AOS is being propped up by battered GW wives, I mean customers, who will play anything if it means not losing the use of their investment in time and models. The way I know how bad AoS is as a game is this: A guy who was part of my old WHF team that used to travel around for events is the top rated player by the ITC rankings (I think that's the one) and another guy is near the top. These guys were the perpetual low scorers (battle points wise) of our team at nearly every event. I have watched them play. Its run broken combo synergy X, melt other army, then move to objectives on turn four. They are top rated because they found the broken combos first, the AoS scene is mostly the lesser tier generals from the WHF scene, and they are ridiculously good painters. Even they admit this to be the case.
9th Age (or as I like to call it, Star Trek Erotic Fan Fiction version of Warhammer for Eurocucks) is where all the power gamers who like rules lawyering people to death migrated to, at least in SoCal. Like every person who was a Win At All Costs guy migrated there and most other communities are kind of glad that they have more or less voluntarily quarantined themselves, especially since there is zero chance of that game ever getting any new players for them to corrupt.
Kings is dead on Cali, but doing well in the south and (as I understand it) the UK, with 80+ events being a regular thing in both areas. I have personally been to three 50+ KoW events this year and the only AoS event that I know of that has reached those numbers was the one at LVO (which GW dumped tons of prize money into) and maybe Adepticon? Every other 2 day AoS has been something like 12-16 people, especially in Cali. Wife and I are sticking with kings since we prefer movement based games and we will be relocating to TX soon.
GW might get themselves out of their death spiral, but it wont be AoS that does it. Its going to have to be AoS with Guns (aka 40k 8th) that does it for them, if they can ever manage to unfuck the rules.
