesting and passes the ball to create balance through a comp system to the players to make it a competetive game. They just care about pretty models and some rules to go with them, no matter how inaccurate or overpowered they are. This in short means they want to sell more while thinking less.

Edit: Thor beat me to the mention of the article.

There's also a dedicated thread about this article somewhere in the General 40k Discussion.

Back on topic: I think we're overreacting because of missing FAQs. What it means though is that for some time we are able to assault out of a WWP again, because technically there are no official FAQs available and the codex says we can ;)All being sneaky and stuff

Dogmar wrote:

Back on topic: I think we're overreacting because of missing FAQs. What it means though is that for some time we are able to assault out of a WWP again, because technically there are no official FAQs available and the codex says we can ;)All being sneaky and stuff

  
Win!

Quote :

the design team are taking this opportunity to fully update all the FAQ and Errata articles.

There were a few typos they needed to fix. That is the extent of GW's updates.

Yes I emailed GW too, and got the same response.

(For a while I thought the email circulating around was the one I had sent and posted about on The Warhammer Forum, but I suspect a few people had the same thought and got the same response).