At least every faction has current rules, so the upcoming codexes might have a theoretical chance of fixing some of these issues
..oh who am I kidding
I have the feeling Eldar will remain OP as long as Jes Goodwin is still working at GW, its my latest favourite conspiracy theory.. The Eldar are Jes's favourites, their model range gets to keep all their classic models always, gets to keep their multipart aspect/kitbashability etc. Go ahead, try changing my mind
There are probably several NDA reasons they cannot do that.
The core issue is that GW sees no reason to invest into expanded writing and playstesting capabilities, as the community is mostly fine with accepting an unbalanced mess as long as there are seasonal balance patches.
Sure they might grumble about it, but they still keep playing and buying.
Yet we always hear "they should release all codex on day 1". Well, imagine this but worse.
Just because GW is incompetent doesn't mean frontloading all the codexes isnt a better format for the consumers.
I think the issue is that GW simply doesn't have enough writers to do all at once.
Also the best format would be full digital release, no paper.
Nah, three years is plenty of time. Remember this is these guys full time job. Presumably they're working 9-5, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year (I think 4 paid weeks off a year still standard for a UK job, might be different these days).
The question is how much info do they have on edition cycles and when they learn they have ANOTHER full reboot. Ideally all the codexes would be written and tested at the same time but we know thats not true and that new books are only tested against the strongest most recent books. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the decision to reboot 40k again was decided like 6 months ago.
Yet we always hear "they should release all codex on day 1". Well, imagine this but worse.
Just because GW is incompetent doesn't mean frontloading all the codexes isnt a better format for the consumers.
I think the issue is that GW simply doesn't have enough writers to do all at once.
Also the best format would be full digital release, no paper.
Nah, three years is plenty of time. Remember this is these guys full time job. Presumably they're working 9-5, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year (I think 4 paid weeks off a year still standard for a UK job, might be different these days).
The question is how much info do they have on edition cycles and when they learn they have ANOTHER full reboot. Ideally all the codexes would be written and tested at the same time but we know thats not true and that new books are only tested against the strongest most recent books. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the decision to reboot 40k again was decided like 6 months ago.
Most skilled professionals (however much anyone mat grumble at the term here) would expect 25 days + Bank Holidays for 32 days.
We also don't know how many testers/designers they have, nor what else they do. They likely also have to work on a combo of 40k, 30k, AoS, KT, warcry and 4+ specialist games at any given time to some degree.
GW will 100% be woefully ill-equipped for those testing demands, it's likely not worth hiring too many more because they'd basically work themselves out of a job once the backlog was cleared and they're not in a position to break the work patterns without an influx of time/people.
Tyran wrote: There are probably several NDA reasons they cannot do that.
The core issue is that GW sees no reason to invest into expanded writing and playstesting capabilities, as the community is mostly fine with accepting an unbalanced mess as long as there are seasonal balance patches.
Sure they might grumble about it, but they still keep playing and buying.
I don't think people actually want balance as much as they simply want change.
Heh, can't wait to see how GW will fix thix (especially LoV) with mere pts-adjustments.
I still wonder what their rules-team thought when they made the Index-rules for LoV:
- This army wants to die in order to trigger and build up their army-rule. Let's make it expensive.
- This army is shooting-focused. Let's lower their BS to 4+/5+ and make sure their armyrule doesn't stack with any modifiers.
- This army is slow with M5". Let's give their guns an average range of 18-24" and make sure nothing has Assault.
- This army has very limited options and units. Let's not give it any sources of re-rolls, synergies or tools in general.
MinscS2 wrote: Heh, can't wait to see how GW will fix thix (especially LoV) with mere pts-adjustments.
I still wonder what their rules-team thought when they made the Index-rules for LoV:
- This army wants to die in order to trigger and build up their army-rule. Let's make it expensive.
- This army is shooting-focused. Let's lower their BS to 4+/5+ and make sure their armyrule doesn't stack with any modifiers.
- This army is slow with M5". Let's give their guns an average range of 18-24" and make sure nothing has Assault.
- This army has very limited options and units. Let's not give it any sources of re-rolls, synergies or tools in general.
Great jurb GW, 3 thumbs up!
its just paying penance for its broken release state. I imagine that around the time of its 10e codex, it will get a large release wave, along with a ground up rebuild that propels them to decent stats again.
its just paying penance for its broken release state. I imagine that around the time of its 10e codex, it will get a large release wave, along with a ground up rebuild that propels them to decent stats again.
Eldar had a broken release too. Why aren't they paying for anything, ever in any edition they get a codex?
Tyran wrote: There are probably several NDA reasons they cannot do that.
The core issue is that GW sees no reason to invest into expanded writing and playstesting capabilities, as the community is mostly fine with accepting an unbalanced mess as long as there are seasonal balance patches.
Sure they might grumble about it, but they still keep playing and buying.
They have all the designers they need.
Changing imbalance is feature to get the tournament tryhards pretending to play "competitive" game replace armies and models constantly.
Marketing department loves how easily players follow their guidance like lemmings.
Dudeface wrote: Interesting question to lobby, say they got every unit in the game fairly balanced and in a stable spot. Then what?
Take a well-earned break and sell the existing game. The new content treadmill needs to end.
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tneva82 wrote: Marketing department loves how easily players follow their guidance like lemmings.
And they hate how poor balance and the new content treadmill drive customers out of the game. Balance is bad because GW employs minimal-talent losers like Jervis (who is gone now but kept a job decades too long) and has no idea how to make a better game, not because they're carefully building the exact imbalance that the marketing department wants.
The cornerstone to GW balance issues is that every 3 years they change the core rules so everything they improve on within an edition gets thrown out the window and it has to restart itself. Even if they devoted more resources, more money, more staff and more skill into rules writing; the 3 year timeframe is brutal (remember because of production chances are of those 3 years you might have 1 year or less to actually write the rules before it all has to go to production)
If GW reigned in the actual changing of the rules to a polish every 3 years with minor adjustments to the core rules then they'd at least create an environment where they can steadily polish things and where greater resource investment would likely pay off.
Dudeface wrote: Interesting question to lobby, say they got every unit in the game fairly balanced and in a stable spot. Then what?
Take a well-earned break and sell the existing game. The new content treadmill needs to end.
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tneva82 wrote: Marketing department loves how easily players follow their guidance like lemmings.
And they hate how poor balance and the new content treadmill drive customers out of the game. Balance is bad because GW employs minimal-talent losers like Jervis (who is gone now but kept a job decades too long) and has no idea how to make a better game, not because they're carefully building the exact imbalance that the marketing department wants.
I always ask people to pause and consider how many armies people in the real world at clubs often play with. Not collect, not build, not want to build, but actually play with. Because often as not a LOT of people do not have many armies that they play with. Most are not meta-chasing and swapping armies every 5 months or something. Yes people do pick up new armies, but by and large wargame armies take time. To buy, build, paint and play. Even if you buy second hand or commission an army the last one - play - is still a huge limit.
So yeah better balance works out better because it means people are exploring other armies out of excitement and choice instead of because their current army is rubbish in the rules right now. When that happens you are FAR more likely to consider other games outside of GW; meanwhile the guy who has a great running army might well buy other armies within the GW system because of the positive experience with their current army.
Honestly what I want is just, not even a crazy super high level of quality, I'd settle for just what they manage to do with Age of Sigmar frankly. There's a few balance hiccups, some armies drop with some zany combos in them and then theyve got to tamp them down. By all accounts the Cities of Sigmar are gonna be a little strong on release - but that game's been chugging happily along, GHBs providing occasional shakeups to what's fun to take, new factions dropping with sometimes a "oh 60% winrate" level splash and generally speaking balance rotates about a fine little cycle.
Games Workshop, the company, can accomplish this. They do accomplish this, with games like necromunda and titanicus and age of sigmar. changes come but theyre not jarring enough to really make you feel bad, and they more just serve to make things fun and interesting. The game has been on pretty much stable ground in the time span that 40k has had to endure 2 full hard stop resets tear everything down and start over.
Far as I can tell the problem is like the double turn in AoS.
One thing A/some designers in 40K (and by extension fans) are keen on are huge swings and big meaty turns. This leads to things that let you get alpha strikes in turn 1/2; to wiping out 1/4-1/2 an enemy army in a single blazing turn of firepower and other super powerful "OMG That was EPIC" kind of moments.
Moments that are really bad for balance and honestly, yeah its cool and all for the person doing it - the other person just watches half their army get torn apart.
Overread wrote: Far as I can tell the problem is like the double turn in AoS.
One thing A/some designers in 40K (and by extension fans) are keen on are huge swings and big meaty turns. This leads to things that let you get alpha strikes in turn 1/2; to wiping out 1/4-1/2 an enemy army in a single blazing turn of firepower and other super powerful "OMG That was EPIC" kind of moments.
Moments that are really bad for balance and honestly, yeah its cool and all for the person doing it - the other person just watches half their army get torn apart.
I think it's even more general than that. There's an element at GW that wants games to be a "watch what the dice do" experience more than a game. Set up your cool toys, roll some dice, and see what happens. Don't worry too much about player agency or anything that could let a less-skilled player have a bad time, roll some dice and if they go against you it's only dice luck and you'll do better next time. Maybe at most you have some obvious buff stacking so players can feel clever for figuring out that you should use the "attack twice" stratagem and the "+1 to hit" stratagem on the same unit and it should be your best offensive unit, but never anything that can't be explained in a short netlist post.
Part of why modern 40k is such a mess is that there's unresolved tension between that element, the element that wants a serious narrative game, and the element that wants a serious competitive game. So you have things like GW using all the language of a serious competitive game in writing the rules but then writing missions that encourage you to shove your armies into the middle of the table and roll dice to see what happens, or competitive play articles that focus exclusively on faction win rate (easy to have with a "see what the dice do" game) and ignore more advanced and informative metrics.
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H.B.M.C. wrote: I love it when WarCom posts comedy articles!
They could at least come up with a new joke, the current one is getting kind of stale.
Yet we always hear "they should release all codex on day 1". Well, imagine this but worse.
Just because GW is incompetent doesn't mean frontloading all the codexes isnt a better format for the consumers.
I think the issue is that GW simply doesn't have enough writers to do all at once.
Also the best format would be full digital release, no paper.
Nah, three years is plenty of time. Remember this is these guys full time job. Presumably they're working 9-5, five days a week for 48 weeks of the year (I think 4 paid weeks off a year still standard for a UK job, might be different these days).
The question is how much info do they have on edition cycles and when they learn they have ANOTHER full reboot. Ideally all the codexes would be written and tested at the same time but we know thats not true and that new books are only tested against the strongest most recent books. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the decision to reboot 40k again was decided like 6 months ago.
Most skilled professionals (however much anyone mat grumble at the term here) would expect 25 days + Bank Holidays for 32 days.
We also don't know how many testers/designers they have, nor what else they do. They likely also have to work on a combo of 40k, 30k, AoS, KT, warcry and 4+ specialist games at any given time to some degree.
GW will 100% be woefully ill-equipped for those testing demands, it's likely not worth hiring too many more because they'd basically work themselves out of a job once the backlog was cleared and they're not in a position to break the work patterns without an influx of time/people.
Not sure about the other systems, but I'm fairly sure that 30k has its own dedicated team, just based on the different design philosophies and approaches to the game. I can't imagine that the same people behind late 40k's dedication to "what's in the box" design also being behind the 30k approach that actually encourages conversions and customization.
If GW reigned in the actual changing of the rules to a polish every 3 years with minor adjustments to the core rules then they'd at least create an environment where they can steadily polish things and where greater resource investment would likely pay off.
This is what I'd hoped would happen in 8th and why I defended it. I figured there was no way they'd set themselves up with the ideal system to tweak and fine tune the rules on an individual unit basis and then not use it. Then they GW gunna GW and I just packed it in. They're never going to change and hoping for them to be actually competent at game design is a fools errand.
Stu Black clearly understands he's not allowed to say it's gak, but he says a tonne of intelligent things in the podcast, if you're a fan of 10th edition and you want a blue pill I suggest listening to it.
Overread wrote: If GW reigned in the actual changing of the rules to a polish every 3 years with minor adjustments to the core rules then they'd at least create an environment where they can steadily polish things and where greater resource investment would likely pay off.
That is exactly what GW did, minor adjustments to core rules. 10th is not like 8th where everything was changed, 9th was also broken and also just had minor changes. I just skimmed an article on the top 10 changes for 10th edition, only 3 of them were core rules changes. 40k could have been balanced at launch if it wasn't GW doing it or if they just take a 6 month break from 10th in 12 months and learn how to actually do balance instead of relying on the ole' dartboard. The fact that every faction was updated at once should make things easier, not harder because we know GW are completely gak at running releases of balanced codexes, the running balance in 9th was all over the place. It's not editions being 3 years that is the problem, it's GW that is the problem. It takes them 4 tries to balance something usually, which isn't insane or anything when you're starting from dartboard points, the whole problem is that they are. I would have done the pts foundation myself over the summer for 10th if I liked the rules. GW could have hired an Indian on Fiverr to do the math for them, they don't need someone with statistics PhD. That no one with an interest in mathhammer has fallen into the team on accident through the years is baffling given how many in the community like to talk about efficiency of this or that or combos and stuff like that, instead its all feelings and dartboards from the team.
I'm not saying I want to boil down 40k to make it more competitive, I don't like Grimdark Future, I like wacky and fluffy rules, but wacky does not have to mean terribly balanced.
That no one with an interest in mathhammer has fallen into the team on accident through the years is baffling given how many in the community like to talk about efficiency of this or that or combos and stuff like that, instead its all feelings and dartboards from the team.
Is it really that baffling though?
You said it yourself, the mathhammer types love to talk.
So I'm betting they're pretty easy to weed out during the interview process.
Is it really that baffling though?
You said it yourself, the mathhammer types love to talk.
So I'm betting they're pretty easy to weed out during the interview process.
Sounds par for the course for a design team phobic of accountability.
Is it really that baffling though?
You said it yourself, the mathhammer types love to talk.
So I'm betting they're pretty easy to weed out during the interview process.
Sounds par for the course for a design team phobic of accountability.
vict0988 wrote: The fact that every faction was updated at once should make things easier, not harder
but only if the people doing it talk to each other
the Indices have the very same problem as the Codices had, people not talking to each other or skimming over each others work before it is released
they did not even agreed on which order the units are listed in the documents before they wrote them, no way that there was talk about balance except for very basic design goals of the higher ups like "less lethal, more fun"
Yet we always hear "they should release all codex on day 1". Well, imagine this but worse.
Not quite sure how it gets worse(since it's cesspool bad currently) but fair nuff
Nah, it's a bad faith argument from Dudeface.
Yes it's bad faith that they managed a complete mess with 1/7th of the possible detachments etc out on release day. Having them release the whole game on day 1 in the exact same timeframe etc would certainly go better.
The only perk is you wouldn't have the rolling power curve as books drop, instead just 2 years of them slowly having to tweak all factions simultaneously.
Yes it's bad faith that they managed a complete mess with 1/7th of the possible detachments etc out on release day. Having them release the whole game on day 1 in the exact same timeframe etc would certainly go better.
The only perk is you wouldn't have the rolling power curve as books drop, instead just 2 years of them slowly having to tweak all factions simultaneously.
They "managed" a complete mess not for lack of capability, but for lack of willingness. They're a 5+ billion dollar company. They can afford to pay a few people 6 figures to do serious game design. But they won't.
The big problem is 10th launched without any proofreading, never mind balancing. The initial Index releases had typos, missing/extra wargear choices and in some cases entire abilities that made no sense. It's pretty clear it was rushed out of the door before it was ready because this is bad even for GW.
I'd like to see a deeper dive in these Metawatch articles but I'm not convinced GW is actually doing that so it seems unlikely. Even just things like noting the overall win rate and the win rate without the mirror matches included would be a good start. That's especially true if you have a few factions absolutely dominating the top of the meta as we have now since we'll be seeing a lot of Eldar vs Eldar or GSC vs GSC matches and by definition they reduce the winrate in those matchups to 50%. I also think the start of an edition is a pretty good time to make a bunch of emergency fixes to try to at least get some extra data on what works and what doesn't. I suspect we'll see the new points system cause them major problems as they try to adjust balance using points changes going forward, and we see a load of unintended consequences from nerfs and buffs as we've already seen with things like melee Wraithknights.
Yes it's bad faith that they managed a complete mess with 1/7th of the possible detachments etc out on release day. Having them release the whole game on day 1 in the exact same timeframe etc would certainly go better.
The only perk is you wouldn't have the rolling power curve as books drop, instead just 2 years of them slowly having to tweak all factions simultaneously.
They "managed" a complete mess not for lack of capability, but for lack of willingness. They're a 5+ billion dollar company. They can afford to pay a few people 6 figures to do serious game design. But they won't.
The salary or competence of the staff is not the only factor at play, nor will hiring more help necessarily. The Indexes were previously written very quickly without due time, releasing them as full codex rules with ~6-7 times the number of detachments, relics and Enhancements wouldn't have stood any better chance.
The business driven decisions and timescales are more of a problem than the salary. Also they won't hire a 6 figure salary in GBP because that'd be ridiculous by any metric.
What I think you mean to say is "hire more staff, pay better, give them more time and allow more community input" which simply isn't on the agenda right now.
the only way to fix 40k is by making it no longer 40k, the concepts that worked ok for half a dozen units with one or two characters and maybe one of those units as a vehicle of some sort (stuff like IGOYGO) fall over with larger forces, ditto the 28mm scale doesn't work very well as forces grow
its fixable, but since it still sells why would they bother?
Dudeface wrote: Yes it's bad faith that they managed a complete mess with 1/7th of the possible detachments etc out on release day. Having them release the whole game on day 1 in the exact same timeframe etc would certainly go better.
Or, instead of this farce of a three year edition cycle, you take the time to do it right. The indices are a mess because they're an obvious rush job that you aren't supposed to use once you get your real rules, not because releasing a well designed and balanced complete game at the start of an edition is an unreasonable task.
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Dudeface wrote: Also they won't hire a 6 figure salary in GBP because that'd be ridiculous by any metric.
Why would that be ridiculous? A six figure salary is what a software developer with 2-3 years of experience is making working on F2P loot box shovelware, surely GW can afford to at least match that for the right people. If it's ridiculous it's only because we know GW doesn't value competence and would rather lowball their employees and rely on them being so desperate to participate in their hobby that they'll accept the offer.
Dudeface wrote: Yes it's bad faith that they managed a complete mess with 1/7th of the possible detachments etc out on release day. Having them release the whole game on day 1 in the exact same timeframe etc would certainly go better.
Or, instead of this farce of a three year edition cycle, you take the time to do it right. The indices are a mess because they're an obvious rush job that you aren't supposed to use once you get your real rules, not because releasing a well designed and balanced complete game at the start of an edition is an unreasonable task.
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Dudeface wrote: Also they won't hire a 6 figure salary in GBP because that'd be ridiculous by any metric.
Why would that be ridiculous? A six figure salary is what a software developer with 2-3 years of experience is making working on F2P loot box shovelware, surely GW can afford to at least match that for the right people. If it's ridiculous it's only because we know GW doesn't value competence and would rather lowball their employees and rely on them being so desperate to participate in their hobby that they'll accept the offer.
A software developer in the UK with 2 years of experience is on 35-40k. The average salary for an experienced game designer of the board nature is apparently 45-60k. 100k+ in the UK is a director/ceo level salary.
Again, not relevant, but stop applying US standards to UK job markets. Yes they could upheave their entire development cycle and I think we'd all be for giving them more time, but they're not in a position to do so currently. They'd have to let 10th pan out for 5+ years to get the lead time for 11th.
Dudeface wrote: A software developer in the UK with 2 years of experience is on 35-40k. The average salary for an experienced game designer of the board nature is apparently 45-60k. 100k+ in the UK is a director/ceo level salary.
Cool. Then pay $150k and get your choice of any game developer in the entire country. Poach whoever you want from any UK company and there's no way they're turning down the offer. Do that 3-5 times and you have the single best design team in the entire UK, and you've still spent a trivial amount of money compared to GW's total revenue. And if you stop assuming you can only recruit from a single country and pay market rates for your biggest market you can have your pick of game designers out of the entire world. GW has the money to easily afford to hire the best possible talent, they choose not to because they have an idiotic belief that attitude matters more than skill and choose to hire cheap yes men instead.
(And seriously? $100k is CEO level? Who would ever want to be CEO of a UK company when 100 times that in the US is a low-end salary for the job)
Yes they could upheave their entire development cycle and I think we'd all be for giving them more time, but they're not in a position to do so currently. They'd have to let 10th pan out for 5+ years to get the lead time for 11th.
Sure, now that they've completely botched the handling of 10th they have problems for the future. That doesn't mean doing 10th correctly was an impossible task.
Dudeface wrote: A software developer in the UK with 2 years of experience is on 35-40k. The average salary for an experienced game designer of the board nature is apparently 45-60k. 100k+ in the UK is a director/ceo level salary.
Cool. Then pay $150k and get your choice of any game developer in the entire country. Poach whoever you want from any UK company and there's no way they're turning down the offer. Do that 3-5 times and you have the single best design team in the entire UK, and you've still spent a trivial amount of money compared to GW's total revenue. And if you stop assuming you can only recruit from a single country and pay market rates for your biggest market you can have your pick of game designers out of the entire world. GW has the money to easily afford to hire the best possible talent, they choose not to because they have an idiotic belief that attitude matters more than skill and choose to hire cheap yes men instead.
(And seriously? $100k is CEO level? Who would ever want to be CEO of a UK company when 100 times that in the US is a low-end salary for the job)
Yes they could upheave their entire development cycle and I think we'd all be for giving them more time, but they're not in a position to do so currently. They'd have to let 10th pan out for 5+ years to get the lead time for 11th.
Sure, now that they've completely botched the handling of 10th they have problems for the future. That doesn't mean doing 10th correctly was an impossible task.
I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
But you know what? You should email them your ideas on these subjects.
leopard wrote: the only way to fix 40k is by making it no longer 40k, the concepts that worked ok for half a dozen units with one or two characters and maybe one of those units as a vehicle of some sort (stuff like IGOYGO) fall over with larger forces, ditto the 28mm scale doesn't work very well as forces grow
its fixable, but since it still sells why would they bother?
Lots of truth to this. I'm sort of hoping that one of their smaller scale games (probably Combat Patrol) will eventually mutate into basically a more streamlined version of an older edition. That is, I'm hoping we get a tighter ruleset designed around fielding fewer units at once where they focus in on making the gameplay interesting without needing a ton of strats and special rules and such. I like what I've heard about the current Combat Patrol, but the lack of flexibility in army creation is keeping me away for now.
ccs wrote: I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
That table of win rates at the start of this thread says they don't. Do you have anything to add here besides asserting that GW must know what they're doing because GW is doing it?
leopard wrote: the only way to fix 40k is by making it no longer 40k, the concepts that worked ok for half a dozen units with one or two characters and maybe one of those units as a vehicle of some sort (stuff like IGOYGO) fall over with larger forces, ditto the 28mm scale doesn't work very well as forces grow
its fixable, but since it still sells why would they bother?
Lots of truth to this. I'm sort of hoping that one of their smaller scale games (probably Combat Patrol) will eventually mutate into basically a more streamlined version of an older edition. That is, I'm hoping we get a tighter ruleset designed around fielding fewer units at once where they focus in on making the gameplay interesting without needing a ton of strats and special rules and such. I like what I've heard about the current Combat Patrol, but the lack of flexibility in army creation is keeping me away for now.
a good step would be to take combat patrol size and have models act and move either individually or in small groups, but with a bonus to working together, at present you have too few units, but the basic idea is actually sound
Anybody else felt it was a weird phrasing from the accompanying mail?
"The heavy weights of Warhammer 40.000", "Play with the winner" and "Pick your army based on their competitive performance". Showing some armies having a below 40% win rate. Right above an article called "Crazily balanced games".
Reminds me of the phrase "What is satire allowed to do?", really.
Dudeface wrote: Interesting question to lobby, say they got every unit in the game fairly balanced and in a stable spot. Then what?
The exact same as what GW is doing now minus the codex books. Just release new models or remake old ones. Some faction dice and expansions.
It does not matter how many people are there or much they get paid, as long as they are not allowed to talk to each other or other design teams until rules are released you will get a bad product
if GW ever end up in a place, by pure luck, where essentially every faction is pretty well balanced, with a set of scenarios that are workable for pretty much all factions there will only be one possible solution
Dudeface wrote: A software developer in the UK with 2 years of experience is on 35-40k. The average salary for an experienced game designer of the board nature is apparently 45-60k. 100k+ in the UK is a director/ceo level salary.
Cool. Then pay $150k and get your choice of any game developer in the entire country. Poach whoever you want from any UK company and there's no way they're turning down the offer. Do that 3-5 times and you have the single best design team in the entire UK, and you've still spent a trivial amount of money compared to GW's total revenue. And if you stop assuming you can only recruit from a single country and pay market rates for your biggest market you can have your pick of game designers out of the entire world. GW has the money to easily afford to hire the best possible talent, they choose not to because they have an idiotic belief that attitude matters more than skill and choose to hire cheap yes men instead.
But why? That makes no business sense in the first place. In the UK, if you wanted to outbid the competition you'd be able to do it for around £50-60k, so you're already going in too high. The main problem is what your expected ROI is here. You're talking about doubling (or more) the salaries of your designers, along with the one-off costs of getting rid of the current team. Does better balance lead to a significant enough increase in profit to justify the extra spend? Does the extra spend actually guarantee you get people in capable of balancing a tabletop wargame? There are similarities between video game design and TTG design, but there are also massive differences that mean the skills are not necessarily the same between the two groups.
Paying lots more money to a bunch of people is not the answer to getting better balance, IMO. What's needed is a corporate shift to make balance a priority. You can have the best experts working for you, paid top salaries, but if the company doesn't value the job they do it doesn't matter.
(And seriously? $100k is CEO level? Who would ever want to be CEO of a UK company when 100 times that in the US is a low-end salary for the job)
It depends on the company. Obviously massive multinationals based in the UK will pay internationally competitive salaries easily in the 7 or 8-figure range plus bonuses. But most companies are smallish organisations. The UK average CEO salary is apparently around £200k according to Glassdoor. Bear in mind that includes everything from corporate giants to mid-size companies with fairly small turnovers.
I don't think people actually want balance as much as they simply want change.
Tell that to my wife. She started playing 40k with me right at the end of 9th and liked Votann so I bought her a 1,000 point list. She just got her hekaton finished last night and then we watched this video. Her immediate reaction was "Of course I play Votann and now they're the worst army in the game". She's not competitive at all. She will never play in a 40k tournament in her entire life. Even for casual games, seeing that your army has a 30 something % win rate is disheartening. This is why balance is important for garagehammer players probably even more than competitive players. I travel to tournaments and have played since 1999. If my army is that bad, I will switch to a different one or build a new one for a big tournament. My wife is not going to abandon her freshly painted first army to build eldar for kitchen table hammer.
Necromunda is hilariously broken. We play a campaign about every 6 months and have every gang represented. Van Saar with plasma, Corpse Grinders, and Goliaths abusing gene smithing just run away with it every single time. You have to house rule the absolute hell out of that game or come to a gentlemen's agreement about not taking half of the good stuff for your gang to make it remotely balanced. It's also crazy how the campaign scales. Someone did a really good writeup with all the math on how broken Necromunda campaigns are even compared to other GW games. The gangs that win their first few games get all the credits, XP, upgraded weapons and armor, while the losers get no credits and sometimes lose XP from guys dying post game. Every campaign I've ever been in fizzles out before the end because a few people are so far ahead that nobody else can touch them.
A combination of letting people having their pet projects, too few people and wanting to run a game like you did when you had 100k buyers, when you have a few milions. Will end up with the results we get everytime. Because there is only one thing that can make GW work fast and in depth on their game, and that it is only when it gets in the way of profit, And I don't even think that is a bad thing. I just wish GW was more open about it. Or made clear distinction this are the studios own armies, this will get fun cool rules and are safe to play, those are armie we have to update because there is community of buyers for it, they can be fun or can not. And then there is a group of stuff we do out of obligation, don't expect anything good for them aside for accidents making it so.
Peachy had an interesting interview with a guy that said that unless something creates a 100k money swing for GW, they will not even look at the project. And looking at a project doesn't mean that GW will do something, and even less that it will be a good thing. With cutting costs and the way they do things, comparing to how people play their games, the end effect just has to end bad.
All the hire stuff, change core rules etc Won't matter if the higher ups will ignore testing or if who ever is the eldar super fan at the studio doesn't get reigned in with his rules writing for the faction. They could higher 20 dudes pay each 200k per year, and the end result would not be much different.
Really surprised SM are that low. Maybe it's tournament players not playing them, but OOM is really strong for taking out big centerpieces in my experience.
Guard are in a rough place. The army feels like it should work, but a lot of its really good buffs are contingent on staying still, which is not the name of the game in most scenarios.
ccs wrote: I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
That table of win rates at the start of this thread says they don't. Do you have anything to add here besides asserting that GW must know what they're doing because GW is doing it?
winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit. So even if the balance is terrible, if 40l keeps selling more than the last quarter, from the company's point of view, its working properly
RaptorusRex wrote: Really surprised SM are that low. Maybe it's tournament players not playing them, but OOM is really strong for taking out big centerpieces in my experience.
OoM is quite overrated honestly. It's really good against "all eggs in one basket"-lists, decent againg some lists, and near worthless against some lists.
Eldar and GSC (and other horde lists) for instance, can easily play around OoM, or flat out ignore it.
yeah. people are mixing up things sometimes. My wake up call was finding out that sports schools and trainers think about themselfs, their money, contracts, future contracts AND then about their students, and after that their welfare.
RaptorusRex wrote: Really surprised SM are that low. Maybe it's tournament players not playing them, but OOM is really strong for taking out big centerpieces in my experience.
Guard are in a rough place. The army feels like it should work, but a lot of its really good buffs are contingent on staying still, which is not the name of the game in most scenarios.
OOM is good. I think the problem for SM is that's pretty much all they have. Their datasheets are OK, their strats are OK and they have some nice synergies but those things don't make you a top tournament army. They're up against Eldar, who are broken in numerous ways, GSC who pretty much play their own version of 40k with all their weird shenanigans, and Custodes who essentially shut down the Fight phase for everyone else while being incredibly resilient. Then there are a bunch of armies that don't have faction abilities as good as OOM, but just have better datasheets and synergies.
SM aren't bad, like LoV or DG. They're just really middle of the pack, which is reflected in their win rate.
Are we sure that GW Marketing has not fiddled with the stats, to sell more Eldar, GSC and Knights?
As to the conversation, games should be balanced.
If a company wants to tailor the New Big Thing to be overpowered on release, that is on them. But, once they have sold enough of the NBT, it gets nerfed into line with everything else.
Games should be based on many factors, such as balanced lists and player skill, but not inherrant strength of the army as a whole (or selected OP units).
VladimirHerzog wrote: winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit.
I'd actually argue that they think they're important, but that they don't understand them.
They see a flat 50% and immediately think "Job's a good 'un!" and move onto the army that's at 43% or 62% to "fix" them. It might never occur to them that the reason Army X is at a flat 50% is because it's abusing a combo of two or three units, and completely ignoring almost the rest of the entire Codex, meaning that the army is fundamentally broken but the high-level 50% win rate isn't showing the problems and is, in fact, masking them.
This what I mean when I bring up the Dunning–Kruger effect. They don't know what they think they know, and talk confidently about the successes they've had and changes they'll make without any real understanding of why the game is the way it is.
Skinnereal wrote: Are we sure that GW Marketing has not fiddled with the stats, to sell more Eldar, GSC and Knights?
Hanlon's Razor would say otherwise.
And games should be balanced. One such lever they could pull to increase balance could be... oh I dunno... a more granular and flexible points system. But that'd just be crazy. It's not like they've ever tried that over the previous 9 editions of the game.
ccs wrote: I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
That table of win rates at the start of this thread says they don't. Do you have anything to add here besides asserting that GW must know what they're doing because GW is doing it?
I'm sure there's more involved in running a multi-billion $ earning, global, multi-faceted, publicly traded company that's an (if not the) industry leader than the mere tourney rankings for 1 of its games.
That you disagree proves my point.
ccs wrote: I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
That table of win rates at the start of this thread says they don't. Do you have anything to add here besides asserting that GW must know what they're doing because GW is doing it?
I'm sure there's more involved in running a multi-billion $ earning, global, multi-faceted, publicly traded company that's an (if not the) industry leader than the mere tourney rankings for 1 of its games.
That you disagree proves my point.
You have to write good rules as well, which you can split into innumerable sub-categories of good game design and GW has failed at all of them with 10th edition.
or you can say once you reach a critical mass of players, it does not matter any more what you are doing as long as there is something new every once in a while
Tyran wrote: The fact that GW is the industry leader pretty much proves you don't have to write good rules.
You can definitely make the argument that good rules help, but they are not a priority.
Exactly. You need to write good enough rules. And that is the general state of 40kRT - present.
Aha and at what point exactly are rules not good enough anymore, if even GW's more favourable looking very generalized metawatch statistic completely fails to hide that the game is currently pretty much in it's most unbalanced state since people have even seriously started to make such statistics?
Even with the most favourable reading of this hot mess, just 11 of the factions are in GW's own quite generous balanced zone(while using more than just GT data, without excluding mirror matches, etc...) while 15 of the factions aka the majority are not, and that is after emergency nerfs and with multiple of the armies in the too weak zone already being propped up by broken allys(Knights).
Tyran wrote: The fact that GW is the industry leader pretty much proves you don't have to write good rules.
You can definitely make the argument that good rules help, but they are not a priority.
Exactly. You need to write good enough rules. And that is the general state of 40kRT - present.
You can write bad rules too. As long you more or less have a monopoly it doesn't matter. GW are in the Apple in the US situation. The only thing that could change them is if for some reason a region like US or main land europe decided to become very angry at GW, and went full recast. Only if the loses from something were that 500-1000k big, someone higher up could potentialy wake up. They had a wake up like that in 7th ed, from what industry people were talking on various podcasts.
Let us not forget there was a time when everyone was jumping ship from GW to Privateer Press and better rules and tighter rules writing was one of the big contributing factors.
It wasn't all, but I think it highlights how even a monoply, if it lets one area get too weak, will create a void for a competitor to rise up. Furthermore it shows that its rarely just one thing, there are often many factors in customer choices and behaviours and trying to single out one thing is always going to trip up with "well actually" etc...
Rules are one part of many parts that contributes toward a successful wargame miniature company. One tool in the box; one cog in the machine. The better they are the better it helps the whole.
Overread wrote: Let us not forget there was a time when everyone was jumping ship from GW to Privateer Press and better rules and tighter rules writing was one of the big contributing factors.
It wasn't all, but I think it highlights how even a monoply, if it lets one area get too weak, will create a void for a competitor to rise up. Furthermore it shows that its rarely just one thing, there are often many factors in customer choices and behaviours and trying to single out one thing is always going to trip up with "well actually" etc...
Rules are one part of many parts that contributes toward a successful wargame miniature company. One tool in the box; one cog in the machine. The better they are the better it helps the whole.
And then unfortunately, Privateer Press started slipping. Their rules got worse, their community support got worse, models, SKU... all those issues, around when 8th Edition released. I saw the local Warmahordes community all just shift back to 40k.
Overread wrote: Let us not forget there was a time when everyone was jumping ship from GW to Privateer Press and better rules and tighter rules writing was one of the big contributing factors.
It wasn't all, but I think it highlights how even a monoply, if it lets one area get too weak, will create a void for a competitor to rise up. Furthermore it shows that its rarely just one thing, there are often many factors in customer choices and behaviours and trying to single out one thing is always going to trip up with "well actually" etc...
Rules are one part of many parts that contributes toward a successful wargame miniature company. One tool in the box; one cog in the machine. The better they are the better it helps the whole.
Wasn't the problem with warmachine the fact that it got very popular, people still remember it fondly here, but they couldn't produce enough models. So stores were ordering and not getting merch to sell. People wanted to play, so they were ordering online, slowly killing the stores, to which the store reaction was to not allow warmachine to be played. Thing is GW is slowly moving in to the same spot. They are under printing stuff, and their policy towards or against stores outside of UK, US and west europe is not gaining them many friends around the world. Recasting was always popular here. But in 8th people weren't killing themselfs to straight up rip off GW box designs and start selling them, before the stores can even get their hands on the boxes.
Overread wrote: Let us not forget there was a time when everyone was jumping ship from GW to Privateer Press and better rules and tighter rules writing was one of the big contributing factors.
It wasn't all, but I think it highlights how even a monoply, if it lets one area get too weak, will create a void for a competitor to rise up. Furthermore it shows that its rarely just one thing, there are often many factors in customer choices and behaviours and trying to single out one thing is always going to trip up with "well actually" etc...
Rules are one part of many parts that contributes toward a successful wargame miniature company. One tool in the box; one cog in the machine. The better they are the better it helps the whole.
And then unfortunately, Privateer Press started slipping. Their rules got worse, their community support got worse, models, SKU... all those issues, around when 8th Edition released. I saw the local Warmahordes community all just shift back to 40k.
Part of the problem was WarmaHordes being hyped as “not GW”. And then, arguably inevitably, new editions came out, more rules were added, stuff shifted in perceived rankings and boof, doing everything which had irked their customers about GW was manifesting.
Overread wrote: Let us not forget there was a time when everyone was jumping ship from GW to Privateer Press and better rules and tighter rules writing was one of the big contributing factors.
It wasn't all, but I think it highlights how even a monoply, if it lets one area get too weak, will create a void for a competitor to rise up. Furthermore it shows that its rarely just one thing, there are often many factors in customer choices and behaviours and trying to single out one thing is always going to trip up with "well actually" etc...
Rules are one part of many parts that contributes toward a successful wargame miniature company. One tool in the box; one cog in the machine. The better they are the better it helps the whole.
And then unfortunately, Privateer Press started slipping. Their rules got worse, their community support got worse, models, SKU... all those issues, around when 8th Edition released. I saw the local Warmahordes community all just shift back to 40k.
Part of the problem was WarmaHordes being hyped as “not GW”. And then, arguably inevitably, new editions came out, more rules were added, stuff shifted in perceived rankings and boof, doing everything which had irked their customers about GW was manifesting.
Indeed. At the same time that perception of GW was generally turning up. Optimism was at a decent level around the release of 8e.
It's such a shame, because honestly most of my best Wargaming memories come from moments playing Warmahordes.
PP couldn't afford to gak all over the place like GW can.
ccs wrote: I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
That table of win rates at the start of this thread says they don't. Do you have anything to add here besides asserting that GW must know what they're doing because GW is doing it?
The salary or competence of the staff is not the only factor at play, nor will hiring more help necessarily. The Indexes were previously written very quickly without due time, releasing them as full codex rules with ~6-7 times the number of detachments, relics and Enhancements wouldn't have stood any better chance.
Yeah it would, if you hire more people and pay them better they'll do better work. It's not rocket surgery.
Dudeface wrote: The business driven decisions and timescales are more of a problem than the salary. Also they won't hire a 6 figure salary in GBP because that'd be ridiculous by any metric.
Well, doesn't have to be GBP. Rountree's compensation is like $1.3 mil, so they can afford 100k for a few design lead types.
Dudeface wrote: What I think you mean to say is "hire more staff, pay better, give them more time and allow more community input" which simply isn't on the agenda right now.
That's not what I "meant" to say, it's very much implied by what I said, so this condescending nonsense about "what I think you mean" should stop if you were actually parsing what I put in my post. But I don't think you'll apologize for being rude, it's not in your temperament.
And it not being on the agenda is a problem, a problem I'm very much pointing out.
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Dudeface wrote: Again, not relevant, but stop applying US standards to UK job markets. Yes they could upheave their entire development cycle and I think we'd all be for giving them more time, but they're not in a position to do so currently. They'd have to let 10th pan out for 5+ years to get the lead time for 11th.
They're definitely in a position to do so currently. They have almost 3 years until they have to hit 11th for stockholders. They don't need 5 years if they're handling it well, hiring competent people, and letting them do their job.
"Oh, a balanced game is too much trouble" is such BS. Everyone who claims this just flat out doesn't *want* a balanced game, because they enjoy unfair games and getting unearned wins.
I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
But you know what? You should email them your ideas on these subjects.
That's an appeal to authority, not an argument. Try again chief.
"Oh, a balanced game is too much trouble" is such BS. Everyone who claims this just flat out doesn't *want* a balanced game, because they enjoy unfair games and getting unearned wins.
It's not too much trouble.
It's too unprofitable.
GW is making their profit from imbalance...Why on earth would GW kill off their best marketing tool? When players allow themselves to be exploited for their cash why on earth would GW stop exploiting?
Exploit, exploit, exploit, exploit. Company isn't about giving good product. It's about transfering money from your wallet to their wallet.
But why? That makes no business sense in the first place. In the UK, if you wanted to outbid the competition you'd be able to do it for around £50-60k, so you're already going in too high. The main problem is what your expected ROI is here. You're talking about doubling (or more) the salaries of your designers, along with the one-off costs of getting rid of the current team. Does better balance lead to a significant enough increase in profit to justify the extra spend? Does the extra spend actually guarantee you get people in capable of balancing a tabletop wargame? There are similarities between video game design and TTG design, but there are also massive differences that mean the skills are not necessarily the same between the two groups.
There are tabletop game designers out there with consummate resumes and lots of experience. Even people who bridge the gap, like Sandy Petersen. Now, of course, the suits wouldn't like it because when the get their bs going on about how the game needs to be a certain way they'd get told to their face they're wrong... and they'd have to have people who don't follow the anti-gameplay corporate culture that GW has.
Slipspace wrote: Paying lots more money to a bunch of people is not the answer to getting better balance, IMO. What's needed is a corporate shift to make balance a priority. You can have the best experts working for you, paid top salaries, but if the company doesn't value the job they do it doesn't matter.
If the company is paying them money then by definition it's valuing the work they do.
It depends on the company. Obviously massive multinationals based in the UK will pay internationally competitive salaries easily in the 7 or 8-figure range plus bonuses. But most companies are smallish organisations. The UK average CEO salary is apparently around £200k according to Glassdoor. Bear in mind that includes everything from corporate giants to mid-size companies with fairly small turnovers.
Right, we're talking about GW though. Rountree's compensation is like $1.3 million.
winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit. So even if the balance is terrible, if 40l keeps selling more than the last quarter, from the company's point of view, its working properly
Sure, but if the game was better they'd have more retention, and it'd be easier to get casuals involved. Dunno about larger trends, but where I'm at a lot of people played 10e a few times, stopped buying stuff, and are playing ASOIAF, Infinity, or Legion instead.
I'm sure there's more involved in running a multi-billion $ earning, global, multi-faceted, publicly traded company that's an (if not the) industry leader than the mere tourney rankings for 1 of its games.
That you disagree proves my point.
You're trying to say that the tourney rankings for 40k, their flagship game, are not a problem. That's different from the claim you're making here, which is a wildly unreasonable appeal to authority.
When a new player tries 40k and finds out that they can't have fun games with their friends because it's wildly unbalanced, that's lost sales. And that's basically how 10th works right now.
Exactly. You need to write good enough rules. And that is the general state of 40kRT - present.
No, they're not "good enough" for anyone with a sense of sportsmanship. Part of the reason the 40k tournament scene is so toxic is anyone who likes fair games and sportsmanship leaves for greener pastures - so you're left with the cheaters, toxic CAAC types, etc.
Wasn't the problem with warmachine the fact that it got very popular, people still remember it fondly here, but they couldn't produce enough models. So stores were ordering and not getting merch to sell. People wanted to play, so they were ordering online, slowly killing the stores, to which the store reaction was to not allow warmachine to be played. Thing is GW is slowly moving in to the same spot. They are under printing stuff, and their policy towards or against stores outside of UK, US and west europe is not gaining them many friends around the world. Recasting was always popular here. But in 8th people weren't killing themselfs to straight up rip off GW box designs and start selling them, before the stores can even get their hands on the boxes.
No, that's not the reason. The reason was that PP did the MK 3 rollout and didn't do a playtest like for MK 2, and took the advice of various big retailers in the US (like the guy who runs Black Diamond Games, who *hated* PP and was a GW shill and was giving them advice to fail) instead of making a good, well-playtested game. It's not unlike the bad edition rollouts for 40k, honestly.
There was also Brian Wilson's general contempt for the gaming space, and a few own goals with his idiocy.
ccs wrote: I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
That table of win rates at the start of this thread says they don't. Do you have anything to add here besides asserting that GW must know what they're doing because GW is doing it?
Table shows there's imbalance in game.
Imbalance leads to profit.
It's feature. Not bug.
Sergeantbob you should know that by now after being years here.
GW is making their profit from imbalance...Why on earth would GW kill off their best marketing tool? When players allow themselves to be exploited for their cash why on earth would GW stop exploiting?
Exploit, exploit, exploit, exploit. Company isn't about giving good product. It's about transfering money from your wallet to their wallet.
The whales who metachase are overwhelmed in number by the people who play the game, realize it's not balanced, and don't engage with it.
Why are you saying that their exploitation is a good thing?
The salary or competence of the staff is not the only factor at play, nor will hiring more help necessarily. The Indexes were previously written very quickly without due time, releasing them as full codex rules with ~6-7 times the number of detachments, relics and Enhancements wouldn't have stood any better chance.
Yeah it would, if you hire more people and pay them better they'll do better work. It's not rocket surgery.
You hire someone to do a 25 day task in 10 days, doesn't matter how much you pay them.
Dudeface wrote: The business driven decisions and timescales are more of a problem than the salary. Also they won't hire a 6 figure salary in GBP because that'd be ridiculous by any metric.
Well, doesn't have to be GBP. Rountree's compensation is like $1.3 mil, so they can afford 100k for a few design lead
An annual CEO bonus is not comparable to a salary.
Dudeface wrote: What I think you mean to say is "hire more staff, pay better, give them more time and allow more community input" which simply isn't on the agenda right now.
That's not what I "meant" to say, it's very much implied by what I said, so this condescending nonsense about "what I think you mean" should stop if you were actually parsing what I put in my post. But I don't think you'll apologize for being rude, it's not in your temperament.
Well, perhaps we're similar in some regards.
And it not being on the agenda is a problem, a problem I'm very much pointing out.
Yuuup.
Dudeface wrote: Again, not relevant, but stop applying US standards to UK job markets. Yes they could upheave their entire development cycle and I think we'd all be for giving them more time, but they're not in a position to do so currently. They'd have to let 10th pan out for 5+ years to get the lead time for 11th.
They're definitely in a position to do so currently. They have almost 3 years until they have to hit 11th for stockholders. They don't need 5 years if they're handling it well, hiring competent people, and letting them do their job.
"Oh, a balanced game is too much trouble" is such BS. Everyone who claims this just flat out doesn't *want* a balanced game, because they enjoy unfair games and getting unearned wins.
Yes, you're assuming those staff only have 40k to work on. It's a fair assumption 10th books aren't done. Do you suggest they stop work on 10th now to make 11th?
Yes, you're assuming those staff only have 40k to work on. It's a fair assumption 10th books aren't done. Do you suggest they stop work on 10th now to make 11th?
There are multiple teams involved. Getting good work done requires hiring good people. Who cares what the current crop of clowns do with 10th while it's being developed?
VladimirHerzog wrote: winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit.
I'd actually argue that they think they're important, but that they don't understand them.
They see a flat 50% and immediately think "Job's a good 'un!" and move onto the army that's at 43% or 62% to "fix" them. It might never occur to them that the reason Army X is at a flat 50% is because it's abusing a combo of two or three units, and completely ignoring almost the rest of the entire Codex, meaning that the army is fundamentally broken but the high-level 50% win rate isn't showing the problems and is, in fact, masking them.
Strangely enough, Stu Black mentioned all those things in the latest Meta Watch podcast. He is aware that Win Rates are a crude instrument that can hide other issues that also need to be looked at and addressed.
Now maybe he just talks a good game, but maybe they are actually trying to improve the balance of the game in multiple ways.
Yes, you're assuming those staff only have 40k to work on. It's a fair assumption 10th books aren't done. Do you suggest they stop work on 10th now to make 11th?
There are multiple teams involved. Getting good work done requires hiring good people. Who cares what the current crop of clowns do with 10th while it's being developed?
They have 3 years to get it right from June just gone for the imaginary team they haven't hired yet?
I value a fair game, I do find them sporting. Beyond taking random swipes at my character, do you have any substance to add?
Beyond "GW dumb, throw money at it" there isn't much to work with.
alextroy wrote: ...Now maybe he just talks a good game, but maybe they are actually trying to improve the balance of the game in multiple ways...
Whether or not GW is trying, not trying, actively seeking broken outcomes in search of profit, or whatever seems fundamentally irrelevant to me. They've structured their business model so that they a) burn their game down and start over every three years, b) only do one significant update to any army as a big splashy release once, or maybe twice if you're lucky and Space Marines, during that time, and c) have compartmentalized design teams that don't really talk to each other. I don't think it's possible to produce quality output under those conditions, no matter how many people you have or how much you're paying them.
The business model isn't reliant on poor balance, but the business model is reliant on churn and hype in a way that makes making the game work functionally impossible.
VladimirHerzog wrote: winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit. So even if the balance is terrible, if 40l keeps selling more than the last quarter, from the company's point of view, its working properly
There are two separate questions here: 40k as a product is succeeding well, though probably not as well as it could with better design. 40k as a game is a dismal failure.
They talk about external winrates, too, but also for their goals about internal and generic balance too:
"We want to make generic items usable, but not overpowered. Our target is 10-15% of tournament lists include them."
"We compare the use rates of warscrolls in tournament lists, with different use targets depending on the warscroll's roll in the army."
(So if a battleline unit is present in 80% of lists for a faction, that's more acceptable than an Artillery unit being present in 80% of a Faction's lists.)
The fact that this is being done for one game and not the other - and the other game isn't talking about it - makes me think it's genuine policy not to worry about such things. It's a *philosophy of game design* issue, not just a communications issue.
I'm sure that GW knows how to run their business better than you think you know how to run their business.
But you know what? You should email them your ideas on these subjects.
That's an appeal to authority, not an argument. Try again chief.
RaptorusRex wrote: Really surprised SM are that low. Maybe it's tournament players not playing them, but OOM is really strong for taking out big centerpieces in my experience.
One thing to keep in mind here is that, unlike with other subfactions, GW separates out marine subfactions and tracks their individual win rates. "Marines" are low because if one of the variant chapters does better than the core book everyone plays the variant chapter. Right now pretty much everyone who cares about trying to win is playing their marine armies with the Deathwatch rules, and Deathwatch have a 51% win rate vs. the 43% for "marines". The only people using the basic marine rules are people who are picking their rules for fluff reasons and that's always going to bring down the overall win rate.
RaptorusRex wrote: Really surprised SM are that low. Maybe it's tournament players not playing them, but OOM is really strong for taking out big centerpieces in my experience.
One thing to keep in mind here is that, unlike with other subfactions, GW separates out marine subfactions and tracks their individual win rates. "Marines" are low because if one of the variant chapters does better than the core book everyone plays the variant chapter. Right now pretty much everyone who cares about trying to win is playing their marine armies with the Deathwatch rules, and Deathwatch have a 51% win rate vs. the 43% for "marines". The only people using the basic marine rules are people who are picking their rules for fluff reasons and that's always going to bring down the overall win rate.
Oh, yeah, that's definitely a factor. I just use vanilla rules myself.
The salary or competence of the staff is not the only factor at play, nor will hiring more help necessarily. The Indexes were previously written very quickly without due time, releasing them as full codex rules with ~6-7 times the number of detachments, relics and Enhancements wouldn't have stood any better chance.
Yeah it would, if you hire more people and pay them better they'll do better work. It's not rocket surgery.
You hire someone to do a 25 day task in 10 days, doesn't matter how much you pay them.
You hire a janitor to do game design and it doesn't matter how many days you give them. I don't think the team needs 6 years of university to make 40k great, play some pick-up games and a few tournaments each year and get someone to lay foundational math for the game, keep a digital whiteboard of issues, goals and plans for the core game and each faction and do a thorough competitive round of playtesting after rules are finalized.
They talk about external winrates, too, but also for their goals about internal and generic balance too:
"We want to make generic items usable, but not overpowered. Our target is 10-15% of tournament lists include them."
"We compare the use rates of warscrolls in tournament lists, with different use targets depending on the warscroll's roll in the army."
(So if a battleline unit is present in 80% of lists for a faction, that's more acceptable than an Artillery unit being present in 80% of a Faction's lists.)
The fact that this is being done for one game and not the other - and the other game isn't talking about it - makes me think it's genuine policy not to worry about such things. It's a *philosophy of game design* issue, not just a communications issue.
Rob, The Honest Wargamer alleged GW copied his AoS tournament coverage method in their AoS metawatch. Falcon fell of his perch so we don't have someone like that to spur on the 40k team. I don't think it makes sense to be afraid 10th will never be balanced, they have 12 tries to get it right, they will do it even if by accident. What needs to improve given GW's release model is release balance of editions and codexes, no matter how sophisticated Stu Black's understanding of balancing the game through stat analysis tGW still need a new approach to pre-release balancing of 40k. At least it's not like 7th edition where gak never got fixed.
VladimirHerzog wrote: winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit.
I'd actually argue that they think they're important, but that they don't understand them.
They see a flat 50% and immediately think "Job's a good 'un!" and move onto the army that's at 43% or 62% to "fix" them. It might never occur to them that the reason Army X is at a flat 50% is because it's abusing a combo of two or three units, and completely ignoring almost the rest of the entire Codex, meaning that the army is fundamentally broken but the high-level 50% win rate isn't showing the problems and is, in fact, masking them.
Strangely enough, Stu Black mentioned all those things in the latest Meta Watch podcast. He is aware that Win Rates are a crude instrument that can hide other issues that also need to be looked at and addressed.
Now maybe he just talks a good game, but maybe they are actually trying to improve the balance of the game in multiple ways.
This is one of the things that was requested, Stu Black being so nuanced deserves recognition. I don't think the team members are useless people, they just lack the systems to launch balanced games. I don't think an eternal 9th edition would have been terrible if they just updated codexes slowly to be less lethal and bloated, but 10th wasn't designed for me.
You hire a janitor to do game design and it doesn't matter how many days you give them. I don't think the team needs 6 years of university to make 40k great, play some pick-up games and a few tournaments each year and get someone to lay foundational math for the game, keep a digital whiteboard of issues, goals and plans for the core game and each faction and do a thorough competitive round of playtesting after rules are finalized.
and here is the problem, how to you to this if you are not allowed to talk to other people about your work until after release?
how to you playtest the finalize version of the rules if you have never seen them?
kodos wrote: and here is the problem, how to you to this if you are not allowed to talk to other people about your work until after release?
how to you playtest the finalize version of the rules if you have never seen them?
Well obviously it would require the company to not have nonsensical and counterproductive policies like that. What's your point?
Point is that as long as GW does not see the need to change policy for 40k design (like no leaks is more important than good rules, or keeping rules longer than 3 years), everything else won't improve anything.
And they only way GW sees the need to change is a massive drop in players (not just sales but 100 player events every weekend not happening any more)
From the stories of elder people I know and the internet (4chan list of 40k cheese is exceptionnaly funny to me), it truly feels as if the game was never balanced in the first place anyhow, maybe less internet led to less debates about it? I dunno, I mean, I didn't play back then and was not even aware such games existed, and I only jumped aboard the internet train of wargaming articles and forums later on. Looks to me like this slugfest of a topic is coming back every edition
I have got a question though, what parameters are good indicators of how balance is a game? I mean, everyone seems to have got its own opinion on the matter, but is there any consensus about this?
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: From the stories of elder people I know and the internet (4chan list of 40k cheese is exceptionnaly funny to me), it truly feels as if the game was never balanced in the first place anyhow, maybe less internet led to less debates about it? I dunno, I mean, I didn't play back then and was not even aware such games existed, and I only jumped aboard the internet train of wargaming articles and forums later on. Looks to me like this slugfest of a topic is coming back every edition
I have got a question though, what parameters are good indicators of how balance is a game? I mean, everyone seems to have got its own opinion on the matter, but is there any consensus about this?
If the median game ends turn 3 (or if nothing ever dies), if faction and list diversity narrows over time. Ideally, games are decided by a variety of factors, having a list that is built to take advantage of a weakness in the enemy list, putting Terminators on the table instead of into DS, getting a lucky shooting phase turn 2, deciding not to charge turn 4, saving a CP for both a run move and a morale test in the last turn. But when games can be boiled down to "Andrew brought list A and Buster brought list B so the game was a foregone conclusion because list B is strictly worse than list A". In a game with perfect imbalance you might find out after a few months that list B isn't strictly worse, it needs to be played differently but then it's really strong against list C even if the matchup against list A is still rather poor but the option to take list B is opening up based on new findings about the game. The quickest narrowing you can get is when an option is strictly worse, like the Space Marine grav gun is strictly worse than the grav cannon if I recall correctly, so instantly when someone reads those two profiles and realises they're competing at 0 pts in the Tactical Squad the list options have narrowed by 2, because you can't take a boltgun and you can't take a gravgun, those aren't options you have to think about. If a grav gun was 1 pt and a grav cannon was 2 pts you'd have close to the same effect or if the grav gun was 20 pts and the grav cannon was 40 pts the close GW can get to balance the more opportunities open up.
Skinnereal wrote: Are we sure that GW Marketing has not fiddled with the stats, to sell more Eldar, GSC and Knights?
Eldar have been a top tier army at some point in every edition going back to 6th. Most of their kits were designed in the 1990s. I don't think they need to sell any more Eldar as every single sculpt has probably paid for itself thousands of times over by now. They need to sell Votann, which are their newest army and most likely haven't paid for themselves yet as they had to design an entire army from the ground up and write rules for them, and they aren't even a year old. Yet somehow Eldar are the top army and Votann are the worst, so it just comes down to sheer incompetence at writing rules.
And they only way GW sees the need to change is a massive drop in players (not just sales but 100 player events every weekend not happening any more)
I'm pretty sure at GWs lowest point (6th and 7th 40k) 100 player events still happened. GW is an anomaly in the hobby in that outside of MtG (and maybe DnD these days) no other company has such a massive presence in the hobby so even if the company started to lose sales and return to 6/7th era levels big events would still happen.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: From the stories of elder people I know and the internet (4chan list of 40k cheese is exceptionnaly funny to me), it truly feels as if the game was never balanced in the first place anyhow, maybe less internet led to less debates about it? I dunno, I mean, I didn't play back then and was not even aware such games existed, and I only jumped aboard the internet train of wargaming articles and forums later on. Looks to me like this slugfest of a topic is coming back every edition
I have got a question though, what parameters are good indicators of how balance is a game? I mean, everyone seems to have got its own opinion on the matter, but is there any consensus about this?
It was never balanced, which is crazy because they've been making the same game for 30 years. However this might be the worst state the game has ever been in. Not having 3 armies over 60% and 20 something armies under 50% win rate would be a good start to having a balanced game.
In in ideally balanced game, (a) the choices on the table are more important than the choices before the game AND (b) all units in each army are equally viable in a well constructed list.
a) It shouldn't matter if I choose Aeldari or Leagues of Votann. How effectively you play your army in the mission presented should be more important than the army choice.
b) This is not to say every unit is as useful every list as every other unit. However, there should never be a unit that is always better than another unit that have the same general role. You should never have two units that are backfield objective holders where one is always better than the other regardless of the other units in the army. There should not be one infantry anti-tank unit that is always better than the others in the army.
alextroy wrote: In in ideally balanced game, (a) the choices on the table are more important than the choices before the game AND (b) all units in each army are equally viable in a well constructed list.
a) It shouldn't matter if I choose Aeldari or Leagues of Votann. How effectively you play your army in the mission presented should be more important than the army choice.
b) This is not to say every unit is as useful every list as every other unit. However, there should never be a unit that is always better than another unit that have the same general role. You should never have two units that are backfield objective holders where one is always better than the other regardless of the other units in the army. There should not be one infantry anti-tank unit that is always better than the others in the army.
How niche can a unit be before it becomes not okay do you think? Like if Skorpekh Destroyers can only be included in one effective list, but Canoptek Wraiths can be included in 3, is that a problem?
Skinnereal wrote: Are we sure that GW Marketing has not fiddled with the stats, to sell more Eldar, GSC and Knights?
Eldar have been a top tier army at some point in every edition going back to 6th. Most of their kits were designed in the 1990s. I don't think they need to sell any more Eldar as every single sculpt has probably paid for itself thousands of times over by now. They need to sell Votann, which are their newest army and most likely haven't paid for themselves yet as they had to design an entire army from the ground up and write rules for them, and they aren't even a year old. Yet somehow Eldar are the top army and Votann are the worst, so it just comes down to sheer incompetence at writing rules.
During one of his podcasts Peachy went a bit in to how GW designs the rules and he did mention that there are people at the studio, who have their pet factions. Now this is no proof that there is someone at the DT, who is such a person. But on the other hand every eldar codex ever release was not just good, but borderline OP. Eldar units get more special rules then core rules of some armies. And it is very unlikely, considering how other factions get good books and sometimes bad books, that GW could just by chance have one faction which 9-10 times get a book of higher desing studio attention, not just raw power. 9th GK codex was a codex NDK. It was powerful for a month. Eldar codex feel as if someone sat down, wrote an army list, and then added rules to them, and then added point costs to fit all those units in to one list.
alextroy wrote: In in ideally balanced game, (a) the choices on the table are more important than the choices before the game AND (b) all units in each army are equally viable in a well constructed list.
a) It shouldn't matter if I choose Aeldari or Leagues of Votann. How effectively you play your army in the mission presented should be more important than the army choice.
b) This is not to say every unit is as useful every list as every other unit. However, there should never be a unit that is always better than another unit that have the same general role. You should never have two units that are backfield objective holders where one is always better than the other regardless of the other units in the army. There should not be one infantry anti-tank unit that is always better than the others in the army.
How niche can a unit be before it becomes not okay do you think? Like if Skorpekh Destroyers can only be included in one effective list, but Canoptek Wraiths can be included in 3, is that a problem?
If an army has 4 core themes of list and a unit is better in 1 while a similar unit is better in 3, that isn't really a problem.
That being said, Skorpekh Destroyers and Canoptek Wraiths seem to inhabit different Close Combat unit roles. One is a Heavy Infantry killer while the other seems geared towards light infantry and resilience. That would make me think they are not in direct competition with each other the way Space Marine Scouts, Incursors, and Inflitrators are.
VladimirHerzog wrote: winrates don't matter for the company tho, its all about profit. So even if the balance is terrible, if 40l keeps selling more than the last quarter, from the company's point of view, its working properly
There are two separate questions here: 40k as a product is succeeding well, though probably not as well as it could with better design. 40k as a game is a dismal failure.
For us, the players, thats two separate questions. For GW, the only thing that matters is : Did 40k bring more money in this quarter compared to the last one. The game could be dead with zero matches played per month but if it still brought money in for GW ,they would consider it a sucess (yeah i know, thats an unlikely situation, just using it as a an example)
alextroy wrote: In in ideally balanced game, (a) the choices on the table are more important than the choices before the game AND (b) all units in each army are equally viable in a well constructed list.
a) It shouldn't matter if I choose Aeldari or Leagues of Votann. How effectively you play your army in the mission presented should be more important than the army choice.
b) This is not to say every unit is as useful every list as every other unit. However, there should never be a unit that is always better than another unit that have the same general role. You should never have two units that are backfield objective holders where one is always better than the other regardless of the other units in the army. There should not be one infantry anti-tank unit that is always better than the others in the army.
Agreed.
Further along those lines though, has GW in any interview or article actually stated outright and clearly what they're thinking about when writing rules? How they envision the game?
Not heavily following their media so I don't know.
And they only way GW sees the need to change is a massive drop in players (not just sales but 100 player events every weekend not happening any more)
I'm pretty sure at GWs lowest point (6th and 7th 40k) 100 player events still happened. GW is an anomaly in the hobby in that outside of MtG (and maybe DnD these days) no other company has such a massive presence in the hobby so even if the company started to lose sales and return to 6/7th era levels big events would still happen.
back in 5th the local area so 2 large tournaments with 70+ per year in 5th, in 6th this dropped, raised with start of 7th and went down at the end of 7th again were having 15 people playing was already seen as big event but never went above the 30 people during that time, now there are 2 large (international) tournaments per year with 100+ players
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:I have got a question though, what parameters are good indicators of how balance is a game? I mean, everyone seems to have got its own opinion on the matter, but is there any consensus about this?
make it simple, a casual player, buying a single 2000 point army with the models they like and want to paint (or like the background story) is not called out for being a "Win at all cost" player, powergamer or "The Facking Guy" for coming with a nuke to a knife fight because he did not know that the army and units are a no-go for gaming nights because it is too strong
or that the one kid, starting with 2 other kids from school and losing every single game in the local group and just get told to "get gut" with his Votaan because the other 2 are playing Eldar and GSC and telling him that the so called "imbalance" is only a tournament problem and internet meme but the game itself is perfectly fine and that they are having fun
Tyran wrote: Space Marines do have a degree of bloat and redundant units that can only really be solved by slowly phasing out some of them.
But what kind of a bloat is it really? The fact that instead of something like an armour type or a weapon type being a points based option for character, it is turned in to a separate data sheet for them? Every army cut be cut down in its "bloat". Do eldar really need 5 different melee units? Do csm need multiple csm ? Why do orks need to have more then one unit of basic ork etc. And one could go even further. Why have a separate Dark and Regular Eldar army? Instead of tanks X or melee or shoting unit Y, just have an option called "eldar skimmer tank" , "eldar skimer transport small" , "eldar skimmer transport big", "eldar skimmer anti tank vehicle". Two codex in one, no problems with balancing two similar armies, designed space free, for armies that are more popular, while players get 100% freedom to build an eldar, d. eldar, harelquin or mixed Inari force.
Agreed with Tyran. Dark Eldars and Harlequins or Craftworlders are all completly different flavors of eldars and on the tabletop, at least in theories, they have little to nothing in common whatsoever.
Most space marines chapters as subfactions are mostly just more power armour with slight divergences that in and of itself wouldn't need whole codices in my opinion, let aside grey knights and deathwatch who's organisation and wargear are at odds with any other marines.
As for different units, well, yes, you might be able to reduce the number of entries, but many units are intended on achieving the same result but in a different manner, or against a different target. So thus far, I'd say, if handed carefully, why not?
RaptorusRex wrote: You could easily do SW/DA/BT/BA with supplements, imho. Maybe adjust a few unit abilities to represent differences in tactical employment.
Honestly, you don't even need that. Mainline SM have over 100 datasheets.
That being said, I don't want to dumpster anyone's army, so I'm fine with Space Wolves and Blood Angels and all them having their own unique units. It'd just be nice if some of that love and care was given to other forces.
RaptorusRex wrote: You could easily do SW/DA/BT/BA with supplements, imho. Maybe adjust a few unit abilities to represent differences in tactical employment.
Yeah, exactly, a bit like the old Craftworld supplement or the salamenders as per Codex Armaggedon, or the imperial guard regiments...
Yes, but all those are and were less popular then marine factions. BA, SW, DA had a codex since 2ed. I don't think there ever was something like codex bad moon orks.
Space Marine bloat has less do with the special chapters and more to do with the units that have the same role with slight variations on how they accomplish them:
If the median game ends turn 3 (or if nothing ever dies), if faction and list diversity narrows over time. Ideally, games are decided by a variety of factors, having a list that is built to take advantage of a weakness in the enemy list, putting Terminators on the table instead of into DS, getting a lucky shooting phase turn 2, deciding not to charge turn 4, saving a CP for both a run move and a morale test in the last turn. But when games can be boiled down to "Andrew brought list A and Buster brought list B so the game was a foregone conclusion because list B is strictly worse than list A". In a game with perfect imbalance you might find out after a few months that list B isn't strictly worse, it needs to be played differently but then it's really strong against list C even if the matchup against list A is still rather poor but the option to take list B is opening up based on new findings about the game. The quickest narrowing you can get is when an option is strictly worse, like the Space Marine grav gun is strictly worse than the grav cannon if I recall correctly, so instantly when someone reads those two profiles and realises they're competing at 0 pts in the Tactical Squad the list options have narrowed by 2, because you can't take a boltgun and you can't take a gravgun, those aren't options you have to think about. If a grav gun was 1 pt and a grav cannon was 2 pts you'd have close to the same effect or if the grav gun was 20 pts and the grav cannon was 40 pts the close GW can get to balance the more opportunities open up.
What do you mean by "perfect imbalance"? Are you referencing the Extra Credits video? That's not really a credible game design source...
Bloat is widening of roster / options without adding any depth of choice.
Tacticals, Intercessors, Heavy Intercessors, Incursors, and.. Infiltrators(I can't remember the name?) all fulfill the niche of "fighty line troop with bolters". They could be paired down to a single unit entry with options, or two unit entries with options if you really want to separate tacticals and intercessors. Assault Intercessors could also just be an option for intercessors, same with Reivers.
Like wise, the generic space marine HQ's could be condensed into 10(ish) options. Captain, Lieutenant, Chaplain, Librarian, Tech Marine, and then all of those repeated for the Primaris variations. Real efficiency would just be having generic sheets with the Primaris iteration being an upgrade; maybe it costs 15 points to get an extra wound and attack or something.
This is on contrast to the Eldar melee units you mentioned. Striking Scorpions are high volume of low quality attacks. Banshees are traditionally a smaller volume of higher quality attacks (power weapons) with charge-suppression elements. This cleanly divides the scorpions into being bullies meant to kill hordes of weaker enemies / prey on units which do not want to be in combat, where as banshees are meant to tackle particularly tough enemy units which have innate fightiness; one is a back line bully / horde clearer and the other is an anti heavy armor (meq) CC specialist unit.
So while the Eldar units are similar in that they're both melee and eldar they have very different roles on the table top. Where as the "bolter bois" mentioned all have the same role of park-and-shoot with maybe a counter charge if someone gets too close and you can finish them off. That heavy intercessors are +1 wound and +1 strength does not justify an entirely different entry, nor does incursors (or w/e, I literally do not care enough to remember) do not need to exist purely for the purpose of having a mine and a medic. Especially when those said incursors are functionally interchangable with intercessors in their primary focus of bolter bois, what with ap 1 and ignores cover being different routes to the same goal.
If the median game ends turn 3 (or if nothing ever dies), if faction and list diversity narrows over time. Ideally, games are decided by a variety of factors, having a list that is built to take advantage of a weakness in the enemy list, putting Terminators on the table instead of into DS, getting a lucky shooting phase turn 2, deciding not to charge turn 4, saving a CP for both a run move and a morale test in the last turn. But when games can be boiled down to "Andrew brought list A and Buster brought list B so the game was a foregone conclusion because list B is strictly worse than list A". In a game with perfect imbalance you might find out after a few months that list B isn't strictly worse, it needs to be played differently but then it's really strong against list C even if the matchup against list A is still rather poor but the option to take list B is opening up based on new findings about the game. The quickest narrowing you can get is when an option is strictly worse, like the Space Marine grav gun is strictly worse than the grav cannon if I recall correctly, so instantly when someone reads those two profiles and realises they're competing at 0 pts in the Tactical Squad the list options have narrowed by 2, because you can't take a boltgun and you can't take a gravgun, those aren't options you have to think about. If a grav gun was 1 pt and a grav cannon was 2 pts you'd have close to the same effect or if the grav gun was 20 pts and the grav cannon was 40 pts the close GW can get to balance the more opportunities open up.
What do you mean by "perfect imbalance"? Are you referencing the Extra Credits video? That's not really a credible game design source...
Yes. I've seen people post the book written by GW's former designer as a credible game design source, the book claimed that the best you could do in terms of balance was play games with as many different people as possible and do the dartboard method to balance things, efficiency math or structured playtesting was not. The explanation of how pts calculators work and should be created was atrocious as well, don't believe that something has to be published and have a paywall for it to be good. I think perfect imbalance is a great term as it quickly gets people off the stupid idea that they should be able to beat "oops all melta" with "oops all tanks", everything has a counter and the meta is evolving and self-regulating. Citing 50-dollar textbooks or papers in game design journals in a forum argument would be very stupid I believe as nobody would be willing to purchase the books or papers. Now if you have a problem with the term perfect imbalance or the Extra Credits video we could talk about it here or elsewhere depending on how relevant you think it is to the thread. I don't know what would make you think Extra Credits is bad enough that anything they say should be immediately dismissed. If the idea has an older original term I'd be willing to use that instead.
I checked a Reddit thread with some critiques of the video. Neither Chess nor Starcraft were solved before AI, so games can indeed be balanced enough that they can't simply be solved by taking Castellan and Loyal 32, tonnes of factions not having counters to the list and there being no good reason to take a Valiant over a Castellan or taking SM Tactical Squads instead of IG Infantry Squads. If you have some good free resources please share.
Yes. I've seen people post the book written by GW's former designer as a credible game design source, the book claimed that the best you could do in terms of balance was play games with as many different people as possible and do the dartboard method to balance things, efficiency math or structured playtesting was not. The explanation of how pts calculators work and should be created was atrocious as well, don't believe that something has to be published and have a paywall for it to be good. I think perfect imbalance is a great term as it quickly gets people off the stupid idea that they should be able to beat "oops all melta" with "oops all tanks", everything has a counter and the meta is evolving and self-regulating. Citing 50-dollar textbooks or papers in game design journals in a forum argument would be very stupid I believe as nobody would be willing to purchase the books or papers. Now if you have a problem with the term perfect imbalance or the Extra Credits video we could talk about it here or elsewhere depending on how relevant you think it is to the thread. I don't know what would make you think Extra Credits is bad enough that anything they say should be immediately dismissed. If the idea has an older original term I'd be willing to use that instead.
I checked a Reddit thread with some critiques of the video. Neither Chess nor Starcraft were solved before AI, so games can indeed be balanced enough that they can't simply be solved by taking Castellan and Loyal 32, tonnes of factions not having counters to the list and there being no good reason to take a Valiant over a Castellan or taking SM Tactical Squads instead of IG Infantry Squads. If you have some good free resources please share.
That "Perfect Imbalance" video doesn't really say anything you're saying here, and is frequently cited by anti-balance types.
alextroy wrote: Space Marine bloat has less do with the special chapters and more to do with the units that have the same role with slight variations on how they accomplish them:
IMO it's both. The's bloat from multiple redundant datasheets, there's also bloat from GW insisting that each color you can paint your space marines needs to be a separate army with its own special rules and special units. Consolidating everything back into a single codex and treating chapters no differently from regiments/septs/hive fleets/etc would do a lot to reduce the bloat problem.
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vict0988 wrote: Neither Chess nor Starcraft were solved before AI
Not true. Chess may not have been "solved" in the strictest literal sense of always knowing the single optimal play at all times until processing power (not AI) reached a point where it could calculate the entire set of possibilities but we already knew how to get there. Chess had been reduced to known move sequences being played against each other, with far more emphasis on memorizing and correctly executing the known sequences than strategy. And we knew how to evaluate game states and determine the optimal play, it just required holding too many things in memory for a human to do it for a complete game. All chess "AI" did was apply the known algorithms using computer hardware that was capable of executing the full analysis within a reasonable amount of time.
I don't know if Starcraft is exactly the same since it's a terrible game and I never played it beyond a very casual level but from what I've seen about "competitive" play it was largely the same thing. It may not have been 100% solved but any high-level player knew the optimal openings and the optimal counters and success at a competitive level had more to do with clicks per second and avoiding mistakes. AI may have been applied to bring it to 100% at some point but that probably had more to do with an AI having unlimited clicks per second and never accidentally pressing the wrong button than any real strategy analysis.
alextroy wrote: Space Marine bloat has less do with the special chapters and more to do with the units that have the same role with slight variations on how they accomplish them:
IMO it's both. The's bloat from multiple redundant datasheets, there's also bloat from GW insisting that each color you can paint your space marines needs to be a separate army with its own special rules and special units. Consolidating everything back into a single codex and treating chapters no differently from regiments/septs/hive fleets/etc would do a lot to reduce the bloat problem.
Eh I don't think that would work now for Space Marines. Too many chapters have unique models, unique parts (even if its just shoulderpads) and more.
Bloodangels are a separate army; if that means they are all in one codex with subchapters or in their own codex doesn't really matter. Yes it means BA and Ultramarines iwll share a lot of the same models as their core; but they will each have hteir own special units dotted around that core. Personally I'm totally fine with that.
I think the bloat marines have is a big issue because Primaris, which were clearly just going to be the new remodelled marines, were smashed into the army alongside. So of course when you baiscally copy-cat the roster you end up with a LOT of duplication of themes and ideas and stats and slots.
Their uniqueness isn't necessary. Most of them are just "standard core unit with special snowflake rules" and can be used to represent the core unit, and stuff like the awful aircraft variants can be taken out back and shot.
And whether or not GW is willing to fix the problem it's still where a lot of the bloat comes from. Most of the unique stuff only exists because GW insisted on treating marine sub-factions differently from every non-marine faction and inventing a bunch of pointless extra units to justify having a separate codex.
Their uniqueness isn't necessary. Most of them are just "standard core unit with special snowflake rules" and can be used to represent the core unit, and stuff like the awful aircraft variants can be taken out back and shot.
And whether or not GW is willing to fix the problem it's still where a lot of the bloat comes from. Most of the unique stuff only exists because GW insisted on treating marine sub-factions differently from every non-marine faction and inventing a bunch of pointless extra units to justify having a separate codex.
Thing is GW went down the path that they were and has created those models for those sub-armies. Plus Spacemarines DO outsell every other army by a significant margin over the long term. Heck you can even argue that its a good thing that there are several subarmies so that there IS some visual and thematic variety with Space Marines so that every other battle isn't just pure Ultramarine Spacemarines.
In my view sub-army models weren't a problem except during the edition were GW let you freely take detachments from allied armies and we had a bit of a mania period where everyone was taking sub-armies so that the CC army was the CC units; the ranged subarmy was the ranged bonus ones etc...
Overread wrote: Plus Spacemarines DO outsell every other army by a significant margin over the long term.
But is that cause or effect? Is that because there's something inherently more desirable about marines, or is it because GW gives marines a far disproportionate share of the attention? They have a near-monopoly on being the face of the setting and are always portrayed as the protagonists when they appear, with the other side of the battle being NPCs to be slaughtered for the glory of the marines. And their rules and models always have the highest priority for updates, meaning you never have to fear long periods of neglect and the worst case scenario is you have to use a different chapter's rules for a while to stay competitive.
Overread wrote: Plus Spacemarines DO outsell every other army by a significant margin over the long term.
But is that cause or effect? Is that because there's something inherently more desirable about marines, or is it because GW gives marines a far disproportionate share of the attention? They have a near-monopoly on being the face of the setting and are always portrayed as the protagonists when they appear, with the other side of the battle being NPCs to be slaughtered for the glory of the marines. And their rules and models always have the highest priority for updates, meaning you never have to fear long periods of neglect and the worst case scenario is you have to use a different chapter's rules for a while to stay competitive.
They're also given the moral pass, too, like it's ok when *they* commit genocide, but bad when CSM do it.
A) Massacres Civilians to Open a Hole into the Warp and summon an army of daemons into real space.
B) Massacres Civilians to prevent them from unwitting opening a Hole into the Warp allowing an army of daemons to enter real space.
Might not make a difference to the civilians getting massacres, but motives do matter.
Starcraft has 3 balanced factions, not 1. Each faction has multiple openings, not 1. Every Chess game does not open the same way, every time and Chess computers figured out new ways to strategize during the game. If the right move was to always use queen rockade to switch all your pawns with queens by paying a rook and a knight then it would be a different story. League of Legends is an example from the video, if tanks are strong in the League of Legends meta then the meta will evolve to include more anti-tank champions, that change in the meta makes tanks less powerful and assassins more powerful. If tanks are waaay too powerful in League of Legends then picking anti-tank champions will be worse than just picking tank champions to beat them, like in 40k when Castellans were the answer to Castellans.
Just like Chess has the troll opening bong cloud you could make a deliberately bad list, but factions should not have only bad lists.
A) Massacres Civilians to Open a Hole into the Warp and summon an army of daemons into real space.
B) Massacres Civilians to prevent them from unwitting opening a Hole into the Warp allowing an army of daemons to enter real space.
Might not make a difference to the civilians getting massacres, but motives do matter.
Well when you could just tell the unwitting humans to stop it makes you an donkey-cave.
alextroy wrote: Space Marine bloat has less do with the special chapters and more to do with the units that have the same role with slight variations on how they accomplish them:
IMO it's both. The's bloat from multiple redundant datasheets, there's also bloat from GW insisting that each color you can paint your space marines needs to be a separate army with its own special rules and special units. Consolidating everything back into a single codex and treating chapters no differently from regiments/septs/hive fleets/etc would do a lot to reduce the bloat problem.
Eh I don't think that would work now for Space Marines. Too many chapters have unique models, unique parts (even if its just shoulderpads) and more.
Bloodangels are a separate army; if that means they are all in one codex with subchapters or in their own codex doesn't really matter. Yes it means BA and Ultramarines iwll share a lot of the same models as their core; but they will each have hteir own special units dotted around that core. Personally I'm totally fine with that.
I think the bloat marines have is a big issue because Primaris, which were clearly just going to be the new remodelled marines, were smashed into the army alongside. So of course when you baiscally copy-cat the roster you end up with a LOT of duplication of themes and ideas and stats and slots.
Well, even Primaris alone have a bloat and redundant unit problem. Why exactly are there 3 Phobos line infantry units that look practically identical and all basically do the same thing again?
Well, even Primaris alone have a bloat and redundant unit problem. Why exactly are there 3 Phobos line infantry units that look practically identical and all basically do the same thing again?
Yeah, honestly it's pretty crazy. I wonder how that discussion goes at GWHQ.
Well, even Primaris alone have a bloat and redundant unit problem. Why exactly are there 3 Phobos line infantry units that look practically identical and all basically do the same thing again?
Yeah, honestly it's pretty crazy. I wonder how that discussion goes at GWHQ.
Well, even Primaris alone have a bloat and redundant unit problem. Why exactly are there 3 Phobos line infantry units that look practically identical and all basically do the same thing again?
Yeah, honestly it's pretty crazy. I wonder how that discussion goes at GWHQ.
A) Massacres Civilians to Open a Hole into the Warp and summon an army of daemons into real space.
B) Massacres Civilians to prevent them from unwitting opening a Hole into the Warp allowing an army of daemons to enter real space.
Might not make a difference to the civilians getting massacres, but motives do matter.
Not really when genocide is happening. The side doing the genocide will always have a valid reason in their heads. It will never seem valid to outsiders.
Can you think of one real world example where genocide was justifiable?
And the imperium will do it gw piece not just on the people who could have allowed a warp portal to open but on anyone who may have been anywhere near it but completely unaware. “Just in case”.
The fact that the imperium uses servitors as a punishment is abhorrent.
Chaos is no better though. And it’s certainly not honest. But I think that’s a different thread.
Well, even Primaris alone have a bloat and redundant unit problem. Why exactly are there 3 Phobos line infantry units that look practically identical and all basically do the same thing again?
Yeah, honestly it's pretty crazy. I wonder how that discussion goes at GWHQ.
as far as we know the process is the following:
deciding on a new model line based on specific art/ideas, taking the new model line to the fluff guys for a story and master models to the painters, last point is to get the models and the fluff to a rules writer and let them write them into the Codex based on options from the kit and the fluff that is provided
so someone thinking of "this looks cool" it is produced and adds another 3 units doing the very same stuff to a faction that would actually need something different
if the new line sells good enough or better, it is followed by other kits with that design, if not it is dropped and replaced by something else but kept within the rules as long as there is stock to sell
we have seen that with the Primaris line were different armour designs and concepts were released, some followed up, others were dropped (like we get old Terminator design for Primaris back instead of keeping the new heavy Armour design)
alextroy wrote: Space Marine bloat has less do with the special chapters and more to do with the units that have the same role with slight variations on how they accomplish them:
kodos wrote: deciding on a new model line based on specific art/ideas, taking the new model line to the fluff guys for a story and master models to the painters, last point is to get the models and the fluff to a rules writer and let them write them into the Codex based on options from the kit and the fluff that is provided
That's pretty horrifying to think about, that someone at GW actually thought those idiotic missile primaris marines were a good aesthetic choice. I'd assumed they had to be designed rules-first, with some poor sculptor stuck with the job of trying to turn the rules into something that doesn't look like complete .
alextroy wrote: Space Marine bloat has less do with the special chapters and more to do with the units that have the same role with slight variations on how they accomplish them:
Not defending the rules etc, but using the metric of win rate when all army rosters are different isn’t very scientific to give an impression on army strength
What I mean as an example, you can make a completely terrible death guard army list, a mediocre one or a semi decent one.
Each will effect your win rate, the thing I mostly see is people wanting unique or boss units which are often a waste of points and not even worth fielding.
I think most factions have a workable meta within them and often come with a play-style which works best for them, i once played an ork player who’s tactics were holding back and shooting… his army was built around that mentality too which is always gonna be a loss, he came last in that tournament and blamed the rules...
Then there is victory points and the player to swing it marginally, some players are bloodthirsty and not focused on objectives which can work to your advantage even if you’re the underdog.
And there is also 500point wonder armies which do well but in big point battles are useless etc.
But sometimes tournaments can be 500pts or 1000pts etc
The armies at the top of the list are somewhat easier because it don’t matter what units you pick most of them will work, the armies at the bottom of the list are more… tactical and you need to use your noggin more, I know it’s early but I’ve always found a way to make my army work in updates.
The meta army will change each rule set anyway, incentive for people to switch and buy more models, paints etc
kodos wrote: deciding on a new model line based on specific art/ideas, taking the new model line to the fluff guys for a story and master models to the painters, last point is to get the models and the fluff to a rules writer and let them write them into the Codex based on options from the kit and the fluff that is provided
That's pretty horrifying to think about, that someone at GW actually thought those idiotic missile primaris marines were a good aesthetic choice. I'd assumed they had to be designed rules-first, with some poor sculptor stuck with the job of trying to turn the rules into something that doesn't look like complete .
What’s even crazier is everyone agrees they look ugly as sin, when they first came out I was going to buy the big box and sell those off but they were so ugly you couldn’t even get much over £10 a sprue for them.
10th dropped and all of a sudden they are wildly popular, I guess for rules reasons but don’t know because I don’t follow the “meta” and I got the box and the still ugly as models now sold for £35 a sprue (5 models). So chasing the meta is expensive and the comp types don’t care how ugly the models are as long as they are good.
A) Massacres Civilians to Open a Hole into the Warp and summon an army of daemons into real space.
B) Massacres Civilians to prevent them from unwitting opening a Hole into the Warp allowing an army of daemons to enter real space.
Might not make a difference to the civilians getting massacres, but motives do matter.
Not really when genocide is happening. The side doing the genocide will always have a valid reason in their heads. It will never seem valid to outsiders.
Can you think of one real world example where genocide was justifiable?
And the imperium will do it gw piece not just on the people who could have allowed a warp portal to open but on anyone who may have been anywhere near it but completely unaware. “Just in case”.
The fact that the imperium uses servitors as a punishment is abhorrent.
Chaos is no better though. And it’s certainly not honest. But I think that’s a different thread.
This is part of the absurdity of Warhammer 40,000. There is no justifiable reason in the real world for genocide, forced extinction, or the other forms of indiscriminate slaughter that the forces in 40K engage in. However, in the context of their world these reasons are very reasonable.
The Tyranids are an implacable force bent on the destruction of all before them. They must be destroyed at all cost.
If allowed to spread too far into a planet's population Genestealer Cults will turn the world into a beacon to draw the Tryanids into a sector. They must be stopped at all cost.
If allowed to mass, Orks will go on a destructive rampage that will destroy everything they encounter in search of a good scrap. They must be stamped out whenever possible.
If allowed to gain critical mass, Chaos cults will destroy the planet they are on by opening ever growing portals into the warp. Better the entire world die than this be allowed to happen.
These are just a few examples of the primal forces of destruction that the Imperium of Man deals with. There can be no quarter given. No negotiations made. If you don't destroy them first, they will certainly destroy you because "in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
You're making a good point. When we say the imperium is evil, it is because of what it inflicts on itself: hate, denouncing, obscurantism, corruption, authoritarian regime despotism, intolerance toward other non imperium human factions, even mass murder on them...
But as far as dealing with other factions is concerned, well, best analogy I could find is put a hornet's nest in your bedroom and we'll see if you don't terminate it or have it moved away while I'm pretty sure this is not what the hornets wish because if they built there in the first place that must suit them.
40k is that but the nest is not only in your bedroom, it is also everywhere outside and whenever you make a move you angry some of the nests and you better be ready.
And hopefully it is so, an all human version of 40k would be to much and become revulsing at that point.
alextroy wrote: This is part of the absurdity of Warhammer 40,000. There is no justifiable reason in the real world for genocide, forced extinction, or the other forms of indiscriminate slaughter that the forces in 40K engage in. However, in the context of their world these reasons are very reasonable.
The Tyranids are an implacable force bent on the destruction of all before them. They must be destroyed at all cost.
If allowed to spread too far into a planet's population Genestealer Cults will turn the world into a beacon to draw the Tryanids into a sector. They must be stopped at all cost.
If allowed to mass, Orks will go on a destructive rampage that will destroy everything they encounter in search of a good scrap. They must be stamped out whenever possible.
If allowed to gain critical mass, Chaos cults will destroy the planet they are on by opening ever growing portals into the warp. Better the entire world die than this be allowed to happen.
These are just a few examples of the primal forces of destruction that the Imperium of Man deals with. There can be no quarter given. No negotiations made. If you don't destroy them first, they will certainly destroy you because "in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
See, this is why I don't actually like the way the lore is evolving.
Tyranids, sure - they can't be negotiated or reasoned with (but we can wait them out, because without FTL the entire span of human existence as of 40k could have passed before the Tyranids ate ~10 star systems...)
But GSC? Surely there are countermeasures beyond "genocide". It's a biological/physiological process, not incomprehensible magic. The imperium is the architect of its own misery in this regard, and I am not sure that a comprehensive healthcare and genecare programme would be that much more expensive than weekly genocides...
Orks, again, are aliens. War against them is inevitable because of their nature.
Chaos cultists are... meh. I think they are misguided, but I think lots of people are misguided IRL and don't deserve genocide. If they want to open Warp portals, go ahead - the only people they are hurting are themselves and anyone on their planet. But the destruction the imperium brings is just as bad for themselves and anyone on their planet... Hell, just look at Armageddon!
"We must kill the chaos invasion!"
"Why?"
"For the other humans"
*Twelve seconds later*
"Ok we must kill the other humans now as per protocol."
Yea, the imperium really is a pretty gak place full of pretty gak people, and could be less gakky except that it's a reactionary authoritarian theocracy and so things like "maybe let's fight the genestealer plague like the way we fought that other disease in 0020.M2, instead of fighting it like it can be killed with bullets"
alextroy wrote: This is part of the absurdity of Warhammer 40,000. There is no justifiable reason in the real world for genocide, forced extinction, or the other forms of indiscriminate slaughter that the forces in 40K engage in. However, in the context of their world these reasons are very reasonable.
The Tyranids are an implacable force bent on the destruction of all before them. They must be destroyed at all cost.
If allowed to spread too far into a planet's population Genestealer Cults will turn the world into a beacon to draw the Tryanids into a sector. They must be stopped at all cost.
If allowed to mass, Orks will go on a destructive rampage that will destroy everything they encounter in search of a good scrap. They must be stamped out whenever possible.
If allowed to gain critical mass, Chaos cults will destroy the planet they are on by opening ever growing portals into the warp. Better the entire world die than this be allowed to happen.
These are just a few examples of the primal forces of destruction that the Imperium of Man deals with. There can be no quarter given. No negotiations made. If you don't destroy them first, they will certainly destroy you because "in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
See, this is why I don't actually like the way the lore is evolving.
Tyranids, sure - they can't be negotiated or reasoned with (but we can wait them out, because without FTL the entire span of human existence as of 40k could have passed before the Tyranids ate ~10 star systems...)
But GSC? Surely there are countermeasures beyond "genocide". It's a biological/physiological process, not incomprehensible magic. The imperium is the architect of its own misery in this regard, and I am not sure that a comprehensive healthcare and genecare programme would be that much more expensive than weekly genocides...
Orks, again, are aliens. War against them is inevitable because of their nature.
Chaos cultists are... meh. I think they are misguided, but I think lots of people are misguided IRL and don't deserve genocide. If they want to open Warp portals, go ahead - the only people they are hurting are themselves and anyone on their planet. But the destruction the imperium brings is just as bad for themselves and anyone on their planet... Hell, just look at Armageddon!
"We must kill the chaos invasion!"
"Why?"
"For the other humans"
*Twelve seconds later*
"Ok we must kill the other humans now as per protocol."
Yea, the imperium really is a pretty gak place full of pretty gak people, and could be less gakky except that it's a reactionary authoritarian theocracy and so things like "maybe let's fight the genestealer plague like the way we fought that other disease in 0020.M2, instead of fighting it like it can be killed with bullets"
You nearly had me, but the "misguided Chaos cultists" bit pushed it a bit too far. Gr8 b8 m8 i r8 it 8/8.
The issue isn't how the IoM deals with Tyranids, Orks or Chaos. It is how it deals with Eldar, Tau, Kin and countless minor races.
Most xenos species aren't the Tyranids (there wouldn't be a galaxy left if they were), some of them even managed to develop simbiotic civilizations with humanity or have been allies against larger threats (like Tyranids). And yet the IoM exterminates them as a matter of policy.
Tyran wrote: The issue isn't how the IoM deals with Tyranids, Orks or Chaos. It is how it deals with Eldar, Tau, Kin and countless minor races.
Most xenos species aren't the Tyranids (there wouldn't be a galaxy left if they were), some of them even managed to develop simbiotic civilizations with humanity or have been allies against larger threats (like Tyranids). And yet the IoM exterminates them as a matter of policy.
No they don't. They exterminate them if they get in the Imperium's way. The T'au wouldn't currently exist if the Imperium literally exterminated xenos on sight because their "empire" is so small it's not worth the time and resources it would cost to get rid of it. There are loads of minor xenos races knocking about the galaxy. The Imperium doesn't give a gak what they do, as long as they don't worship Chaos or try to interfere with the Imperium's business they're more or less free to be gross alien dudes.
I swear I clicked on a topic named "New meta watch data, but this last page feels like something I'd read (and normally enjoy) in the 40K Background-subforum.
That's pretty horrifying to think about, that someone at GW actually thought those idiotic missile primaris marines were a good aesthetic choice. I'd assumed they had to be designed rules-first, with some poor sculptor stuck with the job of trying to turn the rules into something that doesn't look like complete .
I think the design was meant to a) not look like existing missile launcher marines so people couldn't use their old sculpts and b) be hard to convert and add parts to because feth creativity and hobbying. It has a side effect of looking like that Russian who cooked himself with an rpg recently but hey, no big deal?
10th dropped and all of a sudden they are wildly popular, I guess for rules reasons but don’t know because I don’t follow the “meta” and I got the box and the still ugly as models now sold for £35 a sprue (5 models). So chasing the meta is expensive and the comp types don’t care how ugly the models are as long as they are good.
You can blame GW's overpowered rules for that. If they were merely "balanced" nobody would touch them.
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alextroy wrote: This is part of the absurdity of Warhammer 40,000. There is no justifiable reason in the real world for genocide, forced extinction, or the other forms of indiscriminate slaughter that the forces in 40K engage in. However, in the context of their world these reasons are very reasonable.
Nah, that ain't the reason. The same people who claim the Imperium is justified never extend that logic to the horrible things the Tau, Eldar, or Chaos do; the point is the moral fantasy of a faction with a right-Christian aesthetic being justified in genocide, tyranny, etc. Even though the setting doesn't actually justify it and instead shows how that attitude is self-defeating (or at least did before Ward et al).
These are just a few examples of the primal forces of destruction that the Imperium of Man deals with. There can be no quarter given. No negotiations made. If you don't destroy them first, they will certainly destroy you because "in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods."
In the case of Chaos and Genestealer cults, a big reason for why they're so successful is because the Imperium is so senselessly tyrannical that the cults look more attractive. If the Imperium wasn't so genocidal it'd actually be better off.
No they don't. They exterminate them if they get in the Imperium's way. The T'au wouldn't currently exist if the Imperium literally exterminated xenos on sight because their "empire" is so small it's not worth the time and resources it would cost to get rid of it. There are loads of minor xenos races knocking about the galaxy. The Imperium doesn't give a gak what they do, as long as they don't worship Chaos or try to interfere with the Imperium's business they're more or less free to be gross alien dudes.
Nah, the Tau exist because the Imperium lost the Damocles Gulf crusade. And the Imperium *does* have a policy of killing all sentient aliens, it's part of their religion. You're a lower priority if you're not attacking them at the moment, but you're still on the list. If you're pacifists, though, expect a visit from them if they think you can't fight back and have a nice planet.
Yeah, like, I know people think I was trolling with my misguided chaos cultist bit, but I think I would genuinely rather worship Slaanesh than live under the imperium (world dependent, I know not all of them are crapsack, but if the one I lived on was like, Vraks? Hell yeah the chaos cultists are the good guys).
Unit1126PLL wrote: Yeah, like, I know people think I was trolling with my misguided chaos cultist bit, but I think I would genuinely rather worship Slaanesh than live under the imperium (world dependent, I know not all of them are crapsack, but if the one I lived on was like, Vraks? Hell yeah the chaos cultists are the good guys).
Low key the best kind of life is on the planets that Astartes run where you can worship the world-spirit or whatever and nobody cares. That or Tau space.
hm wolds run by the adptus astartes are usually described as fairly harsh with poor living conditions to have a reservoir of strong individuals. Not sure it's the best you can hope for but that's a matter of fictional taste
10th dropped and all of a sudden they are wildly popular, I guess for rules reasons but don’t know because I don’t follow the “meta” and I got the box and the still ugly as models now sold for £35 a sprue (5 models). So chasing the meta is expensive and the comp types don’t care how ugly the models are as long as they are good.
You can blame GW's overpowered rules for that. If they were merely "balanced" nobody would touch them.
Hence my amusement at the outrage over the wraithknight email. They just know their customer base.
Nah, the Tau exist because the Imperium lost the Damocles Gulf crusade. And the Imperium *does* have a policy of killing all sentient aliens, it's part of their religion. You're a lower priority if you're not attacking them at the moment, but you're still on the list. If you're pacifists, though, expect a visit from them if they think you can't fight back and have a nice planet.
I wonder if that lore was changed. I read a story about an IG transport fleet being attacked by orks, they do an evac and a warp jump and only a few dudes survive. They land on a planet with "centaur" looking people. In the culimination of the story they find out that there are two factions fighting a loyalist and chaos one, that the "centuars" were once human but they gene moded themselfs to survive the high G on the planet and the macro fauna (gigantic crabs). They even find a STC unit. The commisar decides that the population has to be purged for being mutants, and the main character shots him, and sends a memo on with his Pad that the planet only has a low civilisation level of xenos, and not mutated humans.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: You're making a good point. When we say the imperium is evil, it is because of what it inflicts on itself: hate, denouncing, obscurantism, corruption, authoritarian regime despotism, intolerance toward other non imperium human factions, even mass murder on them...
But as far as dealing with other factions is concerned, well, best analogy I could find is put a hornet's nest in your bedroom and we'll see if you don't terminate it or have it moved away while I'm pretty sure this is not what the hornets wish because if they built there in the first place that must suit them.
40k is that but the nest is not only in your bedroom, it is also everywhere outside and whenever you make a move you angry some of the nests and you better be ready.
And hopefully it is so, an all human version of 40k would be to much and become revulsing at that point.
With the imperium it’s more like, put a hornets nest in your room, then kill your entire family to stop them getting stung. Then kill the hornets and pretend it never happens.
10th dropped and all of a sudden they are wildly popular, I guess for rules reasons but don’t know because I don’t follow the “meta” and I got the box and the still ugly as models now sold for £35 a sprue (5 models). So chasing the meta is expensive and the comp types don’t care how ugly the models are as long as they are good.
You can blame GW's overpowered rules for that. If they were merely "balanced" nobody would touch them.
Hence my amusement at the outrage over the wraithknight email. They just know their customer base.
I blame the players. GW isn’t going score a goal with every release and those marines are damn ugly, but no matter how good the rules there aren’t making it into my marines army. If you care so little about what the models look like that you are happy with those in your army then you may as well just use card tokens for models.
Folks need to have some self respect for their poor armies.
I wonder if that lore was changed. I read a story about an IG transport fleet being attacked by orks, they do an evac and a warp jump and only a few dudes survive. They land on a planet with "centaur" looking people. In the culimination of the story they find out that there are two factions fighting a loyalist and chaos one, that the "centuars" were once human but they gene moded themselfs to survive the high G on the planet and the macro fauna (gigantic crabs). They even find a STC unit. The commisar decides that the population has to be purged for being mutants, and the main character shots him, and sends a memo on with his Pad that the planet only has a low civilisation level of xenos, and not mutated humans.
Don't know that story. Where's it from?
In any case the sourcebooks are clear that the Imperium is psychotically genocidal against nonhumans.
I blame the players. GW isn’t going score a goal with every release and those marines are damn ugly, but no matter how good the rules there aren’t making it into my marines army. If you care so little about what the models look like that you are happy with those in your army then you may as well just use card tokens for models.
Folks need to have some self respect for their poor armies.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. When do you hold GW responsible for doing shoddy work, if at all?
Tyran wrote: The issue isn't how the IoM deals with Tyranids, Orks or Chaos. It is how it deals with Eldar, Tau, Kin and countless minor races.
Most xenos species aren't the Tyranids (there wouldn't be a galaxy left if they were), some of them even managed to develop simbiotic civilizations with humanity or have been allies against larger threats (like Tyranids). And yet the IoM exterminates them as a matter of policy.
No they don't. They exterminate them if they get in the Imperium's way. The T'au wouldn't currently exist if the Imperium literally exterminated xenos on sight because their "empire" is so small it's not worth the time and resources it would cost to get rid of it. There are loads of minor xenos races knocking about the galaxy. The Imperium doesn't give a gak what they do, as long as they don't worship Chaos or try to interfere with the Imperium's business they're more or less free to be gross alien dudes.
Ah, yes. Hence the famous phrase, "Suffer Not The Xenos To Live When They Get In Our Way".
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: You're making a good point. When we say the imperium is evil, it is because of what it inflicts on itself: hate, denouncing, obscurantism, corruption, authoritarian regime despotism, intolerance toward other non imperium human factions, even mass murder on them...
But as far as dealing with other factions is concerned, well, best analogy I could find is put a hornet's nest in your bedroom and we'll see if you don't terminate it or have it moved away while I'm pretty sure this is not what the hornets wish because if they built there in the first place that must suit them.
40k is that but the nest is not only in your bedroom, it is also everywhere outside and whenever you make a move you angry some of the nests and you better be ready.
And hopefully it is so, an all human version of 40k would be to much and become revulsing at that point.
With the imperium it’s more like, put a hornets nest in your room, then kill your entire family to stop them getting stung. Then kill the hornets and pretend it never happens.
Yes, but not for the sake of it but because the Imperium sees the nest, is to stupidly run to find a better solution than bomb the house, then has an ambitious and corrupted representative executiong the family because obviously it was their fault if the nest came there in the first place even if it is not, and the other representative next to him agrees because base on his variant of the cult of the emperor hornets are chaos tainted even if they may not be so good thing.
The problem is real, the decision making and the solutions brought range from suboptimal to criminal.
On topic though, to non tournament players, is the game at such a state of imbalance that your games are sorely affected, or is the issue mostly in the tournament community?
In any case the sourcebooks are clear that the Imperium is psychotically genocidal against nonhumans.
Had to make my mom look from stories on her old PC at home. It is called "Children of the Emperor" by a dude called Barrington Bayley. The books cover has Huron Blackheart on the cover.
On topic though, to non tournament players, is the game at such a state of imbalance that your games are sorely affected, or is the issue mostly in the tournament community?
I have never played a tournament in my life, aside for a store league for new players. My games vs knights look like this. I can't kill anything they have, besides the 5 arbiter models. They can kill anything they see or reach in melee. My games vs custodes look like this. We cost the same points. We have the same number of models. Same save. They have better shoting, better melee, longer charges and in melee they strike first, killing entire squads of my dudes. There is no counter play, no objective play and again the only thing I can kill is 5 arbitors. Vs necrons. I can not kill a Lychguard or warrior brick fast enough for it to not regrow in melee. I can't kill it at all in the shoting phase, even if you use the entire army to target one unit. There are no arbitors to kill. If the necron player starts there is no game to play. Vs marines, I do a ton of stuff that make my turns take twice or three times as long as my opponents, I have to get lucky with charges and even then I sometimes fail to do secondaries or primaries. My opponent focus fires 1-2 units per turn, and I don't have that many of them, so by turn 4, my turns are much faster. Mostly because I have one unit or left overs to play with. I played one time vs GSC and eldar, both pre FAQ/nerfs, decided to not waste my time trying to do that again.
Hence my amusement at the outrage over the wraithknight email. They just know their customer base.
Nah, you are just constitutionally incapable of assigning blame to GW when they do shoddy work. It's not a laudable stance.
Firstly im very capable pf stating GW did a crap job balancing them, so you're fundamentally wrong there. It also doesn't matter if I personally assign blame to them or not, desolation squads and eldar units are in high demand because some people (i.e. not me as i arent buying them) value winning 40k so highly. Those people are the ones rewarding the shoddy work. Be angry at them.
Firstly im very capable pf stating GW did a crap job balancing them, so you're fundamentally wrong there. It also doesn't matter if I personally assign blame to them or not, desolation squads and eldar units are in high demand because some people (i.e. not me as i arent buying them) value winning 40k so highly. Those people are the ones rewarding the shoddy work. Be angry at them.
Considering in other threads you were furious at people for pointing out that GW did a crap job at the 10e points system, that doesn't track.
Tyran wrote: The issue isn't how the IoM deals with Tyranids, Orks or Chaos. It is how it deals with Eldar, Tau, Kin and countless minor races.
Most xenos species aren't the Tyranids (there wouldn't be a galaxy left if they were), some of them even managed to develop simbiotic civilizations with humanity or have been allies against larger threats (like Tyranids). And yet the IoM exterminates them as a matter of policy.
No they don't. They exterminate them if they get in the Imperium's way. The T'au wouldn't currently exist if the Imperium literally exterminated xenos on sight because their "empire" is so small it's not worth the time and resources it would cost to get rid of it. There are loads of minor xenos races knocking about the galaxy. The Imperium doesn't give a gak what they do, as long as they don't worship Chaos or try to interfere with the Imperium's business they're more or less free to be gross alien dudes.
Ah, yes. Hence the famous phrase, "Suffer Not The Xenos To Live When They Get In Our Way".
Yeah. Like all those times the Imperium allied with the Eldar and then exterminated them immediately afterwards, or the stories of them meeting T'au diplomats then shooting them on sight or the rogue traders who have xenos crew members they just have sitting about so they can kill at random or when the Blood Angles teamed up with Necrons to fight tyranids then kept fighting them. The Imperial Creed is like any other religion, some people adhere to it more than others and some people pick and choose when it benefits them to follow it or not. Some worlds only venerate the Emperor because the Imperium visited them and the officials just said "your local forest deity with 9 legs and a chair for a head was actually the Emperor. We can't hang around to elaborate so just make sure everyone knows that now and carry on worshipping it and not any other gods because we'll shoot you okay bye" and left it at that. People who think the Imperium is some galaxy widehive mind of shithole industrial planets full of pathological psychopaths need to read some lore outside of modern Black Library.
Firstly im very capable pf stating GW did a crap job balancing them, so you're fundamentally wrong there. It also doesn't matter if I personally assign blame to them or not, desolation squads and eldar units are in high demand because some people (i.e. not me as i arent buying them) value winning 40k so highly. Those people are the ones rewarding the shoddy work. Be angry at them.
Considering in other threads you were furious at people for pointing out that GW did a crap job at the 10e points system, that doesn't track.
No I was open in stating the system had problems and wasn't fully executed or well. What I was furious about were peoples needs to "win" against someone else's opinion, blindly blame incompetence or promotive exclusivity in the community. Or just outright insult others, but seemingly that does track here.
vict0988 wrote: Starcraft has 3 balanced factions, not 1. Each faction has multiple openings, not 1. Every Chess game does not open the same way, every time and Chess computers figured out new ways to strategize during the game. If the right move was to always use queen rockade to switch all your pawns with queens by paying a rook and a knight then it would be a different story. League of Legends is an example from the video, if tanks are strong in the League of Legends meta then the meta will evolve to include more anti-tank champions, that change in the meta makes tanks less powerful and assassins more powerful. If tanks are waaay too powerful in League of Legends then picking anti-tank champions will be worse than just picking tank champions to beat them, like in 40k when Castellans were the answer to Castellans.
Just like Chess has the troll opening bong cloud you could make a deliberately bad list, but factions should not have only bad lists.
Okay I can't really comment on Chess or League - but I think this is overstating things in Starcraft.
Starcraft was uniquely balanced because asymmetric factions had builds/strategies which were balanced enough that the outcome of the game came down to micro - rather than tempo, as was usually the case in other RTS games.
But this didn't mean there were multiple openings. If Terran did "Strategy A", the Zerg player (or vice versa) had to go "Anti-Strategy A". There were lots of other openings they could pick yes (we can say Anti-Strategy B through Z) - but those would be giving up that tempo advantage. Which means, assuming roughly equal skill, you are going to be at a significant disadvantage. This is very different from there being multiple openings that are all valid because they all reach some similar level of ability/power at the same moment in time.
Age of Empires (any of them imo) for instance has often been much less balanced than Starcraft - which might be surprising given how the factions are more similar to each other. But this in turn mean that one faction's advantage was just superior to the rest - giving that tempo advantage as seen above.
The problem with applying this to say 40k, is that you don't get to decide your list once you know your opponent. In Starcraft you can go "I'm playing Terran, he's playing Zerg, I can assume he's doing the anti-Terran Zerg strategy, and if he isn't it will be inefficient so I'll just run him over." 40k would likely be more balanced if people could tailor their lists (i.e. he's running Eldar good stuff? I'll run my anti-Eldar list) but practically the game/tournament scene doesn't really work that way. Really, given a computer game's flexibility, people would just not run certain weak factions - much like how in League/DOTA some heroes are picked (and banned) constantly, while others scarcely get chosen at all.
The perfect imbalance video is great in theory - but I think the evidence of it happening continuously is quite weak. I.E. when there's a rule reset we sometimes see an approach that appears too strong into a broad field of strategies. But as the meta evolves into people either playing that strategy - or explicitly playing the anti-strategy - it may eventually get pushed down - or entirely out. I think however players relatively quickly cycle through to the "uncounterable" strategies - i.e. those that put you in, at worst, a neutral position versus anything else. This is often why seeing a tournament straight after a big patch can be fun for games - as various players bring different approaches to a new problem. But relatively quickly it starts to be "solved" and micro takes over. Or in 40k (or say card games), hard stats.
Ultimately I'm interested to see how GW fixes this. I think they should take a serious look at the 10th indexes and re-write them. Faction abilities, detachment rules, which units can go with which units, points changes etc. But I imagine it will just be the last. So blanket 10% points increases for Eldar, GSC, Knights and Custodes. 10% points cut for Guard->Voltan?
Isn't that going in to definition of words like "what is incompetence". Does it really matter to the players, not game designers, what ever GW creating eldar rules is on purpose by someone at the design team or an oversight?
Desolation squad single handly is holding up marine factions. Is it annoying that they have to be run, or that maybe the models look kind of a wierd? maybe. But without them the armies don't work, and they already aren't that good.
We can of course go for 90 pages, what ever GW designers know how people play the game their design and how different those two game styles are. But in the end what is important is the results. 70% win rate armies are bad for the game, as are sub 40% win rate ones. It creates trap options, feels bad moment when a player can't do a thing to not just win, but participate in game. And I don't think that outside of the game activities are the fix to this. A votan player right now is not fond of being told to paint more models and stop being a WAAC, especialy if the person telling him that has an army with an over 50% win rate.
Nah, the Tau exist because the Imperium lost the Damocles Gulf crusade. And the Imperium *does* have a policy of killing all sentient aliens, it's part of their religion. You're a lower priority if you're not attacking them at the moment, but you're still on the list. If you're pacifists, though, expect a visit from them if they think you can't fight back and have a nice planet.
This. The Tau survive because the resource cost to eliminate them is too high whilst the Imperium is battling other fronts. And, due to the Imperium's creed being that all sentient aliens must be exterminated and that the entire galaxy must be under the control of humans, it will always be too pressured to be able to commit it's forces in large enough numbers to actually achieve final victory on any front against external enemies.
It's like asking whether the Nazis really had an intention of conquering the USSR because they didn't commit their entire military force to it, ignoring that they couldn't do that if they wanted to hold their occupied lands in France, North Africa etc.
PS: add in that you don't need to win all your games to win an event but need to win most of them with a big difference
So playing an "anti list" that is easily stomped by 1 faction, but makes sure you win high against any other can be placed much higher than a balanced list that wins all games but does not wipe them off the table
And 40k is the only game I know were winning is not the most important metric to place 1st in a single event
kodos wrote: PS: add in that you don't need to win all your games to win an event but need to win most of them with a big difference
So playing an "anti list" that is easily stomped by 1 faction, but makes sure you win high against any other can be placed much higher than a balanced list that wins all games but does not wipe them off the table
And 40k is the only game I know were winning is not the most important metric to place 1st in a single event
I actually never knew that you didn't have to win all games.
Can you elaborate on the fact winning the most is not the most important thing to be in first place?
As I never attended a tournament I have no idea how points are counted and so on so this is a genuine question.
Tyel 811175 11579037 wrote:
Ultimately I'm interested to see how GW fixes this. I think they should take a serious look at the 10th indexes and re-write them. Faction abilities, detachment rules, which units can go with which units, points changes etc. But I imagine it will just be the last. So blanket 10% points increases for Eldar, GSC, Knights and Custodes. 10% points cut for Guard->Voltan?
The problem with video games comperation is also the fact that, if X is OP and you bought the game, you can just play with the OP too. If someone bought Votan, they can't play eldar. Point costs are also a tricky thing to use as a balance tool. Eldar are undercosted, GSC are being handed out ton of free points with respawn mechanics. But neither of the armies is just that. GW does this with eldar every edition. Make them OP, the try fixing them over and over again, and then they get a new codex and we start everything from the start. Fate dice were already "fixed" in 9th, and in 9th eldar were top army too. Knights and Custodes, the way they are right now, is not a being OP problem. It is other armies being really bad comparing to them. Custodes and knights , minus the stupid towering rule, are IMO perfect the way they are. The problem with them is that a marine/melee army in to custodes is an auto lose game. Knights vs any faction that has trouble with killing vehicles, can get so bad, one may a well not play the game.
I don't know what IG problems are, besides the fact that the army units seem to have not enough synergy with each other as far play types IG were given and the fact that they are a shoting army trying to hit stuff on +4 (tau have the same problem). What they need is someone to know how the army is suppose to be played, and writing the rules so that it works.
Votan may, same with sisters, be fixed with points. Armies with on death mechanics require having enough stuff after other stuff dies to play or win the game. Can't do that when you are pointed as a semi elite army.
With the point drops aspect there is also one extra thing. If all armies get it then no army gets point drops. And bringing something like GSC or eldar 10% up, is just bringing them to the level other armies were (the top ones), but leaving them with the very good mechanics. Armies with bad mechnics would still stay bad and people with armies that feel bad playing, may not be fond of suddenly being made to buy 1-2 extra box of stuff to play 2000pts, with an army which is still not fun to play.
Yeah the problem of how much money you should spend to not be stuck with a bad army looks like a thing to me. Quite an important one at that. Or wait another edition but that sucks waiting 3 years and hope for the best.
kodos wrote: PS: add in that you don't need to win all your games to win an event but need to win most of them with a big difference
So playing an "anti list" that is easily stomped by 1 faction, but makes sure you win high against any other can be placed much higher than a balanced list that wins all games but does not wipe them off the table
And 40k is the only game I know were winning is not the most important metric to place 1st in a single event
Flames of War used to have a good scoring system, not sure if it still does as not playing it much these days.
you have a win condition, thats a pure win/lose, your score is based on how many loses your side took, what you caused on the enemy only matters if you lost. essentially the winner scores (it was a 7 point system, so if you win you score six, your opponent one), but the score reduces based on casualties
as such you can win an event without winning all games so long as in the games you do win you take few casualties, and in the games you lose you inflict damage
it sort of discouraged MSU spam type armies such as armoured car lists and light tank lists that could do a lot of damage against the right sort of targets but would themselves get hammered in the process
so in effect it became a game not so much of winning to place 1st, but of casualty management.
for 40k & fantasy events it usually appears the win/draw/loss count generally matters more with the actual VP score being a tiebreaker, but I have seen outright VP, or outright kill ratios used as the event scoring as well - its all fine as long as you know in advance
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: As I never attended a tournament I have no idea how points are counted and so on so this is a genuine question.
usually there are 20 total points and you get 11 to 20 tournament points for a victory based o the difference scored during the game (and 9 to 0 for losing)
With a 5 game event, winning 3 games 20:0 and losing 2 games 0:20 will place you higher than winning all 5 games 12:8 or lower
So lists are built to win 20:0 as much as possible even if this means losing 0:20 against certain other builds rather than trying to handle all common lists
It's like asking whether the Nazis really had an intention of conquering the USSR because they didn't commit their entire military force to it, ignoring that they couldn't do that if they wanted to hold their occupied lands in France, North Africa etc.
I always jump an nazi example when I see one. And it fits here especialy well. The Imperium of Men "dislikes" all its enemies and is willing to genocide the living hell out of them, if given the chance. But all things are not equal. Just like the Unforgiven don't do a 180 at every sign of any csm sighting, but they do it for every Fallen. The imperium is willing to accept the existance of certain xeno races, it can be a mix of cost, utility and use of the xeno, that makes the Imperium act so. At the same time the Imperium does not accept three things and goes after them no matter the cost, time and situation. Imperial tax avoiders, detractors of any big branch of the Adeptus, non sanctioned abhumans not under control of the Imperium. Things like that generate an response from Imperium every time, at imperial speed of course, but they just do. The humans did find the tau, when they were a race of people living in caves, their planet wasn't interesting enough, nor were the tau themselfs important enough to wipe out. But if tau were a group of miners and engineers seers operating an STC and rejecting any control from the Mechanicus, and punitive fleet would be sent ASAP. Troops would be pulled from other engagment just to burn out the renegades.
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Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: Yeah the problem of how much money you should spend to not be stuck with a bad army looks like a thing to me. Quite an important one at that. Or wait another edition but that sucks waiting 3 years and hope for the best.
There was a meme for GK in 8th, which I think would be accurate for DG in 9th too. It went something like this. Wait for the autum FAQ to fix it. Wait for the Codex to fix it. Wait for the IA to fix it, Wait for the next spring FAQ to fix it. Wait for the next edition to fix it. It is not for all faction, and not 100% accurate for all w40k armies, but for some it is. And it ain't fun seeing people ask themselfs why they spend ton of time and money, on something that is not fun.
leopard wrote: 40k & fantasy events it usually appears the win/draw/loss count generally matters more with the actual VP score being a tiebreaker, but I have seen outright VP, or outright kill ratios used as the event scoring as well - its all fine as long as you know in advance
is win/draw/los more common now?
Most 40k events i know still use a 20:0 system which is based on difference in VP with total VP being first tie breaker and win/draw/los 2nd tie breaker
I wonder if that lore was changed. I read a story about an IG transport fleet being attacked by orks, they do an evac and a warp jump and only a few dudes survive. They land on a planet with "centaur" looking people. In the culimination of the story they find out that there are two factions fighting a loyalist and chaos one, that the "centuars" were once human but they gene moded themselfs to survive the high G on the planet and the macro fauna (gigantic crabs). They even find a STC unit. The commisar decides that the population has to be purged for being mutants, and the main character shots him, and sends a memo on with his Pad that the planet only has a low civilisation level of xenos, and not mutated humans.
Don't know that story. Where's it from?
In any case the sourcebooks are clear that the Imperium is psychotically genocidal against nonhumans.
I blame the players. GW isn’t going score a goal with every release and those marines are damn ugly, but no matter how good the rules there aren’t making it into my marines army. If you care so little about what the models look like that you are happy with those in your army then you may as well just use card tokens for models.
Folks need to have some self respect for their poor armies.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. When do you hold GW responsible for doing shoddy work, if at all?
I hold them entirely responsible for the god awful models. Those things are vile and a stupid concept. Massive fail on the part of GW and I Love the primaris range, they are the first big miss of the range for me. And that trumps rules and everything else.
The rules being bad isn’t good either. The fact that one unit is so much stronger than others so that players will exploit that isn’t great, but that is a facet the players have agency over. We can’t remake the models, we can convert them or proxy but the models are the models. The fact that players will exploit these things to try and win and be happy to play piss ugly models to boot is on the players. You don’t have to exploit a strong unit to get an edge, winning isn’t everything and maybe other things should be more important.
End of the day, a player looks at their army and sees it is full of ugly ass models they hate just so they might win, and they know they paid over the odds for these horrible models and had to spend time painting them instead of enjoying themselves then that is on them for being so obsessed with trying to win so hard. They deserve an ugly army just for that.
They could not play them, play a unit that is a bit “worse” but still not bad and maybe win but have an army they were proud of. Instead they are being WAAC, even if that cost is over paying for horrible models you know you hate.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: As I never attended a tournament I have no idea how points are counted and so on so this is a genuine question.
usually there are 20 total points and you get 11 to 20 tournament points for a victory based o the difference scored during the game (and 9 to 0 for losing)
With a 5 game event, winning 3 games 20:0 and losing 2 games 0:20 will place you higher than winning all 5 games 12:8 or lower
So lists are built to win 20:0 as much as possible even if this means losing 0:20 against certain other builds rather than trying to handle all common lists
Thanks for the explanation comrade! That's a lot clearer
Being bit of an anti talent as far as art stuff goes, which my LL army can attest to with it looks. I would be the last to judge some of the choices GW takes with their models. But looking bad definitly doesn't help. And it is easy to check.
9th ed BA, one of the few marine armies that had some success, run a lot of Sanguinary Guard. A Blood Angle models as they can be. Old DC was used too. Later on, as it is now with most marines. The way to play them is to take Oath and desolators. Take melee with marines, or worse, try to be a melee army. You will not be a happy person.
Now in both examples we have BAs being okeyish to good, or at least not bad. But I think most of us would agree that a big majority of BA players, were more happy having an army of model looking like BA, then looking like desolators too.
We can even bring 8th in to the argument too. BA were good . for some time, there too. The problem is that the BA part of the BA army consisted of 15 scouts and 2 characters, the rest was IG, a Ravellan etc And that army was more meta and BA are now. A lot of marines, not just BAs liked that. Same with DE players being told, that in order to start their army they should take a farseer, dire avangers and wave serpents.
The need to take 5 button pushers from outside your army, is not fun right now. But at least it is just 5, VERY hard to get models.
Over the 3 editions I have seen people play a ton of units that were old, bad looking (to me and in general world view sense of the models), the models that are good fly off the shelfs. Impossible to get them. Bad models on the other hand, may look great. And if someone cares a lot for outside of game aspects, it can help to deal with an army being bad. But I don't think the argument works on Timmy and his marines getting beaten by Jimmies custodes. He doesn't want to be told that in 10-15 years, when he grows up, has a home, is more mature and sofisticated, he will learn to not care and like to paint. Because for Timmy what matters is that he is not having fun now, and Jimmy is. And in 6 months Jimmy may no longer be playing and Timmy will be left with an investment that wasn't very fun.
kodos wrote: PS: add in that you don't need to win all your games to win an event but need to win most of them with a big difference
So playing an "anti list" that is easily stomped by 1 faction, but makes sure you win high against any other can be placed much higher than a balanced list that wins all games but does not wipe them off the table
And 40k is the only game I know were winning is not the most important metric to place 1st in a single event
What you say about scoring is true - but I think due to competition, its rare to see someone win an event if they haven't gone X-0/X-1.
We do occasionally see in say a 5 game tournament someone who's had 4 blowouts and a close loss beat someone who's had 5 narrower wins - but its not that common.
I think the issue is that 40k doesn't have strong rock/paper/scissors. Its rare I think that a list will be strong into a good list, but bad into a weak list. I think that's because this evolutionary process happens at pace. If a "meta list" has a significant weakness, its usually exploited early, and that list will stop being meta as a result. Lists end up being meta precisely because they have no explicit weaknesses.
So for example, I think Orks in late 8th edition represented a counter-meta pick - because the tools to chisel out 30-40 Intercessors (often IH) were different to those you'd take for efficiently killing 150-180 boyz. And they didn't want to take the second, because there were 5+ times as many Marine players as Ork players (probably rising as you went through the rounds). I argued the same with Harlequins at the outset of 9th - were your going to skew your whole list for that 1 Harlequin player?
I imagine there may be a bit of that at the moment. DG and LoV are bad generally - but a tailored list would look very different into Eldar, Knights, GSC or Custodes. If you are scraping a 50% win rate into one of these factions, but are now even worse in the rest, its not good. (And you also need to deal with Necrons, Thousand Sons, Tyranids etc).
Over the 3 editions I have seen people play a ton of units that were old, bad looking (to me and in general world view sense of the models), the models that are good fly off the shelfs. Impossible to get them. Bad models on the other hand, may look great. And if someone cares a lot for outside of game aspects, it can help to deal with an army being bad. But I don't think the argument works on Timmy and his marines getting beaten by Jimmies custodes. He doesn't want to be told that in 10-15 years, when he grows up, has a home, is more mature and sofisticated, he will learn to not care and like to paint. Because for Timmy what matters is that he is not having fun now, and Jimmy is. And in 6 months Jimmy may no longer be playing and Timmy will be left with an investment that wasn't very fun.
We're a bit astray but connected to the topic, what you say is true not just for timmy but for us too. We play for fun and have got enough problems and unfunny thing to do besides, playing those games is having fun with people, if it doesn't provide then what's the point?
As for like painting, like modelling etc that's an advice I'd totally give but knowing that in the ends its a matter of taste so you can't force people into liking it. For a hobby with that much investment it's a great shame to be bereft of its fun. I think everyone agrees on that ( for once )
They could not play them, play a unit that is a bit “worse” but still not bad and maybe win but have an army they were proud of. Instead they are being WAAC, even if that cost is over paying for horrible models you know you hate.
What if they proxied them with something cooler? Then everyone wins or would you still be mad?
Well then you run in to a different problem. There will be people whose armies are bad, or were bad for years. Or ones whose armies just got better or mid tier now. And suddenly someone pops out and say they are going to use GK terminators as custodes, because same bases and halbards with guns=zero confusion, and Crow makes a great blade champion, while Voldus is a few letters away from Valdor. Oh you are going to get some "no" reactions from those people. Especialy if they in the past were told a no.
In places where proxies are okey, w40k meta gets muddied a lot, because why would someone punish themselfs with an army X, when they can print one themselfs at 1/10th the price or buy them at 1/4th the cost from their friendly local recaster. Often before GW actualy manages to send the models for the army to your country. There are some super talented people in all parts of europe that "deliver" full files 2-3 weeks after the art being show by GW.
They could not play them, play a unit that is a bit “worse” but still not bad and maybe win but have an army they were proud of. Instead they are being WAAC, even if that cost is over paying for horrible models you know you hate.
What if they proxied them with something cooler? Then everyone wins or would you still be mad?
Not sure it matters since nobody is actually disagreeing with you that GW dropped the ball. Read Andy's full post again and they already answered that:
Andykp wrote: The rules being bad isn’t good either. The fact that one unit is so much stronger than others so that players will exploit that isn’t great, but that is a facet the players have agency over. We can’t remake the models, we can convert them or proxy but the models are the models. The fact that players will exploit these things to try and win and be happy to play piss ugly models to boot is on the players. You don’t have to exploit a strong unit to get an edge, winning isn’t everything and maybe other things should be more important.
They could not play them, play a unit that is a bit “worse” but still not bad and maybe win but have an army they were proud of. Instead they are being WAAC, even if that cost is over paying for horrible models you know you hate.
What if they proxied them with something cooler? Then everyone wins or would you still be mad?
Not sure it matters since nobody is actually disagreeing with you that GW dropped the ball. Read Andy's full post again and they already answered that:
Andykp wrote: The rules being bad isn’t good either. The fact that one unit is so much stronger than others so that players will exploit that isn’t great, but that is a facet the players have agency over. We can’t remake the models, we can convert them or proxy but the models are the models. The fact that players will exploit these things to try and win and be happy to play piss ugly models to boot is on the players. You don’t have to exploit a strong unit to get an edge, winning isn’t everything and maybe other things should be more important.
They could not play them, play a unit that is a bit “worse” but still not bad and maybe win but have an army they were proud of. Instead they are being WAAC, even if that cost is over paying for horrible models you know you hate.
What if they proxied them with something cooler? Then everyone wins or would you still be mad?
Not sure it matters since nobody is actually disagreeing with you that GW dropped the ball. Read Andy's full post again and they already answered that:
Andykp wrote: The rules being bad isn’t good either. The fact that one unit is so much stronger than others so that players will exploit that isn’t great, but that is a facet the players have agency over. We can’t remake the models, we can convert them or proxy but the models are the models. The fact that players will exploit these things to try and win and be happy to play piss ugly models to boot is on the players. You don’t have to exploit a strong unit to get an edge, winning isn’t everything and maybe other things should be more important.
I'm not asking you.
Sorry, I didn't realise you were having a private conversation asking someone to repeat themselves on a public forum.
Sorry, I didn't realise you were having a private conversation asking someone to repeat themselves on a public forum.
Stop being an ass and looking for an argument.
The conversation isn't private, but I'm looking for one person's answer because they put forth a viewpoint I was interested in. Yours doesn't add anything to the conversation.
Sorry, I didn't realise you were having a private conversation asking someone to repeat themselves on a public forum.
Stop being an ass and looking for an argument.
The conversation isn't private, but I'm looking for one person's answer because they put forth a viewpoint I was interested in. Yours doesn't add anything to the conversation.
It was a viewpoint they'd already answered very comprehensively. Andy clearly established they thought the rules were not balanced and this wasn't good enough. They stated the bad sculpts are bad irrespective of the ability to proxy them.
They also made it clear they're more annoyed at the sculpts than the rules, although they feel that the players can opt to self police and not use broken rules for advantage.
You already have what you're asking for, to repeatedly reiterate feels like you want a different answer and or to bait a certain response out.
It's OK, Hecton is happy to comment on my form and prior stances, theirs is to try and back someone into a corner and make a pro-GW or anti-competitive statement then lord over about game design and how terrible it all is.
Andykp wrote: Instead they are being WAAC, even if that cost is over paying for horrible models you know you hate.
That is not what WAAC means.
If you don't decide your list based on throwing darts at your miniature collection to see what your list includes then you are win at all costs, get with the program /sarcasm.
WAAC seems to be used the same way the N or F word gets invoked. You dislike someone, no matter what they are, who they are, what they do you call them a nazi or fasist. Sometimes I wish people were just allowed to say F you to someone, would be less confusing and more on point to the argument at hand.
I'm late to the thread and don't plan on posting a lot in it, but to me it looks like Andy said he considers spamming the max number of the terrible Desolator models despite hating them just so you can win is WAAC.
Now, I don't know where I draw the line at WAAC, or how I define quintessential WAACness, but this might qualify for me.
If you actually LIKE the Desolators, I wouldn't consider it it WAAC. But buying $240 CAD of stuff that you hate just to win...
I think that if not WAAC, it's at least close enough to it that some people will see it that way.
PenitentJake wrote: I think that if not WAAC, it's at least close enough to it that some people will see it that way.
Some people will call anything they don't like WAAC. But words still have meanings and the term is Win At ALL Costs. Prioritizing in-game effectiveness over aesthetics is having priorities that aren't the same as yours but that doesn't make it WAAC. WAAC is about cheating/rules lawyering, seal clubbing, etc, where you are willing to bend or break all of the rules in pursuit of victory.
What? Upset that someone's being called out for using "WAAC" as a way to try to ad hominem people who have complaints about the game they don't like?
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PenitentJake wrote: I'm late to the thread and don't plan on posting a lot in it, but to me it looks like Andy said he considers spamming the max number of the terrible Desolator models despite hating them just so you can win is WAAC.
Now, I don't know where I draw the line at WAAC, or how I define quintessential WAACness, but this might qualify for me.
If you actually LIKE the Desolators, I wouldn't consider it it WAAC. But buying $240 CAD of stuff that you hate just to win...
I think that if not WAAC, it's at least close enough to it that some people will see it that way.
No, win at all costs implies bad sportsmanship. Nothing of the sort going on in the example provided.
It's just another way of trying to say "If a player beats me, they're a bastard!"
Maybe I'm just poor, but spending a quarter G on models you hate seems really dumb. But fine, if you say not WAAC, I'm cool with that.
Certainly not rational though.
Decently rational. I think that some people approach 40k as a game, and relish the battle of wits - they'd rather lose a fun game where you're both trying to beat each other than win one where their opponent held one hand behind their back. So when people say "trying to win is unsportsmanlike" (more or less), they think, bs, I can't have fun if people act like that. They may also care about fluff or aesthetics to a certain degree.
Hang in a minute! I take a bit of time off the forum and it all gets silly.
Hecaton, I did answer about proxying as dusface said, it’s right there in the post.
The rules for those models suck, the models suck harder. Simple.
And as I understand it WAAC stands for win at all cost? Is that not right?? You can infer what you like but that’s what it means literally.
In this case the cost is having an army, you the owner think is horrible and ugly. No comments on sportsmanship or anything like that, just a comment on the cost of the desire to win.
There was no ad hominem attacks (another favourite internet BS term). Just an observation that some people in the hobby community (no one in particular on here because I don’t know of anyone who has done it) will happily pay over the odds for ugly as sin models just to win. Models they wouldn’t have touched but the rules got good.
None of that was an attack on anyone here’s character because I don't know anyone who has done it. Just the people I sold them too.
Andykp wrote: There was no ad hominem attacks (another favourite internet BS term). Just an observation that some people in the hobby community (no one in particular on here because I don’t know of anyone who has done it) will happily pay over the odds for ugly as sin models just to win. Models they wouldn’t have touched but the rules got good.
Yes, it is an ad hominem attack. Calling someone WAAC is an attack on their character.
GW is bad for designing those models, and the players have much less power in this situation than GW to rectify the situation; the fact that you're putting all the responsibility on them rather than GW is very telling. You don't seem to think that GW has an obligation to act ethically, but the players do. GW is beyond ordinary sin, in your eyes, it seems.
Hecaton wrote: Yes, it is an ad hominem attack. Calling someone WAAC is an attack on their character.
To be fair, that's not what an ad hominem is. An ad hominem argument is an argument of the form "you suck therefore X". Merely saying "you suck" is aggressive and insulting but not an ad hominem.
Hecaton wrote: Yes, it is an ad hominem attack. Calling someone WAAC is an attack on their character.
To be fair, that's not what an ad hominem is. An ad hominem argument is an argument of the form "you suck therefore X". Merely saying "you suck" is aggressive and insulting but not an ad hominem.
Well, that's implied. "You suck therefore you are responsible for GW's bad decisions, not GW."
Andykp wrote: ... another favourite internet BS term...
There's nothing BS about the term. It describes a specific logical fallacy.
"You suck and you're wrong!" = Not an ad hominem.
"You suck therefore you are wrong!" = Ad hominem attack.
But….I’m not saying anyone sucks, I’m not attacking anyone. Maybe WAAC was a bit too triggering here, it was merely a comment on the fact that some competitive players will now snap up previously pariah models because the rules are good even though many of them lambast the same models as awful right up until the rules changed.
I’m not calling hecaton WAAC, or painting owl, I’m certainly not being aggressive, I just find it very odd that anyone would choose to have models they hate in their army. The key bits of WAAC are the winning and the cost. The cost being the horrible models. It’s not even that I hate the models, it’s that the people buying them hate them.
Here is a lot about the competitive scene that baffles me, recently I found out you can pay to be coached in 40K , now I find that people aren’t just chasing the good units but will buy units that they hate if the rules are good enough. For someone who doesn’t play or mix in that scene at all it’s very very odd, to the point of being unbelievable. But here we are!
So please ignore the WAAC part of my comments, it’s obviously a touchy subject and not the point I was trying to make. I will be more careful in my use of the term and save it for 5e worst cases.
And HBMC, by BS term I meant it gets rolled out on here far too easily to try and deflect an argument and reposition someone as the victim with any attempt at real dialogue. It rarely adds anything to the discussion but just tries to shut it down. I know it has a real meaning but it rarely is used in that way. (Nothing to do with its use here)
WAAC is inherently an attack. Sometimes it's an accurate attack, like when you're talking about the guy that moves his models an extra inch when you aren't looking or cheats with dice. That is a clear example of Win At ALL Costs behavior. But someone who merely prioritizes in-game performance over aesthetics is not trying to win at ALL costs, they merely have different priorities from you. By calling them WAAC you are putting them in the same category as the cheaters, the seal clubbers, etc, and saying that their choice of priorities is equivalent to all of that.
WAAC is inherently an attack. Sometimes it's an accurate attack, like when you're talking about the guy that moves his models an extra inch when you aren't looking or cheats with dice. That is a clear example of Win At ALL Costs behavior. But someone who merely prioritizes in-game performance over aesthetics is not trying to win at ALL costs, they merely have different priorities from you. By calling them WAAC you are putting them in the same category as the cheaters, the seal clubbers, etc, and saying that their choice of priorities is equivalent to all of that.
Anyone who prioritizes in-game performance over aesthetics, whether they're posting here or merely reading this thread. You're saying that because they bought the (IMO) ugly missile marines for competitive play regardless of their lack of aesthetic value they're equivalent to the guy who brings an edited version of the codex with buffs for all his favorite units. It would be no different than me calling all narrative players CAAC TFGs for buying narratively-appropriate units even if they have bad rules. Even if I didn't name you specifically I bet you'd feel pretty attacked by that comment.
Anyone who prioritizes in-game performance over aesthetics, whether they're posting here or merely reading this thread. You're saying that because they bought the (IMO) ugly missile marines for competitive play regardless of their lack of aesthetic value they're equivalent to the guy who brings an edited version of the codex with buffs for all his favorite units. It would be no different than me calling all narrative players CAAC TFGs for buying narratively-appropriate units even if they have bad rules. Even if I didn't name you specifically I bet you'd feel pretty attacked by that comment.
Not especially no. My point wasn’t that people bought models I thought were ugly but that they bought models THEY thought were ugly. Models they wouldn’t go near and were slating online mere months before were suddenly the hot product and the same people were paying over the odds for them.
That is not a sign of a healthy system. Now if anyone is sat there with a load of desolation marines that they just bought because they love he rules that’s fine by me, the ones I sold made me a pretty penny and got me a new dreadnought for next to nothing
But if that is considered normal and acceptable with you and your crowd it is another example of why I will never get that slice of the community. Utterly baffling.
Automatically Appended Next Post: And “casual at all costs”… that’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
Not especially no. My point wasn’t that people bought models I thought were ugly but that they bought models THEY thought were ugly. Models they wouldn’t go near and were slating online mere months before were suddenly the hot product and the same people were paying over the odds for them.
That's just being competitive and fairly high on the scale for it, where as the low end might be putting together the most powerful list you can with the units you already own and have painted.
WAAC is a very specific term that explains itself. Win at all costs. The "all costs" bit is important here because it means taking advantage of anything you can. At the low end it often means trying to pull fast ones on your opponent / not pointing out rules which might favor them that they're forgetting or 'pretending' you don't know, such as using out-of-sequence strategems and such unless specifically called on it. Soft cheating, if you will. On the 'higher' end it involves straight up cheating like getting extra movement or lying about rolls / changing dice / saying your units have rules which they absolutely do not.
So while I believe most people in this thread will agree that buying the ugly G.I.JOE missle-marines purely because they're strong is kinda distasteful, and not the direction the hobby should be going... Doing so doesn't make anyone a WAAC player.
Andykp wrote: That is not a sign of a healthy system.
No, it's a sign of a system you don't enjoy. I get that you value aesthetics but not everyone else has the same priorities. For someone who prioritizes in-game performance having ugly models is, at best, a fairly minor annoyance. That doesn't make either side inherently right.
And “casual at all costs”… that’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
I guess you haven't seen self-identified casual players having a complete meltdown at someone who dared to bring a list that wasn't "casual" enough or didn't comply with their version of the lore.
Not especially no. My point wasn’t that people bought models I thought were ugly but that they bought models THEY thought were ugly. Models they wouldn’t go near and were slating online mere months before were suddenly the hot product and the same people were paying over the odds for them.
That is not a sign of a healthy system. Now if anyone is sat there with a load of desolation marines that they just bought because they love he rules that’s fine by me, the ones I sold made me a pretty penny and got me a new dreadnought for next to nothing
But if that is considered normal and acceptable with you and your crowd it is another example of why I will never get that slice of the community. Utterly baffling.
GK for 2 edition were a codex NDK. If you could just take only NDK, you would do it. And people did 3-5-6 maxed them out, otherwise the army would just not work. The NDK is considered one of the worse looking models in the game period. But when given two options play an army which is not fun and bad, and play an army that has ugly NDK, and at least potentialy have a chance for some fun game, people will pick the second over the first more often.
And how is it not healthy, wanting to not have fun is the way to go? I do this, and I know it is not healthy, because I have the papers for it.
I guess you haven't seen self-identified casual players having a complete meltdown at someone who dared to bring a list that wasn't "casual" enough or didn't comply with their version of the lore.
People don't even know what a casual list anyway. You will have an eldar player drop at the store with his new 10th list, then whine how all marines are running double or triple desolation squads vs his "casual" eldar list. Only when someone realy casual aka with a bad list, plays vs them they get tabled and the difference between the casual and not is very ephemerical. Is someone who build a custodes army with a christmas box and starter set a WAAC, a regular or Casual player? He has no assasins, uses sisters of silence instead of the cheaper arbitors, but at the same time he has a warden unit, a 10 brick of guard and 2xallarus which is almost the same as in tournament list. A GK player using terminators was casual as F in 8th and 9th, because termiantors were horrible, not worth taking in any situation, but now they are a WAAC, because strikes and especialy interceptors got much worse. Did the WAACGK with maxed out NDK, 30 interceptors and 0 terminators became a CAAC overnight when 10th rules got leaked?
Andykp wrote: That is not a sign of a healthy system.
No, it's a sign of a system you don't enjoy. I get that you value aesthetics but not everyone else has the same priorities. For someone who prioritizes in-game performance having ugly models is, at best, a fairly minor annoyance. That doesn't make either side inherently right.
And “casual at all costs”… that’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
I guess you haven't seen self-identified casual players having a complete meltdown at someone who dared to bring a list that wasn't "casual" enough or didn't comply with their version of the lore.
I guess the fact that there's a unit people want to spam mac of and will proxy/sell kidneys for/do whatever it takes to field might be an indication of a broken system.
Overall agree, both WAAC and CAAC often get misapplied on here very regularly. Very evidently no offense was meant though following an explanation and it certainly wasn't worth Hecaton spending a page trying to bait Andy into some gakky argument over it.
What? Upset that someone's being called out for using "WAAC" as a way to try to ad hominem people who have complaints about the game they don't like?
No the fact you shamelessly try to prod and bait someone into n argument or a position for you to attack them.
All you need to say is "oh I see you used WAAC there, you might need using it incorrectly and some people might be upset you're inferring it's cheating to take 30 desolation marines".
Trying to bait an explicitly worded response to force an argument so you get a little dopamine rush over a misunderstanding, isn't exactly a noble defense of competitive players using ugly as sin models they bought at twice the price.
Andy clearly meant they disagreed with using the models they deem ugly purely because it leverages poor rules writing. Which interestingly backs up your stance in the world about a poorly balanced game.
Why the heck can't you let him alone? He goes out of his track to explicitly say he was a bit to harsh and clearly explain his opinion. Then you might say I disagree with you Andy but there comes a point in this discussion we're continuing debating is really just argument for the sake of an argument and turning every thread into a dumpster fire. That's being tiring.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: Being accused of being WAAC as in too competitive at a GAME plus recieving excuses and reformulation afterwards for having been harsh is NOT abuse
waac includes behaviour that isn't actually competitive too.
Like cheating.
Still though, someone throwing down 30 desolation marines built as per GW instructions will inevitably be regarded as someone that wants to win above all.
Honestly it's a scale: CAAC ----- normal players ------ WAAC
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: Being accused of being WAAC as in too competitive at a GAME plus recieving excuses and reformulation afterwards for having been harsh is NOT abuse
Once again: WAAC does not mean "too competitive", it refers specifically to unethical behavior outside the scope of normal gameplay such as cheating or seal clubbing. An accusation of WAAC behavior is a serious insult.
I take it you own 30 desolation marines and frequent events then? Otherwise you've not been abused by anyone.
I wouldn't worry you've not been overcivil at all, quite the opposite.
You're asking me to be overcivil.
What has directly "abused" you? What has been said that requires you to be aggressive and manipulative? Justify the lack of civility on a personal level please.
waac includes behaviour that isn't actually competitive too.
Like cheating.
Still though, someone throwing down 30 desolation marines built as per GW instructions will inevitably be regarded as someone that wants to win above all.
Honestly it's a scale: CAAC ----- normal players ------ WAAC
I don't think it's a scale like that. CAAC players are typically also focused on winning, they just get there by bullying people who can beat them, seal clubbing on pickup game nights, etc.
So you might say you just described someone who wins at all costs? Maybe you need to redefine your own terms.
Not Online!!! wrote: Still though, someone throwing down 30 desolation marines built as per GW instructions will inevitably be regarded as someone that wants to win above all.
No, that is just normal competitive play.
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Dudeface wrote: So you might say you just described someone who wins at all costs? Maybe you need to redefine your own terms.
No, the self-identified "casual" player who is a CAAC TFG needs to redefine theirs. The issue is that "casual" means having a low investment in something and not taking it very seriously. IOW, the kind of person who plays one game a year with a starter box they got in 1995 and certainly doesn't post on forums about the hobby. But certain players will label themselves "casual" players despite having a massive investment, both in time/money and in emotional attachment to the game, and then use "casual" as a bludgeon to try to force everyone else to play exactly the way they do. And in many cases it's very much about winning. Rather than acknowledge that their list was weaker and take the loss in a meaningless game of toy soldiers they'll have a complete meltdown over the possibility of losing or having to change their list in any way to compete. There's nothing even remotely "casual" about their behavior by any conventional definition of the word but it's the flag they rally behind so they get to be called CAAC.
WAAC and CAAC are terms used to describe people who have improper social and behaviour skills during games at the polar extremes of behaviour; which results in a negative play experience for those they play against
They are NOT about how skilled a player is at the game nor about how well/poorly they have built their army list. You can have a WAAC who has terrible skills and makes up for it by cheating or only playing very new players who are still learning the rules; you can have a very skilled CAAC player who is just not paying attention to the game what so ever and might even just wander off mid-game because "eh its a game don't take it too serious bro" or who screams "cheese/waac" every time someone fields an army against them that doesn't fit their interpretation of what that army should look like "lore wise"
Using those two terms to define player skill is often done, but its not really getting to their real meaning. Player skill levels is a whole separate aspect and yes you do get situations where high and low skill players end up playing each other without either party really knowing the other's play style or level (because we don't have grades or such to segregate and inform the playing population and most clubs only have a small player pool to start with).
Not Online!!! wrote: Still though, someone throwing down 30 desolation marines built as per GW instructions will inevitably be regarded as someone that wants to win above all.
No, that is just normal competitive play.
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Dudeface wrote: So you might say you just described someone who wins at all costs? Maybe you need to redefine your own terms.
No, the self-identified "casual" player who is a CAAC TFG needs to redefine theirs. The issue is that "casual" means having a low investment in something and not taking it very seriously. IOW, the kind of person who plays one game a year with a starter box they got in 1995 and certainly doesn't post on forums about the hobby. But certain players will label themselves "casual" players despite having a massive investment, both in time/money and in emotional attachment to the game, and then use "casual" as a bludgeon to try to force everyone else to play exactly the way they do. And in many cases it's very much about winning. Rather than acknowledge that their list was weaker and take the loss in a meaningless game of toy soldiers they'll have a complete meltdown over the possibility of losing or having to change their list in any way to compete. There's nothing even remotely "casual" about their behavior by any conventional definition of the word but it's the flag they rally behind so they get to be called CAAC.
As the person who came up with it no, that is not it at all. CAAC refers to "casual" players who whine and cry about anyone who brings a stronger list than theirs, come up with all kinds of arbitrary rules (most of them vague and unwritten) that you're expected to follow, assert moral superiority over everyone who doesn't follow their rules about the "right" way to play the game, and attempt to shun those people from the community. And they assume that "casual" is synonymous with "good", and is the default assumption for everything that isn't competitive. IOW, if a unit/game type/etc is bad for competitive play then it must, by default, be great for "casual" games even if in reality it makes things worse for those games as well. This usually extends to having a poor level of understanding of game design and balance, and even being proud of embracing bad design/balance as proof of how thoroughly they reject the hated competitive style of play.
In short, the term "casual" becomes redefined from its normal meaning of having a low investment in the game and not taking anything seriously to being extremely serious about rejecting the people and play styles they hate. There is nothing at all casual about them, and "CAAC" highlights the absurdity of their chosen label.
CAAC is about shaming competitive mindsets and enforcing game restrictions to enforce a particular play style to manipulate a local meta into being "casual" (green bit). TFG is someone who will be a harsh misleading person that will pick on and beat down people at their club to be the big fish in the little pond. WAAC is someone who will manipulate, cheat or abuse circumstances to ensure they win(red bit).
If you're telling me that someone is forcing certain comps and playstyles to club seals and get easier wins whilst telling people that it's fine because they're casual (lying), they're doing all they can to win at any cost.
All of this is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand and tbh it's absurd that someone is so offended at a mislabelling of a behaviour that wasn't targeted at anyone that they feel the need to break rule 1 and make a personal attack.
Dudeface wrote: TFG is someone who will be a harsh misleading person that will pick on and beat down people at their club to be the big fish in the little pond.
No? TFG is a general term: That ing Guy. It can be a CAAC TFG, a WAACTFG, or even just the guy who only bathes once a month and creeps on every woman who enters the store.
If you're telling me that someone is forcing certain comps and playstyles to club seals and get easier wins whilst telling people that it's fine because they're casual (lying), they're doing all they can to win at any cost.
I think you're misunderstanding the goals here.
The WAAC player's goal is victory by any means necessary. Even if they have to cheat with their netlist against a baby seal a win is a win and that's all that matters. In fact, seal clubbing is better than a normal game because it has the best chance of winning 100-0. They feel entitled to a 100% win rate and nothing can be allowed to get in the way of that.
The CAAC player wants to win but not any more than the average person. What they don't want to do is change. That's the thing in common with my definition and the supposed original one* you quoted: the CAAC player has a specific way they want to play the game, defined by taking sub-optimal choices and opposing list optimization. They're generally content to win half their games as long as their opponents are all playing the "right" way, where they table flip is when they start losing most of their games and have to face the choice between continuing to lose or improving their lists. But as long as everyone is playing the "right" way they won't feel the need to push any further. They aren't going to cross that line into cheating/seal clubbing/etc. And they sure as hell aren't going to compromise their "casual" principles by taking a tournament list to improve their chances of winning.
*I'm not convinced that's the original one given the concept has existed in other games for a long time. For example, I first encountered that kind of player in MTG at least 20 years ago. Maybe Peregrine came up with "CAAC" specifically but it's at most a new label for an old concept, certainly not the sole possible definition.
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Overread wrote: Using those two terms to define player skill is often done, but its not really getting to their real meaning.
Yep. You can have high-level competitive players who are scrupulously honest, clearly declare all of their intentions, and give their opponent every benefit of the doubt, the polar opposite of the WAAC attitude. Or you can have very low-skill WAAC players who feel entitled to win despite their lack of skill and cheat constantly to compensate. Same thing with CAAC. Skill is an entirely different scale that has nothing to do with the toxic attitudes of WAAC/CAAC players.
Dudeface wrote: TFG is someone who will be a harsh misleading person that will pick on and beat down people at their club to be the big fish in the little pond.
No? TFG is a general term: That ing Guy. It can be a CAAC TFG, a WAACTFG, or even just the guy who only bathes once a month and creeps on every woman who enters the store.
If you're telling me that someone is forcing certain comps and playstyles to club seals and get easier wins whilst telling people that it's fine because they're casual (lying), they're doing all they can to win at any cost.
I think you're misunderstanding the goals here.
The WAAC player's goal is victory by any means necessary. Even if they have to cheat with their netlist against a baby seal a win is a win and that's all that matters. In fact, seal clubbing is better than a normal game because it has the best chance of winning 100-0. They feel entitled to a 100% win rate and nothing can be allowed to get in the way of that.
The CAAC player wants to win but not any more than the average person. What they don't want to do is change. That's the thing in common with my definition and the supposed original one* you quoted: the CAAC player has a specific way they want to play the game, defined by taking sub-optimal choices and opposing list optimization. They're generally content to win half their games as long as their opponents are all playing the "right" way, where they table flip is when they start losing most of their games and have to face the choice between continuing to lose or improving their lists. But as long as everyone is playing the "right" way they won't feel the need to push any further. They aren't going to cross that line into cheating/seal clubbing/etc. And they sure as hell aren't going to compromise their "casual" principles by taking a tournament list to improve their chances of winning.
*I'm not convinced that's the original one given the concept has existed in other games for a long time. For example, I first encountered that kind of player in MTG at least 20 years ago. Maybe Peregrine came up with "CAAC" specifically but it's at most a new label for an old concept, certainly not the sole possible definition.
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Overread wrote: Using those two terms to define player skill is often done, but its not really getting to their real meaning.
Yep. You can have high-level competitive players who are scrupulously honest, clearly declare all of their intentions, and give their opponent every benefit of the doubt, the polar opposite of the WAAC attitude. Or you can have very low-skill WAAC players who feel entitled to win despite their lack of skill and cheat constantly to compensate. Same thing with CAAC. Skill is an entirely different scale that has nothing to do with the toxic attitudes of WAAC/CAAC players.
That's a much better and clearer definition all round thank you.
I get what you're saying. It was only after I moved from wh40k to Warmachine when it suddenly turned out that knowing and following the rules and measuring distances neatly and transparently makes you a good player and a desirable opponent and not a ruleslawyering powergamer.
Now I started playing Kill Team, and, what do you know, there are some players in the group who just misinterpret the rules and do impossible things when it comes to distances (interestingly only when it favours them) but when you play correctly they look down on you making comments on how they are casual players and leave such approach to tournament powergamers who just want to win at all cost.
Cyel wrote: I get what you're saying. It was only after I moved from wh40k to Warmachine when it suddenly turned out that knowing and following the rules and measuring distances neatly and transparently makes you a good player and a desirable opponent and not a ruleslawyering powergamer.
Now I started playing Kill Team, and, what do you know, there are some players in the group who just misinterpret the rules and do impossible things when it comes to distances (interestingly only when it favours them) but when you play correctly they look down on you making comments on how they are casual players and leave such approach to tournament powergamers who just want to win at all cost.
Honestly just sounds like a local problem with your local gamers into 40K.
Sometimes you can get that were enough of a core of the local group dominates one game so that the "game" becomes an attitude of play and other types of player either leave outright or drift into other games.
You can change it, but it often requires bringing the people to you; starting your own 40K/Killteam games and promoting your style of play enough that either some of the current players shift attitudes or new people join in
I have seen that problem too, and it has to do how the rules of GW games are written, specially among non-native speakers
so the rules "as written" are not clear to everyone and most just play it how it "feels" right to them and if you are the guy pointing out that this is not what is written there, you are the problem because this would "feel" wrong
that those people also use the interpretation to their own advantage is an attitude of certain players in addition to the original problem
A classic: this is a non competitive way of doing things, but sometimes if we can't decide we simply roll a dice and see.
Then when all is over we sit down, take all the rules and calmly re-read to see who got it correctly. Most funny scenario is when none of you actually caught it correctly.
I think this will not be satisfactory if you are more into the competitive aspect because losing on a randomly resolved rule issue in that case can be frustrating. If you don't care to much that's a good way of speeding the process if the matter is becoming tedious.
I also imagine this could be the moment to see if you're opponent was bordering on or outright cheating or if he was simply grumpy because... You know how some simply don't like being pushed out of their habits.
Honestly just sounds like a local problem with your local gamers into 40K.
Sometimes you can get that were enough of a core of the local group dominates one game so that the "game" becomes an attitude of play and other types of player either leave outright or drift into other games.
You can change it, but it often requires bringing the people to you; starting your own 40K/Killteam games and promoting your style of play enough that either some of the current players shift attitudes or new people join in
Nah, that ain't a local problem. On many media online I have seen people use the "I am not a WAAC tournament player, who hates fun" after they were found out to be playing rules wrong or trying to pull illegal moves, units/gear combinations. I don't know when and how it started, but GW games are unique in the maner of somehow winning, playing with proper rules etc somehow being equated to anti fun. Fun is somehow doing wierd stuff, leting people do +X" charges, doing wrong moves or even bringing bad armies and expecting that others will do it too. No other table game is like that. And I think, GW can get away with many things, because some people exist who claim that the game should be played that way. And reading some old articles from old GW designers, some of them sound as if they hated the very idea of a game being a game, point costs, clear rules etc. Everything is suppose to be random dice rolls, changing rules in the middle of the game etc. It is as wierd as the people that claim that it is impossible to have a good game of w40k, if the armies, table etc are not painted. And when you check what someone of them accept as painted is the way they paint stuff, and the same people will scoff at even professional spanish or russian painters, same way they do at dudes playing grey models
And reading some old articles from old GW designers, some of them sound as if they hated the very idea of a game being a game, point costs, clear rules etc. Everything is suppose to be random dice rolls, changing rules in the middle of the game etc. It is as wierd as the people that claim that it is impossible to have a good game of w40k, if the armies, table etc are not painted. And when you check what someone of them accept as painted is the way they paint stuff, and the same people will scoff at even professional spanish or russian painters, same way they do at dudes playing grey models
Sorry, can you elaborate, I didn't understand what you meant? Do you mean this is a an aspect of the strangeness of 40k player base?
Well I come from a background of sports. I went to a sports middle and highschool, and I am at a sports university right now. To me, if a game has rules, then they are to be followed. Good or bad, you do that. The fix to a games problems should be "If you don't know how a rules interaction works, just roll a dice". I have sports history, I remember matches in various sport types ending with a roll of a coin. Riots would break out over such game fixes. Especialy in team sports like football or rugby. I can't imagine how someone could be paid with money, allowed to have their own projects, shaped the games not for the game quality , game players or game fans, but just for themselfs and then deliver what GW delivers. It goes beyond lazy, and enters the realm of , I can't explain it to myself. It is either not carrying, hubris, maybe some mental malfunction in understanding what games are. I can't remember people faces, maybe there are people who don't understand that games are better with clear, good or bad, rules systems. But then why hire such people. I get someone doing something one time, two time, maybe three times wrong. But some of the designers at GW have worked their for decades. And they are doing the same things over and over again. It drives away people from the game, makes player retention in GW games horrible. The company functions on sunk costs of players, nostalgia and being a monopolist. I get that the job of GW execs, unlike the GW design team, is to make money and not a good game. But good games that are fun to play sell better. Warmahordes when it had good rules and was fun to play, became an actual competitor to some GW games.
Sorry, can you elaborate, I didn't understand what you meant? Do you mean this is a an aspect of the strangeness of 40k player base?
it is more about how the game is written not the playerbase as some designers preferred a more RPG like rulebook were players make up their own story and the rules being open so everyone can adapt them to fit their needs and less being a game were the rules are taken literally
and this causes problem with the playerbase as some take this as advice to be more relaxed while others see this as additional restriction to play the game (like your Transport colours must match the chapter you play and you cannot use your Blood Angles Rhinos as for your Ultramarine models but must have 2 sets of different painted Rhinos, otherwise this is cheating)
because this is a game with exact rules that must be followed (which it is not because it was never written that way)
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: A classic: this is a non competitive way of doing things, but sometimes if we can't decide we simply roll a dice and see.
Then when all is over we sit down, take all the rules and calmly re-read to see who got it correctly. Most funny scenario is when none of you actually caught it correctly.
it gets complicated when people insist on the English rules to have priority but cannot decide on how to interpret them when the translated rules are much clearer but are not supporting their point of view
Sorry, can you elaborate, I didn't understand what you meant? Do you mean this is a an aspect of the strangeness of 40k player base?
it is more about how the game is written not the playerbase as some designers preferred a more RPG like rulebook were players make up their own story and the rules being open so everyone can adapt them to fit their needs and less being a game were the rules are taken literally
and this causes problem with the playerbase as some take this as advice to be more relaxed while others see this as additional restriction to play the game (like your Transport colours must match the chapter you play and you cannot use your Blood Angles Rhinos as for your Ultramarine models but must have 2 sets of different painted Rhinos, otherwise this is cheating)
because this is a game with exact rules that must be followed (which it is not because it was never written that way)
A classic: this is a non competitive way of doing things, but sometimes if we can't decide we simply roll a dice and see.
Then when all is over we sit down, take all the rules and calmly re-read to see who got it correctly. Most funny scenario is when none of you actually caught it correctly.
it gets complicated when people insist on the English rules to have priority but cannot decide on how to interpret them when the translated rules are much clearer but are not supporting their point of view
Ok I get you.
Yeah I pretty much think at least for most of its history it was a game of RPG larger sacale of some sort and was heavily emphasised as such even in the rulebooks. But then this is a matter of simple human polite relationship and making sure you and you're opponent agree on the terms before starting. Personnaly when playing 40k I like pouring house rules in it as we play fully for the lore and tories but we al are okay with it. But playing BA we all agree on strictly following the rules and play in a more competitive fashion.
I would say this looks like bad faith to me. But then again in theory the best way to solve it is to make it clear at the beginning which version is the one you use.
Which boils down to: remember its a game and be a nice pal so everyone has a good time.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Karol wrote: Well I come from a background of sports. I went to a sports middle and highschool, and I am at a sports university right now. To me, if a game has rules, then they are to be followed. Good or bad, you do that. The fix to a games problems should be "If you don't know how a rules interaction works, just roll a dice". I have sports history, I remember matches in various sport types ending with a roll of a coin. Riots would break out over such game fixes. Especialy in team sports like football or rugby. I can't imagine how someone could be paid with money, allowed to have their own projects, shaped the games not for the game quality , game players or game fans, but just for themselfs and then deliver what GW delivers. It goes beyond lazy, and enters the realm of , I can't explain it to myself. It is either not carrying, hubris, maybe some mental malfunction in understanding what games are. I can't remember people faces, maybe there are people who don't understand that games are better with clear, good or bad, rules systems. But then why hire such people. I get someone doing something one time, two time, maybe three times wrong. But some of the designers at GW have worked their for decades. And they are doing the same things over and over again. It drives away people from the game, makes player retention in GW games horrible. The company functions on sunk costs of players, nostalgia and being a monopolist. I get that the job of GW execs, unlike the GW design team, is to make money and not a good game. But good games that are fun to play sell better. Warmahordes when it had good rules and was fun to play, became an actual competitor to some GW games.
Also a lot clearer. I agree with you at heart.
However I think 40k's design at least for a long time was meant to be more or less tinkered with on purpose. But even tinkering you are right, you must establish clear conventions about what the new or modified rules are otherwise it can't be fair game.
What has directly "abused" you? What has been said that requires you to be aggressive and manipulative? Justify the lack of civility on a personal level please.
Anyone who's insulting me, or a group I belong to collectively.
Dudeface wrote: So you might say you just described someone who wins at all costs? Maybe you need to redefine your own terms.
CAAC is inherently derivative of the WAAC terminology, and defines people who have a similarly unsportsmanlike attitude but make a point of not identifying as tournament players etc.
CAAC is about shaming competitive mindsets and enforcing game restrictions to enforce a particular play style to manipulate a local meta into being "casual" (green bit). TFG is someone who will be a harsh misleading person that will pick on and beat down people at their club to be the big fish in the little pond. WAAC is someone who will manipulate, cheat or abuse circumstances to ensure they win(red bit).
If you're telling me that someone is forcing certain comps and playstyles to club seals and get easier wins whilst telling people that it's fine because they're casual (lying), they're doing all they can to win at any cost.
All of this is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand and tbh it's absurd that someone is so offended at a mislabelling of a behaviour that wasn't targeted at anyone that they feel the need to break rule 1 and make a personal attack.
It's not absurd, considering the level of acrimony on this forum.
However I think 40k's design at least for a long time was meant to be more or less tinkered with on purpose. But even tinkering you are right, you must establish clear conventions about what the new or modified rules are otherwise it can't be fair game.
It's not just about the tinkering - a lot of it has to do with the idea that you're only "allowed" to win by the social hierarchy of the gaming group you're in, and players who learn the rules and play well are somehow evil, WAAC, doing it wrong, etc. It's a toxic viewpoint, but I and others have pointed out that it comes from GW.
Of course ones wins are always baseed on superior skills, coolness, maturity, combined with a high level of personal culture and the understanding of the hobby. While everyone else who isn't a friend, is just an donkey-cave WAAC. Even if your list are different by one unit choice.
it gets complicated when people insist on the English rules to have priority but cannot decide on how to interpret them when the translated rules are much clearer but are not supporting their point of view
Logic and GW rules should either not be used as a combo or used very carefuly. I am still waiting for GW to explain why the GK land raiders have different stats, then marine ones.
What has directly "abused" you? What has been said that requires you to be aggressive and manipulative? Justify the lack of civility on a personal level please.
Anyone who's insulting me, or a group I belong to collectively.
So you're a particular member of the group owning 30 desolation marines? Honestly it's clear to pretty much everyone else no insult was intended.
All of this is largely irrelevant to the topic at hand and tbh it's absurd that someone is so offended at a mislabelling of a behaviour that wasn't targeted at anyone that they feel the need to break rule 1 and make a personal attack.
It's not absurd, considering the level of acrimony on this forum.
Maybe there'd be less acrimony if instead of breaking forum rules and trying to bait arguments, you offered helpful corrective comments to educate the people using the wrong terminology?
But yes, an obvious mistake in terminology isn't worth attacking people, or do you just pick arguments with anyone you meet who doesn't perfectly align with your beliefs in life?
It's not just about the tinkering - a lot of it has to do with the idea that you're only "allowed" to win by the social hierarchy of the gaming group you're in, and players who learn the rules and play well are somehow evil, WAAC, doing it wrong, etc. It's a toxic viewpoint, but I and others have pointed out that it comes from GW.
That would indeed be a toxic group and I'd run from it.
But since it's not a hardware you can't change and has a big deal of RPG elements, I think it stands within reason to add or modifiy things. However, the mandatory conditions are that everyone should be aware and agree. If someone does not agree to pmay on house rules then you ought to return to normal rules because even if you like it less you play on a ground that is equal for both and clearly defined.
To sum it up, I don't see inherent problem to modifying or houseruling, since it's but a game, however with strict limitations of good faith.
Again, not that I don't do it on BA, for exemple, considering it is not RPG tinted at all and a totally enjoyable set of rules to my our taste. But I know people who houseruled it to lean on historical accuracy. However if you ask them to play by normal rules they either decline politly or play you with the normal set of rules. That's a good exemple of how you can do it. I feel.
Maybe there'd be less acrimony if instead of breaking forum rules and trying to bait arguments, you offered helpful corrective comments to educate the people using the wrong terminology?
Nah, the acrimony starts when people throw insults around and then don't want any of the smoke. It's not breaking forum rules to call that out, as much as some mods might disagree.
That would indeed be a toxic group and I'd run from it.
But since it's not a hardware you can't change and has a big deal of RPG elements, I think it stands within reason to add or modifiy things. However, the mandatory conditions are that everyone should be aware and agree. If someone does not agree to pmay on house rules then you ought to return to normal rules because even if you like it less you play on a ground that is equal for both and clearly defined.
To sum it up, I don't see inherent problem to modifying or houseruling, since it's but a game, however with strict limitations of good faith.
Again, not that I don't do it on BA, for exemple, considering it is not RPG tinted at all and a totally enjoyable set of rules to my our taste. But I know people who houseruled it to lean on historical accuracy. However if you ask them to play by normal rules they either decline politly or play you with the normal set of rules. That's a good exemple of how you can do it. I feel.
There's nothing inherently wrong with houseruling, I'd agree. In fact it can be a good thing - there were a few house rules for the last Crusade I ran, but I put that out in the open from the beginning.
Problem with house rules, is that they are hard to balance in larger groups, very bad to implement for pick up games. And can get REALLY bad, if someone uses their local status to buff one or two armies. And it somehow never happens to bad armies. It is always stuff like skimers on rooftops being invisible from the ground floor, buildings with no doors or windows full of models that can out of LoS shot be impossible to charge etc.
Karol wrote: Problem with house rules, is that they are hard to balance in larger groups, very bad to implement for pick up games. And can get REALLY bad, if someone uses their local status to buff one or two armies. And it somehow never happens to bad armies. It is always stuff like skimers on rooftops being invisible from the ground floor, buildings with no doors or windows full of models that can out of LoS shot be impossible to charge etc.
In my group, I said it elsewhere I think in this topic but we actually managed to bang heads together and come up a somewhat improved ork dex Not perfect nor anything but we finally made something quite enjoyable. Most of our rules are otherwise aimed at making the game quickier or simpler and adding profiles or rules to represent things related to a scenario.
In larger groups it's way trickier. the only way I can think of is to surrender the rule making to a single GM, but you need to trust him and moreover it only goes well with RPG like play. I am a 40k scenario player myself, so again, I'd gladly give in to this, but it must be a consensus that pleases all parties involved.
For pick up game, I'm quite sure it's not really possible if you're not long time opponents. Apart maybe from a few tweaks to fasten gameplay, otherwise it's safer to stick to the original rules. Then rule inteprretation comes into play and there trouble sarts because both think (or pretend) they abide by the rules why knowingly or unwittingly bending them one way or another. Apart from the dice resulotion method, I really can't think of a way to actually overcome it other than good faith on both parties.
What =ever the case, the game will always rely on all people involved to behave friendly and honestly.
It all gets a bit fiery when eve I look away from Thai thread for day.
Honestly Hecaton, no insult was intended and certainly none directed at anyone in here.
House rules, these are good but. Rely on a smaller distinct group of players that can all agree them it’s not a solution for a lot of people who play in pick up games etc.
Today I took my ORKS out for the first time in 10th and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Not true at all. A major part of why I left X-Wing was getting tired of CAAC types that would get really salty if I insisted on measuring range/arc and wouldn't let them take shots when they were a bit short or tried to place ships accurately when they bumped instead of just letting them drop it kind of close to where it should be. I can't even count the number of times I've seen "fly casual" used to complain about playing by the rules instead of its original meaning of "don't be a dick".
And then there's MTG, where god help you if you try to join an EDH group without carefully negotiating the exact power level of the decks you're allowed to play and all of the unwritten rules you're expected to follow for "fun". If you think 40k has a problem with people complaining about competitive lists try playing "casual" MTG. You'll wish you hadn't.
And then there's MTG, where god help you if you try to join an EDH group without carefully negotiating the exact power level of the decks you're allowed to play and all of the unwritten rules you're expected to follow for "fun". If you think 40k has a problem with people complaining about competitive lists try playing "casual" MTG. You'll wish you hadn't.
Best time I had with MTG was when I started at uni with a bunch of other people; we were all newbs and we were all mostly going at it the same way we did with other collectable card things as kids. Granted we had more disposable income so we could buy more packs, but in general we were in the "buy packs, build decks, have fun" avenue. The few pros (who converted us) regularly beat us and took a different approach, but it worked out for the most part because there was a core with the same attitude and approach.
But yeah MTG can be hard, partly because the variation in power between a "built it from random cards intermediate" deck and "built it from cherry picked cards online/vast numbers of packs bought and either at a high skill level or copied a high skill level deck) is basically where the lower tier deck only wins on the upper tier one breaking because of shuffling.
Skill and investment variation in MTG can be utterly vast. Of course the matches are also often fast (esp compared to wargames) so in a large enough group if you've got a spread of skills and such it can even out because the different groups focus on each other. Small groups its much harder.
Sure, but taking the best units in a codex isn't WAAC, it's just using your brain for the listbuilding stage rather than solely after dice start rolling. I wouldn't intentionally take a slower car to a race, a less accurate gun to a shooting competition, etc. Why would I take a less useful unit in my army if I have better choices available?
WAAC is inherently an attack. Sometimes it's an accurate attack, like when you're talking about the guy that moves his models an extra inch when you aren't looking or cheats with dice. That is a clear example of Win At ALL Costs behavior. But someone who merely prioritizes in-game performance over aesthetics is not trying to win at ALL costs, they merely have different priorities from you. By calling them WAAC you are putting them in the same category as the cheaters, the seal clubbers, etc, and saying that their choice of priorities is equivalent to all of that.
To the garagehammer and fluffhammer advocates, anyone actually thinking about winning games while deciding whether to include a unit in their list is "WAAC". It's also comforting when you get tabled turn 3, you don't have to admit your misplays or do any self reflection on the fact that you haven't updated your army since 2005, you can just call the other guy "WAAC" and walk away feeling morally superior.
Sure, but taking the best units in a codex isn't WAAC, it's just using your brain for the listbuilding stage rather than solely after dice start rolling. I wouldn't intentionally take a slower car to a race, a less accurate gun to a shooting competition, etc. Why would I take a less useful unit in my army if I have better choices available?
Yeah, I never understood the idea that in order to play casually you need to just... slap together a hodgepodge list based on some ephemeral theme or models you like, or something to that effect, without regard for how it will actually perform on the table. The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
I don't play competitively, I have no interest in tournaments. But I can look at a codex, see that a unit has crap rules, and avoid it because I know it won't be fun to use units that don't do what they're supposed to. Or on the flipside I can see a standout unit and take it to shore up an otherwise weak list, or just because it does the job it needs to. Is that really an awful mindset? The whole thing strikes me as like playing casual pick-up basketball with your buddies, and then getting mad when someone shows up wearing no-slip sneakers instead of just picking the footwear they like the look of. Maybe there's a point where someone's taking it too seriously and being unsportsmanlike or just not fun to play with, but just putting in their A-game for an inherently competitive activity shouldn't be it.
I liked Warmachine- as much as Page 5 got twisted to justify all kinds of douchebaggery, the game was up-front about fostering a give-it-your-best mentality rather than the inherently contradictory 'it's just a silly game who cares (but also here are elaborate win conditions and listbuilding systems that incentivize optimization)' of GW.
Of course, the good games are ones where the fluffy/thematic lists are also the ones that are effective on the tabletop, so following the history or fictional background yields an effective fighting force and a 'competitive' list and 'narrative' list are one and the same, but GW has never accomplished that and likely never will.
Edit: One of my favorite examples of a game that is emphatically not competitively-oriented is AK47 Republic. Die rolls before the battle determine what units you can take, how many points you get, and whether or not your troops abandon your cause or your opponent gets reinforced with a platoon of shiny new battle tanks. Once the battle starts, there's a plethora of further random events that can shape the outcome. In my experience it's the sort of game that most 40K players (even casual ones) run away from screaming, because it does not have any pretense to providing a fair fight. The contrast to 40K really shows how many core conceits of the 40K gameplay experience are geared towards a fair, balanced, predictable, competitive game despite the prevalence of casual or narrative-oriented players.
Toofast wrote: Sure, but taking the best units in a codex isn't WAAC, it's just using your brain for the listbuilding stage rather than solely after dice start rolling. I wouldn't intentionally take a slower car to a race, a less accurate gun to a shooting competition, etc. Why would I take a less useful unit in my army if I have better choices available?
because GW said so
hence all the discussion is going around because the company blames the players and not the game
and some gamers believe this and turn it ti 11, so the game is as balanced as a game could be (which is a lie but for some GW marketing is the only truth) and it is up to players for everyone to have fun
GW does not want to balanced the armies so they say the players have to chose an appropriate list that is balanced against a weaker army otherwise you are a TFGWAAC that wants to kill the fun
and this is were we are and why people thing that "matched play" is the same as "ultra competitive" and all tournament players are WAAC players simply because they take the best units in their army for a list
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
Toofast wrote: Sure, but taking the best units in a codex isn't WAAC, it's just using your brain for the listbuilding stage rather than solely after dice start rolling. I wouldn't intentionally take a slower car to a race, a less accurate gun to a shooting competition, etc. Why would I take a less useful unit in my army if I have better choices available?
because GW said so
hence all the discussion is going around because the company blames the players and not the game
and some gamers believe this and turn it ti 11, so the game is as balanced as a game could be (which is a lie but for some GW marketing is the only truth) and it is up to players for everyone to have fun
GW does not want to balanced the armies so they say the players have to chose an appropriate list that is balanced against a weaker army otherwise you are a TFGWAAC that wants to kill the fun
and this is were we are and why people thing that "matched play" is the same as "ultra competitive" and all tournament players are WAAC players simply because they take the best units in their army for a list
I think you kind of nailed an important issue on that particular part of the topic.
Having a RPG tinted and thus thinkable Game (sorry for repeating) is NOT mutually exclusive with having a balanced game to start with.
For that reason, even with the way I see 40k as I expressed above, I find no excuse to GW for not trying to balance the game. Achieving perfect balance in a game with such variety of rules might not be easy, granted. But when you live of the production of a game you must try to make it as balance as you can, it's what customers pay you for.
So while I agree that a game with such a setting as 40k, initially built as a sandbox, should be encouraged and allowed to houserule, it does under no circumstances excuse their level of no gals given regarding balance.
People should make this difference and ask more of GW, even if this light be a fool's errant.
Edit: One of my favorite examples of a game that is emphatically not competitively-oriented is AK47 Republic. Die rolls before the battle determine what units you can take, how many points you get, and whether or not your troops abandon your cause or your opponent gets reinforced with a platoon of shiny new battle tanks. Once the battle starts, there's a plethora of further random events that can shape the outcome. In my experience it's the sort of game that most 40K players (even casual ones) run away from screaming, because it does not have any pretense to providing a fair fight. The contrast to 40K really shows how many core conceits of the 40K gameplay experience are geared towards a fair, balanced, predictable, competitive game despite the prevalence of casual or narrative-oriented players.
AK47 republic is good stuff. Huge fan of how that works lol. But I'd never play it with someone I wasn't already acquainted with, they wouldn't get it.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
Funny Andy, seems you play the same as we do with my group.
I totally understand you and that's really why I play 40k: to tell a story. It matters not if I win or lose, though I try to make intelligent battlefield choices of course. What matters is that it was fun and that we collectively push our imagined story further.
If I play for the competitive aspect, the "battle of wits" aspect, then I play Bolt Action or Project Z. 40k is too poorly balanced to make this take on the hobby worthwhile in my opinion.
But this is my way of enjoying this game and setting. I'd say it with a catch all phrase: there are as many ways to enjoy the game as there are players.
Sure, but taking the best units in a codex isn't WAAC, it's just using your brain for the listbuilding stage rather than solely after dice start rolling. I wouldn't intentionally take a slower car to a race, a less accurate gun to a shooting competition, etc. Why would I take a less useful unit in my army if I have better choices available?
Yeah, I never understood the idea that in order to play casually you need to just... slap together a hodgepodge list based on some ephemeral theme or models you like, or something to that effect, without regard for how it will actually perform on the table. The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
Because my casual Votann list has no chance of beating your competitive Eldar list, so for me to have fun I need you not to build a competitive Eldar list. Slapping together a hodgepodge list is sometimes not even good enough, taking a hodgepodge list for the worst faction might be so bad that it's basically impossible for most factions to roughly match the power level and you might need to deliberately take a few overcosted Eldar units to power down your list if most of the datasheets are undercosted since a hodgepodge Eldar list might still generally be far better than a regular Votann list. If you want to play casually with a competitive list you can just say that, but it's not really a mystery why people don't want to deal with the unfiltered garbage that is GW balance.
Great if you can beat Votann in the list building phase with Eldar, congratulations, do you want a sandwich, high five or video proving how you stomped a casual Votann list with a competitive Eldar list? Now that's taking things to the extreme and I've come across casual players that were obnoxiously whining about my list, I get the hate towards those specific people, but there are tonnes of casual players that are pretty large with allowing you to take whatever list you like as long as you aren't trying to club seals.
Building a list with no restrictions is kind of silly, how often are you going to find a list that is better than a tournament list? Once, I think I came up with a list that was superior to what was being run in tournaments. Obviously, there's more to list building than trying to win, you could insist on including some number of datasheets or avoid bringing too much of something to forge a narrative or to see if something works.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
If winning doesn't matter then why does your objectives have VP? Just try to achieve the objectives you find the most narratively satisfying as much as possible while trying to deny the objectives your opponent has that seem most narratively satisfying for you to deny him.
If winning doesn't matter then why does your objectives have VP? Just try to achieve the objectives you find the most narratively satisfying as much as possible while trying to deny the objectives your opponent has that seem most narratively satisfying for you to deny him.
The first half of your post was 100% spot on btw, just hopping in for this bit. I think you're almost there, people do that but with VP to use the rules. The "I don't care about winning" part comes in when the Ork player decides to go krump the warlord personally despite it not being efficient, or means abandoning a primary to fulfil the secondary - they're trying to win and score VP, but doing it in a matter they consider fun/honourable. It's incredibly subjective and not for everyone, but usually the "I don't care about winning" means that fulfilling a good time with their opponent or having a good narrative alongside a close game their way (ideally without forcing it on others) is the key.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
First off, I see nothing wrong with how you are playing. Whatever way you play where you and your opponent have fun is the right way to play. However, I don't think you are really playing Warhammer 40K the game. More like you are playing a game with Warhammer 40K miniatures. You could literally pull any edition off the shelf--any TT ruleset for that matter--and have just have about the same fun time. I mean, you'd probably have an even better time adapting Fate to the TT.
So, I wonder, why so invested in a discussion about the meta for the new edition? Meta is crunch. It's for people playing the rules as written. As soon as you start playing by narrative fiat, all meta goes out he window. You might like the current edition, but I don't think GW could put out any ruleset that you couldn't have fun with due to the way you play the game.
(also lots of competitive people will let you rollback actions in games so long as you haven't moved too far ahead and it doesn't break the game state)
For me, I don’t play to win. It’s for fun, but the fun is doing the objective set by the game.
A narrative experience doesn’t normally mean you just wing it, you craft an objective that leads to that.
A last stand is the same as wining, how long can you last with the resources you have against what ever is set.
The end of halo reach has you fight an endless mode, ending with your loss.
But I think most people playing reach will fight it out.
Often I think the biggest reason we don’t really see much good narrative in 40K, is that the rules kinda suck for it.
They often have many rules that pull away from each other, balance is all over the place.
Making narrative within a meta more strained, with even now the game seeming massively lethal.
It’s not that you can’t, it’s that a lot of casual players will find it out of reach.
If your game time is a few hours a month, unless you are able to spend a few hours online before each game.
That default is just going to be the norm, and GW should be working on that.
It helps narrative and casual play a lot, even if the objective itself is have fun.
Apple fox wrote: For me, I don’t play to win. It’s for fun, but the fun is doing the objective set by the game.
A narrative experience doesn’t normally mean you just wing it, you craft an objective that leads to that.
A last stand is the same as wining, how long can you last with the resources you have against what ever is set.
The end of halo reach has you fight an endless mode, ending with your loss.
But I think most people playing reach will fight it out.
Often I think the biggest reason we don’t really see much good narrative in 40K, is that the rules kinda suck for it.
They often have many rules that pull away from each other, balance is all over the place.
Making narrative within a meta more strained, with even now the game seeming massively lethal.
It’s not that you can’t, it’s that a lot of casual players will find it out of reach.
If your game time is a few hours a month, unless you are able to spend a few hours online before each game.
That default is just going to be the norm, and GW should be working on that.
It helps narrative and casual play a lot, even if the objective itself is have fun.
If you win the last stand battle by doing the chicken dance with your Terminators in your opponent's backfield then you have a badly designed mission for the kind of experience you're trying to get.
If winning doesn't matter then why does your objectives have VP? Just try to achieve the objectives you find the most narratively satisfying as much as possible while trying to deny the objectives your opponent has that seem most narratively satisfying for you to deny him.
The first half of your post was 100% spot on btw, just hopping in for this bit. I think you're almost there, people do that but with VP to use the rules. The "I don't care about winning" part comes in when the Ork player decides to go krump the warlord personally despite it not being efficient, or means abandoning a primary to fulfil the secondary - they're trying to win and score VP, but doing it in a matter they consider fun/honourable. It's incredibly subjective and not for everyone, but usually the "I don't care about winning" means that fulfilling a good time with their opponent or having a good narrative alongside a close game their way (ideally without forcing it on others) is the key.
I don't agree, if your Warboss goes Krumpin and that leads you to losing the game because you have fewer VP than you need to win the game then you're disencentivised from doing it, which is bad game design for the purpose of having a narrative experience. But if you're not playing with defined numbers of VP for each thing, then you can just try to do them as much as possible and abandon the objectives when appropriate. Your opponent might not do any chicken dancing with their units and just destroy your units but then you'll have won the narrative victory of having completed your objectives. There is probably something I'm missing, I don't play narratively in 40k.
Sure, but taking the best units in a codex isn't WAAC, it's just using your brain for the listbuilding stage rather than solely after dice start rolling. I wouldn't intentionally take a slower car to a race, a less accurate gun to a shooting competition, etc. Why would I take a less useful unit in my army if I have better choices available?
Yeah, I never understood the idea that in order to play casually you need to just... slap together a hodgepodge list based on some ephemeral theme or models you like, or something to that effect, without regard for how it will actually perform on the table. The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
Because my casual Votann list has no chance of beating your competitive Eldar list, so for me to have fun I need you not to build a competitive Eldar list. Slapping together a hodgepodge list is sometimes not even good enough, taking a hodgepodge list for the worst faction might be so bad that it's basically impossible for most factions to roughly match the power level and you might need to deliberately take a few overcosted Eldar units to power down your list if most of the datasheets are undercosted since a hodgepodge Eldar list might still generally be far better than a regular Votann list. If you want to play casually with a competitive list you can just say that, but it's not really a mystery why people don't want to deal with the unfiltered garbage that is GW balance.
Great if you can beat Votann in the list building phase with Eldar, congratulations, do you want a sandwich, high five or video proving how you stomped a casual Votann list with a competitive Eldar list? Now that's taking things to the extreme and I've come across casual players that were obnoxiously whining about my list, I get the hate towards those specific people, but there are tonnes of casual players that are pretty large with allowing you to take whatever list you like as long as you aren't trying to club seals.
Building a list with no restrictions is kind of silly, how often are you going to find a list that is better than a tournament list? Once, I think I came up with a list that was superior to what was being run in tournaments. Obviously, there's more to list building than trying to win, you could insist on including some number of datasheets or avoid bringing too much of something to forge a narrative or to see if something works.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
If winning doesn't matter then why does your objectives have VP? Just try to achieve the objectives you find the most narratively satisfying as much as possible while trying to deny the objectives your opponent has that seem most narratively satisfying for you to deny him.
We barley kept track of VPs to be honest, it wasn’t you til turn 4 we realised we were doing it wrong and had to start again, it wasn’t a big thing, but drawing the mission cards gave us the structure to build our narrative around and worked really well! I like those. It tied in with the terrain and everything. All we had to do was move a few bits about.
What I really don’t understand is why you would question what I said like I was lying to you for some reason. It’s very odd behaviour I have seen a few times from you and others.
I totally understand you and that's really why I play 40k: to tell a story. It matters not if I win or lose, though I try to make intelligent battlefield choices of course. What matters is that it was fun and that we collectively push our imagined story further.
If I play for the competitive aspect, the "battle of wits" aspect, then I play Bolt Action or Project Z. 40k is too poorly balanced to make this take on the hobby worthwhile in my opinion.
But this is my way of enjoying this game and setting. I'd say it with a catch all phrase: there are as many ways to enjoy the game as there are players.
I think it’s a great way to enjoy the game and it means all the faults with balance and the system don’t matter but you really have to have a like minded group to do it. I feel for all those who don’t get chance to experience 40K like this. It’s such an immersive and narrative experience, for me you get all aspects of the hobby out of it, story telling, painting and crafting and rolling dice.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
First off, I see nothing wrong with how you are playing. Whatever way you play where you and your opponent have fun is the right way to play. However, I don't think you are really playing Warhammer 40K the game. More like you are playing a game with Warhammer 40K miniatures. You could literally pull any edition off the shelf--any TT ruleset for that matter--and have just have about the same fun time. I mean, you'd probably have an even better time adapting Fate to the TT.
So, I wonder, why so invested in a discussion about the meta for the new edition? Meta is crunch. It's for people playing the rules as written. As soon as you start playing by narrative fiat, all meta goes out he window. You might like the current edition, but I don't think GW could put out any ruleset that you couldn't have fun with due to the way you play the game.
(also lots of competitive people will let you rollback actions in games so long as you haven't moved too far ahead and it doesn't break the game state)
I’ll be honest this thread is so off topic now I forgot it was the meta one. I keep track of these chats because it intrigues me how differently people play the game, I only really respond to comments that I have an interest in replying too, look back at the thread and you will see I haven’t waded in on what’s good or bad or competitive aspects. I really don’t know about these things so don’t have a valid opinion on them. But when someone says “everyone plays to win” I will comment.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
First off, I see nothing wrong with how you are playing. Whatever way you play where you and your opponent have fun is the right way to play. However, I don't think you are really playing Warhammer 40K the game. More like you are playing a game with Warhammer 40K miniatures. You could literally pull any edition off the shelf--any TT ruleset for that matter--and have just have about the same fun time. I mean, you'd probably have an even better time adapting Fate to the TT.
So, I wonder, why so invested in a discussion about the meta for the new edition? Meta is crunch. It's for people playing the rules as written. As soon as you start playing by narrative fiat, all meta goes out he window. You might like the current edition, but I don't think GW could put out any ruleset that you couldn't have fun with due to the way you play the game.
(also lots of competitive people will let you rollback actions in games so long as you haven't moved too far ahead and it doesn't break the game state)
I’ll be honest this thread is so off topic now I forgot it was the meta one. I keep track of these chats because it intrigues me how differently people play the game, I only really respond to comments that I have an interest in replying too, look back at the thread and you will see I haven’t waded in on what’s good or bad or competitive aspects. I really don’t know about these things so don’t have a valid opinion on them. But when someone says “everyone plays to win” I will comment.
Hmm, how do things get off topic....the world wonders.
I'm not upset that people don't get why we would act strangely tacticaly wise in our game to get a good laugh, an epic outcome, or just moving the scenario. It is really a particular mindset and if you're not into it, it will look strange. Matter of tastes. The important think is to play with like minded people though because otherwise both will be desappointed.
As an anecdote, the most extreme length one of my buddy has come is in our current campaign. He stomped me with his needs and following our story, he said "dude, what if instead of just being stomped we put the game upside down and you play your retreat?". Suddenly, a game that was about to be boring became a frantic session of me trying to hold him back to evacuate vs his nids trying to catch me. We had a blast in the end. But that's totally silly but that's a very peculiar mindset.
This topic went well out of hand but although it's gone off track it's come back to a healthy discussion so I'm happy with it.
catbarf wrote: The objective of the game is to beat your opponent, and the listbuilding stage is where you devise the strategy that will accomplish that goal. It's hardly WAAC to pick units and synergies that will contribute towards winning the game.
"But I don't play to win!"
The amount of people I've heard repeat that line over the past decade makes me really wonder.
And it never made any sense to me in the first place. I mean, no one plays to lose, and no one plays to draw (forcing a draw on the other hand), so of course everyone plays to win.
That’s really not true, now to make something clear before I start to avoid any confusion here, I am not a ”casual” player I have invest thousands of pounds and untold hours into this hobby over 30+ years, t takes up huge amounts of my time and effort. But I am what I like to call a narrative player. It is ALL about the story.
So when I was playing my game yesterday my mate and I were both playing to achieve the objectives the narrative had set out but were both playing them in ways appropriate to our armies and in a fun way for each other “Winning” was not the object of the game but telling the story was.
In the end he “won” the game on VPs but the narrative outcome was much more interesting, he had achieved his goals but my army had had a very crucial narrative shift with an old stalwart warboss having been shown up by a newcomer and their being a shift in power in my ORKS.
During and after the battle we have discussions about what is happening narratively, what the story is. This takes as long as the battle most the time. We also discuss how things went tactically, how we played and what mistakes we made etc (mostly about learning the new edition at the minute).
Now this is very nuanced and different from how you would play in a pick up game for sure and it isn’t how everyone plays but we have known each other for a long time and been playing for a long time so we can play this RP style of game. Neither of us know the rules inside out and there’s an awful lot of going back to do things we forgot or suddenly remembering a rule the army or unit has that would have helped but two turns after the event. We would get battered by anyone who knows the rules well and is setting out purely to win the game so wouldn’t let us go back or re roll a shooting with the lethal hits we just remembered we had. But that is not how we do it.
So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
There are others like me out there too, we don’t all play to win. It’s a big big hobby with lots of different motivations for playing a game.
First off, I see nothing wrong with how you are playing. Whatever way you play where you and your opponent have fun is the right way to play. However, I don't think you are really playing Warhammer 40K the game. More like you are playing a game with Warhammer 40K miniatures. You could literally pull any edition off the shelf--any TT ruleset for that matter--and have just have about the same fun time. I mean, you'd probably have an even better time adapting Fate to the TT.
So, I wonder, why so invested in a discussion about the meta for the new edition? Meta is crunch. It's for people playing the rules as written. As soon as you start playing by narrative fiat, all meta goes out he window. You might like the current edition, but I don't think GW could put out any ruleset that you couldn't have fun with due to the way you play the game.
(also lots of competitive people will let you rollback actions in games so long as you haven't moved too far ahead and it doesn't break the game state)
I’ll be honest this thread is so off topic now I forgot it was the meta one. I keep track of these chats because it intrigues me how differently people play the game, I only really respond to comments that I have an interest in replying too, look back at the thread and you will see I haven’t waded in on what’s good or bad or competitive aspects. I really don’t know about these things so don’t have a valid opinion on them. But when someone says “everyone plays to win” I will comment.
Hmm, how do things get off topic....the world wonders.
Me?.. maybe a bit.
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Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote: I'm not upset that people don't get why we would act strangely tacticaly wise in our game to get a good laugh, an epic outcome, or just moving the scenario. It is really a particular mindset and if you're not into it, it will look strange. Matter of tastes. The important think is to play with like minded people though because otherwise both will be desappointed.
As an anecdote, the most extreme length one of my buddy has come is in our current campaign. He stomped me with his needs and following our story, he said "dude, what if instead of just being stomped we put the game upside down and you play your retreat?". Suddenly, a game that was about to be boring became a frantic session of me trying to hold him back to evacuate vs his nids trying to catch me. We had a blast in the end. But that's totally silly but that's a very peculiar mindset.
This topic went well out of hand but although it's gone off track it's come back to a healthy discussion so I'm happy with it.
Because my casual Votann list has no chance of beating your competitive Eldar list, so for me to have fun I need you not to build a competitive Eldar list. Slapping together a hodgepodge list is sometimes not even good enough, taking a hodgepodge list for the worst faction might be so bad that it's basically impossible for most factions to roughly match the power level and you might need to deliberately take a few overcosted Eldar units to power down your list if most of the datasheets are undercosted since a hodgepodge Eldar list might still generally be far better than a regular Votann list. If you want to play casually with a competitive list you can just say that, but it's not really a mystery why people don't want to deal with the unfiltered garbage that is GW balance.
Great if you can beat Votann in the list building phase with Eldar, congratulations, do you want a sandwich, high five or video proving how you stomped a casual Votann list with a competitive Eldar list? Now that's taking things to the extreme and I've come across casual players that were obnoxiously whining about my list, I get the hate towards those specific people, but there are tonnes of casual players that are pretty large with allowing you to take whatever list you like as long as you aren't trying to club seals.
Building a list with no restrictions is kind of silly, how often are you going to find a list that is better than a tournament list? Once, I think I came up with a list that was superior to what was being run in tournaments. Obviously, there's more to list building than trying to win, you could insist on including some number of datasheets or avoid bringing too much of something to forge a narrative or to see if something works.
Ok, so if my faction will auto win or lose against my opponent's faction due to GW's gak balancing, we'll go play something else instead. The point is that 40k *should* be a game that allows for the contest of wits.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:I'm not upset that people don't get why we would act strangely tacticaly wise in our game to get a good laugh, an epic outcome, or just moving the scenario. It is really a particular mindset and if you're not into it, it will look strange. Matter of tastes. The important think is to play with like minded people though because otherwise both will be desappointed.
My friends and I do this all the time. But I draw a distinction between what my friends and I do with the game, versus how it is designed to be played.
That these two things are not the same is why we rely on social contract to ensure everyone's on the same page.
Maréchal des Logis Walter wrote:I'm not upset that people don't get why we would act strangely tacticaly wise in our game to get a good laugh, an epic outcome, or just moving the scenario. It is really a particular mindset and if you're not into it, it will look strange. Matter of tastes. The important think is to play with like minded people though because otherwise both will be desappointed.
My friends and I do this all the time. But I draw a distinction between what my friends and I do with the game, versus how it is designed to be played.
That these two things are not the same is why we rely on social contract to ensure everyone's on the same page.
Well, I proclaim again: silly RPG gimmicks and a balanced, well made games ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE! (cheering crowd)
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Kanluwen wrote: Listbuilding isn't "a battle of wits", no matter how hard people want it to be.
Could we consider that it even becomes an issue when the game is such imbalanced that in the end, what matters is not wits and tactical acumen of sorts but putting the best units on the table?
This is sometimes an impression I have: that 40k is in such bad state most of the times whatever you do this unit or that combo will destroys you. This is catastrophic for people who enjoy using their brain to win a fair fight and this is not the point of a board game.
That's an impression though I don't claim it's true.
Tyran wrote: No, but it is a "can you make basic mathematical comparison and basic planning" which is technically speaking a skill.
You would have had an argument for that fifteen or twenty years ago.
Not now. Not when every book is dissected and ranked into tiers the second it leaks. Now it's just "Can you google?"...which I guess some people view as a skill?
Even then you will likely see some variation in high performing lists. Sure a lot of the same units repeat but there is usually a variance in support units that cover the holes left by more high their units
So even then you need to analyse the your meta and understand why each unit is taken. Specially if you are playing a second or third tier faction against a top tier one.
If we talk wargaming at large, list building usually is a skill though. Deciding what units to take to play your advantage and your opponents disavantages plus thinking about all of this will coordonate during the game is totally a skill.
Then, related to this topic, the question is: in 40k and its balance issues, can we still say it is?
In relaxed playstyle it is, you may ban things you know unfair or unfunny to play with/against though, but then within these boundaries you pick units for a task nontheless.
In lore friendly playstyle on the other hand I acknowledge that often it is dictated by the circomstances of the scenarios you play and the story, so it's more about what you do with said units that you might have taken to make the story alive, to follow the theme.
The issue with list building being a skill depends on what context you expect to find yourself.
I.E. "competitive 40k" tends to work in tournaments. Listbuilding skill therefore tends to be in tailoring to who you expect to see at the top tables. There's no point tailoring into DG or LoV that you should just stomp over early on. You do however want your list to stack up against Eldar/Knights/GSC etc when played properly.
This is a very different format to a random 1v1 pick up group. People take a dim view on list tailoring - often because it exaggerates imbalances between books. But if you are to avoid tailoring, you tend to end up with "Faction X goodstuff" into "Faction Y goodstuff". Or I guess you can take a less optimised idea, and pick stuff according to what you like, or a theme.
But the thing is the meta can often shift. People often do play units which are considered suboptimal.
A good example of this I think was in early 9th with Dark Eldar Talos. They were considered by some to be on the weaker side of a pretty busted codex. With a meta dominated by Marines they were not that efficient compared with other choices. As the meta shifted - with more DE, Ad Mech, Orks and finally Grey Knights, Talos started to be more attractive. And then, rather inexplicably, they got a 10 point per model reduction (while other DE stuff got nerfed) presumably because everyone had been saying they were weak and not running them. Cue being everywhere.
List building can be a skill. We saw for example Siegler win the LVO with Ad Mech when everyone thought they were terrible. We saw I think it was Siegler again win a tournament with Tau during 8th's Marine meta prompting lots of "are Tau broken now" debates (not really, the Riptide was just quite good into mass Intercessors).
But usually its easier to just take up (and learn) an OP faction/build rather than try to identify a counter.
But I mean as another example, I think most would say Eldar are the best faction at the moment. The best Eldar list is however more debatable - we see quite a few variants (with, admittedly, usually some certain units) performing well. You could I guess say a certain swathe of the book is busted, just make your selection from those S-tier units, but I'm not convinced its that simple.
It's funny though, how the loudest arguments about 40k list building having no strategy always seem to come from people who have no interest in or understanding of competitive play.
kodos wrote: because GW said so
they say the players have to chose an appropriate list that is balanced against a weaker army otherwise you are a TFGWAAC that wants to kill the fun
and this is were we are and why people thing that "matched play" is the same as "ultra competitive" and all tournament players are WAAC players simply because they take the best units in their army for a list
I have the rulebook in front of me, can you tell me the page numbers for those quotes? I just bought a ticket to a huge tournament in Tampa, several hundred players. You get a big trophy for winning. The whole point is to take the most competitive list you can possibly put together and win as many games as you can. It's put on by...checks notes...GAMES WORKSHOP. It sounds weird for a company to say "if you play to win the game, you're TFGWAAC" and then spend tens of thousands of dollars hosting the March Madness of Warhammer 40k for hundreds of players all around the country to go and play with competitive lists with the intention of taking home a big trophy and having articles written about how good they are at competitive warhammer...
Because my casual Votann list has no chance of beating your competitive Eldar list, so for me to have fun I need you not to build a competitive Eldar list.
So the onus is on me to get worse rather than you to get better? Weird how it doesn't work like that in golf, racing, shooting, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, chess, or literally anything else I can think of with a winner and a loser. I'm not spending money and time buying/building/painting subpar units just to play down to the level of someone who refuses to try to get better. I would rather just not play you. I can only play tournament games and tournament prep games and play way more 40k than I even want to in a year. There's multiple 100+ person events in my state yearly. If you just want to push random units around and make laser noises, you can find someone else who is content playing that way. For me it sounds about as interesting as watching nuln oil dry.
I'm not using a 50 year old set of clubs just because my buddy is a 25 handicap. I'm not unplugging one coil pack from my 911 just because the guy in the other lane has 100 less hp. I'm not taking a factory Glock 19 to a shooting competition if it allows a tricked out race gun with a trijicon. Why would I take a bunch of crappy units to a Warhammer game?
ThePaintingOwl wrote: It's funny though, how the loudest arguments about 40k list building having no strategy always seem to come from people who have no interest in or understanding of competitive play.
From the outside looking in it does seem as though all you have to do is Google what is winning, and spam it. Now I’m sure that’s a massive over simplification of what’s happening but that’s how it looks to those of us who don’t play competitively.
I just did a quick Google search and thousand a of results came up, I found this list of winning eldar lists, all very very similar.
Andykp wrote: So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
I... genuinely don't know how to respond to this. From the sounds of it, you're just making up a story and rolling dice to achieve random results and then incorporating that into the story. One wonders why you even bother with the rules in the first place?
So I believe you. You're not playing to win because you're not really playing 40k.
Back in 2006 we did a series of massive narrative games just before Apocalypse launched (ahead of our time!). There were three scenarios - the initial attack against our defensive lines, our armoured counter-attack, and the final battle at the fortress. The organisers (in this case myself and a friend of mine) designed all the lists, and we knew walking into the first game that it was a losing battle. We were under no illusions that we could win (a smattering of Guardsmen and light Eldar forces against an overwhelming tide of Nurgle Terminators and vehicles).
We still tried!
We knew that the narrative would play out as we suspected, and outside of some truly incredible dice-based luck we knew that we wouldn't be victorious at the end, but we still gave it our all, playing it like desperate defenders trying to buy as much time as possible and we had a blast.
A few years later, after Apocalypse had launched, we organised a few massive games where we, again, had the lists all ready to go well in advance of the game. The idea was to stop a ritual from bringing a powerful Daemon Prince back into reality (he had been banished during the last big event in 2006). It would be more fun if he was revived, as it would give us greater narrative options later down the line for our evolving story, but our goal was to stop it. I never stopped trying to win. I never just decided to throw the game or agree to not use the forces I had brought with me. In the end we lost, and the Daemon Prince was resummoned. My lead Inquisitor even faced him 1-on-1 in melee, a silly prospect for an squishy Ordo-Hereticus Inquisitor in the days of 3rd-5th, and he died. Didn't care that he lost, but I still tried to do what I could. We played the game, as it and creating narratives are not mutually exclusive.
So I amend my statement:
No one plays to lose. No one plays to draw. Everyone plays to win. Anyone who isn't, isn't actually playing the game.
Exactly. People from the outside looking in are the loudest voices saying "all you have to do is google a winning list and anyone can succeed with it". It's rarely the people who actually play competitively saying that's how it works.
Toofast wrote: I can only play tournament games and tournament prep games and play way more 40k than I even want to in a year.
Because???
Anyways, while that sounds like a perfectly awful way to play 40k, it's just a you problem. Especially that last bit - if you want to play less, just... play less.
Andykp wrote: So we don’t play to win. Our aims when we play are in this order of priority; BOTH have a fun experience, use our collections (as in we will pick units we won’t to use for lots of reasons, such as they are a new model, just painted or they are just cool), add to our narrative in universe. We don’t pull gotcha moments on each other, we discuss army composition while making our lists together so we can make our lists fit each others, if either of us are bringing something potentially powerful we let the other know so we can be prepared and not have it dominate the game in a boring way and we discuss any tricks or special abilities our units have.
I... genuinely don't know how to respond to this. From the sounds of it, you're just making up a story and rolling dice to achieve random results and then incorporating that into the story. One wonders why you even bother with the rules in the first place?
So I believe you. You're not playing to win because you're not really playing 40k.
Back in 2006 we did a series of massive narrative games just before Apocalypse launched (ahead of our time!). There were three scenarios - the initial attack against our defensive lines, our armoured counter-attack, and the final battle at the fortress. The organisers (in this case myself and a friend of mine) designed all the lists, and we knew walking into the first game that it was a losing battle. We were under no illusions that we could win (a smattering of Guardsmen and light Eldar forces against an overwhelming tide of Nurgle Terminators and vehicles).
We still tried!
We knew that the narrative would play out as we suspected, and outside of some truly incredible dice-based luck we knew that we wouldn't be victorious at the end, but we still gave it our all, playing it like desperate defenders trying to buy as much time as possible and we had a blast.
A few years later, after Apocalypse had launched, we organised a few massive games where we, again, had the lists all ready to go well in advance of the game. The idea was to stop a ritual from bringing a powerful Daemon Prince back into reality (he had been banished during the last big event in 2006). It would be more fun if he was revived, as it would give us greater narrative options later down the line for our evolving story, but our goal was to stop it. I never stopped trying to win. I never just decided to throw the game or agree to not use the forces I had brought with me. In the end we lost, and the Daemon Prince was resummoned. My lead Inquisitor even faced him 1-on-1 in melee, a silly prospect for an squishy Ordo-Hereticus Inquisitor in the days of 3rd-5th, and he died. Didn't care that he lost, but I still tried to do what I could. We played the game, as it and creating narratives are not mutually exclusive.
So I amend my statement:
No one plays to lose.
No one plays to draw.
Everyone plays to win. Anyone who isn't, isn't actually playing the game.
Equally mot sure how to respond. Because I don’t go out to win the battle, I’m not actually playing the game? Really? Okay I think it’s best we agree to disagree, because these discussions don’t lead to good things.
Exactly. People from the outside looking in are the loudest voices saying "all you have to do is google a winning list and anyone can succeed with it". It's rarely the people who actually play competitively saying that's how it works.
That in its self doesn’t mean that isn’t how it works. All the winning lists for all the factions I could find were all remarkably similar, so did all the players skilful come up with the same thing or did one or two and everyone else just copy it?
If there is more to it please enlighten me, I am genuinely interested to see what goes into making a competitive list.
Toofast wrote: I can only play tournament games and tournament prep games and play way more 40k than I even want to in a year.
Because???
Anyways, while that sounds like a perfectly awful way to play 40k, it's just a you problem. Especially that last bit - if you want to play less, just... play less.
My point was that there are plenty of people out there willing to bring a decent list and play a competitive mission that I don't need to tune my list down to play casual games just so I can play Warhammer. There are also plenty of people willing to play garagehammer that nobody is forced to play against WK/fire prism or GSC hordes just to get a game. I'm not sure why people are so determined to tell me that I'm having fun wrong. They can play their way in their group and I can play my way in mine, and we don't really have to interact much. I don't set out to go seal clubbing at the FLGS because I don't get any better at the game that way.
Equally mot sure how to respond. Because I don’t go out to win the battle, I’m not actually playing the game? Really? Okay I think it’s best we agree to disagree, because these discussions don’t lead to good things.
Yup. 40k is a competitive game. Not giving your opponent a good game is bad sportsmanship.
Campaign and progressive play really blur the simple win/loss dichotomy.
We're usually concerned with 4 sets of goals:
Mission Objectives, Agendas, Campaign Goals and Long-Term Narrative Goals.
Sometimes these align and sometimes they don't. Games tend to be more interesting when these various sets of goals are in tension, so that pursuing an Agenda might cost you the victory, but might accelerate a Long-Term Narrative goal.
Equally mot sure how to respond. Because I don’t go out to win the battle, I’m not actually playing the game? Really? Okay I think it’s best we agree to disagree, because these discussions don’t lead to good things.
Yup. 40k is a competitive game. Not giving your opponent a good game is bad sportsmanship.
Competitive 40k is gw's marketing department idea to exploit guillible ones to get their money as easily as possible.
40k is as competitive as emperor's clotres were stellar in the famous story.
Toofast wrote: I can only play tournament games and tournament prep games and play way more 40k than I even want to in a year.
Because???
Anyways, while that sounds like a perfectly awful way to play 40k, it's just a you problem. Especially that last bit - if you want to play less, just... play less.
My point was that there are plenty of people out there willing to bring a decent list and play a competitive mission that I don't need to tune my list down to play casual games just so I can play Warhammer. There are also plenty of people willing to play garagehammer that nobody is forced to play against WK/fire prism or GSC hordes just to get a game. I'm not sure why people are so determined to tell me that I'm having fun wrong. They can play their way in their group and I can play my way in mine, and we don't really have to interact much. I don't set out to go seal clubbing at the FLGS because I don't get any better at the game that way.
So to clarify, you won't go to the flgs and play randoms in case they're not serious enough for you? Probably do you look at their lists, guffaw and walk away? Or do you just pound them into the dust as they were obviously serious and trying their best? You're painting yourself up as TFG of your flgs with these comments.
Equally mot sure how to respond. Because I don’t go out to win the battle, I’m not actually playing the game? Really? Okay I think it’s best we agree to disagree, because these discussions don’t lead to good things.
Yup. 40k is a competitive game. Not giving your opponent a good game is bad sportsmanship.
Competitive 40k is gw's marketing department idea to exploit guillible ones to get their money as easily as possible.
40k is as competitive as emperor's clotres were stellar in the famous story.
Further to that "good game" is a subjective statement.
tneva82 wrote: Competitive 40k is gw's marketing department idea to exploit guillible ones to get their money as easily as possible.
40k is as competitive as emperor's clotres were stellar in the famous story.
Yes, we get it, you don't like competitive play. Can you stop spamming every thread with "UR HAVING FUN THE WRONG WAY"?
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Dudeface wrote: So to clarify, you won't go to the flgs and play randoms in case they're not serious enough for you? Probably do you look at their lists, guffaw and walk away? Or do you just pound them into the dust as they were obviously serious and trying their best? You're painting yourself up as TFG of your flgs with these comments.
Lolwut? How is it TFG behavior to only want to play competitive games? Why are you assuming they are being rude and laughing at people instead of just playing with like-minded opponents? This all sounds like more of a problem with you than with the person you're criticizing.
PenitentJake wrote: Sometimes these align and sometimes they don't. Games tend to be more interesting when these various sets of goals are in tension, so that pursuing an Agenda might cost you the victory, but might accelerate a Long-Term Narrative goal.
Couple of questions:
Why is it better that the objectives are in tension? Wouldn't it be better to use a purely narrative mission with objectives tailored to the specific scenario instead of a matched play mission that you have to reinterpret into something related to the story? If the in-universe goal of the army is to do X to advance their long-term plan to accomplish Y then how is it a benefit to have a separate mission condition where you win by standing on six arbitrary spots on the table and accumulating VP? Why play with the primary mission at all?
And how do agendas really help with this? Most of them are just stock matched play style secondary objectives, only with a slightly different reward for accomplishing them. I might see if it agendas were something interesting, like "your warlord must kill this specific enemy character to avenge his defeat in the previous battle", but is "gain XP for killing vehicles" really adding much narrative to the game? Or making it play differently from a tournament mission where you get VP for killing vehicles?
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)
, now I find that people aren’t just chasing the good units but will buy units that they hate if the rules are good enough. For someone who doesn’t play or mix in that scene at all it’s very very odd, to the point of being unbelievable. But here we are! 
(cheering crowd)