season of war The Season of War results were pre-determined.

[RuneBrush]

I don't think it's a big conspiracy - Order was always going to come out in a win scenario for numerous reasons.  Fluff wise it makes sense, the Age of Chaos is over and we're in the Age of Sigmar.  Order is starting to establish "real life" again by building cities etc and the general mood is optimistic!

I think the points originally raised are pretty decent and the results are largely based on painting rather than games.  If you looked at the number of WIP photo's on here when the campaign started there were a lot of Order based projects going on.  Armies such as Amy's where she also did a tutorial on how she painted her Stormcast are also really inspiring and encourage people to have a punt at painting up that small unit of Stormcast they've been meaning to.  Silver Tower heroes were also very Order heavy which will have added to the count.

I don't think it's a foregone conclusion however, the closing game this Sunday at WHW has the potential to impact the results (if you get two best game votes then your faction gets 5 bonus points for example) and each game influences a different city - so it's going to be interesting to see exactly what does happen.  I still predict an Order win - however as has been said this could mean that the other factions get extra models rather than the winners...

[APH]

An easy balance would have been putting the loser at -1, along with the winner at +1. It would force players to seek out others of different Alliances.

[Thor0298]

It's interesting. My local store is almost even between all factions and currently chaos is in the lead. I think I've seen everyone lead at some point except death

[HunterB]

Surprise that Order is winning overall?   No.

Conspiracy? No.

I think sometime looking at this on a smaller scale is more interesting, as mentioned above there are several stores that are either really close or have swapped Alliances etc.

 

My store was a close call between Order and Chaos for a long while but suddenly Death took over (pretty much soley to TK) and are still holding on although Order are making a final push it will be close, Destruction have always been 4th but are slowly gaining a bit on Chaos that has been bumped to 3rd.

 

There was mention that a lot of games have been witnessed on round bases not many on square indicating a lot of new stuff used/new players come in, there may be something to this but equally well I know a lot of long time players that have rebased at least one army to rounds

[MechaBriZilla]

I don't know about predetermined.  But I do think the OP had some good points.  New stuff does drive interest, and I for one am extremely disappointed that since AoS started, Not only did Death loose TK as an active faction, but we've only seen 1 Battletome release over the last year, while every other faction has had at least 3 (iirc).

That said, never assume conspiracy where stupidity is a sufficient explanation.  As much as I love the direction GW has gone with AoS, and as much as I love this game, the fact remains that they do make mistakes.  If GW had wanted to manipulate this game, this level of order domination is not what they would have wanted.  They would have wanted the results to appear more natural, or to swing more at least.  I think the most damning thing you can say about GW at this point is that they just didn't consider how releases would affect the campaign.

Anyway, I for one am not going to complain too much.  I loved the campaign, even if my Alliance had a very poor showing, this is the kind of thing I want to see GW do more of.  And, with their recent interest in our opinions, I'm sure that the next one will be better than the first!