Thing is, if anyone cared about their community, or if the store was run properly, someone would take a break from their hardcore tournament training games to scale down their army and play a smaller game to help new players. Or hobbyists/ staff would offer advice on the direction the new player should be going, or there would be a "beginner's night" where the games were smaller scale. Or the shop could let the player use elements from the store army to fill out their force. That's how it worked back when Warhammer was flourishing.
The game played better at small scales back then, though. Going from ranks of four to ranks of five, steadfast making a ton of ranks essential,
horde heavily incentivizing huge units even for units that win off of active instead of static res, all of these and more are changes to the core rules of the game that push units and in turn armies to be ever larger. The larger, higher point value standard games isn't a player driven phenomenon, it's a result of a deliberate push in that direction by GW in their rules, trying to squeeze more purchases out of their existing player base at the expense of creating a game that has grown ever more difficult for new players to get into.
It's a trend that they needed to pull back from, but to completely reverse it, to build their strategy around not just catering to new players, but specifically alienating the old, that's not better. Boiling alive isn't any less fatal than freezing yourself.
And the rumored 'everything new will be limited availability, single production run models that vanish from the shelves and the rules after six months' aspect of the supposed strategy for expansions after 9th's release ensures that it's not just the existing disgruntled player base they're alienating. Any new players they manage to attract will learn that GW doesn't want them around after they've been playing for 6 months, either. That's not just axing the existing player base in favor of a hypothetical new one, that's axing the idea of a long term player base at all, and I just don't see how a game that demands commitments of hundreds of hobby hours to get into can survive that way. Would Warmahordes have survived as the competitor it is if all the units introduced in each new expansion had been dropped and discontinued when the next expansion was released?
Again, all that bitterness is assuming the veracity of rumors that I still find somewhat doubtful.
EDIT: For the record, the only things we've seen on round bases so far are skaven engines. If it's just monsters and the like on round bases, I can deal. It's the idea of infantry being on round bases, but still expected to rank up in the same game, that I find just conceptually infuriating, based on experience with War of the Rings.
I cannot even fathom how you would rank up the Bell or Furnace pushers with a round base. Could mean those two units will become self mobile like the Cauldron of Blood but the round base still validates the awful rumor. I'm not really sure why you would need to play even a skirmish game with round bases. Seems to me that you can get at many models around each type. But you CERTAINLY cannot play a rank and file formation game with round bases. What will happen to our 'corner to corner'?
