Hello, dear reader! Over the past nine months, we’ve been frankly astonished at the outpouring of support for the content that we write here at Goonhammer. Our only goal has ever been to write fantastic content and improve the level of discourse around our favorite hobbies, and if your feedback is anything to go by, so far we’ve been doing a solid job of it.
Some of the most popular articles on the site are our detailed reviews of new books, particularly for Warhammer 40,000. Producing these has been an intense process for us, often involving multiple authors working around the clock, staring at tiny, grainy screen grabs of Youtube videos or other sources posting content from new books. In that sense, we’re lucky to have people on the team in Australia, the UK, and the US so we can push content through as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, this can put a lot of pressure on us, particularly given how aggressive the Games Workshop release schedule has been of late and looks to continue to be moving into 2020. The Chapter Approved/Blood of Baal preorder weekend nearly destroyed half of our authors, and I can personally tell you that I got some real over-the-glasses-what-the-hell-are-you-doing looks from my better half when I was up at 2am still working on a review. But the net is that we also sometimes miss things or get them wrong, and that’s frustrating for us, and also means that even after posting the review the team is still glued to their computers juggling feedback and corrections from the (very helpful) comments we get on them.
Moving forward, we’ll be splitting each of our reviews into two parts:
- In Part 1, our Review Articles, we’ll go over the contents of a book, talk about what’s good and bad, and the impact we think it’ll have on the meta for players. We’ll call out key rules and changes where we think the biggest, most important stuff is, but we’re not going to transcribe a whole book the way we’ve been doing. For a good example of what this looks like, check out our Chapter Approved 2019 Balance Update Review and our Chapter Approved Review. The balance update is our most popular review of all time, and we spend more time talking about the impacts and don’t list every single points change. If a book covers multiple factions, we’ll cover all of them in the Review. We’ll be releasing these reviews the first day preorders go up, usually a week before a book is released.
- In Part 2, our Analysis Articles, we’ll cover the same detailed analysis we always have, diving into the minutiae of each book and giving a detailed blow-by-blow of what works and what doesn’t, and strategies we think merit further investigation based off the contents. If a book covers multiple factions, we’ll likely split the analysis articles into several parts in order to cover each faction separately. For an example of one of these, check out our Faith and Fury Chaos and Black Templar Reviews. These detailed analysis articles will likely release a week after the book hits shelves, giving our authors more time with the books in hand to properly think over the contents, so we can provide more thoughtful analysis beyond hot take first impressions.
We’ll also be continuing to do a separate article on the fluff of each new book, usually within a week of the book’s release.
The net result is more content for you, the reader, and fewer complaints from our loved ones that we appear to have acquired unpaid second jobs that intermittently devour entire weekends. We look forward to implementing this in January with the release of Psychic Awakening Book 4: Eat Shit, Dark Angels, Your Rules Are Still Bad (working title).
Happy Holidays,
-The Goonhammer Team
