The Baby and the Bath-Water

There's an old saying which I'm 90% sure other people use, which is "throwing out the baby with the bath-water". In other words, when getting rid of extraneous rubbish there's always a danger that you'll get rid of something you intended to keep- or even in extremis, the whole of the thing.

I've been getting that kind of feeling with 40k recently. For example, how many of us old grognards have played the 'armour marks' game when looking at a miniature, especially a conversion or a Chaos model?

Basically, you look at a model and in your best train-spotter/ tank geek/ aero enthusiast voice say "Ah yes, mostly Mk III but the helm looks to be MK V and I reckon those are MKIV shoulder pads. Probably a Chapter heirloom."

Well here's the thing- you may well not be doing that much longer. With the advent of Primaris, the older armour Marks are going to lose a lot of relevance since they're too small for the big new kids on the block. The various types of Mark X armour don't have any of the same history and aren't all that interchangeable, which is odd. Considering the Imperium is meant to be under serious pressure, the idea that MKX is so easily available when MKIV fell out of use almost as soon as the Heresy started feels weird.

It's not just in the Primaris range, though, where it seems to me like 40k's inherent flavour is in danger. With the advent of mono-pose kits, making your own custom characters is harder than it used to be (though still not as hard as when everything was metal) but more importantly, the tightening of the rules has led to a lot less options. The Ork range, most notably, is seeing a massive contraction of what you can do with your models, with many options being relegated to index-only. Outside of Open Play, the ability to take a random vehicle, festoon it with gunz, and run it as part of your army is now very limited. Were the Indexes to be abolished, as some are advocating for, you wouldn't even be able to put Rokkits on a Battlewagon.

There are several things which certain elements of the community have been advocating for for some time- better communication with the playerbase, tighter and more balanced rules, and advancement of the story. GW have tried pretty hard to deliver all three, and I think they've succeeded for the most part. And yet with that have come some very negative effects, for example the reduction of the effects of terrain to the extent that I've even seen some players argue for the removal of the LOS rules and the loss of blast templates (and the utterly predictable rise in tightly-packed horde armies that followed it). Then we have rules changes that seem to make little to no logical sense, such as the way Characters work and the fact that assault moves can't use the Fly rule, which had to be made because of exploits creeping in.

As for the advancing story, for every player excited for the return of the Primarchs and the Imperium Nihilus, there's another who thinks the whole thing is very badly written and poorly thought-out. For my part, I worry that GW are actively pushing for a 40k End Times which would see our existing armies retired or changed out of all recognition. It would almost certainly lead to an uptick in sales, but I fear it might drive older players, like myself, out of the hobby altogether.