A Forgeworld Experience (Patreon)

Hello to all, so as I recently said I wanted to move toward posting material here that will be either interesting or helpful for those of you following me - this need not necessarily always be about miniatures, sometimes it could be a lore question and so on.

The core point though is that as I said previously I know the vast majority have come here to support me and the channel to which I am humbly appreciative. Paywalls are annoying so if possible I want to keep the majority of content here on the Patreon accessible to all - I might save Q&A for a Patreon Tier - but for the rest I am hopeful if people enjoy it, they will choose to support me with a $2 Patronage.

SO NOW - A Forgeworld Experience.

I recently made a fairly sizeable purchase, that of what is known as Relic Falchion Tank Destroyer - which I have chosen to dub The Annihilator - this is a horrific tank which hails from the Heresy period and it is quite simply bonkers. It has two Volcano Cannon mounted on the main hull fixed, and then it has two Quad Lascannon sponson, its mental (and its primarily for me to be able to erase enemy armour from existence)

However, as I was building the model I found a curious discrepancy. My Cannon barrels seemed to be identical, and this was a problem because as you can see illustrated in the pictures, on the internal side - that is the side where the barrels come together - they have a tapered edge on the reinforcing element. This taper is designed to let the barrels sit properly together, however as you can see mine were both on the right side of the barrel.

On the FW site, and in the paperwork as well as many other owners of these Falchion tanks, the images did not match the barrels I had.

Now you're probably thinking - so just tell them and they'll send you a new Barrel LT. Well thats what I thought as well, and thats what I did, however the plot thickens, when I was informed that according to their packing information, it was listed as packing one barrel x2.
This to me made no sense, how could that be correct?
The guys at Forgeworld though were very appreciative of my explanation and despite their information seeming to suggest I was in the wrong, I was fairly certain that my position had to be correct, it just made no sense otherwise. The Customer service team went to the FW store to check out other kits, and confirmed to me that those kits also had the barrels the same as myself. However again I maintained this made no sense and had to be an error somehow.

They agreed to investigate further, and so went off to speak to the team at the molding factory, a day or so later I got a reply.

It turned out that the packing information was incorrect and that there should be two different barrels supplied with the kit. Forgeworld will now be sending on to me the new barrels as and when they are ready to be sent out. So its a good result and the team listened to my concerns and they did everything to resolve and find out the bottom line.

The reason I make this post is for two reasons.

Firstly, I have in my lifetime as I am sure we all have had endlessly bad experiences with customer services, they generally just want to get rid of you asap and give you as little help and time as possible, so far any interactions I have had with the team either at GW or Forgeworld have been highly helpful which sits tbh with just how GW operate in my experience, but beyond that most businesses and sites which operate in miniatures and tabletop gaming also have excellent service teams, and maybe thats part of being in a business you likely enjoy as a hobby - but I still think its worth noting.

Secondly, this was a very small error on the kit and quite honestly if I hadnt been paying very close attention its something that could have been missed, or maybe being British I would have automatically assumed that it was me that was in the wrong and it couldnt possibly be the other way around.
The point though is that even with small issues in a product or service, it is worth giving that feedback or questioning to the team which handles the product. For one they will want to ensure that the products they are putting out meet customer expectations and are of a high quality, which they cannot ensure if they dont get critical fair feedback, and for two by me flagging this with the team, they will likely be switching up those kits that were found also to have wrong barrels so that anyone else buying this tank wont face the delay I am in building the kit to completion.

So thats my short piece today about the experience I had with this kit and Forgeworld. I'll probably talk a bit more about building minis soon in another post, because building is actually a skill and important thing when it comes to minis and people focus way too heavily on just painting, but the building side is critical to ensuring a good final paint job. So I'll talk about that soon enough.

Thanks for reading hope this was helpful, and I'll have more along the way, please be sure to leave your thoughts or questions below.

LT