Thoughts and rumors on 9th edition

The End Times came, destroyed everything and has left the warhammer community in a panic state of, rage quitting, armies being redundant, round base fiasco and "Oh that's your favorite character?.......Dead!!!". But its strongly rumored that 9th edition is coming this summer with some sizable changes. But nothing is set in stone yet and with rumors coming out every other day its hard to tell what the changes will be. I didn't pick up warhammer until just after 8th edition came out so the next edition rumor thing is new to me and as a collector and not much of a gamer its fun to follow the rumor mill so saying that lets have look at some of these rumors (Have to give credit to the warseer forum for the rumor thread) Make sure to check out my thoughts of it all at the end

• Bubblehammer: More of a fluff thing for what happened after the End Times. There is no more map of the old word but little bubbles of reality where each faction is before the next collision with another bubble (could be chaos, elves, empire, undead etc).Not a fan of this but its a rumor that's been continuing for a while now.
• Switching to round bases: Holy shit this one took off like a rocket!! It started with saying its going to round bases and every one flipped! The picture in the header shows two skaven war machines with round bases but its either considered fake or people thought it could be the new bases for un based war machines.
• Fantasy going skirmish: Not that the whole game is going skirmish but being able to play the game at a skirmish level. This ones being debatable because some say its getting scaled down or a skirmish unit is more optional.
• Starter box: Supposedly set for june and it has chaos v humans. Its skirmish level based in introducing new players with the rules with smaller units.
• Factions: Armies are being reduced to 6. Chaos will be all one faction, as will undead. Dwarfs join with empire but there's not much more on the factions apart from it being reduced to 6.

There are more rumors going around and always being updated but they are the more popular ones going around for now

My Thoughts on 9th edition

Some of the things i did liked and some im not so sure about. 

The whole bubble hammer stuff sounds like it needs a good background story to make it stand because basically the old world is gone and we get left with these "bubble pockets" of civilization floating around? Hmmmm.... not sure about that hopefully they can make it work.

Round bases i doubt will happen. For the skirmish level i dont know why they need to unless its cost cutting so they will have all games the same bases.

Speaking of skirmish level i hope this happens. It will give you two optional ways to play the game: skirmish and the bigger standard way and maybe a bigger sized game after that(End Times game). Hopefully the starter set will have skirmish options aswell as normal models and rules. Introducing someone to the game with so many rules and models can be intimidating and a skirmish option will work well.

The factions thing im not sure about. It doesn't really bother me but i keep hearing about army units getting squatted and it could annoy people seeing favorite armies loosing units and to join with another army but on the other hand it would be cool seeing an ogre mixed in with a unit a empire soldiers.

Last thing i will mention is about the new end times models. Freak'n fantastic models and i cant see them not getting used in the next edition. Nagash is €85! That is to much money and too nice of a model just to disappear in a new edition. I'm sure they will fit End Times stuff in somewhere.

In the end we know very little about whats going to happen. For all we know GW could hit the restart button and start fresh (I doubt it but wouldn't surprise me if happened). I'm just gonna take it for what its going to be and embrace the change instead of  raging and fearing it because its going to happen. Maybe very little might change? Maybe all the rumors will be right all along? But for now i would hold off starting a new army anytime soon.
Bring on 9th.....
That is if it does come this summer........