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Total War Warhammer 3 devs will remove Steam users starting boycotts

https://www.pcgamesn.com/total-war-warhammer-3/steam-boycott-ban

Total War Warhammer 3 Steam forum boycotts are now banned, as Creative Assembly outlines moderation rules but is still open to criticism.

Total War Warhammer 3 devs will remove Steam users starting boycotts

I haven't checked in on this game since around launch. Anyone want to bring me up to speed on what's happening? I gather the latest expansion pack is priced differently than prior DLC?

Also, that line about discussion being a privilege seems icky.

55 comments

n3er0o

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The part where they said "The right to discuss is a privilege—it is not an entitlement you earn by playing the game" made me laugh out loud. What a ridiculously bad public take hahaha

redhorsejacket

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Right? Like, if I want to be as charitable as I'm capable of being, I could understand that sentiment if you are talking about your own official forums on your website. Like, sure, if you own the content and the forum, you have the power to determine what is and isn't acceptable on your platforms. It's a stupid determination, mind you, but it's within your power. However the impression I gather from the article is that they're referring to the Steam forums, which is absolutely asinine to me.

wildginger

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They are referring to the steam forums, and in one of their own comments in said forum they say that theyre required by steam to have those forums, in response to someone asking why they dont shutter the whole thing if they cant handle responding to bug fixes and the like.

So its not actually a privilege, its a requirement to sell the game.

all-knight-party

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For OP or others wondering about context:

It requires a surprising amount of digging to really try and figure out what started all this, but from my rudimentary research, it seems to me that this is a problem that's existed for a few games now and has steadily gotten worse, stemming from high DLC prices and an equally high number of, potentially game breaking, bugs, across multiple games that don't get fixed as it's very quickly on to the next one for CA.

There's rumination that it's because the studio is constantly working on multiple games at the same time and just shoves everything out without having the proper time to go back and make sure everything works like it should.

This seems like it came to a head with a recent DLC pack's price increase while containing equal or lesser content than Warhammer 2 DLC, which was cheaper on release. This prompted review bombing from the community, which prompted a response from one of the lead devs, Rob, who basically said (paraphrasing here) "Costs are up, there's no good time to do this, but we have to raise the DLC prices and challenge ourselves to make the content better to match".

Turns out the community doesn't think the content is better to match. CA doubled down on that position, and here we are.

wildginger

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And doubled down hard, since the boycott bans are killing off their more popular mod creators.

DarkenLM

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A surprisingly increasing number of companies seem to be making suicide sprints lately.

GreenMario

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They know the world is ending so it's a sprint to be top of the leaderboards.

cynar

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Cheap money (in the form of loans) has reduced. This means that investors are suddenly putting a lot more pressure on the top. In good companies, this is dealt with by the leadership team. Unfortunately, a lot just let the shit roll downhill.

There is also the issue of compartmentalization. In larger companies, the people dealing with the complaints have little to do with the people who actually need to change things to fix the root cause. This leads to the schizophrenic/sociopathic behaviour we see. The mouth has very little idea what the hands are doing.

all-knight-party

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Right, I can't remember the Creator's name, but apparently they supported a boycott and got banned for it, removing access to their workshop account as well, and they created one of, if not the most subscribed mod for the game. Maybe you know that, I haven't played Total War since Rome 1, so I'm way out of touch

ICastFist

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Considering how consistent the complaint of how much SEGA is forcing CA to act like a shittier version of Paradox, that's not surprising.

Since the niche of players that buys Total War games will hardly budge upwards, the only way to maximize profits is to squeeze those suckers with endless DLC. No wonder every game since Shogun 2 has had blood as a separate DLC.

nonailsleft

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I think customers forget about the, like what, 20-25% inflation in the last few years. Either they f+ck over their employees or they have to charge more

BandoCalrissian

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That inflation is a large part of why consumers are sensitive to this price increase. This is fundamentally a purchase with disposable income. Inflation reduces the disposable Income of the population until (if ever) wages catch up with inflation.

all-knight-party

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Everytime there's a change in pricing that was already a set precedent there's a hurdle to overcome like this, and it becomes extremely important to handle the situation delicately since 95% of possible ways to handle it could go very wrong.

I feel like the only way to really deal with it correctly if it truly must happen because of rising costs is to just admit that, like they did, but then stick to that and only that message, and just wait for the community to come around. If it's possible to provide any sorts of even vague math around sales and cost to produce this content then that context would help people understand, but there's almost no way to change a precedent for the worse on the consumer end without some amount of backlash.

nonailsleft

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Well it's not very complex. A software company has a lot of its cost coming from wages. If the employees see their cost of living increasing by 20%, they'll expect to see their wages rise to compensate.

Consumers will bitch, but eventually accept the higher cost of the software

bluetardis

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They pissed $100M away on a project inspired at a boozy directors lunch.

They then rushed out half assed dlc and a new game and put the price up for both.

Poor management calls that customers aren’t happy about. If the quality was there people would have been fine

ThunderingJerboa

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Except they have been increasing the prices this whole time... Most of the prior race packs which focused on 2 factions from Total Warhammer 2 were 10 dollars per pop. Hell the last 2 dlcs were so much bang for the buck since they basically made a pair of 19$ dlc obsolete (yes, with the new pack you only get 1 lord each but having 1 lord but a whole new faction for 10 bucks is good value and that doesn't even count that you also get a number of units from a different faction as well). So Total Warhammer 3 comes out and to say it was a fucking mess at launch is an understatement. Their first new dlc is a race pack at the price of 16 USD. So we see an increase of about 60% right there for many units that simply should have been in the game at launch since the chaos roster was very light compared to the other 2/3 factions in the game as well. So come around to when we get a new faction, prior to this factions cost around 19$ and the price increases to 25$ and personally the community was angry but I was 100% fine with this since yeah prices increase and factions have been this price since 2016. So its fucking insulting they do a new race pack and give us a bullshit letter saying I quote

To get right into it: our costs are up. Unfortunately, that means that prices have to rise. We know any increase is going to be tough, which is why our prices have remained fairly stable over the past few years. The downside is that any increase today is going to be more noticeable.

When this is a blatant lie, this new race pack that gives us less content than prior is now an increase of 150% from 10$ it used to be in total warhammer 2 but a ~60% increase from the last fucking price they had from a year prior. It also doesn't help when they haven't patched the fucking game when there is obviously broken shit. For instance they dropped a patch for the honorable frenchmen (Bretonnia) but some faction features were broken for nearly half a fucking year until after this whole. Hell Nakai the kroxigor (A big fuck off giant lizard alligator man who can do a death roll) lord for again half a year couldn't recruit his special units and kroxigors. This anger is coming from a place where obviously the money they earn is being misused on other projects that end up crashing and burning. Like a fucking new extraction shooter that was a money pit gets canned that was DOA (technically never got released but I know they were running beta test and I imagine it getting canned was based on how much engagement was around it, I remember seeing so many fucking ads that beta test). A reskin of Total war Troy (A newly released AAA priced game that had a peak of 5,424 user), which has failed by basically most margins. So its god damn insulting to hear a lead say basically if you don't buy this dlc expect this game won't be supported anymore even though it is literally CAs only cash cow right now. People want better support for this game, it is under horrid management. A ton of anger is strictly coming from how poor a game WH3 released as and the continued support it has seen. We need a proper custodian team who can actually patch this game more than once or twice in a span of half a fucking year.

Edit: I also want to hammer home how fucking bad TW Pharaoh did.
Peak users
TWW3: 166,519.
Shogun 2: 10k or 50k (can't get an accurate count since Steamcharts only goes back to 2012 but SG2 came out in 2011) was 10k (as long as we ignore when the game was given away for free then it was at 50k).
Rome 2: 118,240
Attila: 26,237
Rome Remastered: 18,407
Three kingdoms: 191,816

the_of_and_a_to

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Customers don't get higher salaries from inflation

nonailsleft

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Depends on the job

Mnemnosyne

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Or they could lower their corporate profit margin so neither is necessary. Don't make excuses for them and act like there's not a huge amount of money being hoovered up by profit.

GreenMario

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Inflation is fake. Money isn't backed by anything so we can demand it's worth anything we want.

The richies are mad some of us made too much money and are overcorrecting to punish us.

wildginger

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Its crazy to me that a ban from the community page removes your contributed mods too.

Guess it must be pretty bad if your mod creators, the ones making you free content to keep your players around, are getting banned for being pro boycott.

Aggy

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If they ban the right creator, I wonder if a bunch of mods will start breaking similar to that guy who removed his packages from npm, breaking everything

DarkenLM

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Ah, yes. The leftpad incident.

Guess this XKCD still holds strong, just like that package.

spittingimage

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"The right to discuss is a privilege" - someone is very confused about the difference between rights and privileges and also wrong.

Stanard

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I had to check. They actually said this. I've never played Warhammer (I have been interested, just haven't gotten around to it) and I don't know these devs at all, but contradicting themselves with just seven words in the same sentence is actually kind of impressive.

spittingimage

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Games Workshop is renowned for shitty treatment of their customers. Looks like whichever studio develops their IP for games will do the same.

BURN

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That’s pretty terrible and should put people off buying anything from them. They increased pricing, and when community backlash happens they just ban everyone who dares express an opinion that isn’t positive.

AeroLemming

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Permanently Deleted

alienanimals

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I just upvoted every Steam review highlighting the company's shitty practices. Thanks for the heads up!

iforgotmyinstance

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Tone deaf company. My friend wants me to get into this series so badly, but this article details what a disgusting relationship CA has with its customers.

Voytrekk

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The series is still great, but decisions by the company recently have really been bad.

UndercoverUlrikHD

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Each time I check the r/totalwar subreddit, there seem to be another PR fuckup from CA. It's really sad considering they were peaking just a few years ago with TWW2. Stopped maintaining my mods due to it.

D1G17AL

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They even closed the Steam discussion thread and didn't have the decency to properly link to the "New Discussion" wherever the fuck that is taking place. CA have their heads so far up their ass that every bit of shit smells wonderful to them at this point.

Edit: Found the link

UserMeNever

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Valve should remove Total War Warhammer 3 from sale. Been a Dick to your customers is not something that Valve should tolerate.

PM_ME_FEET_PICS

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Valve do it too. It's what they are known for.

Jaysyn

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Oh look, another reason not to give a shit about ultra-fashy WH40k

Altan1903

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I think you're thinking of Games Workshop, the IP holder for WH and WH40K. This is about Creative Assembly, the developer of the Total War RTS games, mostly historical, but also 3 set in the WH universe. They basically developed a very adversarial relationship with their core audience and failed to innovate in decades. Oh wait it is kinda similar to the Games Workshop situation...

Hyggyldy

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40k is, in part, parody to make fun of fascists. That's why it's so absurdly over the top. The fact that fascists like it says more about them than the setting.

Jaysyn

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1.) a literary or musical work in which the style of an author or work is closely imitated for comic effect or in ridicule.

2.) a feeble or ridiculous imitation.

In that case, I don't think GW knows what parody is.

Hyggyldy

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It is a ridiculous imitation of a theocratic fascist society.

Maolmi

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Yeah, Sure. Way to much hero worship and storylines where the genetically pure supersoldiers of the empire are the good guys to be a parody of fascism.

TheChurn

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They aren't the good guys. A lot (too much if you ask the community) of the fiction is told from the perspective of the imperium/space Marines, but that doesn't make them the good guys.

They go around saying things like "The rewards of tolerance are treachery and betrayal." They clearly are not meant to be the good guys, even in their own stories.

The problem is media literacy is so poor that far too many people look at quotes like that and think "that's a good point". Even the creators have put out press releases about how all the fascists are missing the point.

Hyggyldy

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That's an absurdly surface level examination.

Maolmi

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You sadly did nothing to deepen my understanding. But there were luckily other. You can now tear into me for not using google or something...

Hyggyldy

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I think you might be taking this internet thing a little too seriously. We all have misunderstandings about stuff but it's not good to stubbornly insist that you know what you're talking about despite clearly never having actually looked in to the material. That's the extent of my tearing in. But you are right in that I should do better about actually saying things of substance instead of trying to be snide all the time.

TigrisMorte

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There are no good guys in 40k, only various flavors of evil. And for bonus points this has nothing to do with 40k.

RandomStickman

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Protagonists aren't always the good guys. Anyone would tell you there are no good guys in 40k and everyone lives a brutal life under eternal war, showing the absurdity of facism.