I'll try not to rant. Not only will I try not to rant but I will also try not to exaggerate things. However, I will likely fail at the first and maybe the second.
There is a prominent Adepta Sororitas/Sisters of Battle group on Facebook ran by James Otero. It's a closed group so James is free to run it however he wants, I will not debate that. That does not mean that I have to agree with policies put into place for the group.
We all know it's hard being a Sisters player. Games Workshop has allowed the army to flounder for decades with poor rules and the lack of plastic models. It could be worse, the Sisters could have been done away with like the Squats and this point maybe that would have been the better option.
The cost of being able to field a base Sororitas army of two units of troops and an HQ is $175. Even worse for people elsewhere, $302 for our friends in Australia. Even for veteran Sisters players the cost of adding new units has a large barrier, $103 if I want to add one Retributor squad, $55 for a Dominion squad. The prices may not seem quite that bad but seeing how all the models are all metal and exclusively sold by GW on their web shop or in GW stores, that's insult to injury.
Back to the matter, James decided that any posts of models in the group had to be entirely Games Workshop models and conversions (as it seemed to me) would be okay as along is was mostly GW parts or if he found it to be acceptable. He went out of his way to specifically ban any posts related to Raging Heroes. Again his group, he can run it however he sees fit, but I'm calling bullshit on the whole thing.
Other companies have filled the Sisters of Battle void, primarily Raging Heroes because of Games Workshop's deliberate lack support for the army and its players. My problem of banning players from community groups because they had to go to another manufacturer is just a deaf, blind and dumb decision. Communities such as this should not be barring new or existing players for any reason outside of negligent behavior. Either you're an ambassador to the hobby and the game or you're an elitist jerk. If you take the elitist jerk route, I'm going to call you out on it.
I don't care if you're a shop owner or some admin in a Facebook group. The moment you start completely barring people from a community, you're inflicting harm on it and quite possibly causing that new player to abandon a game or hobby that he/she was looking forward to be involved in. It's not their fault that GW put a gate up. I despise it as much as new hobbyists being told that their paint jobs suck or that they should quit. It goes hand in hand with super fans talking down to new fans or fans of a property that may not know absolutely everything about it. Stop it.
And speaking of the models by Raging Heroes, the whole over sexualized argument, just stop. Sexy models are not going away and the ones Raging Heroes have put out are no worse than stuff that's been released in the past. The argument that the armor is not realistic, just stop, the setting for these games is not realistic. The people making these models have the right to artistic freedom, just like a group admin has the right wield the ban hammer, even if done so ignorantly. Kind of funny though; I see people crusading against models the likes of Raging Heroes, but I have yet to see any of those same people complaining about Kingdom Death and others.
Anyways, I gave my two cents in the group, I left and am now contemplating starting a new Sisters/Sororitas community group. Rant over, at least for now, because I have a podcast to record.
