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 Easy E wrote:
No, we are talking about if competitive ethos in design leads to survivability of a game, What are you talking about?

because a well written, tight and balanced game can be used by all players no matter if they are competitive, casual or narrative

while a bad written game appeals only to competitive gamers for the same reason gamblers chose the unbalanced games
they don't want to win against opponents, they want to beat the game (and be smarter than the game)

hence why those kind of games are popular among the "tournament" players rather than actual competitive games were you are playing against the opponent

and 40k is dominant for reasons that have nothing to do with the game, because by now there are 10 different games that have that name and they are dropped as soon as the new one comes out
40k is a franchise that is popular despite the game, not because of it (same as any monopoly helps to keep that one thing popular no matter how good it is)
and it is ironic that the one game were even the company making it saying it is not for tournament is driven by tournament players

Okay, so you guys both agree that Competitiveness is not a contributing factor to a games survivability.

What you guys are arguing is your preference for rules and what you wish was true. By your own admission, it is not true for Warhammer 40K. Therefore, we are arguing the same thing.

Thanks for the thread. I think we can end it here, because we are all arguing the same point. Competitive ethos in a games design doesn't help its survivability, commercial success, or longevity in the public sphere.

OP, there is your answer.

It didn’t for the first major wargaming company.
That doesn’t mean it’d be the same for other games.

depends what you mean by competitiveness

a game made for gamblers being successful because it attracts gamblers is something different than making a balanced and tight game that can be used by everyone

both can be used for competitive events
and competitive events are the driving factor behind gaming and the more competitive events there are, the more attractive the game becomes for casual players

Texas Hold'em is somehow popular Poker version but not because it is better than others or more "fun" but because the were more and bigger events using that variant and therefore non-event players started playing it as well

so yes competitive events are important for how successful a gaming system is, but this has nothing to do with how good or well written the game itself is or if the game is designed with those events in mind or not
just that bad written games are more exclusive to competitive events (as those don't care about balance at all or if the rules are tight) while good written games can be used by everyone

Can't really back this up with any examples (and apologies if this has been brought up before!), but I think it might be about priorities?

From what I gather, most wargaming companies make the bulk of its money from selling miniatures rather than the rules themselves, and for a game's long-term survival you need to find a way to sell new stuff to the current playerbase. To sell new miniatures, the best way probably is to renew the game with new editions or add stuff in. But it's a lot harder to add new factions in without upsetting the balance of things, and a new edition of the game might upset gamers who are used to the old version or introduce new mechanics that could be exploited in ways unintended by developers. If the main draw of a game was the fact that it was competitive, the bulk of that game's players would lose interest because it's lost the thing that attracted them.

Probably also worth highlighting the fact that wargaming is niche to begin with, and you're only going to appeal to already-existing gamers if the main appeal is a tight game (especially if the game isn't linked to pre-existing IPs or a historical period), which compounds that issue.

Obviously, a competitive game can have a compelling setting and great minis, but it feels like that people are able to put up with GW's chopping-and-changing and fairly sub-par rules because space knights defending a crumbling space empire against Orks from Streatham's pretty cool, while the level of interest in the Iron Kingdoms wasn't quite there.

I think Warmachine did fall apart because of its competitive rules. As a game it got hollowed out to more complicated chess - and if you didn't play it this way, you got completely destroyed (often in a very non-interactive way) by those who did.

I think narrative players do want to see a story unfold. This doesn't mean they don't have agency - but that "winning the game" is secondary to just playing it. Its more fun to charge your general into the opponent's general and have a fight than position such and such a way to maximise your victory points.

I.E. when I play my goblins in WHFB I do so in a narrative way. There's a whole bag of rules that can make my army fall apart. I can enjoy when everything goes right - and I can enjoy when (via animosity, fanatics, inaccurate war machines and exploding wizards) I somehow manage to kill more of my army than my opponent and then flee off the table.

If I was "playing to win" there's a simple answer - "don't play goblins". But I'm not playing for that reason.

By contrast when I played high elves - I was much more demanding. I wanted to win. I was dangerously close to being "that guy" when it came to wanting to win. If I won a game I felt it was due to my decisions - and I lost, I used to think about what I could have done differently, to stack the odds in my favour, so I'd win next time.

Its very hard for those two mentalities to play against each other. Just about every game system I think about will collapse when you have someone trying to win with an optimised list and plan - and someone who is just there for the fun of the experience. Unless the game is incredibly random. As a result I think balance matters, but not as much as you might think.

I feel GW's advantage is partly mass - its so big that these two player camps can exist in numbers, and one doesn't entirely eat up the second. I'm not sure this was true for things like Warmahordes, X-Wing and various other competitors.

I.E. I'm trying to imagine what "casual Infinity" would look like, and sort of drawing a blank.

Tyel wrote:

If I was "playing to win" there's a simple answer - "don't play goblins". But I'm not playing for that reason..

Thing is that's a really good argument for not having super casually/badly/unbalanced written rules for a generic game system.

Good rules should mean that Goblin players CAN win and should be able to win with more than one army composition.
Because some people will invest money and time into a Goblin army and they don't want to have to invest all that again (and might not even be able too) to have a fair chance at winning. They also might just love goblins and not like elves


Again these ideas of inherent inbalance being good can be ok in something like MTG where building a new force is basically grabbing more pre-made cards from a pack. But when its a game that requires hours of investment just to get a functional force; its not something where people just chop and change armies. Even a lot of long term fans will often have armies they've built up over decades and focus on above others. The number of people who drop and start (and get to table ready) armies rapidly is honestly very few. Even fewer if we accept that GW's marketing suggests that most people only stick around ofr a few years in the hobby and then move on.

What is so narrative about a weak army anyways? pretty much every 40k faction is supposed to be either transhuman super-soldiers, endless waves of soldiers and tanks, super advanced ancient aliens, galaxy ending alien infestations, reality warping daemons or some combination of the above.

None of them is supposed to be weak lore wise as they all routinely conquer planets and exterminate lesser civilizations, yes even the Tau do that.

Maybe in WHFB there are armies that are supposed to be a joke (never really got into WHFB), but 40k is too high on its "grimdark eternal warfare" to have weak armies.

 Tyran wrote:
What is so narrative about a weak army anyways? pretty much every 40k faction is supposed to be either transhuman super-soldiers, endless waves of soldiers and tanks, super advanced ancient aliens, galaxy ending alien infestations, reality warping daemons or some combination of the above.

None of them is supposed to be weak lore wise as they all routinely conquer planets and exterminate lesser civilizations, yes even the Tau do that.

Maybe in WHFB there are armies that are supposed to be a joke (never really got into WHFB), but 40k is too high on its "grimdark eternal warfare" to have weak armies.

See that's another thing - even armies like the Gloomspite Gitz or Skaven might have a jovial side to them; but they are a serious threat. Their units might be half insane, but they are still going to kill you and win the battlefield with tactics that work for them. That some of their units are literally goblins thrown from a catapult doesn't matter because those units "work" for them and they win wars with them.

Having an army that's inherently weaker and will just lose battles because its the "weak army" isn't fun. Sure winning isn't everything but there's a massive difference between playing a game where each faction can win and playing one where one faction basically has to accept loss most times no matter the skill of the players involved.

I'm a historical gamer and look in dismay at the way Bolt Action, an excellent system at heart has become Warhammer 1940K and been ruined by an influx of deeply competitive gamers who are not remotely interested in history and only in the 'meta' - its become a horrible monster.

 Overread wrote:

Tyel wrote:

If I was "playing to win" there's a simple answer - "don't play goblins". But I'm not playing for that reason..

Thing is that's a really good argument for not having super casually/badly/unbalanced written rules for a generic game system.

Good rules should mean that Goblin players CAN win and should be able to win with more than one army composition.
Because some people will invest money and time into a Goblin army and they don't want to have to invest all that again (and might not even be able too) to have a fair chance at winning. They also might just love goblins and not like elves


Again these ideas of inherent inbalance being good can be ok in something like MTG where building a new force is basically grabbing more pre-made cards from a pack. But when its a game that requires hours of investment just to get a functional force; its not something where people just chop and change armies. Even a lot of long term fans will often have armies they've built up over decades and focus on above others. The number of people who drop and start (and get to table ready) armies rapidly is honestly very few. Even fewer if we accept that GW's marketing suggests that most people only stick around ofr a few years in the hobby and then move on.

I think you missed the point. In this scenario you wouldn't choose goblins because of a lack of predictability. On average, a goblin army should perform as any other army. But in any given situation and in any given game, the random rules meant to represent their anarchic nature give you a far larger variance in results than a conventional army.

I used to love playing with and against Orks in 40k, back in the day. The random nature of the army meant that you could have anything from an even, tactical game to a swingy spectacle that created memorable moments. The last such game I had in 5th ed, I think. A bomb squig accidentally went after my Trukk and blew it up. But in doing so the Trukk spun out of control, ended up in an enemy unit and exploded right in their faces. Then the survivor found themselves in charge range of the meganobs that emerged from the wreckage. As an example of a hilarious but not so helpful event, my shock attack gun Big Mek who was a major fire support element in my army teleported himself and his very surprised Gretchin into close combat with a Hive Tyrant. Oops. These rules are not an expression of a strictly inferior army. They just offer unpredictable results flanking more expected performance wedged in between them to create a spectacle that reflects their background. These kinds of rules have been lost in the meantime, systematically removed from 40k after 6th ed and not adopted into AoS from Fantasy right from the start (ignore the joke rules - random tables of old got simplified beyond any recognition or dropped outright).

In my opinion this was done to cater to the competitive mindset. You can't have rules in a game that is meant for the tournament crowd that have significant randomness and variance built into them. It's not just that players who are serious about the competition will just not play such an army, but will also feel robbed of a sure victory if the randomness swings heavily against them. 8th ed 40k and onward have been an exercise in predictability and, in my opinion, boredom.

The loss here is that anarchic armies have no place in such a game and therefore players who enjoy this kind of army are no longer catered to in the name of making competitive players happy. It's unfortunate for the game to no longer reflect the background as it once did, and it alienates a part of the customer base. This is one case where a narrow understanding of balance only serves to make the game worse. GW is particularly bad at this. They deprive themselves of a lot of balancing mechanics and try to make what's left work by paring down the game's rules to minimal variance between outcomes, sacrificing flavor and variety in the process.

Thing is you can always start with a balanced structured competitive system and then build a more varied open play system on top.

It would actually give GW a reason to market open play as its own thing instead of "same rules just er do what you want if you want, but you don't have too".


So you'd have your competitive goblin army stats; and then an open play version that just increases their swingy random nature. Which is much easier to build off the back of a well structured core set of rules.

Heck you could throw the double turn in there and a bunch of other things - eg undead armies resurrecting more models etc....



GW is just bad on rules in general - even when they adopt good practice they either do too little too late; or go so over the top with it that the good idea becomes a negative in its own right. Not to mention that in 3 years they'll throw it all out the window and start over.

Their specialist games seem to do better - which probably hints that they are done by different staff who aren't "set in their ways"; or that managers don't "tinker" with things as much

There specialist games show just how silo'd everything still is at GW. TOW talking about a comprehensive list of 75 USRs that take rules from various sections of previous editions and consolidate them into one area that can be easily expressed on any unit profile, and then each army having a few unique army special rules that still function on the same principles... and then 40k has (literally) a 1000 bespoke rules and a half-assed scattered group of USRs randomly written throughout the core rules... how do these two rule sets come from the same company?

 Overread wrote:
Thing is you can always start with a balanced structured competitive system and then build a more varied open play system on top.

I don't think that would work. I think anything that wasn't the "tournament standard" would be completely ignored and discarded by the player base, who either treat every game like a "practice" game for a tournament, or are stuck in local scenes where anything outside of the norm (READ: tournaments) is inherently "unbalanced".

This is why there has always been such a stigma with Forge World units. It's why Legends suffer from this stigma now. It's how the brain-meltingly stupid notion of symmetrical terrain being "required" for "balance" started to infect everything. It's why companies make 60x44 mats now.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
There specialist games show just how silo'd everything still is at GW. TOW talking about a comprehensive list of 75 USRs that take rules from various sections of previous editions and consolidate them into one area that can be easily expressed on any unit profile, and then each army having a few unique army special rules that still function on the same principles... and then 40k has (literally) a 1000 bespoke rules and a half-assed scattered group of USRs randomly written throughout the core rules... how do these two rule sets come from the same company?

 Overread wrote:
Thing is you can always start with a balanced structured competitive system and then build a more varied open play system on top.

I don't think that would work. I think anything that wasn't the "tournament standard" would be completely ignored and discarded by the player base, who either treat every game like a "practice" game for a tournament, or are stuck in local scenes where anything outside of the norm (READ: tournaments) is inherently "unbalanced".

This is why there has always been such a stigma with Forge World units. It's why Legends suffer from this stigma now. It's how the brain-meltingly stupid notion of symmetrical terrain being "required" for "balance" started to infect everything. It's why companies make 60x44 mats now.

At the same time consider that GW doesn't really do much with their "open play" system because there isn't anything really behind the term other than "do whatever you want" which you don't need a game mode to tell you to do (its not a PC game).

I do get your point, and it as a valid concern. That said consider how Kill Team was a game mode for well over a decade, but was mostly relegated to starter games for a few rounds before people moved onto the "proper game". As soon as GW started moving it out to its own thing; giving it its own rule book; fleshing it out; making it a "product" and something they marketed and put into the limelight - then Killteam took off and now its a very successful game in its own right.

I think that open play systems should copy that model. GW can move things into an open play system; give it its own rule section; highlight it and make it its own thing. At the very least it would set the ground work for having potential to establish itself. Pitfalls and issues after that can then be addressed through that system.

It might well be that the issue with the competitive meta is simply a function of group size and game time and that its very hard to move away from unless wargames become semi-mainstream enough to generate big player groups in many areas. Or perhaps there's a few ways along the line to improve things to make more swingy open games work.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
There specialist games show just how silo'd everything still is at GW. TOW talking about a comprehensive list of 75 USRs that take rules from various sections of previous editions and consolidate them into one area that can be easily expressed on any unit profile, and then each army having a few unique army special rules that still function on the same principles... and then 40k has (literally) a 1000 bespoke rules and a half-assed scattered group of USRs randomly written throughout the core rules... how do these two rule sets come from the same company?

I think this is partially by design. We've seen lots of instances of GW using its other games just to see what sticks and if customers actually prefer the things they complain about or if its just the internet's squeaky wheel effect.

for 40k, it very much looks like it was written by 3 different designers, to get the work done in time, who were not allowed to talk to each other during the process to prevent leaks, and than compiled by a 4th one who never played that game before

and TOW is written by a single person who actually tried to play the game before it is released (same as Adeptus Titanicus)

Tyel wrote:
I think Warmachine did fall apart because of its competitive rules. As a game it got hollowed out to more complicated chess - and if you didn't play it this way, you got completely destroyed (often in a very non-interactive way) by those who did.

WM/H died off due to the companies miss-steps and poor management

However the community got the reputation it did as the only metric of success was the tournament win and that created a bad mindset in a lot (but not all) of the community. And if im honest, im now seeing that sort of mindset creeping into the 40K community local to me

What is often overlooked is that the tightness of the WM/H ruleset made it perfect for us as a casual, tea and biscuits, basement group of wargamers as their was little to no arguing about rules. Things either are or are not and there was a strict list of what happened when. So we could just get on with having fun playing rather than arguing about rules interpretations. It was only when we left our basement to go play in the wider "meta" did we discover that while we were playing the same rules, we were playing a very different game to most other WM/H players.

Interestingly, MK4 of WM/H is starting to gain some steam now so it will be interesting to see who plays it. A new wave of friendlier players or the old competitive rump of the Mk3 players.

Sunno wrote:


WM/H died off due to the companies miss-steps and poor management

.

This is largely true. However its also fair to point out this was in part exacerbated by other factors that were fed by the 'conpetitive' game. by mk3, the game had become bloated and very unwieldy; the 'knowledge burden' to get into the game was high so both returning vets and new players were often largely turned off. This combined with the community-at-large's insistence on steamroller/tournaments made the casual ecosystem very sparsely populated and unfriendly to newplayers. Losing both was a catastrophe. Pp's othervery notable misteps such as axing the pressgangers, axing no.quarter, cid, their repeated FUs to distributors and third parties etc also.contributed enormously.

Sunno wrote:


However the community got the reputation it did as the only metric of success was the tournament win and that created a bad mindset in a lot (but not all) of the community. And if im honest, im now seeing that sort of mindset creeping into the 40K community local to me

Again, largely correct.

Sunno wrote:


What is often overlooked is that the tightness of the WM/H ruleset made it perfect for us as a casual, tea and biscuits, basement group of wargamers as their was little to no arguing about rules. Things either are or are not and there was a strict list of what happened when. So we could just get on with having fun playing rather than arguing about rules interpretations. It was only when we left our basement to go play in the wider "meta" did we discover that while we were playing the same rules, we were playing a very different game to most other WM/H players.
.

I don't know about this. Yea, on one hand the rules were unarguably 'clean' and 'tight'. This on its own doesn't make a game a casual.tea and biscuits game in my mind but i understand where you are coming from.its a game that has a whole heap of sometimes very complex interactions going on and all at the same time. the very technical nature of the game/mechanics, the multiple layers of interactions, feats, buffs and synergies makes it a 'serious' game rather than a 'casual' game.

For the record, my group never played wmh and wanted to hsve a go. I took out my stuff, took the lead on building straight forward and uncomplicated 25pt-30pt mk2 lists and then walked them through the 8 million interactions. If I'd not had 15 years experience at the game and could handle it, I'm not sure my guys would have enjoyed the game, let alone want a second go.let alone be introduced to hordes! :p

Now is there anything stopping 2 'serious' wmh players dialling back on the lists, playing 'loose' and not taking the game seriously. No, there's not. I've done it. But I'd still.argue that despite the 'clean' rules, its not a 'casual' game as we all understand it. I think other games fall into thst category better and easier.

Warmachines rules in 2nd edition were tight but they also had some gamey elements that you had to learn. For example declaring charges to gain additional movement instead of using the run order.

Things that are very well written and set in stone and work easily; BUT which are not always intuitive to new players who will use the run to run and the charge to charge and won't think to use the charge that will fail to gain additional movement.


That said the concept of a tight rules system works for casual games because you can play the game without worries.
The difference is then not between well written rules and badly written rules; but rather complex and simplistic rules.

Warmachine I'd class as complex; easy to learn the basics but trickier to master the complexities. However it all "worked". So even when you did complex stuff you could see the logical train of information and interactions.


What you're more arguing for is a rules system that is much simpler and quicker to pick up.


It's basically like comparing Basic and advanced rules for One Page Rules. Both use the same core simplistic structure. The simple rules are super easy to pick up and use very basic generic wargaming concepts that make it easy to see what's going on. The advanced rules add layers to that which increase complexity; whilst still being clearly functional.