The Wargamer is imploding... Again

[bayonetbrant]

Wargamer: The Future of Wargamer | Wargamer.
https://www.wargamer.com/articles/new-wargamer-team/

Staggering displays of ignorance there

It’s important we come back to the first point, however. Wargamer has been around a long time - the CMS I currently have only goes as far back as 2003/4, but general wisdom suggests that the site has been going since the mid ‘90s

I mean, you own it. You've been running it for years. You don't **know** where it came from?!

"So yeah, I bought this baseball team in Atlanta. I guess they were in Milwaukee once upon a time, and I've heard they around before then, too"

What a bunch of twats

[Staggerwing]

So basically, they are now the Crosley Cruiser of wargaming sites, nothing but a name connecting them to former glories.

[Metaldog]

If you haven't read the Comments, you should.  And all the people I cared about left and/or were a$$holes long since.

[bob48]

I can't say I'm surprised given our experience of 'it/them' over recent years.

[Martok]

Meh.  Sad, but not surprising.  That place tarnished its own legacy a decade ago, even before we left. 

[BanzaiCat]

I actually applied for one of those 'positions' - not because I wanted it but I wanted to hear more about the inside goings-on of the transition. I thought I'd at least get some kind of contact considering I used to be involved with writing, editing, and directing review production, but I heard zip from them. It's just as well and speaks volumes to me of their so-called efforts.

[bayonetbrant]

so it wasn't a full-on trademark rant, but I did feel the need to go off on them a bit

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that 6 owners later there's absolutely no knowledge of the history of site, given that there wasn't any appreciation of it for at least the past decade.

Still, it's sort of like reading "So yeah, I bought this baseball team in Atlanta. I guess they were in Milwaukee once upon a time, and I've heard they around before then, too"

There was a huge, vibrant, close-knit, and SMART crew of dedicated writers and creators that were regularly cranking out 6000-word in-depth reviews of games, and 10,000-word analyses of game series.  All that went up in a puff of smoke around 2009 when ownership started meddling in the editorial independence of the writers.  Two editors & CMS overhauls later, those writers didn't even have their names on many of the articles they'd written.  Today, you're lucky if you can even find the first page of those articles, but less the subsequent pages, or the accompanying images.

The past 10 years of The Wargamer should be a cautionary tale in how *NOT* to operate a website, from allowing bad-faith actors to over-run your forums with no management intervention to alienating your entire writing staff with vainglorious & premature proclamations of greatness to meddling in editorial independence to trashing other sites on the web to outright lying about other content creators because your own failings are on full display.
Now, it's probably a *good* thing overall that the current management was able to break from those egregious errors of 5-10 years ago, but when you've run off the membership of your site, who were the dyed-in-the-wool heart and should of the place, no amount of ownership changes, logo rebranding, CMS changes, or PR offensives are going to bring those glory days back.  It's even harder if you have no understanding of what those glory days were or how you got there.

It's worth noting that many of the hardcore audience, and no small number of the writing staff, are still working together in other places, showing that you can chase a community out of a website, but if that community is resilient enough, it'll undoubtedly reconstitute elsewhere, to significant success.

Their successes could've been The Wargamer's long-term success, if not for the shambolic treatment by successive owners/managers, and (eventually) an amnesiac staff that has no idea what *was* therefore no idea what *could be* for them to aspire to.

At this point, it's just a husk with a name, and is unlikely to ever again actually be "THE WARGAMER" that was a force to be reckoned with in the strategy gaming world.

[BanzaiCat]

I'd love to focus more on how many articles disappeared into their black hole but I doubt 2-3 regime changes later, that anyone would care.

[Silent Disapproval Robot]

The new, "improved"® web page is up. Based on the articles about MtG, 40K, and D&D on the front page, it looks like it's going to be a soulless, corporate controlled generalist gaming site.  Disappointing but not surprising.

[bayonetbrant]

The new, "improved"® web page is up. Based on the articles about MtG, 40K, and D&D on the front page, it looks like it's going to be a soulless, corporate controlled generalist gaming site.  Disappointing but not surprising.

https://www.wargamer.com/welcome

During the 25-year history of our site, we’ve watched the meaning of the word ‘wargame’ steadily change, expanding to encompass digital, tabletop, miniatures, board, and card games alongside the maps and counters of old. The advent of virtual and augmented reality games is beginning to broaden those horizons yet further.

How many of the writing staff were in grade school with that 25-year history started?

[bbmike]

After looking at the new home page and the site's forum, I've concluded that The Wargamer is not a wargaming site.

[bob48]

And we thought it had sunk to as low as it could get. We were wrong.

[bbmike]

Indeed.

[bob48]

Its now positively subterranean.

[bbmike]