Editing Storm of Chaos (section)

==What Happened?==
Storm of Chaos' premise was simple enough: Have matches regarding the story event at your [[FLGS]] and official tournaments, and the results would be sent in to an official website to help dictate the storyline of the event itself once the event concluded. Big events in the game universe that actually allow some level of involvement are usually a rare treat, often bringing new lore and characters out to the fore and giving a chance for otherwise under-used factions to get themselves a bit of the limelight, while giving [[/tg/|experts]] a chance to crunch data and see what they can see about the game's current level of balance. The progress of the campaign would be measured by a map that would be updated depending on wins and losses taken during the event.

Sadly, it [[Not as Planned|didn't go as planned]].

While the centerpiece of the event was the invasion of the Hordes of Chaos, a few problems became clear very quickly, including the fact that while the new edition rules had given massive buffs to [[Chaos Daemons|certain factions]], others weren't as well-balanced or powerful. Between this and a variety of other issues (a larger percentage of newcomers picking up Hordes armies based on [[Cheese|their reputations]], a large veteran playerbase sticking to their [[Your Dudes|armies of choice]], relatively bad balancing of the new rules in general), something amazing happened: Chaos got repeatedly swept in the matches that were sent in. The event wound up being a complete fucking ''embarassment'' for GW's writers, who kept pushing forth [[Gav Thorpe]]'s plot, regardless of how obvious it was that they were essentially ignoring the results of their own event.

During the early phases of the campaign, Chaos repeatedly failed to gain ground, and got held up, essentially, at every major battlefield, when it hadn't been outright fucking ''routed'' going by the campaign maps. The response by GeeDubs' writing team was to basically start giving Chaos [[Plot Armor]], declaring wins that hadn't happened, and manipulating events so that Chaos won anyway. Arbitrarily, it was decided, apropos of nothing, that a plague from [[Nurgle]] destroyed Castle Lenkster, and that the Brass Keep was taken by the [[Skaven]]. This quickly became the start of a pattern.

Later in the campaign, Chaos was assumed to have reached Middenheim. The campaign progression showed otherwise, so GW [[What|moved up the battle lines]] to [[RAGE|reflect what Games Workshop wanted]].

In spite of this blatant act of favoritism on the part of GW, the forces of Chaos continued to lose repeatedly and hard on almost every battlefield. Chaos was held back at Middenheim for the entire next phase of the campaign, and never even got within striking distance of its walls according to the maps, such was how hard the Hordes were losing. Nonetheless, our man Gavvyboy decided that they did actually reach the walls, though presumably being worried about backlash, ratcheted things back and said they were repelled. [[Karl Franz]] didn't show until the final battle, presumably because he had been intentionally been kept back to keep Chaos from [[FAIL|losing even harder]], which opened up the hilarious plot-hole of why it took the bastard longer to get to Middenheim than it took Archaon to get there from Erengrad, which is several orders of magnitude further away.

A number of the special characters for the event had complete ball-drops happen. Valten engaged Archaon, and lost his horse, before killing Archaon's horse. Valten managed to injure the Chaos champion, only for Archaon to murder his ass. Luther Huss then tried to engage, only to likewise be dealt with. Finally, proving that [[Orks|Orcs are made for fightin' and winnin']], Grimgor proceeded to run in, beat the ever-loving shit out of Archaon, declare himself the biggest boss, and then [[What|leaving without killing his ass]]. The biggest "WTF" of the entire storyline was arguably [[Teclis]] [[Powergamer|single-handedly destroying not only Be'lakor, but his entire army, with a single spell]].

The end result of this clusterfuck of an event was that while shaking things up and moving the story forward would have been fine, GW had zero regard for what the players did, and indeed, constantly changed the event map to make it seem like less of a gigantic clusterfuck. Despite thousands of battle results being submitted, GW was content to ignore all of it and push their desired narrative anyway, making an event whose overall outcome was completely divorced from what actually happened. It left a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and though it was retconned out of existence later, the same idiocy that hallmarked it came back in force for [[The End Times]] in 8th Edition with one exception - there was no campaign to stop it.