Making rules for adding Crusade upgrades in 40k would probably be pretty easy.
@Auticus how do you know there was a balance issue in the 30-minute game? You don't play the game, it could have been the losing player making a mistake or bad dice, things that can happen in a perfectly balanced game. The best way to dial in balance after release is to look at competitive lists for factions, if the faction is overperforming you nerf the units that are taken in competitive lists, if the faction is underperforming you buff the units that are not taken in competitive lists. It doesn't have to be rocket science.
If GW did some math, listened to advice from skilled players and tested properly before release there wouldn't need to be a tonne of post-release movement on points and an annual update to points would be enough.
auticus wrote:I didn't read anywhere where Americans were posting that they are better at playing competitively than anywhere else.
What the conversation was saying is that in most other places in the world, there is a time and place for everything, but in America the only time and place is hammer time all the time in public games, which makes fluffy casual narrative fun time very hard to come by here... and that our european counterparts often look at those complaints and ask wtf we are doing over here that that is the case because over there its not like that at all.
I have only seen the "Merica > Europe" coming up back than before they joined the ETC. Simple arguments like US scene is better and more competitive because they have found certain lists that no one in Europe ever took to a tournament and just removed the opponent from the table early on like Imperial Guard Leafblower
which was more or less smiled upon here and commented with a "lets see if the players behind are as good as they think the lists are" and it did not work out well
I have also seen a general difference an the Wargaming community between US and Europe were certain "gamy" elements and pre-game setups were more liked by the others (eg the original Kriegsspiel having a bigger fan-base in the US than in Europe)
like the simple solutions of different victory conditions for armies of different power levels or for attacker/defenders, eg: Army A needs to simply survive the game to win while army B needs to take the objective and if both fail to achieve it, it is a draw
I was on the team that wrote the azyr point system for age of sigmar before official points, and while it was not perfect, it did achieve a very sold and respectable flatter bell curve, to the point where its #1 complaint was "AHHH YOU KILLED LISTBUILDING!!!!"
I always love this example you bring up about your experiences in testing a ruleset with a flatter power curve. I believe the conclusion you reached was that players don't actually want balance -- they want to be able to execute "perfect play" in the listbuilding phase and win, or at least secure a tremendous advantage, before any dice ever get rolled.
People want options, there need to be a certain theme behind like if I take unit A, I need to take unit B as well to get the most out of it. Which does not mean that unit A+unit B is better than unit C+unit D
an All Corners List should be superior over a list that only takes one, while more than one list should be viable, but just having a random selection of units being equal to an all corners list, is what most people don't like
given, first edi AoS was build around that idea, take whatever you have and being equal strong to fine tuned themed list, so any good point system would represent that
that this was not the game people want, well GW made a grade effort to get that themed list building back in by giving certain abilities to units/heroes
for 40k the problem is more that the random release of some units works against the point of themed list building, as the unit that is released is not always the unit a certain theme is missing to finally work
vict0988 wrote:If GW did some math, listened to advice from skilled players and tested properly before release there wouldn't need to be a tonne of post-release movement on points and an annual update to points would be enough.
which needs time and money, and GW does not want to give any if it away as long as people play their game anyway
if 40k is the most played miniature game, no need to invest more than necessary until this changes (so as long as people play the game, no matter if they buy from GW or pirate their rules and use proxies, everything is fine because the important part is to have no option to play a different game for those that are willing to pay)
and just changing points for units not taken or taken too often is not balancing the game but just changing the tournament meta, this is an easy way to keep the meta alive and make people play different lists to that the game does not get boring for those that play it often
adding different stratagems or formations/themes is another one, as well as different scenarios, different FOC or victory conditions for a season, so that last years list need to adjust for next year
auticus wrote: There is one very large flaw with basing game balance solely on tournament results.
Tournament metas are not a reflection of the game as a whole. They are a reflection of the most uber and optimized choices that represent roughly 5% of the entire game.
It's a shame more people don't see that. Unfortunately, the one big group that doesn't see it that way is GW, given that they're going full tilt with tournaments.
I keep saying that 9th is 'Tournament Edition'. There are still people who can't accept this, even with this news.
Yes, what is GW thinking listening to people that have proven themselves against resisting opponents over and over again instead of people that haven't played for years, absolute insanity /sarcasm.
my problem with calling 9th the tournament edition is simply, the current version of the game is not well written or thought thru enough for that
that GW wants 40k to be the tournament game, because this is the best way to make money and force on people to buy their books and their models is a different thing
the casual gamer does not care, just uses Battlescribe and be done
the Tournament player in need of an official source to proof that everything he has written and is doing is by the official rules, needs the books (and maybe a WH+ Sub to get the WD with the rules) to proof that his BS list is right
H.B.M.C. wrote: Yeah, 'cause that's the issue people have with this...
What's your problem with the article? GW giving people free codexes for doing well in the ITC? I literally don't understand and I think your narrative of 9th being the competitive edition is silly. If GW knew anything about competitive 40k they'd know that Skorpekhs and SK needed less of a buff than Skorpekh Lords and Deathmarks. Any competitive Necron player could have told you this. A 5 minute look at top 4 Necron lists in 9th could have told you this. The last GT mission pack was a total joke, without updates for the mission secondaries and the next one is just going *shrug* guess balancing secondaries is too hard, let's just make them mission tertiaries. So GW taking competitive 40k super sewiously is nonsense as far as I am concerned.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Yeah, 'cause that's the issue people have with this...
What's your problem with the article? GW giving people free codexes for doing well in the ITC? I literally don't understand and I think your narrative of 9th being the competitive edition is silly. If GW knew anything about competitive 40k they'd know that Skorpekhs and SK needed less of a buff than Skorpekh Lords and Deathmarks. Any competitive Necron player could have told you this. A 5 minute look at top 4 Necron lists in 9th could have told you this. The last GT mission pack was a total joke, without updates for the mission secondaries and the next one is just going *shrug* guess balancing secondaries is too hard, let's just make them mission tertiaries. So GW taking competitive 40k super sewiously is nonsense as far as I am concerned.
- uses tournament players to playtest
- adopts fan made tournament rules for Matched play in 9th
- uses tournament data to balance the game
-adopts a tournament participation reward system with term "ITC" literally in it
But sure, GW aren't shooting for the tournament crowd.
Not that there's an issue with that. Good tournament balance means good casual balance. It's just unfortunate that GW is very bad at balancing their game.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Yeah, 'cause that's the issue people have with this...
What's your problem with the article? GW giving people free codexes for doing well in the ITC? I literally don't understand and I think your narrative of 9th being the competitive edition is silly. If GW knew anything about competitive 40k they'd know that Skorpekhs and SK needed less of a buff than Skorpekh Lords and Deathmarks. Any competitive Necron player could have told you this. A 5 minute look at top 4 Necron lists in 9th could have told you this. The last GT mission pack was a total joke, without updates for the mission secondaries and the next one is just going *shrug* guess balancing secondaries is too hard, let's just make them mission tertiaries. So GW taking competitive 40k super sewiously is nonsense as far as I am concerned.
- uses tournament players to playtest
- adopts fan made tournament rules for Matched play in 9th
- uses tournament data to balance the game
-adopts a tournament participation reward system with term "ITC" literally in it
But sure, GW aren't shooting for the tournament crowd.
Not that there's an issue with that. Good tournament balance means good casual balance. It's just unfortunate that GW is very bad at balancing their game.
I don't think I said that GW isn't acknowledging the tournament crowd or using them to help balance the game, that doesn't make 9th the competitive edition though, it's not like they're listening to half the things that they are being told by the competitive players. GW has had both a casual playtesting team and a competitive playtesting team since the start of 8th. Who cares what they call their tournament participation reward program? Whether you call Chapter Approved Missions Warzone Nachmund Missions (sounds more narrative) or Tournament Mission Pack (sounds more competitive) or just Chapter Approved 2022 Missions (kind of in the middle) doesn't actually change the content of the book, you're getting caught up in branding and promotional materials and conflating it with what actually matters.
They didn't exactly adopt the Champions missions or Nova missions, they changed and adapted the general format (I imagine the concept already existed in another game prior to Nova using it anyway) and added something the ITC never would have added... Faction secondaries which were added for... Wait for it... Narrative reasons! Faction secondaries make the missions a lot harder to balance and a lot less suited for balanced tournament play.
H.B.M.C. wrote: Yeah, 'cause that's the issue people have with this...
What's your problem with the article? GW giving people free codexes for doing well in the ITC? I literally don't understand and I think your narrative of 9th being the competitive edition is silly. If GW knew anything about competitive 40k they'd know that Skorpekhs and SK needed less of a buff than Skorpekh Lords and Deathmarks. Any competitive Necron player could have told you this. A 5 minute look at top 4 Necron lists in 9th could have told you this. The last GT mission pack was a total joke, without updates for the mission secondaries and the next one is just going *shrug* guess balancing secondaries is too hard, let's just make them mission tertiaries. So GW taking competitive 40k super sewiously is nonsense as far as I am concerned.
- uses tournament players to playtest
- adopts fan made tournament rules for Matched play in 9th
- uses tournament data to balance the game
-adopts a tournament participation reward system with term "ITC" literally in it
But sure, GW aren't shooting for the tournament crowd.
Not that there's an issue with that. Good tournament balance means good casual balance. It's just unfortunate that GW is very bad at balancing their game.
I don't think I said that GW isn't acknowledging the tournament crowd or using them to help balance the game, that doesn't make 9th the competitive edition though, it's not like they're listening to half the things that they are being told by the competitive players. GW has had both a casual playtesting team and a competitive playtesting team since the start of 8th. Who cares what they call their tournament participation reward program? Whether you call Chapter Approved Missions Warzone Nachmund Missions (sounds more narrative) or Tournament Mission Pack (sounds more competitive) or just Chapter Approved 2022 Missions (kind of in the middle) doesn't actually change the content of the book, you're getting caught up in branding and promotional materials and conflating it with what actually matters.
They didn't exactly adopt the Champions missions or Nova missions, they changed and adapted the general format (I imagine the concept already existed in another game prior to Nova using it anyway) and added something the ITC never would have added... Faction secondaries which were added for... Wait for it... Narrative reasons! Faction secondaries make the missions a lot harder to balance and a lot less suited for balanced tournament play.
You're very hung up on the idea that because the game isn't well balanced that it's evidence that GW aren't trying to appeal to the tournament crowd. It never occurred to you that its GW and they just aren't very good at writing rules?
As for everything else thats all basically conjecture on your part. I've never heard of GW having "casual" playtesters. Only players with tournament background.
Sim-Life wrote: You're very hung up on the idea that because the game isn't well balanced that ita evidence that GW aren't trying to appeal to the tournament crowd. It never occurred to you that its GW and they just aren't very good at writing rules?
GW said it is impossible to write better rules with that amount of models to support, and there cannot be less units but there need to be more every month because the people request them
so it it is the people who make it impossible for GW to keep up and write better rules
same with the missions, people want them and with so many requests it is impossible to balance them, there is literally nothing GW can do to make better rules in the first place
H.B.M.C. wrote: Yeah, 'cause that's the issue people have with this...
What's your problem with the article? GW giving people free codexes for doing well in the ITC? I literally don't understand and I think your narrative of 9th being the competitive edition is silly. If GW knew anything about competitive 40k they'd know that Skorpekhs and SK needed less of a buff than Skorpekh Lords and Deathmarks. Any competitive Necron player could have told you this. A 5 minute look at top 4 Necron lists in 9th could have told you this. The last GT mission pack was a total joke, without updates for the mission secondaries and the next one is just going *shrug* guess balancing secondaries is too hard, let's just make them mission tertiaries. So GW taking competitive 40k super sewiously is nonsense as far as I am concerned.
- uses tournament players to playtest
- adopts fan made tournament rules for Matched play in 9th
- uses tournament data to balance the game
-adopts a tournament participation reward system with term "ITC" literally in it
But sure, GW aren't shooting for the tournament crowd.
Not that there's an issue with that. Good tournament balance means good casual balance. It's just unfortunate that GW is very bad at balancing their game.
I don't think I said that GW isn't acknowledging the tournament crowd or using them to help balance the game,
They absolutely aren't acknowledging them. Recent Dark Eldar, 8th Iron Hands......that just doesn't happen without completely ignoring testers.
vict0988 wrote: Making rules for adding Crusade upgrades in 40k would probably be pretty easy.
@Auticus how do you know there was a balance issue in the 30-minute game? You don't play the game, it could have been the losing player making a mistake or bad dice, things that can happen in a perfectly balanced game. The best way to dial in balance after release is to look at competitive lists for factions, if the faction is overperforming you nerf the units that are taken in competitive lists, if the faction is underperforming you buff the units that are not taken in competitive lists. It doesn't have to be rocket science.
If GW did some math, listened to advice from skilled players and tested properly before release there wouldn't need to be a tonne of post-release movement on points and an annual update to points would be enough.
I watched the game and the guy that got wiped never really had an opportunity to respond or do much other than take models off the table. That looked pretty imbalanced to me. If not imbalanced you could fall back to pointer #2 - the game is designed poorly if one person can have most of the fun while the other person just removes swathes of models from the table wholesale and does little else.
Based off of slides from their sales meetings in Dallas that I got to see from our old gw manager who took pictures at their conference (and has since left the company lol) indicating that the bad balance works in the favor of the stores continuing to sell models and baking that in as part of their sales delivery, they intentionally imbalance the game because their marketing indicates thats what makes them the most money, and I full on agree with that. Not that they cannot balance, but they know burn and churn is the most profitable model. Thats why I relate 40k and AOS to magic the gathering. Not only are both sets of games combo-heavy and revolve around weight of list/deck, but they also depend on new buys on a regular basis to continue the churn.
instead of people that haven't played for years, absolute insanity /sarcasm.
I was heavy into GW games from mid 90s all the way up until 2019 and have levied the same comments in 2019 as I did in 2015 as I did in 2012 as I did in 2009 as I do today. The fact I have not played in a few years doesn't mean I don't see the same patterns and recognize the same issues that have been sung about for a couple decades now. I can go down to any of the local stores this very afternoon and watch casual lists get annihilated by tuned lists showing that the point system doesn't do anything for balance, and games ending fast pretty much every weekend perpetually and inevitably going forward.
The thing is a lot of you LIKE that because thats how it is supposed to be to you, and has been a thought process vocalized for a very very very long time in one form or the other.
GW can put out as many narrative crusade rules as they like, but until they stop Bob from showing up to a Crusade game with an LVO / Adepticon list and pooping all over the table and strutting around over it telling people to git gud, the only narrative you are telling is that you need to gate keep your private groups very closely and that points don't mean balance, they mean structure to min/max in. The UK folks know this pretty well, they make lists cooperatively. Thats 100% a culture difference and thing that won't change over here, so if you're wanting narrative 40k you have to exert a lot of energy gatekeeping your games from players that don't know any other mode but full-tilt optimization.
I would LOVE to play 40k again, thats why I watch these boards and participate. I am a huge fan of chaos, thousand sons, etc... and would love to collect another force and play some narrative games. The problem is I don't enjoy competitive players showing up with their A+ list with no regards to anything else, as I do not wish to burn and churn the meta along with them as that is expensive and a ton of time painting armies constantly, plus storage gets out of control when you end up with 18 fully painted armies over the course of time that I had to get rid of last year when I moved. Until that culture can be tempered or GW figures a way to make points == balance so that I don't have to buy new force every year or so to have good games, I will continue to watch.
That's an absolte like that they can't balance with all the models they have, it's a matter of they don't want to put the effort into it.
The way to balance it is you need to expand the rules, not cur them like they did in 8th. Rules that were removed need to be added back and expanded upon.
GW is reaching the point of, they can't have a simple fast game, AND have a large range of models that you can use all together in the same game. It's having your cake and eating it to. Something has to give.
We need more rules to better represent weapons, we need expanding special rules to set specific weapons apart from other in order to give them more strengths to make them more appealing/viable in the game.
Psyker powers are a great example of this, how many times is GW just going to reword and find another way to say "do d3 mortal wounds"
Until GW realizes that they need to expand the rules with more varying degrees of USR, like one I suggested to start giving a lot more weapons in the game rending(x) with x being an AP modifier on a hit roll of 6. The issues we see now are just going to be exacerbated.
Gw can't keep "simple fast games" and have a model line of dozens and dozens of units per army.
Remember the time when a Power Weapon was just that, no matter if an Axe, Sword, Spear etc.
for the one reason that it does not matter if those 3 Attacks from a hero has some special rules or not
so everything we have, all the problems that PR say its because the players want it, is simply because GW wanted to improve the game, without knowing what they are actually doing
People at your locals sound like gits, as a veteran it's partly your job to help police it IMO. It's common etiquette to tune lists, because most people acknowledge the game isn't supposed to be over before it's begun. Ultra-lethality is neither casual nor competitive, game pace preference is personal taste unrelated to how competitive or narrative you like your game.
not all around the world, on some parts is "min-max and git-gut" no quality of live improvements or making gaming for newcomers easier, get the most badass list out there and rofl-stomp your opponent
and cry for changes in FB/Forums if a better player beats you with a weaker list
as said above, Europe plays miniature games/wargames a little bit different than the US
Was about to say here in the states there is no such "tune your list" to not be op. It's tell your oponent who got stomped how to make their list better and more rofl stomp
Like for example, I run knights and solar aux in HH, and I'm looked at as the weird one for A) running an allied detachment to begin with and B) not taking mechanicum allied detachment to run 10 secatari in a assault drill to pop outta the ground and then deliver 10 haywire shots on se some vehicle.
It's very much a, you bring big D lists if you go to pick up games. The issue is that GW is not doing a good job balancing the game around this comeptsrive play style
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I don't believe that they can't balance the game. Not at all. They choose not to because it would take time and effort.
No.
Gw (or qny other company) could apply any amount of time and effort they want, but no, it won't balance it. it A balanced game is like a unicorn. It doesn't exist.
Ttgs are limited systems that can't carry much weight. Gw are worse than most at it and while it's true there could be improvements it'll never improve to the level that critics demand as 'good enough'. Good enough is an ever moving goalpozt. Its still a pretty general truth that no wargame has ever been balanced, irrespective of its writers.
Even those games generally regarded as 'better balanced' like warmachine or x-wing are littered with traps, crutches and go-to builds. And while those games had features to improve balance (like infinitys limited scale, limited rosters/skus or wmh's multiple win conditions and multi-list formats, sideboards etc) none solved the issues, all introduced their own complications, costs and controversies and all were played by gaming populations that were smaller than gws by an order of magnitude if not more.
The issue is that GW is not doing a good job balancing the game around this comeptsrive play style
Alternatively the players are doing a terrible job of playing the game in the vision or approach of its writers.
And fwiw I do think gw do a terrible job of balancing the game. I just also think we the players often are self destructive and could do a hell of a lot more to help ourselves than what we do.
vict0988 wrote: People at your locals sound like gits, as a veteran it's partly your job to help police it IMO. It's common etiquette to tune lists, because most people acknowledge the game isn't supposed to be over before it's begun. Ultra-lethality is neither casual nor competitive, game pace preference is personal taste unrelated to how competitive or narrative you like your game.
Until you've ever been a part of the gang "turf wars" that can be gamer politics, the whole police it up is a definite no-no unless you are willing to take on a whole lot of nastiness. Now I ran campaign events for 20 odd years and often made people submit lists ahead of time, and what that ended up doing was creating a lot of hostility and drama to the point that if i could go back in time I never would have run public campaign events for my stores.
Here in the states its most certainly NOT common etiquette to compare lists to not try to end the game before it begins. Its expected you are bringing your as hard as possible list and thats what you will face. If you want something else you have to put on your senate robes and start politicing to try to get people to not include their over tuned elements. (for some its simply a matter of they don't want to, for others its an expensive hobby and they only own one list - their hard as balls list - and they can't tune down and are not willing to buy weaker models to play in campaigns - they just want to use one list to play in everything)
There are smaller private groups that try to police their games. I know here in my new city there is a group that tries this but even that group has a few members that you are warned about who make a stink so you have to navigate that social minefield.
I don't think I said that GW isn't acknowledging the tournament crowd or using them to help balance the game,
They absolutely aren't acknowledging them. Recent Dark Eldar, 8th Iron Hands......that just doesn't happen without completely ignoring testers.
How do you know they ignored them vs simply rejecting whatever recommendations were made for some reason*?
* i.e. $$
After all they sold a lot of $40 IH books, & no doubt plenty of dreadnoughts in that brief window.
Would whatever the playtest recommendations were have been as profitable? I'm betting not.....
And later, after the quick buck has been made, they can dial it back with no great harm done.
Deadnight wrote: A balanced game is like a unicorn. It doesn't exist.
well yes, but actually no
we are not talking about perfect balance aka chess level of balance, but simply of a "faction A with its best list has an equal chance to win as faction B with its best list"
while for GW let you believe that, faction B takes the worst possible list and faction A with its best list still has no chance to win, even if player B try hard to lose, is the best balance that is possible
if GW is not able to balance their game because of: too many units, too many factions, too many options, too many scenarios, there is no one out there preventing them from reducing them until they can write a better game
"balance is a unicorn because GW told you so, so you buy the expensive books and accept that GW does not even try"
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Deadnight wrote: Alternatively the players are doing a terrible job of playing the game in the vision or approach of its writers.
than maybe GW should start writing rules for the game they want to have, and just random rules and wonder why people are not playing as intended
There are smaller private groups that try to police their games. I know here in my new city there is a group that tries this but even that group has a few members that you are warned about who make a stink so you have to navigate that social minefield.
I'm part of a small-ish group (<50 regulars) that does a fantastic job of keeping away the feelsbad moments you get from competitive players stomping casual players. The guys who started it made it a rule to discuss the kind of the game you want to have with your opponent beforehand, which usually boils down to, competitive or not. On top of that there is a culture in our group Discord of being pretty open about the kinds of players we are, so everyone eventually gets a good sense of the level of play of everyone else, and can adjust their lists accordingly for each game.
Definitely not the norm, and requires some initiative from the players (my last group was the stereotypical, crush-your-opponent-into-the-dirt meta), but I gotta admit when it works, it works. It has taught me that a little bit of effort put into community-building can really go a long way in reducing the friction between casual/competitive.
We also had one of our stores that was the pinnacle of competitive gaming have a number of members that stirred that pot. To them, you didn't have multiple ways of playing. You had one way.
The "correct way". The "by the rules way" and you didn't deviate from the rules with houserules or asking your opponent to tone down.
That caused a lot a lot a lot of drama. If you can keep people out of the group that refuse to conform to those rules, I think you're good to go.
In our community - that was not possible. I think I stood up at the beginning of every event saying "this is a for fun narrative not competitive event, please keep the competitive lists out of these games" and just by saying that there was a lot of all caps and nasty words going back and forth. Then they would just play with their nasty lists anyway and say "you said this was a for fun event, this is how I have fun".
well yes, but actually no
we are not talking about perfect balance aka chess level of balance, but simply of a "faction A with its best list has an equal chance to win as faction B with its best list"
while for GW let you believe that, faction B takes the worst possible list and faction A with its best list still has no chance to win, even if player B try hard to lose, is the best balance that is possible
if GW is not able to balance their game because of: too many units, too many factions, too many options, too many scenarios, there is no one out there preventing them from reducing them until they can write a better game
'It's got too much stuff; there should be less stuff' doesn't really work in the real world. It's Kinda hard when you're a business and the model for pretty much every ttg is 'new wave/new stuff'. And when said consumers of hobby want new stuff.
Yeah, and you kind of echo my point
Like I said -its not perfect balance, just 'good enough' that people claim to ask for. And yet when asked, everyone will have a different opinion of what that is. And thr company in question will always conveniently fall.short of what 'good enough' is. The best list of faction a not equaling that of faction b use very, sadly, not exclusive to gw games (I can think of several casters in wmh that hard-nope entire factions and this is a game commonly regarded as well balanced in comparison to gw). From my pov one list matching another is not 'good enough'. Far from it.
every approach has a cost and I'm pretty certain noone in the gaming community, including gw wants to pay it. 'No one out there stopping them'? Too many units/factions for example? Fine. Consider the likely blowback from the fanbase for removing them and removing their armies. Mate, that's business suicide and woeful PR. Hardly a solution in my mind. Or please, go ahead and defend the decision to unit that all his tanks are gone (for example), or to sisters, guard, blood angels chaos and ork players that their armies are squatted so there's 'less' to balance. You'll be run out of town.
Besides, even if you reduce the game to a hyperbolic dozen specific unit/weapon loadouts and you'll still have 3 that are terrible and half of the rest below the bell curve. Its got nothing to do with competence at designing. Ttgs are very limited systems; they can't hold much weight and whatever structures you add to help support the load have their own costs and complications.
"balance is a unicorn because GW told you so, so you buy the expensive books and accept that GW does not even try"
Because 'gw told me so'? No need to be snide.
Eh, no.
Balance is a unicorn because this is a hobby I enjoy many aspects of- I've played and followed and explored for qbout 20 years across the spectrum of different companies, different approaches, different scales etc. Because I know games writers and games playtesters and because game design, and its pitfalls is something that I find intellectually very interesting. And I've never seen a balanced game, let alone a game that was 'good enough' without issues or a game that could not be abused, let alone any game tied to a business venture or company/individual looking to make any kind of financial.success out of it (or just not lose money).
I don't buy all the expensive books and I accept gw do not even try. I also accept if they did try, it still wouldnt be enough, 'Good enough' is an ever moving goalposts nothing theyd do will satiste the haters out there. And for too many people, hating gw is the hobby.
We also had one of our stores that was the pinnacle of competitive gaming have a number of members that stirred that pot. To them, you didn't have multiple ways of playing. You had one way.
The "correct way". The "by the rules way" and you didn't deviate from the rules with houserules or asking your opponent to tone down.
That caused a lot a lot a lot of drama. If you can keep people out of the group that refuse to conform to those rules, I think you're good to go.
In our community - that was not possible. I think I stood up at the beginning of every event saying "this is a for fun narrative not competitive event, please keep the competitive lists out of these games" and just by saying that there was a lot of all caps and nasty words going back and forth. Then they would just play with their nasty lists anyway and say "you said this was a for fun event, this is how I have fun".
Bummer. Yeah I suppose it really comes down to the individuals who make up your specific group. It's a culture thing.
I'm guessing it was easier for my current group to establish this culture because the bulk of the players are casual and only a few are competitive. So a competitive player isn't going to go out and smash up a starter box list as they will be instantly seen as TFG.
Probably also helps that the competitive players here happen to be the ones that are a little older, with less egos, less to prove.
For balance, I don't care if they reach the level of player skill always being the deciding factor, I just want to not go into a game, have some level of skill matter, and not know exactly how a game will go just by looking at the two armies. I've entirely given up on modern 40k, and have decided to play WHFB 6th instead. When I play Infinity, I feel like my skill level makes a difference, and the outcome isn't entirely decided by the lists.
Perfect balance is impossible, but that doesn't mean to give up entirely on the idea of balance in general. A couple of models being a few points under priced means nothing in the face of entire categories of models being unusable against even weak armies.
GW Marketing tries to advertise that balance is only important for events, while it is actually important for casual pick up games as events don't care and make their own rules anyway
It's most important for pickup games. A competitive player is going to look at the codex and pick the best units. A casual player is going to buy models they like. The problem is when someone buys the models they like and either blows all their friends off the table by T3 without even trying to be competitive if they like Dark Eldar or gets stomped by everyone without having a chance if they like Tau/Necrons. Competitive players will always find broken combos to abuse because the game is just too big not to have some, but casual players shouldn't get their teeth kicked in just because they happened to like the look of a certain faction.
Alternatively, truly "competitive players" don't have to find broken combos to abuse...because competition involves a level-ish playing field to start with.
Worth mentioning anyways that most of the "competitive players" aren't even looking at the codex in these situations. They don't know how their book works half the bloody time, they just copy/paste a list someone else placed at an event with.
GW Marketing tries to advertise that balance is only important for events, while it is actually important for casual pick up games as events don't care and make their own rules anyway
It's most important for pickup games. A competitive player is going to look at the codex and pick the best units. A casual player is going to buy models they like. The problem is when someone buys the models they like and either blows all their friends off the table by T3 without even trying to be competitive if they like Dark Eldar or gets stomped by everyone without having a chance if they like Tau/Necrons. Competitive players will always find broken combos to abuse because the game is just too big not to have some, but casual players shouldn't get their teeth kicked in just because they happened to like the look of a certain faction.
Alternatively, truly "competitive players" don't have to find broken combos to abuse...because competition involves a level-ish playing field to start with.
Worth mentioning anyways that most of the "competitive players" aren't even looking at the codex in these situations. They don't know how their book works half the bloody time, they just copy/paste a list someone else placed at an event with.
It cites the source for its claim or else it gets the hose again
auticus wrote: Depends on your definition of competitive.
My definition of competitive is similar though - to me level playing field, let playing skill on the table decide.
To others, list building dominance is part of that competitive and winning the game before it starts is part of competitive.
I think building competitive lists is totally fine and can be part of an interesting competition to find the best list for the local meta as long as both players are playing with the same goal in mind there's no problem there. What's toxic is someone clearly communicating they want a casual game/event and people ignoring it. It is super annoying when people try to police things that shouldn't be policed though, like whining over someone taking 3 Repulsor Executioners at a point in time where it's fairly weak, it only becomes infuriating when someone refuses to listen to the fact that Repulsor Executioners were good that one time but not now.
GW said it is impossible to write better rules with that amount of models to support, and there cannot be less units
Oh I guess I must have just imagined the swathes of DE units that GW outright deleted.
And, you know, the entire army that they just deleted.
Yeah, the same old corsairs and R & H argument..... always ignoring that those weren't proper GW armies as they've never been on the GW catalogue.
GW doesn't really delete units from official codexes, let alone entire factions (barring squats, 30 years ago!), unless they didn't have an official kit and were available only through conversions/kitbashing. Stuff from FW or WD isn't (or wasn't) entirely supported and that's a different story.
In most cases when GW deletes some old stuff it replaces it with some updated but still different counterpart, like Ork Mek Gunz and the current buggies pushed Big gunz and the older buggies into legends or new Ghaz invalidated the old model.
EviscerationPlague wrote:Wait so I imagined the Librarian on a bike? I imagined half of the Badab characters that existed?
vipoid wrote:Oh I guess I must have just imagined the swathes of DE units that GW outright deleted.
And, you know, the entire army that they just deleted.
ok, so there are now less units in 9th than there was in 8th/7th/6th/5th/4th/3rd/2nd?
never played RT, so maybe this was the Edition that hat more units?
Maybe I am just too stupid for fanboy talk or it is because englisch is not my native language but "unit X was removed" does not contradict the "there cannot be less units (for GW)"
just proof me that for each unit that was removed, no new one was added, because the last time I looked into the books the number of units removed was way lower than those that were added
and just because your snowflake "never had a model" unit was removed, does not mean no other unit was added
but I guess GW just reduced the number of units from 7th to 9th to get their points updates books done
To my mind the problem with "balance" is you cover a lot of things. So it means different things to different people.
As a game, 40k is a function of list building, gameplay and luck. Which is basically saying there are things you can do to skew the odds before the game, during the game, and what the outcome of the roll actually is.
So really discussing imbalance in lists is a question of how much list building trumps gameplay and isn't sufficiently moderated by luck.
If 9th is "the tournament edition" its in trying to make that gameplay side matter more. Because it often mattered very little in earlier editions. While they wouldn't run such a list - I'm fairly confident the better players, your Sieglers etc, could bring a pile of anything, and probably be odds on to beat me even if I'm running the Dark Eldar top meta death list. Because they'd (mostly) get the "gameplay" part right - while I make mistakes all over the place. So to win the dice would have to really be in my favour.
And I feel this is different to say 7th - because if I picked any of the top lists there, and forced someone to play a bad 7th edition list (or about half the factions in the game), I feel there's no hope "gameplay" is going to drag you out of it. Barring an absurd skew of luck, I'd mop you off the table while you'd struggle to kill a unit a turn.
I think its a boring whine - but I feel the main issue 9th has for casual players isn't points balance but that everything dies incredibly quickly. Certain factions undoubtedly have points advantages but its not really a faction issue. Two not particularly good players, playing unoptimised armies, in an unguarded, rush forward and attack whatever you can way, can easily (on strong dice) end up doing 1000 points of damage in a turn, and so the game is essentially decided (again, barring a major intervention from dice) by the bottom of turn 2.
I'm not convinced this is a UK/Europe/US divide. Obviously it happens less if everyone sticks half their army into reserve or brings less damaging options - but its still not really been my experience.
Unit1126PLL wrote: GW could absolutely reduce the number of models/units in the game.
They already deleted Renegades and Heretics (and a whole slew of other models/units like Elysians, Lords of Chaos on demonic steeds, etc).
They just choose not to.
They could, if they wanted, simply combine units. It would probably make many players fething mad, but in general it would probably be a net positive. They combined a lot of unit options in AoS as well as some in the new GSC book(at least on metamorphs iirc) and I think it makes the playing simpler and overall better.
The problem is that some people want 40k to be a roleplay system(with ton of options and units) and others want a wargame that is much more concise, and GW wants to go fish both crowds.
Tyel wrote: To my mind the problem with "balance" is you cover a lot of things. So it means different things to different people.
As a game, 40k is a function of list building, gameplay and luck. Which is basically saying there are things you can do to skew the odds before the game, during the game, and what the outcome of the roll actually is.
So really discussing imbalance in lists is a question of how much list building trumps gameplay and isn't sufficiently moderated by luck.
If 9th is "the tournament edition" its in trying to make that gameplay side matter more. Because it often mattered very little in earlier editions. While they wouldn't run such a list - I'm fairly confident the better players, your Sieglers etc, could bring a pile of anything, and probably be odds on to beat me even if I'm running the Dark Eldar top meta death list. Because they'd (mostly) get the "gameplay" part right - while I make mistakes all over the place. So to win the dice would have to really be in my favour.
And I feel this is different to say 7th - because if I picked any of the top lists there, and forced someone to play a bad 7th edition list (or about half the factions in the game), I feel there's no hope "gameplay" is going to drag you out of it. Barring an absurd skew of luck, I'd mop you off the table while you'd struggle to kill a unit a turn.
I think its a boring whine - but I feel the main issue 9th has for casual players isn't points balance but that everything dies incredibly quickly. Certain factions undoubtedly have points advantages but its not really a faction issue. Two not particularly good players, playing unoptimised armies, in an unguarded, rush forward and attack whatever you can way, can easily (on strong dice) end up doing 1000 points of damage in a turn, and so the game is essentially decided (again, barring a major intervention from dice) by the bottom of turn 2.
I'm not convinced this is a UK/Europe/US divide. Obviously it happens less if everyone sticks half their army into reserve or brings less damaging options - but its still not really been my experience.
So if the top tier tournament player played a pyrovore spam list and you brought a meta Dark Eldar list you still think you'd lose because he's better at gameplay?
The aim of balance in 40k should be that all army compositions should have a chance to win via player skill. I'm not saying all armies should have a 50% win rate but if I did decide I wanted to run a pyrovore spam list there should be a way for me to win with it because eventually I'd be able to overcome other lists via player skill and knowing how to adapt the army to different situations.
When I played WmH competitively I played warcasters that were considered low tier and enjoyed doing so because figuring them out, testing lists and figuring what other units supported them well. Beating opponents who used what were considered "better" warcasters was incredibly fun and satisfying. I placed high in a Masters tournament using what was considered the worst warcaster in the faction simply because I knew how to use her abilities well. That just wouldn't happen in 40k. If I brought low tier units to a game regardless how well I played them I'd just have a bad time.
Unit1126PLL wrote: GW could absolutely reduce the number of models/units in the game.
They already deleted Renegades and Heretics (and a whole slew of other models/units like Elysians, Lords of Chaos on demonic steeds, etc).
They just choose not to.
They could, if they wanted, simply combine units. It would probably make many players fething mad, but in general it would probably be a net positive. They combined a lot of unit options in AoS as well as some in the new GSC book(at least on metamorphs iirc) and I think it makes the playing simpler and overall better.
The problem is that some people want 40k to be a roleplay system(with ton of options and units) and others want a wargame that is much more concise, and GW wants to go fish both crowds.
This is where I feel like GW should go with the Three Ways To Play gak they're peddling. Condensed data sheets for Matched, expanded data sheets for Narrative/Open. They'd even get to publish TWO codexes for each army, one for Matched and one for Narritive. Imagine how happy GW would be having two books per army? The community would probably even thank them and tell them it was the best idea they ever had.
When reading discussions about balance, like this one, I always wonder if people who advocate that „good enough” balance is possible (and just for the sake of cutting out this part of discussion for a moment lets define „good enough” simply as „player skill ammounts to 50% of victory”) in a wargame with such enormous faction/unit spectrum, have ever done even a simple game dev excercise. It is really eyes opening when you go „to the other side” for a brief moment and educate yourself a bit instead of continously moan about things you have no clue about… You may then discover that points do not work because they mathematically cannot work (on a math level „a bit” higher than simple algebra) if interaction exist in the game which are dependant on the factors external to the unit you try to cost, which include such basic aspects as AP vs SV; that in order to even fake „good enough” well, good enough, you have to put in place match time or game time adjustment/handicap mechanics like sideboards or initiative rolls that favour the loosing side etc; that the existence of such things, demanded by the playerbase, like synergies or meaningfull listbuilding go directly against balance, and so on.
40K won’t ever be balanced because the playerbase actively demands unbalanced machanics to exist in the game and opposes such concepts like sideboards, because it is in ruts so deep, that it’s not even funny anymore. It then screams about fixing balance by „adequately assigning cost to a unit”, but adjusting points for „busted units” is not balancing the game, it is applying band aids on an utterly disfunctional system, because points do not work as playerbase think they work.
And regarding the whole „the game should be balanced for the tournament meta” discussion, this does not improve the casual meta, because if you tone down units that benefit from a certain synnergy and as such are spammed in a tournament context, then those very same units become thrash in contexts where they do not benefit from said synnergies, so they actively handicap the casual player who brought them to the table. That is really game design 101.
I don't think that 40k as it is now can be balanced, I agree. It needs a serious overhaul for anything like balance to seriously enter the discussion, rather than be a hypothetical like we're mentioning. However, points do work to get us to good enough. AP vs SV can be accounted for via points, and you don't need side boards or handicaps in order to reach good enough. If other games can make it so people can run meme tier lists and win off skill alone, I genuinely cannot believe that the biggest company in miniature wargaming can't do it.
I could balance 40k "from the other side" as it were, with reliable team members.
Step 1 would upset everyone though: roll back constant model releases and the bazillion units in the game to less than a hundred, maybe 200 datasheets tops. Then go from there.
nou wrote: When reading discussions about balance, like this one, I always wonder if people who advocate that „good enough” balance is possible (and just for the sake of cutting out this part of discussion for a moment lets define „good enough” simply as „player skill ammounts to 50% of victory”) in a wargame with such enormous faction/unit spectrum, have ever done even a simple game dev excercise. It is really eyes opening when you go „to the other side” for a brief moment and educate yourself a bit instead of continously moan about things you have no clue about… You may then discover that points do not work because they mathematically cannot work (on a math level „a bit” higher than simple algebra) if interaction exist in the game which are dependant on the factors external to the unit you try to cost, which include such basic aspects as AP vs SV; that in order to even fake „good enough” well, good enough, you have to put in place match time or game time adjustment/handicap mechanics like sideboards or initiative rolls that favour the loosing side etc; that the existence of such things, demanded by the playerbase, like synergies or meaningfull listbuilding go directly against balance, and so on.
40K won’t ever be balanced because the playerbase actively demands unbalanced machanics to exist in the game and opposes such concepts like sideboards, because it is in ruts so deep, that it’s not even funny anymore. It then screams about fixing balance by „adequately assigning cost to a unit”, but adjusting points for „busted units” is not balancing the game, it is applying band aids on an utterly disfunctional system, because points do not work as playerbase think they work.
And regarding the whole „the game should be balanced for the tournament meta” discussion, this does not improve the casual meta, because if you tone down units that benefit from a certain synnergy and as such are spammed in a tournament context, then those very same units become thrash in contexts where they do not benefit from said synnergies, so they actively handicap the casual player who brought them to the table. That is really game design 101.
Siegler has a 100% win rate in tournaments this ITC season if I recall correctly, the average AdMech player has a 70% win rate, the average Necron player has a 45% win rate. All you have to do is bake skill expression into the game, choosing secondaries has skill expression, deployment, movement, game knowledge, order of operations when it comes to shooting and melee.
Synergy should be a part of list building, when you cut out all the obviously bad choices from list building by balancing points well enough you leave internal list synergy which will have a fair impact. Rhinos in Primaris armies should not be good, they don't need to be, Rhinos just need to be good for a few units or strategies instead of always bad or always good. You can play casually and still have a list with internal synergy, it's kind of hard to make a list where you cannot say in some way that things synergize.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I could balance 40k "from the other side" as it were, with reliable team members.
Step 1 would upset everyone though: roll back constant model releases and the bazillion units in the game to less than a hundred, maybe 200 datasheets tops. Then go from there.
GW cannot even balance the options on a single datasheet, so the people that argue GW should be doing what you suggest are wrong. You will absolutely have less balance with more options, but I also think it's possible to overplay that factor in how balanced 40k becomes. The simple "nerf popular options in OP factions and buff unpopular options in UP factions" will gradually make everything from balance inside a single datasheet to balance between datasheets in a faction to balance between factions better over time as competitive players seek out the most efficient options and take the less efficient options less and less.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I don't think that 40k as it is now can be balanced, I agree. It needs a serious overhaul for anything like balance to seriously enter the discussion, rather than be a hypothetical like we're mentioning. However, points do work to get us to good enough. AP vs SV can be accounted for via points, and you don't need side boards or handicaps in order to reach good enough. If other games can make it so people can run meme tier lists and win off skill alone, I genuinely cannot believe that the biggest company in miniature wargaming can't do it.
So please tell me, how much is an AP-4 D2 worth in a competitive meta context, when the top dog army, so the most popular on the top tables is Drukhari, and how much the same weapon is worth, when the top dog army is Space Marines?
PenitentJake wrote: You'd make it boring as f*&^.
The large number of units available is WHY I (and many others) think 40k is better than any other game, no matter how superior its rules may be.
I fail to see how 400 units with 100 useful ones is less boring than 200 useful units, but I also fails to see why change for the sake of change to make you buy overpriced stuff is something we should be grateful and say big thanks to GW
PS:
and than I don't understand how people are coming up with "40k is impossible to balance" but at the same time not identifying "official balance patch" as scam
so either 40k can be balanced, GW tries and we should keep pay for it, or 40k cannot and GW trying is a scam to make people pay for a useless product
The large number of units available is WHY I (and many others) think 40k is better than any other game, no matter how superior its rules may be.
Well thats untrue.
When this came up before I went to see how many units JUST Khador had in WmH and it was around 90ish? Not including unit attachments/weapons teams.
Infinity Nomads has 69ish units (nice) according to 1d4chan
The Malifaux app says Resurrectionists have 74 cards in their roster.
By comparison Tyranids have circa 50 units, including Forgeworld and Legend models. Imperial Guard have around 50 in their codex not including FW and Legend stuff.
And thats only one faction in each game. Basically what I'm saying is you're talking gak.
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I don't think that 40k as it is now can be balanced, I agree. It needs a serious overhaul for anything like balance to seriously enter the discussion, rather than be a hypothetical like we're mentioning. However, points do work to get us to good enough. AP vs SV can be accounted for via points, and you don't need side boards or handicaps in order to reach good enough. If other games can make it so people can run meme tier lists and win off skill alone, I genuinely cannot believe that the biggest company in miniature wargaming can't do it.
So please tell me, how much is an AP-4 D2 worth in a competitive meta context, when the top dog army, so the most popular on the top tables is Drukhari, and how much the same weapon is worth, when the top dog army is Space Marines?
I don't know. I also don't need to know. I'm not a multi million dollar company running the most successful wargame in the world. How about making it so not one army is the top dog, so a take all comers list is best?
Sim-Life wrote: So if the top tier tournament player played a pyrovore spam list and you brought a meta Dark Eldar list you still think you'd lose because he's better at gameplay?
The aim of balance in 40k should be that all army compositions should have a chance to win via player skill. I'm not saying all armies should have a 50% win rate but if I did decide I wanted to run a pyrovore spam list there should be a way for me to win with it because eventually I'd be able to overcome other lists via player skill and knowing how to adapt the army to different situations.
When I played WmH competitively I played warcasters that were considered low tier and enjoyed doing so because figuring them out, testing lists and figuring what other units supported them well. Beating opponents who used what were considered "better" warcasters was incredibly fun and satisfying. I placed high in a Masters tournament using what was considered the worst warcaster in the faction simply because I knew how to use her abilities well. That just wouldn't happen in 40k. If I brought low tier units to a game regardless how well I played them I'd just have a bad time.
I'm not really following what you mean.
Yes, I think if you handed a top tier tournament player a decent 2k Tyranid list that happened to include 9 Pyrovores, they'd have a decent chance against me. I don't know if they'd win - we'd have to play and find out. But if they play better than me, they can probably make up being 50 points or however many you think they are down for bring Pyrovores. Obviously at some point you could make a bad enough Tyranid list that they are going to struggle to make up the difference - but I'm not really sure how that connects with your next paragraph about WmH.
List building in WmH was still about certain abilities and then statistics. The advantage of playing "bad" warcasters was that people would be less aware of these abilities as against those which were on meta and so seen all the time. But it was still all about synergy. If you took a bad warcaster, with a bunch of bad units which didn't work with those abilities, you were almost certainly in for a bad time, unless your opponent was just making a load of mistakes. Which sort of brings us back to the above. Do you really think you can't beat people who are worse than you at 40k with a "not meta" list?
TheBestBucketHead wrote: I don't think that 40k as it is now can be balanced, I agree. It needs a serious overhaul for anything like balance to seriously enter the discussion, rather than be a hypothetical like we're mentioning. However, points do work to get us to good enough. AP vs SV can be accounted for via points, and you don't need side boards or handicaps in order to reach good enough. If other games can make it so people can run meme tier lists and win off skill alone, I genuinely cannot believe that the biggest company in miniature wargaming can't do it.
So please tell me, how much is an AP-4 D2 worth in a competitive meta context, when the top dog army, so the most popular on the top tables is Drukhari, and how much the same weapon is worth, when the top dog army is Space Marines?
*Astra Militarum are very strong and spam plasma on Veterans = big nerf on plasma for Veterans. *Astra Militarum are strong but never take plasma on Veterans = small buff on plasma for Veterans. *Astra Militarum are weak and spam plasma on Veterans = no change on plasma for Veterans. *Astra Militarum are very weak and never take plasma on Veterans = big buff on plasma for Veterans.
A big buff decreases the overall unit cost by 20%, a small buff decreases the overall unit cost by 10%, a small nerf increases the overall unit cost by 10%, a big nerf increases the overall unit cost by 20%. Adjust based on other adjustments that are being made and updates to missions and core rules.
The initial cost for an option should be based on effectiveness against a broad range of units, valuing specialization over versatility in the case of long-range and mobile units or versatility in the case of short-ranged and slow units.
The reason GW messes up balance is that after receiving feedback on how good the AP-4 DD6 gun is for 0 points they change it to AP-4 D3+D3 and all the feedback they previously got on balance is void so they have effectively not tested the gun at all. Then they release the gun as AP-4 D3+D3 for 0 points and it predictably turns out to be OP. The stats should be decided on by the casual crowd based on what feels right and fun for both players and points should be decided on by the competitive crowd based on what will generate the most balanced game.
Sim-Life wrote: So if the top tier tournament player played a pyrovore spam list and you brought a meta Dark Eldar list you still think you'd lose because he's better at gameplay?
The aim of balance in 40k should be that all army compositions should have a chance to win via player skill. I'm not saying all armies should have a 50% win rate but if I did decide I wanted to run a pyrovore spam list there should be a way for me to win with it because eventually I'd be able to overcome other lists via player skill and knowing how to adapt the army to different situations.
When I played WmH competitively I played warcasters that were considered low tier and enjoyed doing so because figuring them out, testing lists and figuring what other units supported them well. Beating opponents who used what were considered "better" warcasters was incredibly fun and satisfying. I placed high in a Masters tournament using what was considered the worst warcaster in the faction simply because I knew how to use her abilities well. That just wouldn't happen in 40k. If I brought low tier units to a game regardless how well I played them I'd just have a bad time.
I'm not really following what you mean.
Yes, I think if you handed a top tier tournament player a decent 2k Tyranid list that happened to include 9 Pyrovores, they'd have a decent chance against me. I don't know if they'd win - we'd have to play and find out. But if they play better than me, they can probably make up being 50 points or however many you think they are down for bring Pyrovores. Obviously at some point you could make a bad enough Tyranid list that they are going to struggle to make up the difference - but I'm not really sure how that connects with your next paragraph about WmH.
List building in WmH was still about certain abilities and then statistics. The advantage of playing "bad" warcasters was that people would be less aware of these abilities as against those which were on meta and so seen all the time. But it was still all about synergy. If you took a bad warcaster, with a bunch of bad units which didn't work with those abilities, you were almost certainly in for a bad time, unless your opponent was just making a load of mistakes. Which sort of brings us back to the above. Do you really think you can't beat people who are worse than you at 40k with a "not meta" list?
My point was that playing a dud list in 40k cannot be compensated for with player skill. A bad list in 40k will always be a bad list. Other games you can make up for your lists shortcomings by being a good player.
Well thats untrue.
When this came up before I went to see how many units JUST Khador had in WmH and it was around 90ish? Not including unit attachments/weapons teams.
Infinity Nomads has 69ish units (nice) according to 1d4chan
The Malifaux app says Resurrectionists have 74 cards in their roster.
By comparison Tyranids have circa 50 units, including Forgeworld and Legend models. Imperial Guard have around 50 in their codex not including FW and Legend stuff.
And thats only one faction in each game. Basically what I'm saying is you're talking gak.
To be fair to jake, # of units isn't the end of it. An iron fang is an iron fang. An assault kommando is an assault kommando. Vlad will always be Vladimir, and always with the same spells feat and weapons. Min or max sizes. No variety in weapon loadouts. 3 poses per unit type. Even the modern 'monoposish' gw sculpts often have dramatically different aesthetics.
Now I know we disagree on a lot of stuff but I, like you, lean towards 'less is more'. That said there is a genuine and legitimate chain of thought that jake represents, especially in non-competitive scenes that wants loads of in-unit variety and options regardless of their power or efficiency.
Reducing/setting fire to the games rosters might appeal to you or me, it doesn't make jake wrong.
Sim-Life wrote:
My point was that playing a dud list in 40k cannot be compensated for with player skill. A bad list in 40k will always be a bad list. Other games you can make up for your lists shortcomings by being a good player.
Realistically though, only to an extent. Player skill only yakes you so far, in any game.
There's a reason masters winners take haley 2 or 3 and don't take pStryker. And until pStryker wins a masters against top tier builds, I don't think it's a particularly fair claim.
And a bad list being bad is relative. Against a tip tier list? In an absolute sense? Sure. Denial of that is silly. In a relative sense? against, say, another bad list played in the grass leagues? Different story. To those of us who lean towards narrative and 'game-building' as a crucial component of our games, this underpins a lot of our thinking.
I consider myself a narrative player, and I think there are too many different units in 40k right now - to the point where it doesn't make narrative sense.
I was a narrative player in 4th, too, where army theme was achieved through customization rules and conversions rather than a quintillion units.
An IG platoon was a single "unit entry" (datasheet) but had a bazillion different customization options (Drop Troops for a Valkyrie-borne regiment, Mechanized gave them all Chimeras they couldn't normally access, Jungle Fighters made them lighter infantry with better stealth, Carapace Armor made them heavier infantry than the normal, etc.)
So for a single datasheet you had something like 24 different combinations to really capture your army's fluff.
I actually feel like there is less variety today, because whilst there are more datasheets, there are far far fewer options to express your theme.
Sim-Life wrote: So if the top tier tournament player played a pyrovore spam list and you brought a meta Dark Eldar list you still think you'd lose because he's better at gameplay?
The aim of balance in 40k should be that all army compositions should have a chance to win via player skill. I'm not saying all armies should have a 50% win rate but if I did decide I wanted to run a pyrovore spam list there should be a way for me to win with it because eventually I'd be able to overcome other lists via player skill and knowing how to adapt the army to different situations.
When I played WmH competitively I played warcasters that were considered low tier and enjoyed doing so because figuring them out, testing lists and figuring what other units supported them well. Beating opponents who used what were considered "better" warcasters was incredibly fun and satisfying. I placed high in a Masters tournament using what was considered the worst warcaster in the faction simply because I knew how to use her abilities well. That just wouldn't happen in 40k. If I brought low tier units to a game regardless how well I played them I'd just have a bad time.
I'm not really following what you mean.
Yes, I think if you handed a top tier tournament player a decent 2k Tyranid list that happened to include 9 Pyrovores, they'd have a decent chance against me. I don't know if they'd win - we'd have to play and find out. But if they play better than me, they can probably make up being 50 points or however many you think they are down for bring Pyrovores. Obviously at some point you could make a bad enough Tyranid list that they are going to struggle to make up the difference - but I'm not really sure how that connects with your next paragraph about WmH.
List building in WmH was still about certain abilities and then statistics. The advantage of playing "bad" warcasters was that people would be less aware of these abilities as against those which were on meta and so seen all the time. But it was still all about synergy. If you took a bad warcaster, with a bunch of bad units which didn't work with those abilities, you were almost certainly in for a bad time, unless your opponent was just making a load of mistakes. Which sort of brings us back to the above. Do you really think you can't beat people who are worse than you at 40k with a "not meta" list?
My point was that playing a dud list in 40k cannot be compensated for with player skill. A bad list in 40k will always be a bad list. Other games you can make up for your lists shortcomings by being a good player.
Admech has like a 46% winrate right now? Yet Siegler is in the top 8 of the LVO.
I will take Siegler with the worst list you can think of over an 'average' player with the best list you can think of.
Player skill is still a MASSIVE part of 40k. People like to ignore that to feel better when they lose
kodos wrote: there is literally nothing GW can do to make better rules in the first place
That's a hot take. There's an illiterate homeless guy sleeping on the bench outside my store right now that could probably write better rules than some of the stuff they come up with.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
vict0988 wrote: People at your locals sound like gits, as a veteran it's partly your job to help police it IMO. It's common etiquette to tune lists, because most people acknowledge the game isn't supposed to be over before it's begun. Ultra-lethality is neither casual nor competitive, game pace preference is personal taste unrelated to how competitive or narrative you like your game.
Tune your list according to what metrics? What if I just like the grimaldus and helbrecht models? Am I supposed to buy/build/paint a regular Marshal and Castellan just to appease people with weaker list? How many "good units" is too many? What if I'm playing crusher stampede because I like big bugs?
When I make a list, my criteria is x points and battleforged. I'm not sure how else I'm supposed to make a list as that's what the rulebook tells me. Who is this universal, independent arbitrator of what is a "fair list" and what is "cheese"?
Racerguy180 wrote: You could always run them as the non-named versions??? Or did that not occur to you?
Sure but answer my questions. How many "good" units is too many? Who determines that? What about things like a Dimacheron? If I paid $200+ for a model because I like the model, why can't I use it?
Case by case basis. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Nobody is saying you can't use it.
What's more important playing with all your toys against one person once?
Or excersing restraint and thinking about how nice it would be to have more local players to play against instead of chasing the newbie away.
Toofast wrote: What if I'm playing crusher stampede because I like big bugs?
When I play Crusher Stampede against my local casual Death Guard opponent, I don't play them as Leviathan (so I'm not getting the new Octarius rules), I don't take the typically obligatory unit of 6 Hive Guard as fire support, and I use a single Scythed Hierodule plus a mix of other big bugs (including Carnifexes) rather than loading up on Hierodules and Dimachaerons.
There is no hard-and-fast rule for how to de-tune a list nor any objective metric to say how much is too much, but it is possible to take things you like and still balance it out for casual play. You have to go by heuristics, and there can be legitimate problems if you and your opponent are not on the same page about the relative strengths of units and lists, but it can be done.
And all that said I do agree that this should not be my responsibility and it is completely within GW's power to write better rules.
Toofast wrote: What if I'm playing crusher stampede because I like big bugs?
When I play Crusher Stampede against my local casual Death Guard opponent, I don't play them as Leviathan (so I'm not getting the new Octarius rules), I don't take the typically obligatory unit of 6 Hive Guard as fire support, and I use a single Scythed Hierodule plus a mix of other big bugs (including Carnifexes) rather than loading up on Hierodules and Dimachaerons.
There is no hard-and-fast rule for how to de-tune a list nor any objective metric to say how much is too much, but it is possible to take things you like and still balance it out for casual play. You have to go by heuristics, and there can be legitimate problems if you and your opponent are not on the same page about the relative strengths of units and lists, but it can be done.
And all that said I do agree that this should not be my responsibility and it is completely within GW's power to write better rules.
I 100% agree, but they're too entrenched in their current business model to change. They probably look at doing what should be done as too big a risk to make business sense.
Which is lame, but they have chosen to focus on a specific segment of the game to inform their decisions, so until something BUSINESS-wise forces them to re-evaluate their stance, they are not going to change.
Yeah it’s not an exact science on making fair lists to use against more causal opponents. Think/talk out changes you can make to your list in order to make it more fair/fun for both sides. If you don’t want to do this, then only play against more competitive minded people. Point is 1-sided slaughter games are never fun for both sides (at least IMO) and especially so if you can foresee this outcome before any dice are rolled.
Toofast wrote: Tune your list according to what metrics? What if I just like the grimaldus and helbrecht models? Am I supposed to buy/build/paint a regular Marshal and Castellan just to appease people with weaker list? How many "good units" is too many? What if I'm playing crusher stampede because I like big bugs?
When I make a list, my criteria is x points and battleforged. I'm not sure how else I'm supposed to make a list as that's what the rulebook tells me. Who is this universal, independent arbitrator of what is a "fair list" and what is "cheese"?
How does someone with a bad list make their list better? They research and ask for help. This is not an insurmountable option for most people, if you cannot or do not wish to create a casual list then all you need to do is make this clear to your opponents beforehand. I decided to marry the idea of testing TSK, Triarch Praetorians and Skorpekh Lords because I knew TSK was meta and Skorpekh Lords filled a role in my list without providing any synergy. If you play a weak chapter or faction or you're unlucky you can get away with more. If you have a 70% win rate in casual games you're probably using lists that are too hard. That's not to say that you shouldn't strive for that 70% win rate with your casual list, if a casual list overperforms you can start using it in competitive games. That's how I originally found my favourite 8th edition list, it was absolutely brutal and I quickly found out it wasn't fit for casual play so I continued using it in competitive games and found other lists to use for casual games.
If I paid $200+ for a model because I like the model, why can't I use it?
Because casual games are not meant to be played at the expense of your opponent and it's not fun to win less than a third of the time.
It's only at the expense of my opponent if he chooses not to take a decent list. Why am I expected to tune my list down but my opponent isn't expected to improve his? When I started playing 40k I got slaughtered every game. The same happened when I took a break at the end of 7th and came back to 9th. I don't expect my opponents to detune their lists or go easy on me, I need to get better.
You stuck it out, how many new players do that?
It is probably 7/10. So is the community better for retaining only that 30% or actually thinking about your fellow player and shooting for more player retention?
The main problem we are seeing here is everyone is looking at this from an existing player viewpoint. We already have hidden information that they're not privy to. So punishing them until they "git gud"/give up/whatever for choosing the wrong models, suboptimal lists, etc seems self-defeating.
If you don't WANT to tone down your list, that's perfectly fine. But you need to be very upfront that you will not adjust your list to match the player.
If you have the capacity to do so, rock on. Build that community, it's not gonna build itself(especially if you DGAF about a newbie).
Toofast wrote: It's only at the expense of my opponent if he chooses not to take a decent list. Why am I expected to tune my list down but my opponent isn't expected to improve his?
Why not both?
That said if you're at a higher level it's, its arguably easier to tone down that them to tone up. When I was running seriously, and running with female friends especially who were typically newer/less experienced/less 'strong'/physically weaker (ie i could run faster than them for far longer without breaking a sweat) it was far easier for me to tone down, drop my pace and run at their level/pace than it was for them to run at mine. I sure as hell did not feel offended or insulted that they weren't playing 'up'.
Personally I think it's commendable of a player/person to be able to accommodate different players with different approaches to the game. Conpromise and variety are good things. Playing one mode, especially the 'ultra hard' mode in my experience ultimstely just leads to burnout.
Lower power lists do not necessarily mean a not-decent game.
And for what it's worth, while playing hard is fine, (where appropriate imo) only about 3% of the game can play at that level. From my pov, if I tone things down a lot more of the game opens up which makes things far more interesting.
Toofast wrote: IWhen I started playing 40k I got slaughtered every game. The same happened when I took a break at the end of 7th and came back to 9th. I don't expect my opponents to detune their lists or go easy on me, I need to get better.
Getting slaughtered like that is hardly fun though imo.
Not expecting your opponents to accommodate and not being willing to accommodate in turn is surely just doubling down on an approach that feeds into the problems?
This ultra-cutthroat-kill-or-be-killed thinking isn't always helpful. Its a game of toy soldiers. There are loads of reasons why ' I need to take harder lists' isn't always appropriate.
'Getting better' is fine, bit imo doesn't necessarily mean 'play a harder list' exclusively. 'Getting better' also means finding a healthier way of approaching the game and/or playing in a less problematic/destructive manner. I find being able to take the foot off the metaphorical accelerator, slow down and play a less cutthroat game, is a far healthier approach in the long term. So yes that's why, imo you should consider 'toning down'.
It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas. I don't intentionally try to beat noobs like I'm clubbing a baby seal but if someone asks me for a 2k game, I'm gonna bring a decently competitive list. I'll be happy to go over the game afterward and give them tips to improve. I'll happily show them painting techniques to get models done quickly and to a decent standard. I'm all about helping new people in the hobby.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I
Don't put things on ebay. Simples.
Toofast wrote: I don't intentionally try to beat noobs like I'm clubbing a baby seal but if someone asks me for a 2k game, I'm gonna bring a decently competitive list.
If I was the cheeky sort I'd say this still sounds a bit like seal clubbing. just with a dapper suit and a hand waving of your role in it.
Toofast wrote: I'll be happy to go over the game afterward and give them tips to improve.
And how sbout considering things you could have done? Like, was it appropriate to bring a 'decently competitive' list in the first place? It's something we always do in our games, on both the winning and the losing sides.
Look, you're not wrong... you play your game. Its like dating. If folks want what you want, it's all good. Just be open to the notion that how other people play, and what other people want can be different. And maybe considering that makes it better for everyone in the long run. And while you're probably not a bad guy, you don't need to be a bad guy to be a villain in someone else's hobby.
Just keep in mind there is another perspective to this scenario.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I
Don't put things on ebay. Simples.
Simpler things:
Don't just buy units because "they're being used in meta lists".
So you're fine with abusing them as long as you can tell them why the suck...?
The discussion happens before the game, not afterward. Then you show pity on them by giving them hobby tips as well due to the fact that they're unable to match in that area too. That sounds fun. I'll bet player retention is great in your meta too...
Or, you know, take 1 less unit to the game for a point handicap? Or two if your list is still too strong. Seriously, accommodating new/weaker players and their armies to ensure mutual fun is pretty straightforward when you are willing. It is only an insurmountable obstacle for people who are neck deep in the competitive rut.
I feel this is a sort of redundant conversation. If you know enough about the game to know what a meta list is, and perhaps more importantly why its a meta list, you know enough to tone it down.
At the very least you could pick a "bad" Chapter, a "bad" set of warlord traits and relics. You could try using "bad" stratagems.
Ultimately people who know what they are doing - trying to win a game by stacking everything in their favour - will have a massive advantage over people who don't know what they doing, running a pile whatever they have to hand. And that ultimately should be the case, because otherwise it means list building and in game decisions do not impact the result. The debate I guess is how tuned up a list should be by taking synergistic options rather than unsynergistic options. And points just being obviously comparatively wrong.
I read your suggestions for the "unigame" proposal and what you want to do with narrative. I've just been through HUGE multithreaded debates about Crusade on other sites, so I'm a bit burnt out.
But I think that you misunderstand what it is that makes Crusade as it is so amazing. I have come around to some of HBMC's thoughts- I've always agreed with him about consolidating ALL crusade content from Campaigns into a single book. I've similarly agreed with Unit and other posters that it would have been cool if they could have released a "Big Book of Crusade" along side the BRB that contained ALL bespoke Crusade content for all factions as well as various models for linking games into campaigns. While it would have been excellent, this last idea is not as feasible as HBMC's, because bespoke Crusade content in dexes references the updated general rules in that dex... and it would be really hard to provide meaningful bespoke content without doing this.
But killing the progression system and destroying the long term quests like Sainthood, Repentance, Territorial Acquisition, Machine Construction, Planetary Insurrection, System Assimilation... This would rip the soul out of Crusade and replace it with what pretty much amounts to Armies of Renown (which we already have) in stand alone games.
Crusade players care about stories- both those that occur in single battles and those which link a series of battles together to create a longer term arc. Some of us view the entire lifespan of our force as a single, ongoing story.
We still may care about things like balance, or unified rules, but those things are not the priority. The story is the priority. Any sacrifice that you make to the latter for the sake of the former is unlikely to be appreciated.
I think that 3 ways to play and game size variation is the crowning achievement of 9th. They could push it further- lots of Matched players are objecting to bloat, so maybe limit strat use a bit more in matched- ie. BRB strats + 5 individual bespoke strats chosen before the game and paid for with points. You could keep the CP rules as is, but every game, you'd only have five of your own strats to plan around, and only five enemy strats to worry about.
And here's the important part: you make that changed for matched to address people's bloat concerns, but you leave Crusade alone. You leave open alone.
This one change allows strats to still be used in matched, but shifts their focus to narrative, where players can use the full list.
Now the truth about this is it's how everyone plays anyway. Every game I go into, before the first turn, I've got a short list of strats in my head that I might use, and the others might as well not even exist. The rule just formalizes the process for Matched play.
IMO, the progression system would be better served by being a distinct campaign system that is part of a standalone book/book series than something fully integrated into each codex, but your opinion may differ.
That being said, as far as strategems are concerned, I would prefer if strategems were cut to either a list of say 1-2 dozen (max) generic strategems and then no more than a handful of faction specific strats in each codex
OR
the entire system gets reworked so that theres a significantly smaller number of strategems but they are significantly more impactful (think something similar to a feat in Warmachine) but you will only typically be able to use about 2-3 strategems per game max.
What's unfortunate is, because fluffy armies are so gimpted no one has a good time loosing, so you just end up making a competitive list.
Definitely where I'm at. After brutally losing every game with my fluffy Militarum Tempestus list for the first year of 9th, and then for the last 6 months gradually "de-fluffing" it to try to make it more competitive (and then having most of those attempts curb-stomped by GWs changes to flyer cap) I'm at the point where I'm just abandoning MT as an unworkable army concept and building out a new competitive style army, just so I can play casually and win a game on occasion.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
Toofast sounds to me like an American counterpart to Karol- introduced to 40K in an environment where hyper-competitiveness, meta-chasing, and seal-clubbing are taken for granted, and now that they have chased the meta, they feel entitled to continue the cycle of seal-clubbing.
It's an overtly adversarial style of play where you're not looking to both have a good time; it's on your opponent to create their own fun while you do the same.
Toofast wrote: ... I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists...
Each to their own, I guess, but that seems like a really boring way to play.
I bought the new Gravis Captain because I think he looks cool with the Chainsword. I'm getting the new Eldar/Chaos box because I think the Warp Smith looks cool, because the new Eldar bikes look amazing, the Autarch looks like fun, and because I think having a second Maulerfiend - a model I don't like because of its Komodo Dragon head, so I'll be giving it the other head - will be more effective on the tabletop than just having one, and might pair well with my Venomcrawler.
An interesting (I think) question just occurred to me:
If 40K, entirely as it is rules wise and codex wise, would be played with dirt cheap paper tokens instead of expensive miniatures and all the rules were in the living ruleset electronic format you only have to pay once or pay a very small subscription for it, would you consider "solving the unbalanced meta" a bug or a feature?
Because as it is now, community is divided along the line of "I'm able and willing to pay to be able to list build within the meta" and "I'm unable or unwilling to pay for list building part of the game". With paper tokens this goes out of the window, there is no sunken cost falacy, no attachment to your careful painted minis you paid with your kidney for and everybody can access every broken combo there is and everybody can adjust their list between every game they play, so only the concept behind the list matters, not the money behind the list.
Would you consider 40K a mechanically interesting game in such scenario?
nou wrote: Would you consider 40K a mechanically interesting game in such scenario?
Personally, no, because I have investment in the lore and theme of the game, along with an expectation of verisimilitude that imbalance can often break.
A wholly abstract game that makes no pretention to simulating accompanying lore or anything tied to the real world, and which is designed to be exploitable and more of a 'problem to solve', could be fun I suppose. But that's generally not why I'm into wargaming.
A wholly abstract game that makes no pretention to simulating accompanying lore or anything tied to the real world, and which is designed to be exploitable and more of a 'problem to solve', could be fun I suppose. But that's generally not why I'm into wargaming.
You are aware, that you just gave a pretty good description of 8th/9th ed 40K from a meta chaser POV?
IMO, the progression system would be better served by being a distinct campaign system that is part of a standalone book/book series than something fully integrated into each codex, but your opinion may differ.
I think a "Big Book of How to Build Your Own Campaigns for Crusade" would be fabulous. I definitely know that Unit would appreciate something like this too- he and I have discussed that in previous threads. It also ties into HBMC's point about gathering ALL of the Crusade content for every season in a single book rather than 3 like they did in both Octarius and Charadon.
If you're willing to collect and compile ALL the resources for each campaign and combine them, there is actually a heck of a lot of tools to work with; it's just unfortunate that you have to do that. Charadon provided a lose campaign framework; Octarius went further and provided actual campaign trees and such. Nachmund will no doubt have a slightly different campaign structure.
However, doing that doesn't mean you have to lose the handful of pages of bespoke Crusade content in every dex either. As I said, those provide some of the best material for Crusade; the Genestealer Cult Infestation rules ARE a sort of campaign structure- as are the Drukhari rules. Sainthood in the Sisters is too, but it's a bit looser. My favourite part of the Sisters content is actually not Sainthood- I mean, it's great and all, but giving units the option to swear a penitent oath and then redeem themselves in subsequent battles for me is the crowning glory of that dex.
That being said, as far as strategems are concerned, I would prefer if strategems were cut to either a list of say 1-2 dozen (max) generic strategems and then no more than a handful of faction specific strats in each codex
I don't necessarily disagree with this. But I feel like in practice, it's what everyone does anyway. I don't think anyone goes into a game thinking "I'm going to use all of the strategems in this book." I think most people pick their top five, or at most, their top ten and they use those again, and again and again. It's why I think every argument about "I have to remember 30 strategems for my own army and then 30 for every other faction in the game" is at least a little disingenuous. And some folks say, "Well then why not remove the others from the game?" The answer is that THEY are the ones that are there for the narrative players to riff on. I like crafting scenarios in campaigns that use these less practical strats in unusual ways, to bring variety to the typical load out.
I take this a step further personally, because I make my own strat cards (cheaper than GW's cards AND I have the option of adding strats from other source books to the deck). Once I see the opponent, the terrain, the mission and the Agendas, I pick 10-15 cards at most and discard the rest.
Using either of these methods makes it unnecessary to remove them from the book. It would be like a D&D group saying "You know, in 20 years, none of us have ever played Paladins. Maybe they should remove them from the game."
the entire system gets reworked so that theres a significantly smaller number of strategems but they are significantly more impactful (think something similar to a feat in Warmachine) but you will only typically be able to use about 2-3 strategems per game max.
Well obviously a dude like me would be devastated by this, but I'm glad it wasn't your first or only suggestion.
What's unfortunate is, because fluffy armies are so gimpted no one has a good time loosing, so you just end up making a competitive list.
Definitely where I'm at. After brutally losing every game with my fluffy Militarum Tempestus list for the first year of 9th, and then for the last 6 months gradually "de-fluffing" it to try to make it more competitive (and then having most of those attempts curb-stomped by GWs changes to flyer cap) I'm at the point where I'm just abandoning MT as an unworkable army concept and building out a new competitive style army, just so I can play casually and win a game on occasion.
This truly sucks- I'm sorry about that, and I know you're not the only one who hates that rule; HBMC has been on a tear about this, and I'm with both of you. Air cavalry is super cinematic and fluffy as f#&%. HBMC's thought was that that they should have confined the nerf to the two particular fliers that caused the problem- a very workable solution. A similar point of contention lately is the GT 2022 elimination of mixed sub-faction armies.
BOTH of these rules were matched play only, so neither of them are ever going to apply to me. It's one of the things that is so fantastic about not playing matched. Again, I know that many people say they don't have a choice but to play matched. I know that others get a real thrill out of events or play in public spaces. I'm honestly not sure how to help those people, but whatever the fix is, it shouldn't affect those who do have the option of playing a Crusade with a group of their friends, because it would be solving a problem that none of us actually have.
nou wrote: An interesting (I think) question just occurred to me:
If 40K, entirely as it is rules wise and codex wise, would be played with dirt cheap paper tokens instead of expensive miniatures and all the rules were in the living ruleset electronic format you only have to pay once or pay a very small subscription for it, would you consider "solving the unbalanced meta" a bug or a feature?
Absolutely a bug.
Because MY hobby is miniature gaming/miniature wargaming. And you've just taken the minis out of it.
And to add insult? Then you propose charging me a subscription fee?? FOR WHAT? I can already get every rule & pictures of the models free. So can everyone else.
nou wrote: Would you consider 40K a mechanically interesting game in such scenario?
No, it'd just be the same as it currently is - but with no minis. So I wouldn't likely consider it at all.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas. I don't intentionally try to beat noobs like I'm clubbing a baby seal but if someone asks me for a 2k game, I'm gonna bring a decently competitive list. I'll be happy to go over the game afterward and give them tips to improve. I'll happily show them painting techniques to get models done quickly and to a decent standard. I'm all about helping new people in the hobby.
This was why any narrative campaign I tried to run failed. Where I was before I moved, this was a solid chunk of our 40k players as well. They couldn't play in narratives simply because they only owned tournament style lists and sold off anything that couldn't compete otherwise.
The problem was (deviated from this quote above and unrelated to that quote) they also refused to acknowledge that their lists were too much for a casual for fun narrative event, and insisted that those things were one and the same and there should not be competitive events and narrative for fun events. They should be just "events" and that everyone should chase the meta along with them to play "properly".
This is where the bad balance of the game combined with an over competitive meta destroys things for narrative players that want to field their units that the narrative talks about, but which are garbage because "meta".
If anyone is looking for a narrative campaign map for 40K just go into your FLGS gaming area and peel back some of the posters. There, you will find several well-intentioned attempts at Narrative campaigns that lasted two weeks and then fizzled out.
I expect that a pickup game will be played under Matched Play conditions. It is helpful to have a pre-game chat, though, to determine each other's goals/experience. Since COVID all of our FLGS games are pre-arranged which has actually helped. Communicating before a game with some simple things like: "I am looking to test my club-champs list - come at me!" or "I am a returning player who hasn't played since 4th - I think I have a legal 1000 CSM list" can help me do my part to ensure that we have a fun time/meet our goals.
Sometimes a pick-up game can be a blow-out, and hopefully you both manage it with enough grace to be able to play each other again.
Additionally, Dunning-Kruger can be in effect in the 40K community which contributes to some of the angst. As Clint said "Sometimes a man's gotta know his limitations." Maybe it's not always the game designer's fault when we lose?
Wargame players helped the British Navy by testing strategies to defeat German submarines in their game and Yugi Muto saved the world from Yami Bakuda by winning in a children's card game, the fate of the world could be at stake here /sarcasm.
nou wrote: ...Would you consider 40K a mechanically interesting game in such scenario?
Already exists on TTS. I still want the game to be balanced. Even if you use paper tokens they still represent something, it is not unit 117 B, it's a Space Marine Eradicator from the Flesh Tearers chapter. Poorhammer can absolutely be fun, 40k has been mechanically interesting to me since 7th and I have used everything from paper tokens to Space Marines to represent Necrons.
It would be like a D&D group saying "You know, in 20 years, none of us have ever played Paladins. Maybe they should remove them from the game."
I think it should be removed if it was a common thing that nobody played Paladins for 20 years. Make room for a more interesting class if everybody hates it that much or just don't feel inspired by it. If it was just because it was mechanically weak you could house-rule it to make it deal more damage or do bigger heals or stun enemies or something.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
Toofast sounds to me like an American counterpart to Karol- introduced to 40K in an environment where hyper-competitiveness, meta-chasing, and seal-clubbing are taken for granted, and now that they have chased the meta, they feel entitled to continue the cycle of seal-clubbing.
It's an overtly adversarial style of play where you're not looking to both have a good time; it's on your opponent to create their own fun while you do the same.
Not at all. Toofast is a meta chaser and I don't think he really complains about the state of 40k. Karol didn't/couldn't change anything and was stuck with a non functioning list made from a 2nd hand lot, he complained about everything . They only share a competitive attitude.
There's nothing wrong in being a meta chaser, and yes that means keeping small collection of models and replacing underperforming units pretty often. If he enjoys playing with that mentality good for him. Thankfully not everyone are like that, including competitive players.
PenitentJake wrote: I'm honestly not sure how to help those people, but whatever the fix is, it shouldn't affect those who do have the option of playing a Crusade with a group of their friends, because it would be solving a problem that none of us actually have.
The best thing you can do is stop defending GW just because the issue doesn't effect you. We know GW responds if people complain loudly enough. The fix would be for GW to balance their game and make it mechanically sound so that airfleet armies are neither terrible or broken and again, what is good for Matched play is good for Crusade. Better balance in one means better balance in the other.
So please tell me, how much is an AP-4 D2 worth in a competitive meta context, when the top dog army, so the most popular on the top tables is Drukhari, and how much the same weapon is worth, when the top dog army is Space Marines?
I don't know. That's why you playtest and iterate. Not knowing, and there not being an answer within a certain acceptable error range are not the same thing.
Quick thought experiment: Player A decides that gun/unit combo is worth 100 points per model. Player B decides it should be 1 point. Both are clearly wrong so the answer is obviously somewhere in the middle. The question of where exactly it falls on that spectrum is the whole point of playtesting. Nobody's asking for perfection in all cases here, but what we are asking for is something better than we have. A good starting point for GW would likely be to stop adding so many goddamn special rules to every single unit and weapon so there's at least a common baseline to work from.
There's no requirement for a given unit or weapon to be perfectly balanced in all scenarios and match-ups. However, a game with better cross-faction balance means the decisions players make about their list-building choices should be more about creating well-rounded armies capable of taking on all-comers. When external balance is so bad you know you're going to be facing lots of the same type of lists that further exacerbates poor balance by pushing certain units and weapons over others. It's a vicious cycle of imbalance.
Competitive 40k has (imo anyway) rarely worked on a meta basis - its usually just been a function of grabbing the most bang for your points. The issue is that the same offense/defence/movement stats/abilities should cost roughly the same points between Codex A and Codex B.
This has historically not been the case. So 10 BS3+ S5 AP-4 D2 shots has cost say 100 points in "Codex September 2020" - and yet by "Codex February 2021" it only costs 90 points. And then by "Codex September 2022" its only going to cost 80 points.
In the old days this resulted in codexes just being crept out of existence. The CA process now tries to keep things vaguely in check - but its still not a great system.
The best thing you can do is stop defending GW just because the issue doesn't effect you. We know GW responds if people complain loudly enough. The fix would be for GW to balance their game and make it mechanically sound so that airfleet armies are neither terrible or broken and again, what is good for Matched play is good for Crusade. Better balance in one means better balance in the other.
I don't so much defend GW as react to proposals from other people that would break the game for me.
When people propose making changes to Matched play only, I either get on board and discuss their ideas or stay out of the discussion entirely because I really don't have the experience, expertise or interest to effectively contribute to the discussion.
But then you get someone who makes a suggestion like reducing the number of datacards IN THE GAME to 200, or removing ALL strats FROM THE GAME. Saying that these are stupid ideas that would effect Crusade players and suggesting that they should restrict their proposals to Matched play is NOT defending GW.
Did you realise that all this discussion about power creep and design drift would be pointless if GW release all the rules at once digitally at the beginning of the edition?
psipso wrote: Did you realise that all this discussion about power creep and design drift would be pointless if GW release all the rules at once digitally at the beginning of the edition?
Yes. But asking for that is like asking for a solid gold toilet, it's just not on the cards.
psipso wrote: Did you realise that all this discussion about power creep and design drift would be pointless if GW release all the rules at once digitally at the beginning of the edition?
I wish it was a solution.
Your honour, may I refer you to exhibit A.
Privateer Press' mk3 launch.
And it went down like a lead balloon. And this is a company who are generally regarding as writing decent rules. And who provided the cards/rules/stats of all models in the game up front.
Releasing everything for an edition/entire game digitally up front, as well as being developmentally extremely challenging, also fails to account for people leaving, new people joining, new ideas or, or 'new' releases and in this industry, 'new' is what makes money, hence how nearly every ttg has 'waves' built into its business model. Remember as well, even if its released at once, all the factions design/faction elements won't be designed simultaneously/concurrently prior to this.
And, you know, 'digital' isn't the bees knees either. some of us like our books and appreciate this game because its not hooked up to a tablet.
Tyel wrote: Competitive 40k has (imo anyway) rarely worked on a meta basis - its usually just been a function of grabbing the most bang for your points. The issue is that the same offense/defence/movement stats/abilities should cost roughly the same points between Codex A and Codex B.
This has historically not been the case. So 10 BS3+ S5 AP-4 D2 shots has cost say 100 points in "Codex September 2020" - and yet by "Codex February 2021" it only costs 90 points. And then by "Codex September 2022" its only going to cost 80 points.
In the old days this resulted in codexes just being crept out of existence. The CA process now tries to keep things vaguely in check - but its still not a great system.
"Vaguely" being the operative word. It's obvious that they just concentrate on whatever is currently "meta" and a few hand picked units in CA, while leaving older/more obscure units/factions to rot. I seriously doubt letting top level competitive players in on the "balancing" decisions will help with that either. They'll mostly just be interested in whatever is currently "competitive".
A wholly abstract game that makes no pretention to simulating accompanying lore or anything tied to the real world, and which is designed to be exploitable and more of a 'problem to solve', could be fun I suppose. But that's generally not why I'm into wargaming.
You are aware, that you just gave a pretty good description of 8th/9th ed 40K from a meta chaser POV?
Keenly aware. And it's why I don't buy the 'what's good for competitive is good for casual' argument. There are different expectations and goals from each group.
Deadnight wrote: And, you know, 'digital' isn't the bees knees either. some of us like our books and appreciate this game because its not hooked up to a tablet.
Honest question, how do you play 40K at the moment? I need so many patches, tweaks, and limitations spread across so many books that I find it more convenient to just have a laptop open with Battlescribe and Wahapedia on my sideboard, and I normally dislike electronic rules and strongly prefer written books. I find it more confusing to use the books because I don't always remember what's been patched, errata'd, or expanded on, or where the rule I remember is located.
I mean, I'd be ecstatic if GW released the rules online all at once (after public beta testing), then produced hardcopy codices (with the same rules) as printing schedules allow. I'd rather print out the 10-30 pages of rules for a new edition and then wait for them to be formatted in a shiny new codex rather than have getting new rules be tied to the book.
But of course GW wouldn't sell as many books that way, so here we are.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
If they don't want to buy more powerful units, that's fine but they should expect to lose just like I expect to lose before I have properly learned my army.
It's an overtly adversarial style of play where you're not looking to both have a good time; it's on your opponent to create their own fun while you do the same.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
If they don't want to buy more powerful units, that's fine but they should expect to lose just like I expect to lose before I have properly learned my army.
cool, so when will you learn your army?
Because if you're just going to keep on doing your whole "buy units only if they're being used in meta lists"? It means you haven't learned your army. It means you've learned where to find lists to copypasta.
Gadzilla666 wrote: "Vaguely" being the operative word. It's obvious that they just concentrate on whatever is currently "meta" and a few hand picked units in CA, while leaving older/more obscure units/factions to rot. I seriously doubt letting top level competitive players in on the "balancing" decisions will help with that either. They'll mostly just be interested in whatever is currently "competitive".
Its possible. Varies I think from player to player.
I know that while I want a balanced game - I'm simultaneously interested in meta churn. Its always disappointing if a codex is released and the result is "eh, its kind of fun I guess, but its just going to get steamrolled by the top lists at the moment so few competitive players are going to bother with it". But having every codex be "New meta!!!" undoubtedly feeds the codex creep I dislike.
The argument could be that a more tightly balanced game would allow for organic meta evolution - but as said, its not happened historically in 40k and I think its relatively rare after the first few weeks in any game outside of changes to that game state. The best stuff would still be the best stuff, even if the gap would hopefully be lower.
It sort of brings you back to "what would a balanced game look like". Because the idea you should be able to bring anything and win a major feels kind of impossible. Equally however if you see many factions placing, its probably in a reasonably healthy place. But this leads to the idea that 9th actually is fairly balanced - but lots of people feel upset about it.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I
Don't put things on ebay. Simples.
Simpler things:
Don't just buy units because "they're being used in meta lists".
If I play against mostly competitive lists and in tournaments, why would I buy units that aren't competitive? This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument. Then the people making this argument claim that competitive players are killing the hobby. LUL
They should be just "events" and that everyone should chase the meta along with them to play "properly".
I play narrative events sometimes and hear the same complaints. My stance is if you want list-building restrictions, then tell me about them before the event starts. Don't say "ok we're running a necromunda campaign starting at 1,000 creds" and then get mad when I rock up with 4 plasma guns on my van saar. If you don't want me bringing 4 plasma, that's fine just limit special 1 weapons to 1 of each kind per gang. I'm fine with that. I'm not fine with making arbitrary restrictions halfway through an event just because certain people feel a list is "too strong". If you want fluffhammer comps, make that a requirement to begin with. Don't just tell me a point value and then complain my army is too strong when it's built to your army composition requirements in the first place.
An interesting (I think) question just occurred to me:
If 40K, entirely as it is rules wise and codex wise, would be played with dirt cheap paper tokens instead of expensive miniatures and all the rules were in the living ruleset electronic format you only have to pay once or pay a very small subscription for it, would you consider "solving the unbalanced meta" a bug or a feature?
Absolutely a bug.
Because MY hobby is miniature gaming/miniature wargaming. And you've just taken the minis out of it.
And to add insult? Then you propose charging me a subscription fee?? FOR WHAT? I can already get every rule & pictures of the models free. So can everyone else.
Toofast wrote: This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument.
If you refuse to tone down your list so that a less-cutthroat opponent can have fun too, or refuse to take a thematic/narrative force for a narrative event when there's opportunity to min-max, that's exactly what you're doing.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
If they don't want to buy more powerful units, that's fine but they should expect to lose just like I expect to lose before I have properly learned my army.
I'm not sure I'd call "buying meta units" learning the army. The problem with this approach is it's just as likely - if not more likely - to lead to new people just not wanting to play, either against you, or the game in general. Maybe you don't see that as your problem, but eventually it will be.
A more balanced game benefits everyone. Except, ironically enough, players like you who try to buy their way to success. The biggest barrier I've found to getting people involved in 40k is when new players see how bad the balance is and baulk at having to invest time and effort into getting units they don't want, just to be competitive. Alternatively, they look at the units they have bought and get discouraged because their fluffy Tau army is getting dismantled by a spammy DE list. I'm all for groups playing how they want, but taking an attitude towards new players that is extremely likely to be discouraging is TFG behaviour, IMO.
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I
Don't put things on ebay. Simples.
Simpler things:
Don't just buy units because "they're being used in meta lists".
If I play against mostly competitive lists and in tournaments, why would I buy units that aren't competitive? This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument. Then the people making this argument claim that competitive players are killing the hobby. LUL
If you're playing "mostly competitive lists and in tournaments", you're not playing with casual players. LUL
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I only have 2k-2.5k points for any given army at a time and usually it's a 2k meta list with a few other competitive units to swap in for different metas...
I may be misreading this, so feel free to correct me, but this bit sounds like you expect new players to purchase new units that they may not want or like so that their list can be "toned up" to your standards, yet you are unwilling to keep extra units around (or potentially purchase a few yourself) to "tone down" your list to their capacity. If so, why do you consider that OK?
If they don't want to buy more powerful units, that's fine but they should expect to lose just like I expect to lose before I have properly learned my army.
No. They, and everyone else, should expect gw to give us a reasonable enough balance that there isn't a massive gap between various units/factions. At that point actual player skill would start to matter more than ones ability to follow the meta and buy their way to the top by throwing money at "meta units".
Tyel wrote:
Gadzilla666 wrote: "Vaguely" being the operative word. It's obvious that they just concentrate on whatever is currently "meta" and a few hand picked units in CA, while leaving older/more obscure units/factions to rot. I seriously doubt letting top level competitive players in on the "balancing" decisions will help with that either. They'll mostly just be interested in whatever is currently "competitive".
Its possible. Varies I think from player to player.
I know that while I want a balanced game - I'm simultaneously interested in meta churn. Its always disappointing if a codex is released and the result is "eh, its kind of fun I guess, but its just going to get steamrolled by the top lists at the moment so few competitive players are going to bother with it". But having every codex be "New meta!!!" undoubtedly feeds the codex creep I dislike.
The argument could be that a more tightly balanced game would allow for organic meta evolution - but as said, its not happened historically in 40k and I think its relatively rare after the first few weeks in any game outside of changes to that game state. The best stuff would still be the best stuff, even if the gap would hopefully be lower.
It sort of brings you back to "what would a balanced game look like". Because the idea you should be able to bring anything and win a major feels kind of impossible. Equally however if you see many factions placing, its probably in a reasonably healthy place. But this leads to the idea that 9th actually is fairly balanced - but lots of people feel upset about it.
No, you shouldn't be able to bring just "anything" and win a major. But things should be balanced enough that you can't just pick a winner based on looking at two army lists. There should be reasonable internal and external balance for as many different units/factions as possible. And right now gw is not trying very hard to do that.
You can look at some things and see how bent they are after about 5 minutes. Those are the things that need culled.
Its been a while but two examples from 40k I had a problem with when I quit that I posted a few pages back that I'll reiterate here:
My thousand sons couldn't operate as thousand sons because their units were just very minimal output and very high cost. That was glaringly obvious in 5 minutes of reading the book. That should never have been released.
Playing against an army at the time that could just bring back dead models into new units over and over again. I was told that that wasn't a problem at top tables so wasn't a problem.
That attitude is exactly one of my problems, because thats great if you are running a top meta army - the free extra points those armies at the time were getting weren't a problem for those top table armies. But for the rest of the game they were absolutely a problem and a huge negative play experience. It shouldn't have existed in the way it did.
The knight army I faced that vaporized me in 2 turns. Not a problem on top tables I was told... but against casual armies that weren't rocking top 5 meta lists a huge problem.
Those things can be spotted from a great distance immediately and should not exist. Or if we feel compelled, there should be formats that exist that are more restricting that don't have to be houseruled (because houserule comp never turns out well and always generates anger and rage and red faced tantrums in my experience).
Now the answer I hear often is simply "git gud - you played a bad army you should lose" - but thats not really how 40k is marketed. It would be nothing to have for me run the magnus/mortarion/demon tag team combo that you were supposed to run in the day and suddenly I've gitten gud and can play well again like magic - but 40k is supposed to be this grand game of choice that we all know doesn't really exist. It requires people knowing how to tone down for the appropriate scenarios and events, which is the thing that is a problem at the end of the day because some consider that arbitrary, some will do their best to hyper optimize in any system so even if you give them a houseruled comp they will find a way to bust it - because the game is just not in a good state as far as that is concerned, and many are under the mistaken belief that points == balance so when they get in to the hobby they feel 2000 points should feel like 2000 points and are then given the awakening that sometimes 2000 points will be 5,000 points and you have to rock up to the table with that type of army or not bother playing.
I dont know that that is a problem in 40k land because the player base is so massive it self sustains itself when people quit so the people that want to hyper optimize are really not affected at all and it truly is a not my problem kind of scenario. In smaller games this would be felt more acutely.
Tyel wrote:It sort of brings you back to "what would a balanced game look like". Because the idea you should be able to bring anything and win a major feels kind of impossible.
No, you shouldn't be able to bring just "anything" and win a major. But things should be balanced enough that you can't just pick a winner based on looking at two army lists.
I'd say that in a balanced game it should still be possible to build a list wrong, and I would not expect (or want) that you can take just anything and still have an even shot at winning.
However, I would expect 'building a list wrong' to mean not taking critical functions needed for your army to win, like building a completely static army when the objectives will require movement, or not bringing any anti-tank. Whereas right now in 40K it's too easy to build a list wrong by stumbling into pitfalls that you probably wouldn't recognize without game experience- units that seem like they should fulfill a valid niche but can't do it effectively, cost too much for what they provide, or imply a style of play that doesn't function in practice.
It's also better if there aren't any standout units that constitute must-haves and shape listbuilding. That's where a lot of the meta-chasing comes from, spamming certain units and combos that punch above their weight.
Basically I'd like to see listbuilding being about thinking how your army is supposed to work and what objectives it needs to accomplish, and not about taking more of X and less of Y and don't forget this upgrade, this relic, and this WLT that together let you crap out 3D6 mortal wounds and regenerate wounds on Tuesdays.
Toofast wrote: This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument.
If you refuse to tone down your list so that a less-cutthroat opponent can have fun too, or refuse to take a thematic/narrative force for a narrative event when there's opportunity to min-max, that's exactly what you're doing.
Except certain armies are straight up better with a TAC list vs other armies and their TAC list. So how does that work for you?
Toofast wrote: It's not that easy to tone lists down because I don't buy units unless they're being used in meta lists. If a unit sits on my shelf for years without rotating into the meta, it usually goes on ebay. I
Don't put things on ebay. Simples.
Simpler things:
Don't just buy units because "they're being used in meta lists".
If I play against mostly competitive lists and in tournaments, why would I buy units that aren't competitive? This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument. Then the people making this argument claim that competitive players are killing the hobby. LUL
If you're playing "mostly competitive lists and in tournaments", you're not playing with casual players. LUL
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
LMFAO.
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
LMFAO.
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
This lol
Most casual players I knew of were more then fine with units that did not come in the box. I never once saw a player happy that GW removed unit options that did not come in a kit.
Casual players overwhelmingly are the ones taht want GW to release rules for models that don't even exist to give us an excuse to kitbash and convert stuff, but sure, its *our* fault that GW is only providing units with options that are in the kit.
catbarf wrote: Basically I'd like to see listbuilding being about thinking how your army is supposed to work and what objectives it needs to accomplish, and not about taking more of X and less of Y and don't forget this upgrade, this relic, and this WLT that together let you crap out 3D6 mortal wounds and regenerate wounds on Tuesdays.
To be contrarian - I think the issue is that 9th does let you do this, its just most players aren't interested.
I mean I'm not sure people would have identified Siegler's LVO winning list as the best available.
To my mind a good MSU list will focus on a few shooting threats (often not that many really - at least in the current meta before the changes kick in), some potent combat options to keep pressure on objectives and hopefully exchange up, and plenty of of small chaff units who can commit to orders, can sit on backfield objectives, or just generally chaff up the opponent - and deny those enemy assault units those good exchanges mentioned before.
But... well, I'm sort of done. You then get into what units/bonuses to plug into those various bits to theoretically be better than the rest.
Toofast wrote: This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument.
If you refuse to tone down your list so that a less-cutthroat opponent can have fun too, or refuse to take a thematic/narrative force for a narrative event when there's opportunity to min-max, that's exactly what you're doing.
Except certain armies are straight up better with a TAC list vs other armies and their TAC list. So how does that work for you?
Tweak as necessary, get somewhere in the ballpark of a fair fight, rather than crossing your arms and saying 'I refuse to use anything other than the strongest possible meta-chasing competitive build the rules will allow'?
Yeah I'd second Tyel's comments. Players aren't interested in that type of list building. Thats just the current culture defining the game and what they want.
If I ruled the 40k world, you'd have a series of scenarios that were in the mix randomly generated that all benefited certain builds and were challenging for certain other builds.
The scenarios would enforce composition so if you min maxed one way, you risked rolling a scenario that didn't suit your min maxing, pushing you to have to keep all of those things in consideration.
That also is not desirable from a tournament player stand point because you can't optimize very well in that type of environment, but thats how any game I design is usually built around.
Tyel wrote: To my mind a good MSU list will focus on a few shooting threats (often not that many really - at least in the current meta before the changes kick in), some potent combat options to keep pressure on objectives and hopefully exchange up, and plenty of of small chaff units who can commit to orders, can sit on backfield objectives, or just generally chaff up the opponent - and deny those enemy assault units those good exchanges mentioned before.
But... well, I'm sort of done. You then get into what units/bonuses to plug into those various bits to theoretically be better than the rest.
Well yeah, that's definitely part of the game already, although as you note it's pretty shallow. But where it falls apart for me is that you can correctly observe all the things you need to make a functional army, and then pick seemingly appropriate units for those roles that just don't work. You need an understanding of which units are good or bad for their points, whether their capabilities align with their fluff/description, and what combos to take to wring the most effectiveness out of the units. That's where the min-maxing and pitfalls come in that make or break a list.
You could easily take Siegler's winning list, substitute each unit with a less-performant but theoretically role-equivalent counterpart, and make it considerably worse while in theory being based on the same set of identified needs.
auticus wrote: Yeah I'd second Tyel's comments. Players aren't interested in that type of list building. Thats just the current culture defining the game and what they want.
That I can't argue with. There does seem to be success in encouraging players to churn-and-burn in pursuit of an ever-changing meta.
auticus wrote:Yeah I'd second Tyel's comments. Players aren't interested in that type of list building. Thats just the current culture defining the game and what they want.
If I ruled the 40k world, you'd have a series of scenarios that were in the mix randomly generated that all benefited certain builds and were challenging for certain other builds.
The scenarios would enforce composition so if you min maxed one way, you risked rolling a scenario that didn't suit your min maxing, pushing you to have to keep all of those things in consideration.
That also is not desirable from a tournament player stand point because you can't optimize very well in that type of environment, but thats how any game I design is usually built around.
You literally just described what happens when you use the open war deck to figure out missions.
They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".
They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense".
That's fething lame. Every single game I've played of 8th & 9th has been open war deck scenarios.
They can be totally unfair or screw both players equally. The only time we draw again is if it's something that will not effect either player.
What's the fun in that.
We also play on terrain rich tables with lots of features and actual environmental effects like; blackout, sand/duststorm, and acid rain(my personal fav).
No. Despite being a creative endeavour, the creators and artsy types working in the Studio make nothing up.
Rather, the Studio is home to a frankly magnificent Squid, called Robert, the like of which is entirely unknown to science.
Those who work within the studio simply massage Robert’s chesticles, and new content is squirted out. How good your new edition or Codex is depends entirely upon how much of Robert’s excretions can be caught, mid arc, in the very same plastic coffee cup for an early 80’s vending machine they’ve always used since the very beginning.
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
LMFAO.
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?
Toofast wrote: This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument.
If you refuse to tone down your list so that a less-cutthroat opponent can have fun too, or refuse to take a thematic/narrative force for a narrative event when there's opportunity to min-max, that's exactly what you're doing.
Except certain armies are straight up better with a TAC list vs other armies and their TAC list. So how does that work for you?
Tweak as necessary, get somewhere in the ballpark of a fair fight, rather than crossing your arms and saying 'I refuse to use anything other than the strongest possible meta-chasing competitive build the rules will allow'?
You're missing the point. 8th Imperial Guard as a TAC was significantly stronger than a Daemons TAC, yes or no?
auticus wrote: You can look at some things and see how bent they are after about 5 minutes. Those are the things that need culled.
It's not hard to find bad hot takes, confirmation bias just makes it all seem obvious in hindsight.
auticus wrote: If I ruled the 40k world, you'd have a series of scenarios that were in the mix randomly generated that all benefited certain builds and were challenging for certain other builds.
The scenarios would enforce composition so if you min maxed one way, you risked rolling a scenario that didn't suit your min maxing, pushing you to have to keep all of those things in consideration.
That also is not desirable from a tournament player stand point because you can't optimize very well in that type of environment, but thats how any game I design is usually built around.
Also we usually found the bent things 5 minutes after opening the book for the first time, not in hindsight. For both 40k and aos they were usually pretty easy to hone in on.
They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".
Did you poll them to see how many had actually played with them previously? From my own experience, I'd bet it was less than 1 in 10.
EviscerationPlague wrote: You're missing the point. 8th Imperial Guard as a TAC was significantly stronger than a Daemons TAC, yes or no?
I'm sure I am missing the point, because you're not actually making one. Yes, some armies building a generic TAC list are stronger or weaker than others. A late-8th Marine army and a late-8th Tau army were not on the same level. So what? That doesn't mean you can't adjust to make a matchup more balanced.
Just a difference in mission taste, I don't want to win or lose based on the mission rolled before the battle or whether we face each other round 1 or round 4 in an event, I want the mission to change how victory is achieved, not whether it is achieved.
Bad Dakka predictions: Boyz will be terrible in 9th, T5 Boyz will be OP, transhuman Deathwing OP, Iron Hands/Drukhari/AdMech are fair.
Railgun HH stats are fine/insane, one will turn out to have been obvious but both have been made
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
LMFAO.
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?
Casual players were fine procuring those bits as well. The silly changes to unit loadouts has nothing to do with either casual or competitive player preferences.
Maelstrom/ETC encouraged a much less chess-like mentality to list building than ITC. Winning lists were generally much more focused on flexibility and therefore "softer" as a result. I.E. in 8th a list of mass Chimera with Guardsmen inside could win a big tournament - while in ITC this would surely just get nuked out of existence.
But equally, losing because you've just drawn a load of bad cards - while your opponents hand has gone "this turn do A, score loads of points, next turn do B and score loads more points etc" is kind of lame.
The best outcome would be to somehow marry up the two. But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.
They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".
Did you poll them to see how many had actually played with them previously? From my own experience, I'd bet it was less than 1 in 10.
I asked variations of it but would just get nasty responses in return about house rules and unofficial 40k and making up rules as I go. They really really hated the concept of anything that wasn't official ITC tournament 40k. (A lot of them also used "campaign" or pick up games as their tournament tuning games, so to them it would be a waste of time playing things that they wouldn't encounter in a tournament)
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
LMFAO.
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise.
You have very different experiences than I do then. The comp players locally wouldn't shut the hell up about how it was "garbage" that the "Skitarii could take 3x plasmas but only came with 1" during the time of the Drop Pod Skitarii+War Convocations of 7E.
See this?
Spoiler:
That was my "buy-in" for Skitarii. I sold the Calivers out of the boxes to the people running the Flesh Tearers Taxi Services, and they paid for two of my three initial Onagers...and when the War Convocation dropped? I added on another stack of Skitarii same as that size, sold off the Calivers again and got another 3 Onagers.
Do you know why I was able to pull that off? It wasn't because the "competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise". There's a finite number of bits out there when it's something that's a big deal like Arc Rifles or Plasma Calivers.
Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?
Again, do you think that's casual players pushing it? Because it really is not.
vict0988 wrote: Just a difference in mission taste, I don't want to win or lose based on the mission rolled before the battle or whether we face each other round 1 or round 4 in an event, I want the mission to change how victory is achieved, not whether it is achieved.
Yeah - I don't see how thats possible unfortunately. In my experience you can't have both. If missions are the way they are now where the current listbuilding meta works with them, its just a stale set of scenarios that don't REALLY change up things. They are basically the same set of scenarios with minor differences but you still built lists the same way to achieve ALL of them.
But I also don't see missions being the arbitrator of what wins or not being much different from me showing up with my thousand sons and getting t-bagged by my opponent because I brought the wrong army (the non ITC tournament army). The only difference is that the scenarios being static way means I can 100% choose to chase the ITC meta and have good games. THe other I have to try and build along multiple mission parameters and cannot min max for any of them which makes it harder for me (but to me more satisfying).
I don't see my way ever happening in 40k land though so no worries
Casual players were fine procuring those bits as well. The silly changes to unit loadouts has nothing to do with either casual or competitive player preferences.
It actually does have to do more with the competitive playerbase. It's the same reason that the Kharadron Overlords' Thunderer unit had their loadouts changed.
But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.
Different mentalities. For those that want 100% control, yes its a huge feel-bad for a random element to occur you didn't optimize for.
For someone like me, that keeps the game fresher and allows for things I didn't even think of happening, which I enjoy quite a bit. However the maelstrom cards do have a tendency to go over the top with that so I agree they need refined a lot more.
It's funny how Open Play Cards are shouted unfair despite them being balanced in the long run, but at the same time 50% win rate for a faction is the metrics for balance, despite it being just a tournament statistic and has nothing to do with you and your particular army odds at the table in a given game.
One of the CAs, I don't remember which exactly, had a mission set that was very varied, with the exact goal of forcing flexible lists. It was widely considered to be unfair and too random for matched play.
Now I wonder how those would be perceived if a single 40K game took 30minutes instead of 3hrs, so you could play in the best-of-3 or best-of-5 manner in a single evening at the FLGS.
It's funny how Open Play Cards are shouted unfair despite them being balanced in the long run
A pick up game at your FLGS isn't exactly the long run. I can understand wanting an individual game to be balanced.
Campaigns it's fine. You roll up an Open War or a random "narrative mission" which clearly favors one force or the other, finish it in half the time as a "real" game, get your RP/Glory/Credits/whatever and upgrade your force. Hey, maybe you'll be the one with the good luck next time! At least you got something out of it.
Pick up games or tournaments? I don't think Open War style or incredible imbalanced missions are good for those.
Currently have this problem with a different, non-GW game where the missions heavily favor different types of units. Just means everybody skews towards killing (which always wins the match, regardless of mission). Makes me very wary of that sort of format for tournaments/pick-up games.
vict0988 wrote: Just a difference in mission taste, I don't want to win or lose based on the mission rolled before the battle or whether we face each other round 1 or round 4 in an event, I want the mission to change how victory is achieved, not whether it is achieved.
Yeah - I don't see how thats possible unfortunately. In my experience you can't have both. If missions are the way they are now where the current listbuilding meta works with them, its just a stale set of scenarios that don't REALLY change up things. They are basically the same set of scenarios with minor differences but you still built lists the same way to achieve ALL of them.
But I also don't see missions being the arbitrator of what wins or not being much different from me showing up with my thousand sons and getting t-bagged by my opponent because I brought the wrong army (the non ITC tournament army). The only difference is that the scenarios being static way means I can 100% choose to chase the ITC meta and have good games. THe other I have to try and build along multiple mission parameters and cannot min max for any of them which makes it harder for me (but to me more satisfying).
I don't see my way ever happening in 40k land though so no worries
In the new GW missions there's a mission that awards victory points for each unit killed to a max of 3 per turn, here your Thousand Sons would be at a disadvantage against Knights, while on the mission where your 5-man Rubric squads can plant or defuse bombs more pts-efficiently than Knights can you'd be at an advantage. Let's forget about secondaries and holding objectives and all the other things that are in the mission pack and just focus on what you like here. If you play against Knights you win all the time playing one mission and lose all the time playing the other mission, how is this one terrible game improved by the knowledge the Knight player will most likely win one of his other matches after you get a free win against him this time make the game more fun?
I think having 5 unique types of primaries and a unique combination of objective placement and deployment zones + a unique and thematic secondary option is more fair and interesting. A mission where there are 3 objectives along the sides of the battlefield where you have to hold 2/3 is vastly different from a mission where you only have to hold one of the 5 objectives that are placed near the center of the battlefield. Add the difference between the fighting for the middle against one type of list vs another and fighting for the sides vs one type of list vs another to me that's more fun than doing rock-paper-scissors to see if Knights or Thousand Sons get the easy win mission.
GW getting rid of the ITC Champions missions kill/kill more objective was a really good idea and actions are neat way to lower lethality in the game and give units with an otherwise small impact a chance to win the mission for you.
Tyel wrote: Maelstrom/ETC encouraged a much less chess-like mentality to list building than ITC. Winning lists were generally much more focused on flexibility and therefore "softer" as a result. I.E. in 8th a list of mass Chimera with Guardsmen inside could win a big tournament - while in ITC this would surely just get nuked out of existence.
But equally, losing because you've just drawn a load of bad cards - while your opponents hand has gone "this turn do A, score loads of points, next turn do B and score loads more points etc" is kind of lame.
The best outcome would be to somehow marry up the two. But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.
I don't think you needed much flexibility for Maelstrom, ITC was too focussed on lists that could obliterate the enemy or were insanely tough, but it's not like that wouldn't work in Maelstrom since there were rewards like kill 3 units or cast a bazillion psychic powers which rewarded making lists that could kill 25% of the enemy army turn 1 or just spam psykers as much as possible instead of making something "softer". Needing to have a psyker in your Necron list to complete the Master the Warp objective didn't need you to create a softer list, it needed you to cheat since Necrons do not get psykers. The deck-building fix also turned out to be tedious and worsened what was a fun casual format in order to cater to the crazies that thought Maelstrom belonged in tournaments.
how is this one terrible game improved by the knowledge the Knight player will most likely win one of his other matches after you get a free win against him this time make the game more fun?
All knight lists are skew lists. In warfare, skew forces are specialist forces great at certain things and not so great at other things. I was a tanker in the army, and there were absolutely missions you did not send us on because tanks were really bad at certain things.
I expect the same thing in wargames.
Skew lists are to me directly relational to bad balance. They are the min max lists that skew to one thing heavily to stack math in their favor and they flourish in an environment where they know they will always be good at.
Missions that have different primaries are great and what I am after. But they have to really be different enough or else they aren't doing their job.
Any missions where I can ignore mission parameters and just aim to kill my enemy to win is an example of (to me) bad mission design, because as a min max optimizer I can just ignore all mission parameters and optimize lethality. This is what many tournaments i've been to in the past 30 odd years of being involved in tabletop wargames have focused on and those allow skew to flourish.
The question then posed is "but is it fair for that skew player (knights, all melee, all long range anti tank, all tank parking lot, whatever skew you want to talk about) is going to be PUNISHED" and to me the answer is yes. If you actively choose to run a skew list, you should have some risks involved with that. As a balanced player trying to run thousand sons rubric marines the way the narrative says I should, I am punished by having to face something like all armor skew because I have to run anti-armor skew to have a fun game. So I'd have to know that ahead of time (which we call list tailoring which is as I have been told for a long long time evil and a bad thing and not fair or a good time).
The game tries to let you run skew lists and then treat them as if all of their matches should be even, which shoves the balance over to the skew lists, which is where you always get the phrase "its fine on the top tournament tables so its fine overall", because that just says "if you'd also run power skew you'd be fine so the game is fine". Its one big reason why balanced forces can't ever be balanced in 40k without your opponent and you cooperatively building lists to play against that would provide for that.
Armor is good at holding points on a battlefield. Armor is good to roll objectives with speed and good firepower. Armor is horrible at things like having to claim objective points (you need infantry for that) and horrible in battles where they are bottlenecked like city battles or canyons / keyholes.
I love systems that provide all of that so the one list to optimize them all can't exist. The open war deck with multiple mission types was a lot of fun in my experience, but the skew players always threw a fit because they couldn't optimize for them and their ITC lists were not able to dominate in that environment, and they did not want to go out and buy a force just for campaign so wanted all games to be ITC missions where their lists were tailor made and optimized for.
Open War cards are great. People actually banned them? Sheesh... talk about having fun the 'wrong' way.
Kanluwen wrote: You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
You think players were responsible for that frigging trash?
EviscerationPlague wrote: Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?
You really think that the players (of any type) had a hand in GW's changing the rules for unit upgrades?
They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".
Did you poll them to see how many had actually played with them previously? From my own experience, I'd bet it was less than 1 in 10.
I asked variations of it but would just get nasty responses in return about house rules and unofficial 40k and making up rules as I go. They really really hated the concept of anything that wasn't official ITC tournament 40k. (A lot of them also used "campaign" or pick up games as their tournament tuning games, so to them it would be a waste of time playing things that they wouldn't encounter in a tournament)
Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.
LMFAO.
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
This lol
Most casual players I knew of were more then fine with units that did not come in the box. I never once saw a player happy that GW removed unit options that did not come in a kit.
Here's how I explain the "What's in the box" load out option:
I'm with HBMC in placing the blame on GW rather than any type of player, with the Caveat that GW's rationale was that they were removing a barrier to NEW players (Casual vs. Competitive likely didn't even cross their mind). I say this because if you ARE a new player, it is a barrier to see that some of the "options" for a list do require you an extra box for the sake of a single weapon.
People don't hesitate to call a choice that isn't optimal a "trap choice" - funny that they never thought to call an optimal choice a "trap" because it isn't economically viable.
It's also possible that a secondary motivation was an attempt to encourage TAC lists.
The other thing that I find odd about the topic is that folks frequently say "Every decision GW makes is to maximize profit" - I actually tend to agree most of the time. But if huge numbers of people were buying multiple boxes to get an optimize load out, then it would seem that these load out changes would actually result in making less money.
PenitentJake wrote: The other thing that I find odd about the topic is that folks frequently say "Every decision GW makes is to maximize profit" - I actually tend to agree most of the time. But if huge numbers of people were buying multiple boxes to get an optimize load out, then it would seem that these load out changes would actually result in making less money.
But people weren't buying multiple boxes. They were going to bits sites and ebay to get them.
Except that the bits sites had to do what to restock?
Buy multiple boxes.
So whether the end user was paying GW or the bits seller was paying GW, the older lists would still be more profitable if large numbers of players were fielding an optimized load out.
(Barring recasters, knock-offs and 3d printers that is)
So whether the end user was paying GW or the bits seller was paying GW, the older lists would still be more profitable if large numbers of players were fielding an optimized load out.
But GW doesn't see it that way. They see it as people buying bits from 3rd parties rather than buying entire new boxes from them.
So whether the end user was paying GW or the bits seller was paying GW, the older lists would still be more profitable if large numbers of players were fielding an optimized load out.
But GW doesn't see it that way. They see it as people buying bits from 3rd parties rather than buying entire new boxes from them.
Or third party at that
Automatically Appended Next Post:
H.B.M.C. wrote: Open War cards are great. People actually banned them? Sheesh... talk about having fun the 'wrong' way.
Kanluwen wrote: You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?
You think players were responsible for that frigging trash?
EviscerationPlague wrote: Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?
You really think that the players (of any type) had a hand in GW's changing the rules for unit upgrades?
Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.
It's weird that you would think the players have any impact there.
GW did it to undercut 3rd party bits sellers (and 3rd party bits makers as well, I suppose) because they were embarrassed in a very expensive court case.
Got nuthin' to do with "casual" players in the same way it ain't got anything to do with "competitive" players. It wasn't done as a balance decision, or an ease-of-use decision, or a barrier-to-entry decision, or a 'for the good of the game' decision. It was a business decision.
But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.
Different mentalities. For those that want 100% control, yes its a huge feel-bad for a random element to occur you didn't optimize for.
For someone like me, that keeps the game fresher and allows for things I didn't even think of happening, which I enjoy quite a bit. However the maelstrom cards do have a tendency to go over the top with that so I agree they need refined a lot more.
I still can't believe "discard and draw a new card if this card is impossible to achieve" had to be houseruled into the game. Literally 2 days into the edition, that was the standard houserule pretty much worldwide. When that's the case, you know the playtesters should've thought of it before the book was printed...
But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.
Different mentalities. For those that want 100% control, yes its a huge feel-bad for a random element to occur you didn't optimize for.
For someone like me, that keeps the game fresher and allows for things I didn't even think of happening, which I enjoy quite a bit. However the maelstrom cards do have a tendency to go over the top with that so I agree they need refined a lot more.
I still can't believe "discard and draw a new card if this card is impossible to achieve" had to be houseruled into the game. Literally 2 days into the edition, that was the standard houserule pretty much worldwide. When that's the case, you know the playtesters should've thought of it before the book was printed...
I totally agree and that was another wtf moment where you have to ask if the designers are even playing the game at all as well.
Didnt the same thing happen with powers as well? I want to recall daemons being broken beyond words because you could spam d3 mortal wounds like it was nothing.
Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.
What?
Just... what?
First, how in the world can new players be blamed for anything the company does? Are they reversing cause and effect and forcing GW to make bad decisions in the past?
That's so much worse than the usual 'blame the players' nonsense.
Second, no. Its entirely possible to recruit and train up new players in a 'tournament' mindset. I've seen it first hand- with Warmachine in this particular case, but the local Press Ganger took the casual game nights and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy. Terrain was replaced with colored acrylic panels and felt smears, and any scenario that wasn't in the current SteamRoller set was quietly retired and made 'out of bounds.' [Sad end to this story: the PG pushed enough of the players to another store with more regular tournaments and game night died]
and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy.
Amusing anecdote. One of our players made flash cards of scenarios you could rules lawyer and when the tournament team traveled and also during game night (training night) you'd drill on those cards.
The cards taught you how to argue both sides of any argument (a couple of the cards had three ways to argue the argument) as it was said that being able to argue rules to your favor was also a tournament skill.
When you hear stories about how a player argues something in their favor and then in the next game someone hears them arguing the same scenario in the opposite way, know that that is not a made up story and that it is in fact something people do train for lol.
and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy.
Amusing anecdote. One of our players made flash cards of scenarios you could rules lawyer and when the tournament team traveled and also during game night (training night) you'd drill on those cards.
The cards taught you how to argue both sides of any argument (a couple of the cards had three ways to argue the argument) as it was said that being able to argue rules to your favor was also a tournament skill.
When you hear stories about how a player argues something in their favor and then in the next game someone hears them arguing the same scenario in the opposite way, know that that is not a made up story and that it is in fact something people do train for lol.
Jesus thats insane to think this kinda thing happens. This is what i always mean when you can take out rules that "Caused arguments" but there will always be people like this to argue over anything in the game to just game the system.
auticus wrote: All knight lists are skew lists. In warfare, skew forces are specialist forces great at certain things and not so great at other things. I was a tanker in the army, and there were absolutely missions you did not send us on because tanks were really bad at certain things.
So as a Knight player I'm just going to refuse to play those missions, I'm playing narratively you know
The game tries to let you run skew lists and then treat them as if all of their matches should be even, which shoves the balance over to the skew lists, which is where you always get the phrase "its fine on the top tournament tables so its fine overall", because that just says "if you'd also run power skew you'd be fine so the game is fine".
I think you've got things the wrong way around, if Knights have a 50% win rate in your missions then people will say they are fine competitively, but when you look into it you will see Knights winning 70% in one mission and losing 70% in another mission. So you play the first mission and the game feels awful because wrenching victory points out of the Knights is damn near impossible and in the other mission your opponent cannot even put up a fight because that's the "Knights Bad! Mission". I want pure Knights to have a 40-55% win rate in every mission and an overall win rate of 45-48%. The question when you come to the table to play against Knights should be "do you have the tools to deal with Knights?" and "do you know how to leverage your tools?" not "are you playing the easy mission or the hard mission?"
PenitentJake wrote: People don't hesitate to call a choice that isn't optimal a "trap choice" - funny that they never thought to call an optimal choice a "trap" because it isn't economically viable.
Buying a unit and then never using it because it is 40% overcosted isn't economically viable, that's why we call it a trap. It's rare that units are 40% overcosted, that's usually worst unit in the game category, but each edition usually still has one to five of those, I own 3 Reanimators, if not for Chapter Approved they would be that overcosted.
Never heard of Timmy, Spike and Johnny? Never seen a 30-year veteran who has never sat down and read the actual rules of the edition but just play through osmosis and combines knowledge from several different editions to get through a game? Never seen someone who studied 40k religiously built a meta list and went straight to 2k points for their first game?
Voss wrote: Its entirely possible to recruit and train up new players in a 'tournament' mindset. I've seen it first hand- with Warmachine in this particular case, but the local Press Ganger took the casual game nights and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy. Terrain was replaced with colored acrylic panels and felt smears, and any scenario that wasn't in the current SteamRoller set was quietly retired and made 'out of bounds.' [Sad end to this story: the PG pushed enough of the players to another store with more regular tournaments and game night died]
"Vict you're not allowed to pre-measure, but see my arm *here* that's 11" long and there's no rule that says I cannot put my arm out over the table, see how I can tell that my Screaming Skull Catapult should fire about 30" now?"
"But mentor-sama that'll overshoot the unit you're aiming for"
"I'm not aiming for the unit I'm shooting at, I'm aiming at what's behind them and locked in combat."
Casual and super new players go hand in hand. I do blame them, correct.
What?
Just... what?
First, how in the world can new players be blamed for anything the company does? Are they reversing cause and effect and forcing GW to make bad decisions in the past?
That's so much worse than the usual 'blame the players' nonsense.
Second, no. Its entirely possible to recruit and train up new players in a 'tournament' mindset. I've seen it first hand- with Warmachine in this particular case, but the local Press Ganger took the casual game nights and turned them into tournament training camps about how to rules lawyer the most trivial nonsense to advantage and advised players on what they should and should not buy. Terrain was replaced with colored acrylic panels and felt smears, and any scenario that wasn't in the current SteamRoller set was quietly retired and made 'out of bounds.' [Sad end to this story: the PG pushed enough of the players to another store with more regular tournaments and game night died]
Agreed. I've met a number of new/newer players who jumped head-first into the competitive end of the 40k pool right off the bat. These are the kids who hear about the game online, learn as much as they can watching youtube, join some 40k subs and forums, pick up an understanding of gameplay and the meta pretty much through osmosis, etc. start building and planning an army and then show up to their first games with a list cribbed off of the guy who just won the LVO or whatever major tournament and talking about how whatever units really suck or something is "so OP" despite never having played before. Its not all new players, but its a decent number of them. Theres a lot more discourse out there from the competitive side than there is from the casual side, which usually means that those whos first introduction to the game comes by way of strangers on the internet (as opposed to friends and family who may be more casually oriented) will usually pick up the perspective of competitive gamers first.
If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:
At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.
And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.
A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.
auticus wrote: All knight lists are skew lists. In warfare, skew forces are specialist forces great at certain things and not so great at other things. I was a tanker in the army, and there were absolutely missions you did not send us on because tanks were really bad at certain things.
So as a Knight player I'm just going to refuse to play those missions, I'm playing narratively you know
Or, hear me out, Knights shouldn't just be Knights themselves but also their charges and full feudal houses?
Like be an actual full army list and not just Heavy / superheavy slots?
OR alternatively, be restricted to an certain ammount of points and not be sold as a full army.
And that is harsh, sure, but there is a thing called bad unfitting game design due to seize issues.
Knights literally tick all the issues associated to them. So does an all dreadnought army. A full tank army , etc. because all of these are forces and formations that do not fit the company level kinda GW intermediate Tg size.
(also , gw should really look into diversifying 40 k range of point level games and push better rules for apo and even smaller then normal 40 k games but gw does gw and just doesn't get it sometimes.)
Just as splitting out certain subfactions out of certain factions to DLC type sell rulesbooks is also rather bad from a game design perspective.
"Vict you're not allowed to pre-measure, but see my arm *here* that's 11" long and there's no rule that says I cannot put my arm out over the table, see how I can tell that my Screaming Skull Catapult should fire about 30" now?"
"But mentor-sama that'll overshoot the unit you're aiming for"
"I'm not aiming for the unit I'm shooting at, I'm aiming at what's behind them and locked in combat."
"I don't exactly think that's legal mentor-sama"
*Skeleton dancing ensues*
I liked 8th's "always aim 6" in front of your target because then you'll always hit unless you spike on a small target" because it took ALL the guess work out of cannons.
Bad Dakka predictions: Boyz will be terrible in 9th, T5 Boyz will be OP, transhuman Deathwing OP, Iron Hands/Drukhari/AdMech are fair.
Railgun HH stats are fine/insane, one will turn out to have been obvious but both have been made
I make predictions on a lot of units, but predominantly I stay in my lane as a purveyor of all thinks orky. When Boyz going to T5 was leaked, I was not surprised, in fact I had made that prediction almost a year prior in the Tactics thread. My initial reaction though was that I was afraid GW would nerf boyz in a host of other ways to make it a useless "buff". When the new Mob Rule got leaked along with the new boyz rules/strats etc I was 100% confident in my prediction that Boyz would be trash tier in the ork codex. Here we are 6 months later and my prediction has proven to be 100% correct.
So yeah, predictions can be all over the place but the broken/stupid ones are fairly easy to spot by the people who play that faction relatively competitively. The biggest problem for orkz is that most people who are "ork playtesters" don't actually play orkz as their main army, Reece saying the Stompa was OP as example 1-10,000.
Some things are so outrageous that anyone can see they are broken in and of themselves (IE in a vacuum) the aforementioned Transhuman deathwing is incredibly OP, sadly its one of the few things holding DA together atm, but that doesn't change the fact that it is OP. Chickenwalkers with D3+3 lascannons, obviously broken...so broken in fact that GW had to nerf them twice. I can keep going for a long time with obviously broken combos that were found within minutes of the rules releases but you get the point.
The problem with predictions stems from 2 major issues.
1: Not knowing the full extent of said unit. Boyz going to T5 is a great example of this. IN a vacuum if I told you that 8th edition boys were going to T5 you would immediately go "OH FETH! Thats broken!" and you would be right. outside that vacuum when you realize they suffered Nerfs to Ere we go, mob rule, lost +1 attacks, Lost 5++ KFF, lost all their stratagem support and now are losing about 40% of their mob to morale you can safely say "Oh feth they suck". So predictions made without the full picture can easily lead to errors, this among other reasons is why I'm still not sold on how OP the HH Railgun is going to be.
And 2: Non-faction players internal bias. As an ork player I see this a lot. "OMG ORKZ GET D3 ROKKITZ BROKEN!" or "That's ridiculous, flashgitz get 3 shots each!" Yes, in a SM list that would be broken. In an ork list where we hit on 5s and if we move or the enemy has -1 to hit we hit on 6s you quickly realize this isn't broken....and in fact its kind of crap. Case and point, Tankbustas, a unit armed exclusively with rokkitz is almost never seen, even in friendly games and Flashgitz which just got a buff (-2ppm) are still considered garbage tier. A lot of times people look at a unit or a part of one and internally they compare how that would work in their own army rather than how it synergizes with the army receiving that buff.
So as a Knight player I'm just going to refuse to play those missions, I'm playing narratively you know
Indeed thats been the story since skew lists were a thing, dating all the way back to the appendix imperial guard all tank list that was allowed into tournaments. If you introduced scenarios in campaigns where they had to move and take objectives, the player would refuse to play it (and likely call you out for playing house ruled unofficial nonsense).
In other games that do not reward skew by being always applicable, skew is not seen as much or only on special scenarios where you know you need an armor column for example. The reason being simply because skew is specialized and not all the missions try to tailor for allowing that, whereas in 40k its a feature (which again is why most of the lists I have ever encountered in my 40k career have been a version of some type of skew).
In Battletech if you show up to random games with a heavy or assault lance every game, you're going to have a bad time... because you are going to have scenarios where that heavy / assault lance is going to have rings run around it. Conversely there will be times that heavy / assault lance are the stars because some missions are tailor made for that.
Which is why in Battletech we have different lance types for different missions. Granted Battletech is a different world because there are often game masters controlling op-four, lists are screened, and there is no tournament standard that everyone builds to - but that is a game that is vastly more to my liking because the missions seem more like a wargame as you can't always run your heavy battalions every game and expect to do well all the time.
nou wrote: If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:
At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.
And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.
A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.
Except GW gets no data on how good any units are, only those specific lists and if you don't want to play that format with that list the game is going to have awful balance forever. Why would GW even be the best to set up this format? It was tournament organizers that invented Elder Dragon Highlander in MTG and it was popularized organically, not by Wizards of the Coast the owners of MTG. If you're interested in this format you could probably do a better job of setting up 8-16 balanced lists for it than GW could. But nobody actually wants to play this format, there is no organic interest, it's just a weird thought baby. It'd make more sense to do it with 500 pt lists, that way you can do a best of 3 format to increase the likelihood of the better player winning and I can have fun, tested and balanced lists to use for noob games.
Not Online!!! wrote: ...there is a thing called bad unfitting game design due to seize issues...
Why allow pure Knights to be really good at any mission? Why not make them bad in every mission?
Sim-Life wrote: I liked 8th's "always aim 6" in front of your target because then you'll always hit unless you spike on a small target" because it took ALL the guess work out of cannons.
Cannons should have worked like bolt throwers, scatter dice and templates should have been removed, steadfast should have been less reliable, hordes and spells that ignore magic resistance should not have been added to the game.
@SemperMortis I think Reece was too busy to do a great job being a playtester, if you want to hate him for being part of the Stompa being released at a useless pts cost that's fair, at the same time we also know that GW isn't good at making playtesters effectively playtest rules. As far as I recall it took a while before the Castellan took over the meta, so even one of the relatively strongest lists of all time was not immediately and obviously OP to anyone reading the book and the idea to combo it with Astra Militarum and Blood Angels weren't either, otherwise, everyone would have been taking it week 2 instead of week 24 or 36, I cannot remember exactly how long it took. Iron Hands and Drukhari players have defended their factions as being totally fair when they undoubtedly weren't, either people that play a faction are not always as good as you are at knowing how rules and points changes will affect the strength of their faction or all these people were trying to gaslight everyone on Dakka. I choose to believe ignorance over malice.
@SemperMortis I think Reece was too busy to do a great job being a playtester, if you want to hate him for being part of the Stompa being released at a useless pts cost that's fair, at the same time we also know that GW isn't good at making playtesters effectively playtest rules. As far as I recall it took a while before the Castellan took over the meta, so even one of the relatively strongest lists of all time was not immediately and obviously OP to anyone reading the book and the idea to combo it with Astra Militarum and Blood Angels weren't either, otherwise, everyone would have been taking it week 2 instead of week 24 or 36, I cannot remember exactly how long it took. Iron Hands and Drukhari players have defended their factions as being totally fair when they undoubtedly weren't, either people that play a faction are not always as good as you are at knowing how rules and points changes will affect the strength of their faction or all these people were trying to gaslight everyone on Dakka.
Reece among basically all other Ork playtesters
As far as Castellans...no they were OP from release. The problem, and biggest issue with them is that they were one of the newest armies in the game (if not the newest). And they weren't competitive in and of themselves, they were only competitive when you combined them across multiple different armies because they were incredibly CP hungry. In other words, you would have to know the new knights army AND another imperial faction really well in order to see the benefits, and specifically that 2nd faction would likely have to be Imperial guard since it was the loyal 32 that really broke the system and fed CP into that behemoth. The guy who won ITC in 2018 and then LVO in 2019 switched over from straight IG with a Shadow sword to an IG/Castellan list within months of the IK Codex coming out.
To your second point that obviously broken armies (Iron Hands/Drukhari) were defended by their player base...yes, this happens with every single broken faction, and usually its from the tryhards/WAAC players who don't want their easy mode button taken away. For every IH player who defended the codex there were at least a dozen pointing out the obvious problems. And most of those IH players were using armies painted Red, Blue or Green for some reason.....almost like SM players can just play numerous different factions by simply saying "I'm this codex now".
Another great example would be 7th edition where you had the Tau, Marine and Eldar players rabidly defending their codex saying they weren't broken. Remember 7th edition Eldar? Throw a dart at the Eldar codex a few times and you had a better than average competitive list basically. SM got 400-500pts of free vehicles. Tau got shoot twice triptides. So yeah, you will have players defend broken units/codex because they don't want to lose, but that doesn't change what I said. An honest person who understands a faction can tell you from the start whether a unit is badly broken or not. I still don't think Buggies/Dakkajets were broken. I think the combo with them in Freeboota was broken, but that could have easily been addressed a host of different ways instead of just nerfing the units into the ground. I think the main problem with that is the Freeboota Kulture is inherently OP when given even better than average shooting units. A dakkajet as an example with 36 S6 -1AP shots sounds broken at 120pts, until you realize without Freeboota kulture its only hitting 12 times on average. You are talking about 4dmg on average to a Marine. So 120pts kills 40pts of Intercessor. Make it freeboota and use the WAAAAGH! and that's when its firmly OP, it averages 21 hits and 9dmg to a Marine statline, or 120pts killing 90pts of Intercessor a turn.
nou wrote: If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:
At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.
And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.
A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.
Except GW gets no data on how good any units are, only those specific lists and if you don't want to play that format with that list the game is going to have awful balance forever. Why would GW even be the best to set up this format? It was tournament organizers that invented Elder Dragon Highlander in MTG and it was popularized organically, not by Wizards of the Coast the owners of MTG. If you're interested in this format you could probably do a better job of setting up 8-16 balanced lists for it than GW could. But nobody actually wants to play this format, there is no organic interest, it's just a weird thought baby. It'd make more sense to do it with 500 pt lists, that way you can do a best of 3 format to increase the likelihood of the better player winning and I can have fun, tested and balanced lists to use for noob games.
Since GW is now officially partnered with ITC I see no problem in relegating building such lists by ITC or even the council of the top players from the previous year. And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet, so it is no surprise, that there is no movement behind it. We sometimes discussed the idealised version of this with TOs providing armies (literally, providing minis) for participants, but my proposition get's rid of this problem. And you perfectly know, and it has been mentioned in this thread many times already, that in 40K if something is not god given official it might as well not exist at all, so this must come from either GW themselves or a large TO like ITC to gain traction.
But as Toofast already replied, I am perfectly aware, that such format will never exist in 40K, because despite all the talk about "skill measuring", most of competitive players focus on squeezing as much of advantage they can in the listbuilding stage, not actually having to show their tactical prowess during the game.
And I like your "mini" format of 500 pts. Heck, why not go full on this and make categories for Combat Patrol/Incursion/Strike Force. If 40k is suppose to evolve into an e-sport, why not follow how other sport disciplines are organised? Tournament scene in 40K has always been in this weird state of being pseudo-serious, half arsed endeavour that promotes all sorts of abuse, like those examples of training rules lawyering described above. My proposition let serious players train for the actual set of challenges new season provides. There is no chasing an ever broken meta, there is applying your deep understanding of the game to show your actual skill. There is even no problem with missing the mark with some of those lists, because if you (general you) are so good at spotting the OP/UP, you simply won't choose a given army and choose what you think gives you the best chances of winning.
And you are wrong about balancing only a specific subset of units, because, as I wrote, you can compose such lists from any units in the game. Then play a season with those units, then e.g. replace half of every list with other units and do an iterative balancing, so many times proposed in this thread as an ultimate solution to establish "good enough". With a proper design, you could cover a very large amount of units in just two-three seasons this way. And what else you achieve, is that if you construct tournament armies from mediocre units, then seal clubbing newbies and mismatches at FLGS would be far less common, because sworn tournament players would be training with mediocre armies, so the general health of the community would go way up because as shown by the Toofast reply - you get rid of minmaxers with "git gud" attitude toward newbies.
I see no real flaw in this concept except for enormous inertia of 40K community, stuck in ruts of list building as a vital skill and not wanting to accept the fact that there won't ever be enough balance to get rid of broken lists and seal clubbing. It has been 30 years now and such state has never been achieved. "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results..." and all that.
Agreed. I've met a number of new/newer players who jumped head-first into the competitive end of the 40k pool right off the bat. These are the kids who hear about the game online, learn as much as they can watching youtube, join some 40k subs and forums, pick up an understanding of gameplay and the meta pretty much through osmosis, etc. start building and planning an army and then show up to their first games with a list cribbed off of the guy who just won the LVO or whatever major tournament and talking about how whatever units really suck or something is "so OP" despite never having played beforet.
Ooh, I love running into those players. Especially the ones spewing statistics & talking crap.
I played one just last week (before the CA prs drop went into effect). College kid. From the conversation he A) played Custodes, B) evidently had a few games xp with the new codex already, C) was inquiring when the shops next tourney was/looking to practice & seeing when the best times to get games.
Thought he had it all figured out & that tourney win %s mean something.
So we grabbed a table & I demonstrated that it's not the Necron at the tourney you read about that you need to be concrrned with, it's the Necron your playing against....
If GW has noticed something is an issue at competitive events - you can bet it was there earlier than that. From what I remember "Knight meta" became a thing more or less instantly. Guard+BACP farming was also widely known by this point. I think we are talking week 6 at the latest (2 is more likely tbh - but I can't immediately identify the tournament) - certainly not 36, as that's approaching when the 2020 April FAQ came in to put the Castellan down.
The main reason I think that "Castellan+BA Captains+Guard" didn't absolutely dominate things immediately (or, arguably, ever) was that many debated whether this was in fact the best combo (something which I think would run and run). You could for example slot in Custodes biker captains. You could just go full on Guard. Some of these changes probably occured as a result of GW's changes to the game throughout this 9ish month period of woe.
In more practical terms - generally speaking theorycraft is easy when you are looking at A+B+C. So Semper's right, a lot of people overestimated the boyz changes (although some of us were I think replying to his thread just to keep the conversation going) because the nerfs and removals weren't as obvious. But undercosted buggies/flyers+freebooterz+Speed Waaagh=60-70% damage returns on loads of stuff was all too accurate. Because there was no obvious way it couldn't be.
(Its why yes I do think the Railgun HH is overpowered - if its not on meta because all desirable targets have been driven from the table that's hardly good for the game as a whole.)
The biggest prediction I'd say Dakka got wrong was that assault would be useless. This was rooted in the idea that 8th (and specifically 8th ITC) was devolving into castled up gunlines that hid in the corner. 9th's core rules did nothing for units trying to cross the table to get to do any damage - so how would they prove effective? Well it turns out the Primary objective does a good job of stopping that hide in the corner approach, as if you do your opponent will just run away with the Primary. But it was hard to make that leap without experience.
Regarding "skew lists", mission design, and win rates...
7th edition with formations and onward to 8th/9th with the detachment structure, let the genie out of the bottle and allowed players a lot of leeway to build "skew" lists within the context of competitive play. Back in the day, if people wanted to play knights or some other crazy list, you just talked to your opponent about playing a "narrative" game or whatever - maybe you picked a straight up fight/annihilation type mission.
The thing was, the "matched" play rules and mission designs, back in say 4th edition, were really quite varied in terms of objectives - much more so than they are today. 5th edition really started to simplify mission structure IMHO, but 4th was great. The result of this is that, when combined with the standard force org charts, you built lists accounting for the possibility of doing very different missions. How does my list work if I need to defend bunkers? What if I get ambushed? What units would I use if playing a sentries-based mission. Am I durable enough to hold the middle? Am I fast enough to get a force distributed across the board.
The greater diversity missions meant that there wasn't an optimal list relative to any given mission. You could take the approach of building a "skew" list, but that meant you might fare poorly on one set missions but excel at another. You could also take the approach of making a more "balanced" TAC list that had a good way to respond to any mission you might end up in.
When a critical mass of people deviated towards a "balanced" list it meant that the differences in relative list strength between any two matchups was reduced - making the game "slightly" less about list building and slightly more about tactical execution.
Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.
But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.
You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.
The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.
It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)
EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.
And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet
Nobody wants to play that format because people like listbuilding as part of the game. It would be like the NFL if the league dictated which players were on which teams. The GM position would be pointless, no trades, no free agency market, that stuff is a big driver for fan interest. Building a roster is part of winning a super bowl, which is how it should be. Building a strong list for the current meta and terrain/missions at a given tournament is part of winning a tournament, which is how it should be. Your idea isn't unpopular because it's so groundbreaking nobody has ever heard or thought of it, it's unpopular because it's a bad idea.
And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet
Nobody wants to play that format because people like listbuilding as part of the game. It would be like the NFL if the league dictated which players were on which teams. The GM position would be pointless, no trades, no free agency market, that stuff is a big driver for fan interest. Building a roster is part of winning a super bowl, which is how it should be. Building a strong list for the current meta and terrain/missions at a given tournament is part of winning a tournament, which is how it should be. Your idea isn't unpopular because it's so groundbreaking nobody has ever heard or thought of it, it's unpopular because it's a bad idea.
It's not a valid comparison. The valid comparison is if you let chess players pick their pieces before each game. Even if there were point costs to the pieces and, say, 2000pts allowance, and pieces abilities were "updated" every now and then, you would get as crap of a skill measuring game as 40K is.
And nobody want's to play this format, because to my knowledge, it hasn't been proposed yet
Nobody wants to play that format because people like listbuilding as part of the game. It would be like the NFL if the league dictated which players were on which teams. The GM position would be pointless, no trades, no free agency market, that stuff is a big driver for fan interest. Building a roster is part of winning a super bowl, which is how it should be. Building a strong list for the current meta and terrain/missions at a given tournament is part of winning a tournament, which is how it should be. Your idea isn't unpopular because it's so groundbreaking nobody has ever heard or thought of it, it's unpopular because it's a bad idea.
It's not a valid comparison. The valid comparison is if you let chess players pick their pieces before each game. Even if there were point costs to the pieces and, say, 2000pts allowance, and pieces abilities were "updated" every now and then, you would get as crap of a skill measuring game as 40K is.
You would be right, if this were designed as a symmetrical game with 1 faction. I would say 32 teams with different playstyles and a cap on how much they can pay for players is more analogous to 40k with multiple factions with different playstyles and a cap on how many points they can spend on their army than chess with 2 identical sides. You can't make both sides of 40k symmetrical unless you're only using a single codex.
Tyran wrote: Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.
That's why every time GW takes a choice a way from the player there is uproar.
Is a netlist really "your army with your choices"? How exactly an officially given set of lists is different from a set of netlists that dominate the meta every time around?
auticus wrote: Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.
But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.
You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.
The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.
It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)
EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.
Leaf blower could not exist in 4th as IG did not get vehicle squadrons until 5th, nor could all of their infantry take Chimeras unless they spent a doctrine point.
They didn't have a 4th edition codex, so you could only play 4th with the heavily constrained 3.5 Dex.
Tyran wrote: Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.
That's why every time GW takes a choice a way from the player there is uproar.
Is a netlist really "your army with your choices"? How exactly an officially given set of lists is different from a set of netlists that dominate the meta every time around?
Every single player at every single tournament doesn't play with a netlist. I usually look at netlists and make my own lists using a combination of those units, I don't just copy/paste the latest netlist. That's what most players do. I'll use recent LVO as an example again, the winning list was his own creation and not a copy/paste. The Tyranid lists that did well were all different, too. I don't see this problem either at huge GTs or in my monthly FLGS tournaments with 20 players. Where are you seeing tournaments with every single list being a copy/paste?
Tyran wrote: Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.
That's why every time GW takes a choice away from the player there is uproar.
Ehhhhhhh...
It has more to do with some people having invested time and effort into converting some of those choices. Or from models being invalidated.
If unmodeled wargear gets removed, we really don't see that same uproar.
Is a netlist really "your army with your choices"? How exactly an officially given set of lists is different from a set of netlists that dominate the meta every time around?
I think the feelsbad moments will actually decrease as tourney play gets more popular.
Increased awareness of it makes it easier to avoid if it isn't your thing. It will also push competitive players to put more effort into seeking out likeminded opponents rather than blundering into random pickups against casual players, as there will be more awareness and social stigma around guys labeled as baby seal-clubbers.
auticus wrote: Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.
But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.
You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.
The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.
It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)
EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.
Leaf blower could not exist in 4th as IG did not get vehicle squadrons until 5th, nor could all of their infantry take Chimeras unless they spent a doctrine point.
They didn't have a 4th edition codex, so you could only play 4th with the heavily constrained 3.5 Dex.
Well regardless, my last IG tournament list was from July 2007 (4th edition) and the name of the roster was entitled "Leaf Blower" which was the term being used at the time since I know I didn't invent it heh. Leaf blower in this case was a metric feth-ton of dice being rolled by as many guns as could fit in the list.
I see that the concept of "leaf blower" changed in 5th to be a form of mechanized list. Apparently per my google-fu when 5th dropped, a popular tournament IG player changed his list to be more mechanized and it was called Leaf Blower and that name stuck throughout the duration of 5th as well with that particular build. Or - there were two forms of Leaf Blower. The one running amuk in 4th and the one running amuk in 5th. At least in my region.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
artific3r wrote: I think the feelsbad moments will actually decrease as tourney play gets more popular.
Increased awareness of it makes it easier to avoid if it isn't your thing. It will also push competitive players to put more effort into seeking out likeminded opponents rather than blundering into random pickups against casual players, as there will be more awareness and social stigma around guys labeled as baby seal-clubbers.
That will probably vary by locale to locale but in my area that was most definitely not the case. The moer tourney play got popular, the more feelsbad moments occurred. Players were then given a choice - either modify their attitude to like the tournament play and meta, or leave.
The competitive players I have known overall with some minor exceptions didn't seek out likeminded opponents. They sought out 40k players, and expected 40k players to all play tourney style. They didn't ask if their opponent wanted tourney style, the assumption was that was what was going to happen. Labeling them baby seal-clubbers didn't matter because that was just coming from people who they labeled as bad at the game and were just upset that they couldn't be good at the game so had to blame it on their army lists, when it was obviously player skill that mattered (but you had to drill deep into that thought to uncover what it really meant - and to most of them that meant choosing to run meta lists was as much a part of the skill of 40k as playing on the table)
artific3r wrote: I think the feelsbad moments will actually decrease as tourney play gets more popular.
Spoiler:
Increased awareness of it makes it easier to avoid if it isn't your thing. It will also push competitive players to put more effort into seeking out likeminded opponents rather than blundering into random pickups against casual players, as there will be more awareness and social stigma around guys labeled as baby seal-clubbers.
That will probably vary by locale to locale but in my area that was most definitely not the case. The moer tourney play got popular, the more feelsbad moments occurred. Players were then given a choice - either modify their attitude to like the tournament play and meta, or leave.
The competitive players I have known overall with some minor exceptions didn't seek out likeminded opponents. They sought out 40k players, and expected 40k players to all play tourney style. They didn't ask if their opponent wanted tourney style, the assumption was that was what was going to happen. Labeling them baby seal-clubbers didn't matter because that was just coming from people who they labeled as bad at the game and were just upset that they couldn't be good at the game so had to blame it on their army lists, when it was obviously player skill that mattered (but you had to drill deep into that thought to uncover what it really meant - and to most of them that meant choosing to run meta lists was as much a part of the skill of 40k as playing on the table)
auticus wrote: Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.
But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.
You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.
The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.
It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)
EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.
Leaf blower could not exist in 4th as IG did not get vehicle squadrons until 5th, nor could all of their infantry take Chimeras unless they spent a doctrine point.
They didn't have a 4th edition codex, so you could only play 4th with the heavily constrained 3.5 Dex.
Well regardless, my last IG tournament list was from July 2007 (4th edition) and the name of the roster was entitled "Leaf Blower" which was the term being used at the time since I know I didn't invent it heh. Leaf blower in this case was a metric feth-ton of dice being rolled by as many guns as could fit in the list.
I see that the concept of "leaf blower" changed in 5th to be a form of mechanized list. Apparently per my google-fu when 5th dropped, a popular tournament IG player changed his list to be more mechanized and it was called Leaf Blower and that name stuck throughout the duration of 5th as well with that particular build. Or - there were two forms of Leaf Blower. The one running amuk in 4th and the one running amuk in 5th. At least in my region.
While it is indeed possible you titled your late 4th edition list "Leafblower", it has no meaning at the time to the community.
IG by late 4th were not winning tournaments regularly; with a badly out of date codex and points costs half a decade old.
The hallmarks of Leafblower in 5th were tons of artillery and templates to "leafblow" your opponent off the table. In 4th, this was effectively impossible - the lack of vehicle squadrons meant you could fit a maximum of 3 Large Blast ordnance templates in your list. In 5th, this changed to 9.
What does your 2007 "Leafblower" list look like? You can PM me if you wish but I should be able to tell what codex the list was from just by reading it.
Another possible solution for reducing inadvertent seal-clubbing: add a step to the Core Rules where players decide what style of game they're playing. And by that I don't mean a few random lines in the intro paragraphs of the hobby section of the rulebook, I mean literally make it "Step 1) Determine the style of game you want to play". This makes it crystal clear to the rules lawyer-y competitive types that you need to get through this step with your opponent and reach an agreement before you can even have a game.
Make players sit down with each other and choose between well-defined descriptions of Casual, Narrative, and Competitive before they even put their lists together. It's critical that the descriptions are accurate, and promote the kinds of playstyles people want.
Competitive can be defined as mathematically optimal lists, no restrictions on spamming units for any mechanical edge, and the freedom to design your list to be as hard as you want (within the limits of the Matched Play ruleset) -- anything goes. Recommended only if both players have larger collections, or are very experienced with the game.
Casual can be defined as "you're not exclusively trying to beat your opponent into a pulp, and you're making an effort to build a list that is fun for both you and your opponent." Recommended for most players.
I thought GW's tongue-in-cheek +10 VP for painted models was a great way of handling a similar issue, because it was a resounding signal to WAAC players that painted armies are indeed the "way the game is meant to be played". Anecdotally, this edition I haven't heard nearly as many stories of casual players being bullied by flavor-of-the-month grey tides, and I think that +10 VP rule may have been a big contributor. It very effectively solved the feelsbad scenario of getting smashed by an unpainted army, likely piloted by a rules lawyer-y competitive type, and it doesn't at all affect the rest of the players out there who have some basic level of social awareness.
artific3r wrote: Another possible solution for reducing inadvertent seal-clubbing: add a step to the Core Rules where players decide what style of game they're playing. And by that I don't mean a few random lines in the intro paragraphs of the hobby section of the rulebook, I mean literally make it "Step 1) Determine the style of game you want to play". This makes it crystal clear to the rules lawyer-y competitive types that you need to get through this step with your opponent and reach an agreement before you can even have a game.
Make players sit down with each other and choose between well-defined descriptions of Casual, Narrative, and Competitive before they even put their lists together. It's critical that the descriptions are accurate, and promote the kinds of playstyles people want.
Competitive can be defined as mathematically optimal lists, no restrictions on spamming units for any mechanical edge, and the freedom to design your list to be as hard as you want (within the limits of the Matched Play ruleset) -- anything goes. Recommended only if both players have larger collections, or are very experienced with the game.
Casual can be defined as "you're not exclusively trying to beat your opponent into a pulp, and you're making an effort to build a list that is fun for both you and your opponent." Recommended for most players.
I thought GW's tongue-in-cheek +10 VP for painted models was a great way of handling a similar issue, because it was a resounding signal to WAAC players that painted armies are indeed the "way the game is meant to be played". Anecdotally, this edition I haven't heard nearly as many stories of casual players being bullied by flavor-of-the-month grey tides, and I think that +10 VP rule may have been a big contributor. It very effectively solved the feelsbad scenario of getting smashed by an unpainted army, likely piloted by a rules lawyer-y competitive type, and it doesn't at all affect the rest of the players out there who have some basic level of social awareness.
Why do you need the rules writers to impose common courtesy for you. If you start playing against someone and you see they are being "that guy" just pack up and never play them again. If enough people in your community do this, then the amount of players that are available for "that guy" will diminish and they'll either change or move on. If your community adopts the tournament grinder mentality, then likewise, change to follow, keep playing your fluff lists and not care, or move on.
We don't need hand holding through social interactions to be a part of a rule-set in order to force jerks to stop being jerks... they won't stop being a jerk even if it's in writing. The only way to change a jerk is to hold them accountable for their poor attitude.
EDIT: As for the painted thing, I can't really relate, everyone who I've gotten into the game, the way I introduce it to them is through the hobby first then the game so we've always had games fully painted. We don't play often outside of our social group because we have an understanding of what each person is looking for in the hobby/game so a lot of these WAAC/grey tide style players never really rubbed us as bad as they may someone who relies solely on pic up games at a LGS.
artific3r wrote: Another possible solution for reducing inadvertent seal-clubbing: add a step to the Core Rules where players decide what style of game they're playing.
I think this is a great point.
People might point out that there's already "three ways to play" as we discussed earlier. But really we're talking about a "schism" in the attitude and approach towards "matched play." One person's matched play is casual, TAC/fluff lists and another is meta-responsive, optimal, tuned min-maxed.
Beyond the list building though, there are other elements that feed into this difference. Setting up the terrain in a "symmetrical" layout (ala most tournaments) as opposed more organic or asymmetric arrangement says a lot about the type of game one is playing. What set of missions gets played is also a big part of it. Why aren't the crusade missions (or one's similar to that) not available for "matched" play. There is a lot of possibility that exists between either crusade and competitive-matched play that isn't currently part of the equation.
nou wrote: If competitive players would be seriously about competition and measuring their skill in the actual game, the "pro league" tournament format should look something like this:
At the beginning of a new season, GW announces a set of 8-16 army lists. Those are fixed, 2000 pts lists that are the only lists legal in tournaments. Now burn and churn players will not mind buying new units, so that is not a problem. This creates a clear, hard and, most important, official divide between competitive and casual folks and at the same time provides a controllable and fair ground for tournaments. You can then level the field even further, by designing tournament mission packs and terrain layouts exactly for those armies. Another benefit - there is exactly zero room for min-maxing, the only leeway a player has is in choosing game time elements like relics, traits, etc. GW does not loose any money this way, because they directly control what tournament players have to buy and they will buy whatever won the last round before the next round starts. And then the season ends and the new is introduced, with new armies, so new units to buy. Moreover - now ANY unit can be a torunament unit, even thrash tier units, if only GW/offical TOs decide to make a "thrash tier units season", because every army in the tournament is on the same thrash level.
And what about casuals who want to participate in tournaments? Easy, the above is a "pro league", and next to it you can have an "open tournament" - no prizes, no glory, just an occasion to socialise and push minis around.
A win-win situation for everyone except for seal clubbers.
If they did this, I would actually consider attempting to play competitive events. This actually sounds like it would be fun and not just an exercise in which player can abuse listbuilding the most. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy listbuilding as an exercise in casual play, because I'm usually trying to build a list to fill a certain theme or my own concept of what an in-universe TOE/ORBAT might look like. When it comes to competitive gaming though I get no enjoyment out of it because the pool of viable units I can field is essentially cut down to somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd of the potential options available in most codexes, at which point I have less choice and flexibility than I would otherwise like.
Except GW gets no data on how good any units are, only those specific lists and if you don't want to play that format with that list the game is going to have awful balance forever. Why would GW even be the best to set up this format? It was tournament organizers that invented Elder Dragon Highlander in MTG and it was popularized organically, not by Wizards of the Coast the owners of MTG. If you're interested in this format you could probably do a better job of setting up 8-16 balanced lists for it than GW could. But nobody actually wants to play this format, there is no organic interest, it's just a weird thought baby. It'd make more sense to do it with 500 pt lists, that way you can do a best of 3 format to increase the likelihood of the better player winning and I can have fun, tested and balanced lists to use for noob games.
I think the opposite is true - GW gets better data about the efficacy and playability of units because they can force players to take units that they otherwise wouldn't take, and they know which lists are using which units (something which I am not sure their current meta analysis is able to zero in on) and from that can likewise extrapolate that certain units might be over or underperforming specifically, as opposed to their current analysis capabilities which can only judge that based on armies as a whole. Plus, by enforcing pre-built lists, they can also control for variables that they currently have no control over.
If anything, this is the means by which GW might get the highest quality data available.
Why do you need the rules writers to impose common courtesy for you.
Because the issues we're seeing in this thread stem from a lack of basic common courtesy among 40k players. Let's face it, wargamers are not the most socially aware crowd. The game's complexity and high level of investment attracts rules lawyer-y types who probably need the common courtesy stuff spelled out for them. Otherwise, if the rules say it is Good and Cool to show up to a pickup game with 170 wracks, then that's what some of our less socially attuned people are going to do.
artific3r wrote: Another possible solution for reducing inadvertent seal-clubbing: add a step to the Core Rules where players decide what style of game they're playing.
I think this is a great point.
People might point out that there's already "three ways to play" as we discussed earlier. But really we're talking about a "schism" in the attitude and approach towards "matched play." One person's matched play is casual, TAC/fluff lists and another is meta-responsive, optimal, tuned min-maxed.
Exactly. GW needs a tighter definition of what Matched Play is. And what Casual Play is. And what most people (especially newcomers) should probably be playing.
Unfortunately as it stands, Matched Play has become synonymous with "balanced play" because Matched is the only game mode GW actively supports with its balance updates. So of course the default playstyle is Matched Play, because people will always gravitate toward whatever game mode is seen as the most "fair". And since Matched Play doesn't have a rule against clubbing baby seals, and given that 40k attracts a lot of nerds with not-so-great social skills...
Why do you need the rules writers to impose common courtesy for you.
Because the issues we're seeing in this thread stem from a lack of basic common courtesy among 40k players. Let's face it, wargamers are not the most socially aware crowd. The game's complexity and high level of investment attracts rules lawyer-y types who probably need the common courtesy stuff spelled out for them.
Could just not play with those people, find a group of like minded individuals.
Why do you need the rules writers to impose common courtesy for you.
Because the issues we're seeing in this thread stem from a lack of basic common courtesy among 40k players. Let's face it, wargamers are not the most socially aware crowd. The game's complexity and high level of investment attracts rules lawyer-y types who probably need the common courtesy stuff spelled out for them.
Could just not play with those people, find a group of like minded individuals.
That's what I do. My suggestion above was more about offering a solution to the problems with the player community as a whole. Something that GW could implement and save a lot of players a lot of grief.
+1 to having a difference in the rules between hyper competitive vs narrative.
Could just not play with those people, find a group of like minded individuals.
Variety of reasons. Not withstanding that what I'm used to is people want to play at the store with their friends, and if their friends are hyper competitive people, they endure it.
Peoples' feelings get hurt if they are excluded. Social contracts, etc...
Not playing with your friends because they are hyper competitive is not the answer for a lot of people. Especially since that causes rifts in personal relationships that aren't worth it.
Tyel wrote: I like you Vict - but I'm not sure I'd agree with your memory.
The biggest prediction I'd say Dakka got wrong was that assault would be useless. This was rooted in the idea that 8th (and specifically 8th ITC) was devolving into castled up gunlines that hid in the corner. 9th's core rules did nothing for units trying to cross the table to get to do any damage - so how would they prove effective? Well it turns out the Primary objective does a good job of stopping that hide in the corner approach, as if you do your opponent will just run away with the Primary. But it was hard to make that leap without experience.
With regards to this I wonder when the obscuring rule was first made known. I think we were working with a partial picture when it seemed every new reveal was another death blow to melee units. Similarly back then we didn't know what an ideal terrain board looked like (neither did GW I think) because once they started running the opens they realised you need 4 giganticly based pieces of obscuring terrain with true line of sight blocking ruins stuck on top with all the windows sealed off.
I think we might start to find that it was the initial 9th edition points given to the shootiest factions (Guard and Tau) that made shooting look worse than it is. Having taken some Tau for a test drive, I can tell you that shooting people off the board seems a perfectly valid strategy again. We have already seen several very shooty factions/builds succeed (Ork buggy spam, Ork plane spam, AdMech troop spam, AdMech plane spam, GK/TS are very shooty but part of the shooting is moved to the psychic phase). A lot of the older 9th edition codexes we based the "wow melee is amazing now" concept on are struggling into the shooty lists. Dark Eldar are a melee faction and once they get sensible points costs it will feel a very shooty edition again I think.
Why do you need the rules writers to impose common courtesy for you.
Because the issues we're seeing in this thread stem from a lack of basic common courtesy among 40k players. Let's face it, wargamers are not the most socially aware crowd. The game's complexity and high level of investment attracts rules lawyer-y types who probably need the common courtesy stuff spelled out for them.
Could just not play with those people, find a group of like minded individuals.
Unfortunately for some, it is not feasible for distance/availability/etc...
I'm very happy when I came back to GW stuff that I found a flgs that had all types of players.
artific3r wrote: Another possible solution for reducing inadvertent seal-clubbing: add a step to the Core Rules where players decide what style of game they're playing.
I think this is a great point.
People might point out that there's already "three ways to play" as we discussed earlier. But really we're talking about a "schism" in the attitude and approach towards "matched play." One person's matched play is casual, TAC/fluff lists and another is meta-responsive, optimal, tuned min-maxed.
Exactly. GW needs a tighter definition of what Matched Play is. And what Casual Play is. And what most people (especially newcomers) should probably be playing.
Unfortunately as it stands, Matched Play has become synonymous with "balanced play" because Matched is the only game mode GW actively supports with its balance updates. So of course the default playstyle is Matched Play, because people will always gravitate toward whatever game mode is seen as the most "fair". And since Matched Play doesn't have a rule against clubbing baby seals, and given that 40k attracts a lot of nerds with not-so-great social skills...
For the edification of others, I'd also mention that the language and tone conveyed by "matched" play today leans towards competitively-minded, "tournament-style" play. There are a lot of queues to this effect. First is calling it "matched" play. Second are things like having the control points setup in a symmetrical arrangement on the map. These are the missions that are used in official tournaments, etc.
So while one might say, "just don't play with those people" ... the issue is that the matched play rules speak directly to the inclinations of competitive-minded players.
I'd like love to see match play presented such that you could play a "casual match "or a "tournament-style match" - with some actual rule differences and setting different expectations between the two.
auticus wrote: +1 to having a difference in the rules between hyper competitive vs narrative.
Once again, I have to iterate this does not work unless you can have GW externally balance. We have many examples of one army's TAC being better than another army, yes or no?
I'm not seeing how TAC armies are relevant to having tournament rules vs casual rules vs narrative rules or how balance has anything to do with these things.
Tournament rules are rules that state you are playing tournament style, balls to the wall, min/max, symetrical battlefields, etc.
Casual rules would be more about a default style where you aren't trying to club baby seals and where the scenarios and battlefields aren't dictated by whats taken at the ITC.
Narrative rules would be narrative restrictions to make your armies resemble those in the narrative as well as missions and scenarios that were narratively driven as opposed to being about tournament symmetry.
auticus wrote: I'm not seeing how TAC armies are relevant to having tournament rules vs casual rules vs narrative rules or how balance has anything to do with these things.
Tournament rules are rules that state you are playing tournament style, balls to the wall, min/max, symetrical battlefields, etc.
Casual rules would be more about a default style where you aren't trying to club baby seals and where the scenarios and battlefields aren't dictated by whats taken at the ITC.
Narrative rules would be narrative restrictions to make your armies resemble those in the narrative as well as missions and scenarios that were narratively driven as opposed to being about tournament symmetry.
The big difference is:
Restraint is on GW for Tourney Balance & Restrictions like RO3/1use of each strat per phase/etc. Bonuses like no holds barred
Restraint is on PLAYERS for Non-Tourney bonuses/restrictions like WYSIWYG for colour/weapon/chapter/whatever
Restraint is on players, that part I agree, but players are going to do what the rules say they can.
The problem as I see it is that everywhere you look its tournament style rules in effect 24/7 and I would like to see them actually differentiate the style of play in legalese so that players can't just ignore those.
auticus wrote: Restraint is on players, that part I agree, but players are going to do what the rules say they can.
The problem as I see it is that everywhere you look its tournament style rules in effect 24/7 and I would like to see them actually differentiate the style of play in legalese so that players can't just ignore those.
Current 40k is trying to have some legalese in it and they're still screwing up so be careful what you with for.
2. A formal step at the start of the Core Rules where both players must agree on which mode they want to play.
3. A version of Casual that receives most or all of the same balance updates as Competitive, but where the goal of listbuilding is to create a fun experience for BOTH players, rather than crushing your opponent into the dirt.
2. A formal step at the start of the Core Rules where both players must agree on which mode they want to play.
3. A version of Casual that receives most or all of the same balance updates as Competitive, but where the goal of listbuilding is to create a fun experience for BOTH players, rather than crushing your opponent into the dirt.
Yes, ^^^^^^^ all of that.
I think actual, tangible, differences could be along the following lines:
(a) Casual has a broader diversity missions, in comparison to using the ITC-style missions only. Crusade style missions should be employed.
(b) Even when using ITC missions, they should be less rigid. Objectives can be setup within 6" of the indicated locations for example (instead of perfectly symmetrical objecives). Terrain should be asymmetric in its layout.
(c) [I'm hesitant to suggest this... but....] for casual play, players use a single basic detachment structure (e.g. Battalion). I don't know how you really quantify / measure a min-maxed meta list versus a fluff list, but someway to shape/define this would be good.
artific3r wrote: Because the issues we're seeing in this thread stem from a lack of basic common courtesy among 40k players. Let's face it, wargamers are not the most socially aware crowd. The game's complexity and high level of investment attracts rules lawyer-y types who probably need the common courtesy stuff spelled out for them. Otherwise, if the rules say it is Good and Cool to show up to a pickup game with 170 wracks, then that's what some of our less socially attuned people are going to do.
Well it comes down from the top. GW writes shoddy, exploitative rules and that sets the tone for the community. If GW puts lackadaisical effort into writing the rules, why should players put any more into following them?
auticus wrote: I'm not seeing how TAC armies are relevant to having tournament rules vs casual rules vs narrative rules or how balance has anything to do with these things.
Tournament rules are rules that state you are playing tournament style, balls to the wall, min/max, symetrical battlefields, etc.
Casual rules would be more about a default style where you aren't trying to club baby seals and where the scenarios and battlefields aren't dictated by whats taken at the ITC.
Narrative rules would be narrative restrictions to make your armies resemble those in the narrative as well as missions and scenarios that were narratively driven as opposed to being about tournament symmetry.
The big difference is:
Restraint is on GW for Tourney Balance & Restrictions like RO3/1use of each strat per phase/etc. Bonuses like no holds barred
Restraint is on PLAYERS for Non-Tourney bonuses/restrictions like WYSIWYG for colour/weapon/chapter/whatever
But why should players enforce someone using their Word Bearers as a different Legion? Have you seen the current Word Bearer rules?
Here's a stab at defining Casual vs Competitive listbuilding.
In Casual the goal is to build a list that lets both players have a fun and engaging experience. Usually this means having a good variety of units in your army and not skewing your list with too much of one thing (eg. Heavy Support, Troops, Flyers, etc). When in doubt, have a talk with your opponent about what style of list is acceptable.
In Competitive the goal is to build the absolute hardest list you can, using every tool available to you in your (hopefully) large collection. Recommended for experienced players with extensive collections who want to play against the most challenging competitive lists.
GW would be expected to put as much effort into balancing Casual as it does with Competitive. As long as Casual Mode is perceived to be as "fair" as Competitive, then it will likely gradually become the default style of play. The problem right now is that Open Play is totally unsupported (therefore, perceived as less balanced and therefore less fair), and Crusade is just way too much complexity and overhead for the pickup game culture that is popular in the US.
If GW has noticed something is an issue at competitive events - you can bet it was there earlier than that. From what I remember "Knight meta" became a thing more or less instantly. Guard+BACP farming was also widely known by this point. I think we are talking week 6 at the latest (2 is more likely tbh - but I can't immediately identify the tournament) - certainly not 36, as that's approaching when the 2020 April FAQ came in to put the Castellan down.
GW made changes based on the Nova Open results it says in their article, the Castellan got 3/3 top 3 spots, so I think we can agree that the Castellan was ruling the meta around 3 months after the book's release which fits with the story I've heard on podcasts, I know that the Primaris Rhino and Necron Croissants saw success before the official models came out, sometimes it is that obvious and I might have been misinformed about the history of the Castellan's dominance.
I think Knight meta was more than just the Castellan, 4 regular Knights could stomp an unprepared list, I remember getting smashed so hard a few times that my competitive list for the remainder of 8th had basically nothing but S5 and S10 weapons.
I don't want to defend GW too much here, because I'm often beating the same drum about how the janitorial staff could have warned GW that Iron Hands/Drukahri/AdMech would be OP.
Tyran wrote: Listbuilding is a fundamental part of the game because a big part of 40k is player's choice, it is building your army with your choices.
That's why every time GW takes a choice a way from the player there is uproar.
Is a netlist really "your army with your choices"? How exactly an officially given set of lists is different from a set of netlists that dominate the meta every time around?
Have you checked 9th edition Necron lists? There is no netlist. It's the Wild West, anything goes. As long as you have a unit of 20 Warriors at least, but I'm not going to complain about that, if 1 Monolith became near-mandatory as well, then things would truly be as they should be.
nou wrote: And you are wrong about balancing only a specific subset of units, because, as I wrote, you can compose such lists from any units in the game. Then play a season with those units, then e.g. replace half of every list with other units and do an iterative balancing, so many times proposed in this thread as an ultimate solution to establish "good enough". With a proper design, you could cover a very large amount of units in just two-three seasons this way.
I think you need at least 10 lists to test a faction, with Space Marines and a few others ballooning in the number of datasheets available I'd say the average is 20 lists. So it'd take 10 years to test the game this way. In the current format people will organically try a variety of lists in tournaments and people will copy those that do well making it relatively easy to spot where the problems are in the case of an OP faction or where the problems aren't in the case of an UP faction.
The kind of testing where the janitorial staff test 20 different lists for each faction should be done after rules finalization to help finalize pts costs for publication and after step 1 which is estimating pts values based on pts-efficiency math done the Indian you hired on Fiverr.
Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.
Sim-Life wrote: Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.
Hey, just a question for the thread because I haven't tried this myself, and even if I had, there would still be no basis of comparison because I'm not familiar with matched missions.
White Dwarf updated the Maelstrom rules for 9th: has anyone tried them?
Just seeing the comment about defining "casual" by greater mission diversity made me think of those, and I'm curious about what this crew thought of them.
As a casual narrative player, I found them to be fun because each game was different. I also loved the sigmar open war cards because each game was different, and you couldn't optimize for scenarios which meant the lists tended to be saner.
From a competitive standpoint they are infuriating because you can't optimize for them which renders listbuilding not as impactful, which leads to upset feelings and negative play experience if your prime interest is in listbuilding and optimization.
They are definitely a tool that forces you to REACT as opposed to going in ahead of time knowing whats coming and letting you tune for that. I tend to appreciate missions in wargames where I can't know everything and tune for everything so I enjoy things like Maelstrom a lot more than your typical competitive player does.
They also due to their being missions that make you REACT means you have to be playing the game in the spirit of fun and playing the game as opposed to in the spirit of competitive sporting leagues, which are two very different approaches to a game.
Sim-Life wrote: Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.
This is what I advocate for.
It's weird, but I'm kinda ok with that.
I think if someone showed GW, to their collective faces, how the game is played, rather than this weird version that they seem to play, it could lead to a positive outcome.
I think you need at least 10 lists to test a faction, with Space Marines and a few others ballooning in the number of datasheets available I'd say the average is 20 lists. So it'd take 10 years to test the game this way. In the current format people will organically try a variety of lists in tournaments and people will copy those that do well making it relatively easy to spot where the problems are in the case of an OP faction or where the problems aren't in the case of an UP faction.
You missed the part, where those lists are designed by the best players committee in the first place. According to the wisdom of this very thread, they should be able to spot the glaringly OP/UP elements when they work on a set of balanced lists for the season, just as they currently do, but instead of exploiting those for advantage, they can use those to construct well balanced lists. And what is more - you are not working from scratch to begin with - you take the current state of the meta and arrange the lists for the first season based on current data.
But you are also stuck in the rut here, because the most crucial difference this format makes is in the play culture as a whole. When you have a set list of armies it is detrimental to deviate from such lists in your tournament prep games at FLGS - if you min-max at FLGS to easily win games then you will lack the necessary skill at the actual tournament. And just like that, puff! goest the problem of seal clubbing. You won't see spamming the best units when at the actual tournament players will have only one copy of it at their disposal, etc...
auticus wrote: Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.
But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.
You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.
The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.
It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)
EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.
Leaf blower could not exist in 4th as IG did not get vehicle squadrons until 5th, nor could all of their infantry take Chimeras unless they spent a doctrine point.
They didn't have a 4th edition codex, so you could only play 4th with the heavily constrained 3.5 Dex.
Go buy yourself a copy of Chapter approved 2001.
GW sold me (and others) a helluva lot of tanks 2001-2002 because of that book. My local shops tables looked like we were playing WH40K:Kursk! You can absolutely "Leafblow" opponents off the board with IG tanks in 3e.
It was also absolutely used in tournaments. Wich caught people unprepared because at the time it wasn't that common to bring alot of armor/heavy armor to tourneys - so people only included limited AT in their lists. Often nicely confined to a single HW Plt./Dev squad. And IIRC they went on to reprint/revise the AC rules two or three more times. bAlso, the Armegeddon Steel Legion (from 3rd edition) had to have every infantry squad mounted in Chimeras.
As for "Leafblower" in general? Despite not having some internet guy to name it, you've always been able to make lists that rolled a ton of dice & wiped the opponent off the board. Doesn't have to be a Guard list. * It's how I started playing this game in a FLGS tourney in the closing days of RT!
My friend Dan needed a 40k smackdown something bad. So bad that it inspired me to spend $$, effort, & join a whole different minis game. So I made a Wolfguard Termie list with as many assault cannons & cyclone launchers, bribed the shop owner to pair us up in round 1 (because I needed to properly surprise Dan & that'd have been lost if we didn't play each other 1st), and blew him off the table on turn two. Ok, technically turn 3 as I had to pick off some random survivors....
After seeing the Eldar/CSM box reveal and the confirmation that Nids are next I feel like GW made a last minute decision to delay CSM to be packaged with SM 2.0
Jarms48 wrote: After seeing the Eldar/CSM box reveal and the confirmation that Nids are next I feel like GW made a last minute decision to delay CSM to be packaged with SM 2.0
more likely that we're gonna see something happen with chaos overall
I play in local tourneys. I would not be in favour of having competitive games restricted to certain pre-approved lists. Part of the fun of 40K for many is selecting your army. I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do? Mind your own list? I get having the odd tourney with new restrictions/themes to keep things fresh, but we can leave that to the TOs as they respond to their playerbase.
While I could get behind a "player code of conduct", I do not see the need for the creation of formal Casual Matched Play and Competitive Matched Play modes. Saying that "Casual means playing for fun" isn't very helpful. Although it does occur, I don't worry too much about so-called seal-clubbing. The folks that I interact with that do participate in ITC don't waste their table-time smashing a new player. They are looking for a warm-up or test match which they won't get crushing some poor new-comer. Table time is money.
For me, its implied that a tourney game will be against someone with a tuned list whilst a pick-up game will be also Matched Play but perhaps tuned to 80%. And if I come up against someone with the current hotness in a pick-up game what's the worst thing that happens? I lose while getting to see what has people all upset.
We already have the ability to say "Grand Tournament 2022 Mission Pack - 2000 points?" If that is not your jam then politely decline the game. Players can also say "I am new to 40K - looking for an intro game" or words to that effect. Pre-game discussion can be very helpful, but it doesn't need to be legislated with yet another mode of play that will elude definition. Legislation is not a great approach to make up for a lack of emotional intelligence in wargaming. A quick pre-game conversation can avoid hurt feelings, as can an honest appraisal of your own goals and abilities.
Maybe I am just lucky to be in a fairly laid-back community that can also dial it up when appropriate? We're self-regulating. Thing is, my last three gaming communities as I move around have been that way.
What it sounds like you just said was "we don't need things like that because I don't have to worry about it, and haven't had to deal with that, so sucks to be you".
Thats awesome you've had self-regulating communities.
Thats not 100% everywhere and its a recognized problem with a lot of communities that I think could use some solid solutions toward. What I'm used to are people playing how the book lets them play. If the rules say they can, they will. If you aren't having fun because you are wanting to play a narrative force thats your problem, not theirs, and they will club away with impunity until you either quit or sell off your narrative forces and chase after the plastic meta dragon with them.
Lets use an empathy exercise. Lets say you are a tournament player that loves optimizing, listbuilding, and tuned hardcore lists.
Lets say your entire community tells you to gtfo with that nonsense and you have to field a more fun narrative force that you aren't having fun with, but you have no one in your community that will play your optimized listbuilding list. Lets say that the default discussion online is also narrative play and you have to dig hard to find the optimization chats.
That would be a problem for those people guaranteed and understandably so.
auticus wrote: What it sounds like you just said was "we don't need things like that because I don't have to worry about it, and haven't had to deal with that, so sucks to be you".
Thats awesome you've had self-regulating communities.
Thats not 100% everywhere.
Sure. My own experience is limited to the places I've lived and gamed, keeping in mind that it is since 2nd Ed in four cities with lots of cross-pollination. I take my gaming as it comes, but I also make an effort to see the experience from my opponent's perspective. I don't need a rule to tell me to communicate and have some empathy. If you don't have empathy no amount of legislation is going to instill in you. I try to be pragmatic with my expectations as well as understand the situation (tourney vs pickup etc). Maybe I've just been lucky in my communities, but things are going well. Tourneys here sell out in minutes - its easy to arrange a game when we are not in lockdown. My 40K gaming life is good. Should I feel bad about that? I am guessing you had a falling out? It happens. Take a break. Don't take the burden of the entire gaming community's enjoyment on your shoulders.
Anyhoo.
Edit - sorry, I missed your edit/addition. I certainly try to be empathetic, but that might not extend to continually playing in mode that I do not enjoy. I absolutely enjoy games where we decide ahead of time to try something "narrative", but I enjoy Matched Play under tourney conditions more. Its also easier to arrange. Some casual narrative folks have very specific parameters!
So go with your empathy exercise, lets say for argument's sake that my 40K community suddenly transforms into a narrative-only community with very strict rules about army composition. I guess I will have a decision to make with some broad options. I guess I can go with the flow; I can try to negotiate; I can look for another group; or I can walk away from the game? As the great poet said: "leave the pieces on the floor and move on." If I am "the only one in step" on the parade then perhaps its time for me to stop parading? This is a leisure activity, not a job. If I am never having fun/just not enjoying it then I will leave. I left 40K in 7th, albeit due to the rules rather than the community. I wasn't having fun so I stopped playing. I focused on Flames of War. Came back for 8th, leaving FOW after a bit of their 4th Ed. If I find I am out of step with my opponents or the game in the future I am prepared to politely show myself out while also keeping my miniatures.
Now, don't think that I don't worry about my community. If a new player says they are looking for an intro game I will jump on that to arrange the best, most fun learning game that I can. If I see that a friend is down I will try to cheer him up. I will allow people to have bad days and I appreciate when they allow me to have a cranky moment. But anyway.
While we all have the right to play, we don't necessarily have the right to play exactly as we see fit. We need to play with broadly like-minded people making compromises along the way. In the meantime GW will try to figure out what makes the most people happy knowing that pleasing everyone is impossible. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they don't.
This is probably a controversial suggestion, and somewhat counter-intuitive to the intended gameplay mode, but I actually think a "casual" game mode would benefit from a more restricted force organizational chart.
For example, something like needing a 2:3 ratio of troops to non-troop units (excluding HQ) - and also a restriction of no more than 1:1 ratio of any specific type of specialist unit to troops.
So for example, if you took two troops, you could have 2 elites and 1 heavy support (2 troops : 3 total specialists) but not 3 elites (as that would exceed the 1:1 troop to specific specialist ratio).
Obviously, this would need to carefully consider the balance and potency of each faction's troop selections to make the not feel like penalty or a tax to take. Troops units should be fun and effective to field, as they are the core type of unit.
Such a move would help level of the playing field a little between armies and force players into taking more well-rounded armies, instead of giving people the option to make detachments of all elites or whatever. Let people go to town on alternative force organization in full blown "unrestricted" competitive / tournament play or whatever.
auticus wrote: Yeah and once things moved from list building there was a big stink.
But I also want to bring up one of the darlings of 4th edition. I also abused this at the GT level heh the Imperial Guard leaf blower list.
You just sat there and rolled buckets of dice and removed enemies wholesale.
The mission didn't matter (its been a while, so I may be mis remembering some things) because just wiping out my opponents netted me the win.
It was so gross. And unfun. But I was winning tournaments so that was how I 'had fun' at the time. (and feel bad about it today because a lot of people jumped out of 40k specifically because of that build and not having fun playing against it)
EDIT: I know people attribute leaf blower to 5th edition (and it was part of that as well) but the word was used in 4th as well. That was the title of my army builder roster file "leaf blower" and I know that those were from 4th edition days as I jumped out of tournaments at the end of 4th and stuck with narrative in 5th.
Leaf blower could not exist in 4th as IG did not get vehicle squadrons until 5th, nor could all of their infantry take Chimeras unless they spent a doctrine point.
They didn't have a 4th edition codex, so you could only play 4th with the heavily constrained 3.5 Dex.
Go buy yourself a copy of Chapter approved 2001.
GW sold me (and others) a helluva lot of tanks 2001-2002 because of that book. My local shops tables looked like we were playing WH40K:Kursk! You can absolutely "Leafblow" opponents off the board with IG tanks in 3e.
It was also absolutely used in tournaments. Wich caught people unprepared because at the time it wasn't that common to bring alot of armor/heavy armor to tourneys - so people only included limited AT in their lists. Often nicely confined to a single HW Plt./Dev squad. And IIRC they went on to reprint/revise the AC rules two or three more times. bAlso, the Armegeddon Steel Legion (from 3rd edition) had to have every infantry squad mounted in Chimeras.
As for "Leafblower" in general? Despite not having some internet guy to name it, you've always been able to make lists that rolled a ton of dice & wiped the opponent off the board. Doesn't have to be a Guard list. * It's how I started playing this game in a FLGS tourney in the closing days of RT!
My friend Dan needed a 40k smackdown something bad. So bad that it inspired me to spend $$, effort, & join a whole different minis game. So I made a Wolfguard Termie list with as many assault cannons & cyclone launchers, bribed the shop owner to pair us up in round 1 (because I needed to properly surprise Dan & that'd have been lost if we didn't play each other 1st), and blew him off the table on turn two. Ok, technically turn 3 as I had to pick off some random survivors....
I played (and have played ever since) Armored Company/Armored Battlegroup/Emperor's Fist since forever.
It had the opposite problem - it lacked the resilience of mechguard (especially 5e Leafblower) because the tanks could be stunned or damaged. Stunning a Chimera in 4E shut it down and the passengers could only fire Lasguns and one other weapon (at the risk of being open Topped) and only if they weren't forced to disembark by a penetrating hit.
In 5e:
1) pens no longer forced a disembark
2) instead of 6 lasguns and one open-topped fire point, chimeras got 5 closed fire points.
3) Veterans became troops choices and got access to 3 Special, 1 Heavy, and one Heavy Flamer with special pistols on the sergeant. Combined with 2, that essentially meant Chimeras got 3 unstunnable plasma guns and some change (possibly a plasma pistol, for 7 shots)
4) penetrating hits no longer forced you to disembark, so the unit was safer and could merrily continue to act irrespective of damage to the vehicle
5) the damage chart in general was more forgiving, making low-armor cheap vehicles (like the basilisk, medusa, and hydra) relatively more durable for their points than the vehicles that paid for thick armor but used the same damage chart (Russes)
The Leafblower list in 5th ran barely any Russes at all, as +~30 points per tank for AV 14 wasn't worth it compared to the same (or greater) firepower for cheaper on the AV 12 chassis vehicles.
This is why Armored Battlegroup (which existed with Leafblower) was barely even mentioned when top IG tournament lists were discussed.
In his Dec 99 White Dwarf apologia for the newly-released 3rd Ed Imperial Guard Codex, Jervis referred to the nerfs to the "Shooty Imperial Guard Army From Hell (SIGAFH)" that had appeared with the 3rd Ed MRB list. Naming scary lists is not a new thing! He says that while few had enough Plasma guns and Lascannons to make it work (reader looks guiltily askance), "while winning lots of games, was not by all accounts very exciting to use." There is a history of army lists being used in the wild in ways not foreseen by those inside the walls of Nottingham (all pulsa-rockets in 2nd, Wolfguard Terminators with Assault Cannons and Cyclone Launchers in 2nd, etc).
The SIGAFH could indeed generate an eye-watering amount of damage in a fairly small list. A brief moment in the sun. The massed suns of plasma that is. Alpha Strikes are not a new thing.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
H.B.M.C. wrote: And their solution to this was to make plasma guns slightly more expensive, right?
Yes - the price of a Plasma Gun went from 5 points to 8 points, with all Guardsmen going up 1 point as well. That added up in a list. Leman Russ also went up. It was the first deliberate nerf that I recall besides the great "blip" of going from 2nd to 3rd when many things changed all at once. The dance has been going on for some time.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
Yeah but it is a 2-way street.
Each game is a 2 way street with two players that have agreed to have a game. The difference is that tourney players are not demanding changes to the way that two non-tourney players are having their narrative or casual game, or criticizing them for the way that they have fun.
It understand that a player could feel frustrated if they are the only one that wants to play "narrative" while the rest of their community want to practice for a tournament. That is the result of free-will/free market. If you don't want to play "competitive" - then maybe don't? Maybe find like-minded players? It is not everyone else's fault that they have fun differently than you. Your isolation would be somewhat self-imposed.
If someone posted on our message board (we are trapped in the early 2000s but it works) that they only want to play a narrative game based on their favourite Badaab War fan fiction then I might give it a whirl in accordance with their parameters once or twice. Not my cup of tea, but hey, cleanse the palette. In the meantime I will continue to enjoy tournaments and the associated preparations/list tinkering/practicing/fine tuning with like-minded people. We'll police ourselves thank you.
Each game is a 2 way street with two players that have agreed to have a game. The difference is that tourney players are not demanding changes to the way that two non-tourney players are having their narrative or casual game, or criticizing them for the way that they have fun.
Of course the tourney players are not demanding changes to the approach/style of matched play - matched play is setup and intended to cater to what they want.
The issue, which we're debating, is that there is swath of players that don't want their match play games to all be "tourney prep" games. And neither open play nor narrative/crusade play fits the bill either. Matched play adopting and increasingly looking (or out right being) the ITC format is unfortunate. There is a lot of space in the casual to competitive continuum that are is wholly glossed over in the current approach to setting up games.
I think you need at least 10 lists to test a faction, with Space Marines and a few others ballooning in the number of datasheets available I'd say the average is 20 lists. So it'd take 10 years to test the game this way. In the current format people will organically try a variety of lists in tournaments and people will copy those that do well making it relatively easy to spot where the problems are in the case of an OP faction or where the problems aren't in the case of an UP faction.
You missed the part, where those lists are designed by the best players committee in the first place. According to the wisdom of this very thread, they should be able to spot the glaringly OP/UP elements when they work on a set of balanced lists for the season, just as they currently do, but instead of exploiting those for advantage, they can use those to construct well balanced lists. And what is more - you are not working from scratch to begin with - you take the current state of the meta and arrange the lists for the first season based on current data.
I still don't see how you get a smidgen of data from this. If my best players committee thinks that a list with 2 Land Raiders, 6 Eradicators, 20 Assault Marines is balanced against a list with 1 Wraithknight, 2 Warwalkers, 20 Dark Reapers and 10 Dire Avengers what do I learn from that? I don't learn whether any of the units are strong or weak like I would from studying current tournament results, all I learn is which of the 16 lists are stronger and weaker relative to each other and which player that plays this game mode is the best at this game mode. If all lists where from the same faction you could get some good data, but internal balance is still only half the game.
Mezmorki wrote: This is probably a controversial suggestion, and somewhat counter-intuitive to the intended gameplay mode, but I actually think a "casual" game mode would benefit from a more restricted force organizational chart.
Easier to just play highlander (rule of 1) with rule of 3 for Troops and Dedicated Transports. Sometimes it's the darndest lists that do the best. Was my Novokh Infantry horde more competitive than my Szarekhan list with a mix of vehicles, monsters and infantry? The 60 Flayed Ones that won me 2/3 games in the first list have since gone down 23%, I don't think the second list got any discount, it miraculously won me 3/3 games. Is spamming Canoptek Reanimators a problem when they are overcosted? I think a compassionate effort to make a casual list is good enough. If you're not able to discern a casual list from a competitive one and accidentally make one of the latter then you're probably not a threat on the table. A Monolith in 8th was actually just as good as a Knight provided the Knight took a melee weapon and just stood guard in the deployment zone instead of rushing up and chopping the Monolith easily in half.
H.B.M.C. wrote: I think if someone showed GW, to their collective faces, how the game is played, rather than this weird version that they seem to play, it could lead to a positive outcome.
They see when they visit tournaments. "Woah, someone used this one flamer Stratagem from a book with another flamer Stratagem from a book and it caught us off guard when we saw at a tournament" *both Stratagems are in the same book* I'm not asking for the game designers to be competitive, but there are so many ways that this is an obvious question to ask. Even if you're not competitive and not looking for only the best combo, it'd still be interesting to learn how much damage you can output with a unit of Aggressors just for the heck of it, like we sometimes discuss "who can throw the most dice in one shooting attack" or something like that, but GW was totally uninterested and just printed Stratagems seemingly for the sake of printing Stratagems.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
I disagree.
I think a lot of people have been accommodating to the notion that competitive gaming is fine and has its place, but not everyone wants it all rhe time and feel its not suitable in every scenario for every opponent. No one's said you're having fun wrong. What theyre saying is 'it has its place'. And you don't seem to want to see or accept that.
There's a big difference between saying 'competitive play sucks' and 'there's a lot of negative consequences from that style of play for some people, not everyone wants that kind of thing. maybe you should be aware of those concerns and desires, and be aware that doubling down on the competitive approach and being hostile towards and unwilling to listen to, entertain or compromise with other people is destructive to everyone in the long-term' In other words, i think it's good to consider accomodating for the greater health of your community and our community overall. And lets be realistic. Ours is a small community overall. The 'elite' game cannot exist without the grass leagues and both need to be supported for the game and the community to flourish - look at how wmh fell away because the over competitives refused to consider anything that wasn't a 75pt steamroller ultra cutthroat list. Compromise and accommodations for others is a fundamental building block of community. Who knows, you might enjoy a stint in the grass leagues away from the A-tier units game too.
I say that as someone who played high level games in both 40k and wmh. I've seen both sides of it.
Hell, in the real world we don't even think twice about accomodating our friends and partners. if I am able to accomodate my wife's passion for her football team and get season tickets (when I have zero interest in the sport) and join her every weekend for five odd years for all the games, and there are fewer things worse than the dreary and incredibly rough hoofball played in Scottish 'premier' football through the dreary miserable cold wet weather that is the Scottish winter (and spring, summer, autumn), toning down my list for someone who's not into tourneys is a breeze. And yes it should be considered the other way too out of politeness if nothing else (but again, low powered lists are not poisoning your games with high-powered builds, the opposite sadly cannot be said. And take this from someone who has taken both). Everyone benefits from people willing to accomodate. And hey, it doesn't have to be all the time either. Just be aware that its a thing.
And just to note, for the bolded bit - you're missing the point here just claiming people want change to games they don't play. if you're into competitive games and you play other folks that are into that - that's fine! However, the point a lot of people here have been saying is that is not the case the other way round- even if you're not into competitive gaming, you can't escape it or conpetitive types taking it everywhere else too. It seeps into every other approach and every other game type. Some find this toxic and destructive and I've seen more than one person feel that competitive players often just don't care and throw down their tourney lists against you anyway. their experience with their competitive players, over competitive players and competitive-at-all-costs players is they bring that attitude everywhere, especially where its not welcome and against all players regardless of context. then they just shrug their shoulders and ignore the consequences of their actions nd decisions and their role in it. And that is a problem. It doesn't matter where tprople like auticus go. Like I said, you might not be a bad guy, but you don't have to be a bad guy to be the villain in someone else's hobby, destroying it for them. I'm sure the likes of auticus and nou don't want to play against tourney lists, and would be happy, like me, to play narrative games in the grass leagues with other d-grade lists, and leave the a-lists to you - its frustrating as hell that you can't or don't want to see that.
And one final point. Just because you are in the status quo position and benefit from the situation as it is, doesnt mean the situation isn't problematic or doesn't need to change. I can point to plenty historical and modern precedents where change, whether cultural or not was necessary and the status quo wasn't beneficial.
@Vict That just leads back to the whole "the rules are too bloated" thing. Lets be honest if you wanted to thoroughly playtest a model each single model now has so many variants and additional rules like strats and auras that its basically impossible to feasably test everything properly.
Of course it doesn't help when you have people like Jake who think that "more rules = more fluffy" and want to apparently balance the game by being additive instead of subtractive.
Sim-Life wrote: @Vict That just leads back to the whole "the rules are too bloated" thing. Lets be honest if you wanted to thoroughly playtest a model each single model now has so many variants and additional rules like strats and auras that its basically impossible to feasably test everything properly.
Of course it doesn't help when you have people like Jake who think that "more rules = more fluffy" and want to apparently balance the game by being additive instead of subtractive.
Canoptek Wraiths must have 1 of 2 melee options and up to 1 of 2 shooting options. That's a total of 6 loadouts, I don't think you need to test 6 lists with 18 Wraiths to test the Wraith datasheet. Test 1x3 and 3x6 with whatever weapon option the player feels is best for the army that is being tested. #1 math will have made the issue of internal datasheet balance small in the first place #2 if you see Wraiths in tournament play you will most likely see only one loadout get used, buff the others or nerf the one that is getting used. 6 months of some of the loadouts being worse than the others isn't so bad. What's bad is when there is a clear disparity, like when you can get an extra gun for free, there is no reason not to take the extra gun, you don't actually need to playtest to avoid stupid gak like that. Whether that pistol should be 1 or 4 points is not so important, because sometimes the gun will be worth 1 and sometimes the gun will be worth 4, as long as the gun is worth it in some situations and not always worth it.
You do make a really good point though, it's probably something I'm going to think about a lot more because I really hate it when you're more or less forced to rip miniatures apart to give them a different loadout. The safe bet is to keep the same unit loadout good through editions. So if whips and pistols are good in 9th they should be good in 10th, leave all the other loadouts as niche builds that are only sometimes good. Asking whether you should equip pistols to your Wraiths when you first build them is not as big a deal as having to repaint Wraiths you've had for years because the designer thought "this is the edition of the heavy gun, not the pistol". Like you shouldn't release a new gun like the grav cannon or D-flamer and instantly make them the far more pts-efficient option. I don't care if the new gun is scarier, but then give it a high enough price that people that have an existing collection with the old-school lascannons or D-cannons are better in most cases.
Sim-Life wrote: Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.
Its easy when you make something to test if it works the way you envisioned it, what is much more important is to test when it breaks. And GW obviously doesn't do that.
An armies testing should be 'that guy' writing the most bs degenerate lists he can think of with the codex. Not a beer and pretzel game with 10 random units off the shelf.
Using your example of wraiths. Sure a basic unit has two load outs. But that's not the only things that effect them. There's also 6 dynasties you need to test those two load outs under so thats 12 variations. Then there's stratagems. According to a Russian I know there's 3 strats that effect wraiths, so each loadout now needs to be tested with each dynasty and each strat so thats now 36(? I dunno, I'm gak at maths) tests. Wraiths are also <CORE> so each model or rules that effects them is also going to need tested. You can say the effects of subfactions are minimal but then it wasn't Salamander dreads that destroyed a meta for like 6 months.
This is the effect of piling so many rules on top of each other. The game not only becomes more bloated but it becomes harder and harder to identify problems during testing to the point where it's easier to just release a book, let the public pay to beta test is then release a fix later.
Sim-Life wrote: Using your example of wraiths. Sure a basic unit has two load outs. But that's not the only things that effect them. There's also 6 dynasties you need to test those two load outs under so thats 12 variations. Then there's stratagems.
...there's 3 strats that effect wraiths, so each loadout now needs to be tested with each dynasty and each strat so thats now 36(? I dunno, I'm gak at maths) tests. Wraiths are also <CORE> so each model or rules that effects them is also going to need tested. You can say the effects of subfactions are minimal but then it wasn't Salamander dreads that destroyed a meta for like 6 months.
This is the effect of piling so many rules on top of each other. The game not only becomes more bloated but it becomes harder and harder to identify problems during testing to the point where it's easier to just release a book, let the public pay to beta test is then release a fix later.
You don't need to test Mephrit, Sautekh, Nephrekh or Sautekh Wraiths, they are non-issues. Let's say I test a small amount of Wraiths in Nihilakh and spam Wraiths in a Custom Dynasty. I'm probably not going to be surprised by anything Novokh or Szarekhan Wraiths can do, it won't be absurdly much better than both Nihilakh and Custom Dynasty Wraiths.
I don't know what kind of monkey-brained fart could have tested Chaplain Dreads after giving them a rather strong ability and come to the conclusion that the ability should not come with a pts cost increase. How you can test Dreadnoughts without using them in the Dreadnought chapter? Dreadnoughts were not insane in Blood Angels or Black Templars, flamers were not insane Blood Angels or Space Wolves. Dreadnoughts should be spammed in the chapter that obviously buffs them the most with all the requisite Stratagems and Relics, it's painfully obvious.
Stratagems, Relics, and WL traits should be woven into playtesting of various lists as organically as possible. If I'm playing 18 Wraiths you bet I'm going to slap a Cryptek with an overcharger in there and slap as many Strats and buffs on as possible and see if something breaks.
So that leaves what SK can do for them, but SK cannot do anything super unique for them that he cannot do for Skorpekhs, Ophydians or Triarch Praetorians. That combo alone will not break the game, if it happened to be an especially strong combo compared to any of the others then that would be exactly the good kind of synergistic list building you'd want to have in the game, then you can nerf it a little bit in 6 months if everyone keeps copying the same list in competitive 40k (12 months if I had things my way).
This is not me supporting Chapter Tactics as a concept or saying that they don't make it fundamentally impossible for a unit to be balanced across all sub-factions, that's just an obvious cost of Chapter Tactics that only Chapter-based pts costs could change, but that'd be a huge hassle with its own downsides. Risks like flamers being overcosted in the flamer chapter and undercosted in the melee chapter. You could try to play it safe and make the increased costs for flamers be very tiny, but then you're still not making flamers worth taking on the melee chapter a significant amount of the time and you might as well have made Chapter Tactics less impactful, which is why I have cheered every time a book has been released with relatively weak chapter tactics.
Of course it doesn't help when you have people like Jake who think that "more rules = more fluffy" and want to apparently balance the game by being additive instead of subtractive.
More rules isn't automatically more fluffy.
But more rules create greater potential to reflect a larger collection of stories on the table. And it's almost an undeniable fact.
It does mess with game balance, I'll be the first to admit it, Your analysis of the difficulties of play testing wraiths is spot on. For me, story potential is a must and balance is nice to have. For most people, balance is a must and story potential is nice to have. It's just a different approach to the game.
And I get it: I'm fortunate enough to have a group of like minded players, and that's the only reason that I am able to take the approach to this game that I do.
By the way, what did I do to you to p!$$ you off so much that you'll go out of your way to burn me? I've started referencing other people recently, but I usually do it when I reference the parts of their POV with which I agree. Unit and I have had conversations where we managed to find some common ground despite wildly different points of view, and I've found myself agreeing with a lot things HBMC's been saying lately too.
I may have referenced you a couple times, and pointed out that we want different things out of our game, but I do my best to see the validity of your arguments within the context of what it is that you want from the game. Here's a fun exercise. Count the number of times in this post that I have respectfully acknowledged and validated your point of view and then go find any response you've ever made to me that goes as far to find common ground.
If you find one, direct link me to it, or better yet, quote it back so that everyone including me can see that you aren't always as antagonistic as you sometimes seem to be.
Edit: Walked back some of my knee jerk reaction... Diplomacy again.
I would rather have balance first and then be able to riff custom rules for my narrative off a balanced base.
A game that is imbalanced to start with means you have to do more work to balance it before you can begin to understand the impact of rules changes made by the organizer.
Why not just go back to how it was.
Ge makes their rules that are geared toward a less tournament style game play.
Then have indipendent originization make their tournament rules, and have GW sponsor said organization.
That gives the people who just wanna have a fun, non sweaty game, get their rules for GW.
Tournament and competative play still exists with officially recognized 3rd party tournament rules, and because GW would sponsor them, it would would give them validity to be recognized by the tournament community and offer separate data sheets for them
For example narrative / casual play could bring back the things that were a lot more thematic like templates facings, armor vulues things like that, but then official tournament data sheets that just operate as if it was now. No facings, no av, ECT ECT.
This way GW could balance one aspect of the game without effecting the other.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
** All of his post **
I fully agree and exalt.
I don't read anyone here saying competitive play sucks or is bad wrong fun. Someone mentioned an alternative version of competitive play involving set lists. Id actually be all for that, but just as a format, not to force everyone to do it.
Fun trivia fact: I ran such a tournament series back in 4th edition as a rogue trader regional. The feedback was about 50% thought it was fun as hell and were happy that the table skill meant for, and the other 50% boycotted me and sent me all caps hate mail for about a month after the event saying people like me ruin tournaments and that they hoped I got butt cancer and died. (the butt cancer wish would crop up again when we published azyr for age of sigmar when people cried out that we killed listbuilding by making the point system too balanced - I don't know what it is about butt cancer and people wishing it on others in the tabletop gaming space but it seems to be a common wish )
I don't ever advocate for a format to be the only one, I am and have always been more about options and multiple formats.
I don't hate competitive play, I did it for a full decade and had a blast. I played in 14 different grand tournaments, a little over 50 regional rogue traders and god knows how many local tournaments for both 40k and fantasy, traveled all over the united states, and had a great time doing so.
What I've advocated in this thread is that GW make the distinction between pick up matched games, and tournament games. Thats important because house rules are seen as satan and it would be nice for GW to explicitly lay out boundaries because like it or not those boundaries are "official" and bear more weight than someone like me trying to get a matched campaign game where I make the table not symetrical and put a special rule for the scenario that makes it night fighting for this one time and has a unit restriction where you can't take the same units more than once (highlander format) because of the narrative without having people screaming in my face or telling me to go outside so we can fight in the parking lot (also true story though that was age of sigmar and that happened when I dared run a warhammer world scenario for halloween for our GW store since that was houseruled nonsense that punished all competitive players)
That its just as "official' to play a game of 40k (or sigmar) without tournament rules in effect and that not all matched games are tournament games. And in my opinion narrative games could use a more restrictive list building structure, because you don't always get to cherry pick the absolute best and sometimes the army should be composed of mostly your troop choices which you have more access to. The tournament players who hate that are free to stay in their more open ended building game and neither side can scream at the other for playing "houseruled nonsense".
It's easy enough to make the difference, if you say you are looking for a 100 PL casual Matched Play game with <insert homebrew mission> you've said all you need to say. If I say 2k casual GT22 or 2k competitive GT22 I've said all I need to say. If someone would like to bring a competitive list to a casual game or a casual list to a competitive game they can ask if that's okay.
Backspacehacker wrote: Why not just go back to how it was. Ge makes their rules that are geared toward a less tournament style game play. Then have indipendent originization make their tournament rules, and have GW sponsor said organization.
That gives the people who just wanna have a fun, non sweaty game, get their rules for GW. Tournament and competative play still exists with officially recognized 3rd party tournament rules, and because GW would sponsor them, it would would give them validity to be recognized by the tournament community and offer separate data sheets for them
For example narrative / casual play could bring back the things that were a lot more thematic like templates facings, armor vulues things like that, but then official tournament data sheets that just operate as if it was now. No facings, no av, ECT ECT.
This way GW could balance one aspect of the game without effecting the other.
Garbage balance, templates and 25% obscured helps bring out the sweatiness in people. Nobody will recognize a single 3rd party for tournament rules so you end up with splinter factions that each believe their version of competitive 40k is the right and balanced way to do things. A splintered game would take away from one of 40k's main selling points, being the most played miniature game in the world. GW is already producing as many rules as ever for narrative 40k, vehicle facings are not something every casual or narrative player wants.
Narrative play is inherently already more splintered, whether the people next town over think your campaign is silly shouldn't matter to you, you're not going to play narrative with them and GW doesn't have to care as long as they are keeping you as happy customers. You have the freedom to introduce vehicle facings and templates, you could even make it unique to just one faction if you wanted. Homebrewing is much harder for competitive play, even if it's just missions.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
** All of his post **
I fully agree and exalt.
I don't read anyone here saying competitive play sucks or is bad wrong fun. Someone mentioned an alternative version of competitive play involving set lists. Id actually be all for that, but just as a format, not to force everyone to do it.
Fun trivia fact: I ran such a tournament series back in 4th edition as a rogue trader regional. The feedback was about 50% thought it was fun as hell and were happy that the table skill meant for, and the other 50% boycotted me and sent me all caps hate mail for about a month after the event saying people like me ruin tournaments and that they hoped I got butt cancer and died. (the butt cancer wish would crop up again when we published azyr for age of sigmar when people cried out that we killed listbuilding by making the point system too balanced - I don't know what it is about butt cancer and people wishing it on others in the tabletop gaming space but it seems to be a common wish )
I don't ever advocate for a format to be the only one, I am and have always been more about options and multiple formats.
I don't hate competitive play, I did it for a full decade and had a blast. I played in 14 different grand tournaments, a little over 50 regional rogue traders and god knows how many local tournaments for both 40k and fantasy, traveled all over the united states, and had a great time doing so.
What I've advocated in this thread is that GW make the distinction between pick up matched games, and tournament games. Thats important because house rules are seen as satan and it would be nice for GW to explicitly lay out boundaries because like it or not those boundaries are "official" and bear more weight than someone like me trying to get a matched campaign game where I make the table not symetrical and put a special rule for the scenario that makes it night fighting for this one time and has a unit restriction where you can't take the same units more than once (highlander format) because of the narrative without having people screaming in my face or telling me to go outside so we can fight in the parking lot (also true story though that was age of sigmar and that happened when I dared run a warhammer world scenario for halloween for our GW store since that was houseruled nonsense that punished all competitive players)
That its just as "official' to play a game of 40k (or sigmar) without tournament rules in effect and that not all matched games are tournament games. And in my opinion narrative games could use a more restrictive list building structure, because you don't always get to cherry pick the absolute best and sometimes the army should be composed of mostly your troop choices which you have more access to. The tournament players who hate that are free to stay in their more open ended building game and neither side can scream at the other for playing "houseruled nonsense".
How is such hate mail not grounds for being banned from the gaming group?? So glad i have never really played out in the wild so to speak.
Backspacehacker wrote: Why not just go back to how it was.
Ge makes their rules that are geared toward a less tournament style game play.
Then have indipendent originization make their tournament rules, and have GW sponsor said organization.
That gives the people who just wanna have a fun, non sweaty game, get their rules for GW.
Tournament and competative play still exists with officially recognized 3rd party tournament rules, and because GW would sponsor them, it would would give them validity to be recognized by the tournament community and offer separate data sheets for them
For example narrative / casual play could bring back the things that were a lot more thematic like templates facings, armor vulues things like that, but then official tournament data sheets that just operate as if it was now. No facings, no av, ECT ECT.
This way GW could balance one aspect of the game without effecting the other.
Not all casual/narrative players want facings, templates, AV, and such back. To be clear those aspects things have nothing to do with casual and narrative gaming and more a desire/preference by a subset of the playerbase; whether it be tournament players or casual players.
I know as a narrative player I want cool campaign rules, with a metagame above the battlefield where you fight for area control and whatnot. Crusade scratched that itch just slightly for me, but I think it can go so much further. Even the current PtG system in AoS is slightly more fleshed out than the 40k one. Also, I do not want a campaign system that is divided piecemeal among several campaign books. I want one book that goes a whole campaign with relics, traits, RQ, missions and whatnot. That is narrative gaming for me, not AV, facings, and templates.
Sim-Life wrote: Making a bunch of rando lists and playing them against each other isn't a good way to test lists. When Privateer Press hired Will Pagini, one of the best Warmahordes players in the world, he started spamming units during playtest games and quickly found units that cause issues whereas prior the playtesters had never played that way before so they never caught spam lists as a problem.
Its easy when you make something to test if it works the way you envisioned it, what is much more important is to test when it breaks. And GW obviously doesn't do that.
An armies testing should be 'that guy' writing the most bs degenerate lists he can think of with the codex. Not a beer and pretzel game with 10 random units off the shelf.
That's the sole reason GW was so bad at balance for so long. It's like they couldn't fathom people making spam lists with the strongest possible units, despite tournaments being held every week around the world where people were playing that way. It was also pretty common in shops even back in 1999 when I got into the game. I'm really hopeful that the ITC partnership will allow them to finally understand how the game is played and rein in some of the OP stuff. I understand imperfect balance is the goal due to sales targets but we aren't even close to that.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
** All of his post **
I fully agree and exalt.
I don't read anyone here saying competitive play sucks or is bad wrong fun. Someone mentioned an alternative version of competitive play involving set lists. Id actually be all for that, but just as a format, not to force everyone to do it.
Fun trivia fact: I ran such a tournament series back in 4th edition as a rogue trader regional. The feedback was about 50% thought it was fun as hell and were happy that the table skill meant for, and the other 50% boycotted me and sent me all caps hate mail for about a month after the event saying people like me ruin tournaments and that they hoped I got butt cancer and died. (the butt cancer wish would crop up again when we published azyr for age of sigmar when people cried out that we killed listbuilding by making the point system too balanced - I don't know what it is about butt cancer and people wishing it on others in the tabletop gaming space but it seems to be a common wish )
I don't ever advocate for a format to be the only one, I am and have always been more about options and multiple formats.
I don't hate competitive play, I did it for a full decade and had a blast. I played in 14 different grand tournaments, a little over 50 regional rogue traders and god knows how many local tournaments for both 40k and fantasy, traveled all over the united states, and had a great time doing so.
What I've advocated in this thread is that GW make the distinction between pick up matched games, and tournament games. Thats important because house rules are seen as satan and it would be nice for GW to explicitly lay out boundaries because like it or not those boundaries are "official" and bear more weight than someone like me trying to get a matched campaign game where I make the table not symetrical and put a special rule for the scenario that makes it night fighting for this one time and has a unit restriction where you can't take the same units more than once (highlander format) because of the narrative without having people screaming in my face or telling me to go outside so we can fight in the parking lot (also true story though that was age of sigmar and that happened when I dared run a warhammer world scenario for halloween for our GW store since that was houseruled nonsense that punished all competitive players)
That its just as "official' to play a game of 40k (or sigmar) without tournament rules in effect and that not all matched games are tournament games. And in my opinion narrative games could use a more restrictive list building structure, because you don't always get to cherry pick the absolute best and sometimes the army should be composed of mostly your troop choices which you have more access to. The tournament players who hate that are free to stay in their more open ended building game and neither side can scream at the other for playing "houseruled nonsense".
How is such hate mail not grounds for being banned from the gaming group?? So glad i have never really played out in the wild so to speak.
They formed their own competitive discord and facebook, but the thing was whenever we would try and do campaigns they would show up to play as well since they were store events and would do so with the intent of making sure we weren't "teaching people how to play wrong". For Sigmar, the Azyr ruleset was one of the point systems released before official points so that hate mail came from players around the globe lol.
Backspacehacker wrote: Why not just go back to how it was.
Ge makes their rules that are geared toward a less tournament style game play.
Then have indipendent originization make their tournament rules, and have GW sponsor said organization.
That gives the people who just wanna have a fun, non sweaty game, get their rules for GW.
Tournament and competative play still exists with officially recognized 3rd party tournament rules, and because GW would sponsor them, it would would give them validity to be recognized by the tournament community and offer separate data sheets for them
For example narrative / casual play could bring back the things that were a lot more thematic like templates facings, armor vulues things like that, but then official tournament data sheets that just operate as if it was now. No facings, no av, ECT ECT.
This way GW could balance one aspect of the game without effecting the other.
Not all casual/narrative players want facings, templates, AV, and such back. To be clear those aspects things have nothing to do with casual and narrative gaming and more a desire/preference by a subset of the playerbase; whether it be tournament players or casual players.
I know as a narrative player I want cool campaign rules, with a metagame above the battlefield where you fight for area control and whatnot. Crusade scratched that itch just slightly for me, but I think it can go so much further. Even the current PtG system in AoS is slightly more fleshed out than the 40k one. Also, I do not want a campaign system that is divided piecemeal among several campaign books. I want one book that goes a whole campaign with relics, traits, RQ, missions and whatnot. That is narrative gaming for me, not AV, facings, and templates.
I'm just giving facings and av as an extream example of varying degrees of the rules between the idea of a more fluffy vs tournament style
auticus, the competitive group in your area sounds almost comedically hostile. I've moved around the country a few times and have played with a quite a few groups across several major US cities, and I've never heard stories as bad as yours. Even the most hardcore competitive players I met would be totally down to dial back their lists to have a casual pickup game or a wacky round of highlander.
It's interesting how much these things can vary. The group I'm in right now is probably the most casual group I've ever played with, and as a result I would say the competitive players are actually more or less on the defensive in this group. They tend to keep their heads down, and have to spend more time defending their style of play than vice versa, because the default is casual, and there is always an underlying suspicion that competitive players are mean-spirited, WAAC jerks (which they're not, they're actually some of the nicest people in the group!).
I moved from there last spring. Where I am now (west side of the country) things are a lot more laid back.
The competitive guys here also play campaigns and also don't bring their min max lists from what I can gather to those games and know when not to do that, so its entirely a regional culture thing.
Granted I have only dipped my toes in conquest and battletech here so far, but in paying attention to the store people around me and their conversations its
A) less political
B) people seem to be a lot more open to their opponent's enjoyment of the game.
I'm still not willing to make a $600 - $800 investment into a game where I have to politic to get narrative games though. My opinion may change in a year or two of being here if I can see a reliable and steady stream of data showing me that that investment wouldn't be me wiping my butt with my money and time and having to sell out right away.
vict0988 wrote:It's easy enough to make the difference, if you say you are looking for a 100 PL casual Matched Play game with <insert homebrew mission> you've said all you need to say. If I say 2k casual GT22 or 2k competitive GT22 I've said all I need to say. If someone would like to bring a competitive list to a casual game or a casual list to a competitive game they can ask if that's okay.
If I had a nickel for every time someone's idea of a casual game was bringing their favorite netlist...
In any case, the pre-game-negotiation approach still doesn't suffice if Matched Play incorporates tournament-oriented rules. Things like Ro3, flyer limits, or an outright ban on mixing subfactions might be needed for LVO, but are less critical for casual games. We're definitely seeing a trend towards Matched Play being designed for tournament balance, and that has knock-on effects on casual play.
And while you can always houserule, as Auticus has pointed out many times getting a local group (let alone random pick-up opponents) to accept houserules can be like pulling teeth.
I agree with the idea behind splitting Matched Play into a ruleset intended for casual games while still using points, versus one intended to be suitable for cutthroat tournament play. It would be much easier to balance the game competitively if GW could put heavier restrictions in place for competitive play without invalidating people's collections altogether. And it would draw a clear line between styles of play.
Or, really, just put some more structure into Narrative so that it's suitable for pick-up games- no free summoning and use points, but no tournament comp restrictions either, and you always have Open for the 'anything goes' ruleset. The problem, fundamentally, is that Narrative and Open don't provide enough structure for a lot of casual players, so they have to default to Matched Play instead.
Honestly, they just need to make a big ol' statement to the effect of:
Power is meant for pick-up games where people might need to make changes to their lists on the fly to ensure both parties can have an enjoyable game without requiring swapping units out wholesale.
Points are made for a more structured and granular play experience where both players have agreed to a more cutthroat experience, such as a tournament.
I'm sick and tired of people assuming points = balance.
Deadnight wrote: Meh, facings are no more or less appropriate for narrative than degrading stats.
Universal shooting/damage system, but have infantry, mcs and vehicles take damage differently.
Like the Warjack grid in wmh. That was brilliant.
This is a bit of a separate discussion, but I disagree.
Narrative play is inherently more concerned with the process than matched play (which is more concerned with outcomes).
Whether or not a shell penetrated the armor of the tank (or did superficial external damage or detonated against the armor and didn't harm the tank but killed a bunch of infantry around it etc) is much more useful to narrative players than the current abstraction of "well, this Lascannon bounced off of the armor save, but this one failed to wound, but this one wounded and only did one damage which is the same as this Bolter over here, etc".
At least for people that like to write narratives of how the battle went (rather than just before or after).
I think you need at least 10 lists to test a faction, with Space Marines and a few others ballooning in the number of datasheets available I'd say the average is 20 lists. So it'd take 10 years to test the game this way. In the current format people will organically try a variety of lists in tournaments and people will copy those that do well making it relatively easy to spot where the problems are in the case of an OP faction or where the problems aren't in the case of an UP faction.
You missed the part, where those lists are designed by the best players committee in the first place. According to the wisdom of this very thread, they should be able to spot the glaringly OP/UP elements when they work on a set of balanced lists for the season, just as they currently do, but instead of exploiting those for advantage, they can use those to construct well balanced lists. And what is more - you are not working from scratch to begin with - you take the current state of the meta and arrange the lists for the first season based on current data.
I still don't see how you get a smidgen of data from this. If my best players committee thinks that a list with 2 Land Raiders, 6 Eradicators, 20 Assault Marines is balanced against a list with 1 Wraithknight, 2 Warwalkers, 20 Dark Reapers and 10 Dire Avengers what do I learn from that? I don't learn whether any of the units are strong or weak like I would from studying current tournament results, all I learn is which of the 16 lists are stronger and weaker relative to each other and which player that plays this game mode is the best at this game mode. If all lists where from the same faction you could get some good data, but internal balance is still only half the game.
You still think within the current system. Under my proposed system the imbalance problem as we know it today ceases to exist even without fully repairing the balance of the game. Consider such an exaggerated example:
GW launches an UberPrimarisMarines 3.0 and to sell them, the core troop choice now has once per game ability to point and remove a single enemy unit from the game amd you can fit 10 of those in a legal 2000pts list, enabling you to alpha strike an entire symmetrical list so the game devolves into initiative roll. This is obviously busted ability that should not make it past playtesting, but it did.
In a current reality, narrative and casual players will organically restrain from using this build, as it removes all fun from the game. Tournament players however, will use this list as it is the winning list, so the game is obviously meant to be played this way, so git gud or find another hobby and don’t tell me how to have my fun and all that. Cross games between casuals and tournament guys is straight up impossible, seal clubbing is the new norm and the community is as hostile as it gets.
Now what happens under my proposed reality: narrative players do as they always did, use this unit only if it fits a particular narrative and only in ways that are not destroying enjoyment. Now what do tournament guys do? They also don’t spam this unit, because only a single tournament list features only a single copy of this unit. What is more - if the rest of this list is UP enough, it is a perfectly valid, balanced list for tournament play. Tournament and casuals can play together and tournament guys get their tournament prep games even when facing a typical casual list and everybody is happy, except those guys who wished Auticus to get butt cancer, without whom the community would arguably be ways more welcoming to new players and thus stronger and healthier.
Now on the other topic - you seem to think that statistical data is the only information that can be used to balance things and that you need to test every iteration to find bad apples. It is not how it is in reality, because a) there are internal relationships between units, weapons, wargear and special rules (heck, “tailored” rules are just copypastes with different names most of the time) so you can adjust many units/weapons proportionately to the statistical findings about a single unit/weapon/wargear etc. And b) you don’t need to test every iteration - there is a whole class of mathematical problems, the most famous one being The Counterfeit Coin Problem. You need way, way less tests that the total iterations within the system to find an outlier.
I would rather have balance first and then be able to riff custom rules for my narrative off a balanced base.
A game that is imbalanced to start with means you have to do more work to balance it before you can begin to understand the impact of rules changes made by the organizer.
Of course. Even among narrative players, I would say the majority still highly prioritize balance, and that is a totally valid point of view- I don't think I've ever said otherwise (though I might have once upon a time before I found the need for nuance in these types of discussions).
Even I like balance. But I don't like it coming it at the expense of options that enable players to express the character of their armies on the battlefield. Not every suggestion in the name of balance harms the ability to do that, but some of the suggestions do. I don't want to lose datasheets; I don't want to lose sub faction traits and I'm not particularly keen on losing strats either...
Although, making some of the more common strats more universal isn't a bad idea, and as mentioned previously, I'm not too keen on equipment strats myself. I also don't mind the restriction of any of these things in Matched play settings. Some the other systems that have been floated- buy a finite number of strats from the list before the game using points/ PL, or restrict some of them to once per game- all of those are fairly reasonable suggestions- especially if rul
I didn't mean to imply that we shared many views- I know your perspective is different than mine. But we have both talked about how a big book of all things Crusade would have been advantageous. And both of us would like to see more support for campaign systems and game linkages.
I am not sure why non-tourney players feel the need to impose their desires on something that other people do?
That's my favorite part about the argument. They don't even see the irony of "competitive play sucks and you're all having fun wrong...so here's how should change competitive play (that I never participate in)"
** All of his post **
I fully agree and exalt.
I don't read anyone here saying competitive play sucks or is bad wrong fun. Someone mentioned an alternative version of competitive play involving set lists. Id actually be all for that, but just as a format, not to force everyone to do it.
Fun trivia fact: I ran such a tournament series back in 4th edition as a rogue trader regional. The feedback was about 50% thought it was fun as hell and were happy that the table skill meant for, and the other 50% boycotted me and sent me all caps hate mail for about a month after the event saying people like me ruin tournaments and that they hoped I got butt cancer and died. (the butt cancer wish would crop up again when we published azyr for age of sigmar when people cried out that we killed listbuilding by making the point system too balanced - I don't know what it is about butt cancer and people wishing it on others in the tabletop gaming space but it seems to be a common wish )
I don't ever advocate for a format to be the only one, I am and have always been more about options and multiple formats.
I don't hate competitive play, I did it for a full decade and had a blast. I played in 14 different grand tournaments, a little over 50 regional rogue traders and god knows how many local tournaments for both 40k and fantasy, traveled all over the united states, and had a great time doing so.
What I've advocated in this thread is that GW make the distinction between pick up matched games, and tournament games. Thats important because house rules are seen as satan and it would be nice for GW to explicitly lay out boundaries because like it or not those boundaries are "official" and bear more weight than someone like me trying to get a matched campaign game where I make the table not symetrical and put a special rule for the scenario that makes it night fighting for this one time and has a unit restriction where you can't take the same units more than once (highlander format) because of the narrative without having people screaming in my face or telling me to go outside so we can fight in the parking lot (also true story though that was age of sigmar and that happened when I dared run a warhammer world scenario for halloween for our GW store since that was houseruled nonsense that punished all competitive players)
That its just as "official' to play a game of 40k (or sigmar) without tournament rules in effect and that not all matched games are tournament games. And in my opinion narrative games could use a more restrictive list building structure, because you don't always get to cherry pick the absolute best and sometimes the army should be composed of mostly your troop choices which you have more access to. The tournament players who hate that are free to stay in their more open ended building game and neither side can scream at the other for playing "houseruled nonsense".
How is such hate mail not grounds for being banned from the gaming group?? So glad i have never really played out in the wild so to speak.
They formed their own competitive discord and facebook, but the thing was whenever we would try and do campaigns they would show up to play as well since they were store events and would do so with the intent of making sure we weren't "teaching people how to play wrong".
Then your store owner (or manager if a GW) is at fault for allowing them to continue to participate.
I guarantee that this crap would get them banned from playing anything - private game or store event- at my local shops. And they'd be lucky if the weren't banned from the shops in general....
Maybe the solution is to force competitive players to play casually by making casual play better/more interesting and widening the casual/competitive divide?
Rework Power Level to be a bit more, err... workable (big complaint locally from all the tournament gremlins and even semi-competitive asuals is that its "not balanced" as two units could be priced identically even though one is coming stock standard and the other one has 4 plasmaguns/meltaguns, etc. and then streamline all the unit datasheets by cutting various special rules and abilities, eliminate warlord traits, artifacts/relics, etc. (for balance reasons, of course) from competitive play and "paywall" all of it behind a narrative power-level based paywall with better listbuilding and mission design, etc.
Give the competitive players the highly balanced and heavily streamlined but otherwise totally bland competitive game of their dreams and basically put all the cool and fun stuff on the "narrative" side of the fence that plays the way the game is "meant" to be played. I would imagine that would encourage the competitive crew to pretend like they aren't playing every game like its the top table at the biggest tournament ever. It seems like the big issue currently is that theres basically no reason to play a true "narrative play" game for a lot of players, because narrative play doesn't necessarily offer anything "more" than matched play does - and actually the perception seems to be that it offers them "less" as a result of power levels "robbing" them of what they perceive to be a properly balanced experience. So flip the script a bit and rework power level so that the perception issue changes a bit (which means it won't be as simple as it is today, but it doesn't need to be complex - instead of buying a unit for 5PL regardless of upgrades, maybe its 5PL including 1-2 upgrades from this menu of options, and for an additional PL you get an additional 1-2 upgrades from this menu of options, etc.) and then put all the fun and cool but potentially balance-breaking stuff behind the narrative wall. In terms of datasheets
And truth is that a lot more could be done with power level in terms of making rules that interact directly with a units PL rating (i.e. "+1 to hit in melee when fighting a unit with PL 5 or less") or even rules that allow you to spend excess/unused PL on mid-game strategems/abilities. In terms of datasheets, I would imagine that there would be a number of basic rules which are common to both matched and narrative games, plus several more which are tagged "[NARRATIVE PLAY]" or something to indicate their non-availability in Matched. GW could go a lot farther to making a more interesting game experience on the narrative end of the pool while also appeasing competitive players with a better balanced game by differentiating the rules/gameplay a bit more.
EDIT - It seems to me, basically, that as it currently stands the problem is that casual players are showing up to gamenight looking for casual games using matched play points and rules. This simply enables competitively minded players to field more aggressive lists in a casual environment, rather than allowing the casual players to play casually. So it seems like we can fix at least some of the perceived issues by simply giving casual players more of a reason to want/demand to play narratively and further differentiating what that means from competitive play, so that a competitive player will be forced to "dial down" in order to play in a casual environment.
I would rather have balance first and then be able to riff custom rules for my narrative off a balanced base.
A game that is imbalanced to start with means you have to do more work to balance it before you can begin to understand the impact of rules changes made by the organizer.
Of course. Even among narrative players, I would say the majority still highly prioritize balance, and that is a totally valid point of view- I don't think I've ever said otherwise (though I might have once upon a time before I found the need for nuance in these types of discussions).
Even I like balance. But I don't like it coming it at the expense of options that enable players to express the character of their armies on the battlefield. Not every suggestion in the name of balance harms the ability to do that, but some of the suggestions do. I don't want to lose datasheets; I don't want to lose sub faction traits and I'm not particularly keen on losing strats either...
Although, making some of the more common strats more universal isn't a bad idea, and as mentioned previously, I'm not too keen on equipment strats myself. I also don't mind the restriction of any of these things in Matched play settings. Some the other systems that have been floated- buy a finite number of strats from the list before the game using points/ PL, or restrict some of them to once per game- all of those are fairly reasonable suggestions- especially if rul
I didn't mean to imply that we shared many views- I know your perspective is different than mine. But we have both talked about how a big book of all things Crusade would have been advantageous. And both of us would like to see more support for campaign systems and game linkages.
I think the issue is "expressing the character of armies on the battlefield". We both want that, but IME 9th doesn't deliver.
To me:
1) stratagems don't do this. They don't make narrative sense.
2) army rules only do this awkwardly (here are two options, pick them). There are also severe balance issues that affect this (and I give examples). Balanced subfaction and custom subfaction rules would be very important here. VERY IMPORTANT.
3) wargear options do not do this either. An army's flavor is more than just "they prefer missile Launchers to autocannons" or whatever.
For all my armies, I have found that 4th edition allows me to express their character far better than 9th. Even though ninth has 1e10 more options.
catbarf wrote: The problem, fundamentally, is that Narrative and Open don't provide enough structure for a lot of casual players, so they have to default to Matched Play instead.
Yes, there it is. Nice and succinct
FWIW, all of the balance updated and tweaks intended for matched-competitive should apply to matched-casual too. Better balance helps both.
Regarding the lists themselves, my feeling is that strong tournament list generally doubles down on the most effect units in the codex, stacking multiples of that. From a casual perspective, I like the idea of the Highlander rules, since it forces people to into taking sub-optimal units.
Backspacehacker wrote: To what unit said I find that no army has this issue of identity more then tsons
Like there is an army that should have lots of good flavor but none of the stats or weapons really bring that out.
Honestly anything centered around psyker abilities seems to suffer but that's my opion on that
Agreed. The Thousand Sons should have a lot of room for flavor, but they are B-L-A-N-D bland. The Crusade section is boring and phoned-in. The army special rules are boring and phoned-in. The abilities, units, weapons, etc. are boring and phoned-in. To be frank, I don't think they currently warrant having a full codex of their own. Unlike Death Guard who have an army list that overwhelmingly contains units and weapons unique to the faction, the Thousand Sons are the reverse, being mostly generic CSM options (or spins on them, putting "Thousand Sons" or "Exalted" in front of the word "Sorceror" or "Daemon Prince", etc.) with a literal handful of unique options (Rubric Marines, SOT, Ahriman, Magnus, Infernal Pactman), plus a handful of non-Thousand Sons units ported over from AoS/Fantasy (Mutalith Vortex Beast - which should be a daemon, but isn't, and then a few Tzaangor units) as filler. DG at least have two distinct terminator units, their regular troops unit (disregarding poxwalkers), about a dozen distinct character models/solos across the HQ and Elites slot (+ Lord of War), a terrain piece, and 3 distinct vehicles (PBC, Bloat Drone, MBH). That at least makes them feel like something more cohesive of an army - maybe I'm being harsh on the TS in discounting the contributions made by MVB and Tzaangors, but I would have liked more options that allude to the idea of this being a unique legion of heretic ASTARTES rather than a hodgepodge of tzeentch-worshipping mortals and near-mortals.
catbarf wrote: The problem, fundamentally, is that Narrative and Open don't provide enough structure for a lot of casual players, so they have to default to Matched Play instead.
Yes, there it is. Nice and succinct
FWIW, all of the balance updated and tweaks intended for matched-competitive should apply to matched-casual too. Better balance helps both.
And there it is, tourney seeping out of its environment. Again.
What is it with you people not understanding that:
A) not all matched play is competitive play (beyond the basics of "Yes, there will be a winner & a loser"), B) not all casual play is narrative.
If we casual players WANTED to play tourney style? We'd enter a tourney.
Just like if you wanted to play Crusade you'd seek out a Crusade league or such.
But you don't advocate for Crusade material to be used in your tournaments. So why do you want to pollute our casual Thursdays etc with Competitive changes?
nou wrote: GW launches an UberPrimarisMarines 3.0 and to sell them, the core troop choice now has once per game ability to point and remove a single enemy unit from the game amd you can fit 10 of those in a legal 2000pts list, enabling you to alpha strike an entire symmetrical list so the game devolves into initiative roll. This is obviously busted ability that should not make it past playtesting, but it did.
In a current reality, narrative and casual players will organically restrain from using this build, as it removes all fun from the game. Tournament players however, will use this list as it is the winning list, so the game is obviously meant to be played this way, so git gud or find another hobby and don’t tell me how to have my fun and all that. Cross games between casuals and tournament guys is straight up impossible, seal clubbing is the new norm and the community is as hostile as it gets.
Now what happens under my proposed reality: narrative players do as they always did, use this unit only if it fits a particular narrative and only in ways that are not destroying enjoyment. Now what do tournament guys do? They also don’t spam this unit, because only a single tournament list features only a single copy of this unit. What is more - if the rest of this list is UP enough, it is a perfectly valid, balanced list for tournament play. Tournament and casuals can play together and tournament guys get their tournament prep games even when facing a typical casual list and everybody is happy, except those guys who wished Auticus to get butt cancer, without whom the community would arguably be ways more welcoming to new players and thus stronger and healthier.
I'm not interested in playing one of 16 premade lists every game and for that to be the only thing I can play against, almost nobody is. I want to build a list of units that I like and that I think work together and I want my opponent to do the same more or less. I don't want to have to be concerned with whether my list will be too competitive if I put x, y or z unit into my list or whether my list will be absolute garbage because I feel like including a, b or c unit into my list. I want GW to balance the game instead of foisting the job on me and I don't think that's too much to ask. They could start by buffing Deathmarks instead of Skorpekh Destroyers by looking at competitive Necron list trends.
Now on the other topic - you seem to think that statistical data is the only information that can be used to balance things and that you need to test every iteration to find bad apples...
vict0988 wrote: ...#1 math will have made the issue of internal datasheet balance small in the first place...
...step 1 which is estimating pts values based on pts-efficiency math done the Indian you hired on Fiverr...
Kanluwen wrote: Honestly, they just need to make a big ol' statement to the effect of:
Power is meant for pick-up games where people might need to make changes to their lists on the fly to ensure both parties can have an enjoyable game without requiring swapping units out wholesale.
Points are made for a more structured and granular play experience where both players have agreed to a more cutthroat experience, such as a tournament.
I'm sick and tired of people assuming points = balance.
How is a new casual player supposed to know when he is allowed to upgrade his units with plasma guns? It is true that when PL concepts like "every weapon should cost the same or at least an increment of 5" then points =/= balance.
why do you want to pollute our casual Thursdays etc with Competitive changes?
Because I want to use my Canoptek Reanimator and have it pull its weight somewhat and I don't think the flamer Wracks were fair.
I've long stated that in gw-land points don't equal balance and never have. They provide structure to optimize within.
You can't have strong listbuilding impact along with strong balance. You can have one or the other (or a mix of the two - a little balance and a little listbuilding).
Right now its all about the structure provided to min/max within. Listbuilding is all about finding the combos that make your 2000 point list fight at a higher weight class / act like its 4000 or 5000 points.
If Points == Balance then 2000 points would be 2000 points at its most extreme end, and any 2000 point list would have a good game against any other 2000 point list.
Thats how a lot of people infer points, and how I myself would like points to be (and how I design games to be) but the listbuilding folks do not like that because it removes listbuilding from mattering as much so I see this as a perpetual struggle between those two styles clashing.
No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kanluwen wrote: Honestly, they just need to make a big ol' statement to the effect of:
Power is meant for pick-up games where people might need to make changes to their lists on the fly to ensure both parties can have an enjoyable game without requiring swapping units out wholesale.
Points are made for a more structured and granular play experience where both players have agreed to a more cutthroat experience, such as a tournament.
I'm sick and tired of people assuming points = balance.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
auticus wrote: I've long stated that in gw-land points don't equal horse and never have. They provide structure to optimize within.
You can't have strong horn impact along with strong horse. You can have one or the other (or a mix of the two - a little horse and a little horn).
Right now its all about the structure provided to min/max within. Horn is all about finding the combos that make your 2000 point list fight at a higher weight class / act like its 4000 or 5000 points.
If horn + horse = unicorn then 2000 points would be 2000 points at its most extreme end, and any 2000 point horse would have a good game against any other 2000 point horse.
Thats how a lot of people infer horns, and how I myself would like horns to be (and how I design horses to be) but the unicorns do not like that because it removes horses from mattering as much.
The best 2k list got nerfed by 200 pts and had some errata and went from 70% to 45% win rate. There are no 2k lists that act like 1k lists or 3k lists.
auticus wrote: I've long stated that in gw-land points don't equal horse and never have. They provide structure to optimize within.
You can't have strong horn impact along with strong horse. You can have one or the other (or a mix of the two - a little horse and a little horn).
Right now its all about the structure provided to min/max within. Horn is all about finding the combos that make your 2000 point list fight at a higher weight class / act like its 4000 or 5000 points.
If horn + horse = unicorn then 2000 points would be 2000 points at its most extreme end, and any 2000 point horse would have a good game against any other 2000 point horse.
Thats how a lot of people infer horns, and how I myself would like horns to be (and how I design horses to be) but the unicorns do not like that because it removes horses from mattering as much.
The best 2k list got nerfed by 200 pts and had some errata and went from 70% to 45% win rate. There are no 2k lists that act like 1k lists or 3k lists.
Well except when we had free wargear/units during 7th formations but nobody counts 7th for anything so
auticus wrote: I've long stated that in gw-land points don't equal horse and never have. They provide structure to optimize within.
You can't have strong horn impact along with strong horse. You can have one or the other (or a mix of the two - a little horse and a little horn).
Right now its all about the structure provided to min/max within. Horn is all about finding the combos that make your 2000 point list fight at a higher weight class / act like its 4000 or 5000 points.
If horn + horse = unicorn then 2000 points would be 2000 points at its most extreme end, and any 2000 point horse would have a good game against any other 2000 point horse.
Thats how a lot of people infer horns, and how I myself would like horns to be (and how I design horses to be) but the unicorns do not like that because it removes horses from mattering as much.
The best 2k list got nerfed by 200 pts and had some errata and went from 70% to 45% win rate. There are no 2k lists that act like 1k lists or 3k lists.
I strongly disagree with you.
I just watched a game of 40k this past weekend where the one list was very much about 50% capability of the other list and got destroyed. But they were both "2000 points". One was a casual list, the other an optimized LVO list. They were in no way shape or form in the same ballpark as each other, it was like watching a high school football team go up against an NFL team. The only similarity was "40k" was the game they were playing.
Tyran wrote: I think we need a clear definition on what is casual play and how it differs from competitive play.
I know it kinda sounds obvious, but obvious isn't the same as clear.
I agree with that. And I think the even bigger challenge is what, from a written rules standpoint, would result in an actual difference between competitive and casual play?
Point Limits - Matched (Competitive): Uses points, 2K standard for full games
- Matched (Casual): Uses points, 2k standard for full games
Missions - Matched (Competitive): Uses tournament mission pack (e.g. basically what's in 9th edition right now)
- Matched (Casual): Broadens the mission pack. Control point missions less rigid (more flexible point placement), more focus on asymmetric and /or varied primary objectives (could overlap with Crusade mission pack). Victory determination can require a margin of victory to have a declared winner (below the margin of victory games treated as a draw).
Table Setup - Matched (Competitive): Symmetrical board layouts (per typical tournaments)
- Matched (Casual): Guidelines for establishing asymmetrical board layouts. Provides a process for players alternating placement of terrain or defines another procedure to use.
Force Organization - Matched (Competitive): Per existing 9th edition rules. Can use any detachments paying CP costs as needed. Use of allies per current rules.
- Matched (Casual): "Unified force organization method" (TBD) to allow less room for skew. Use of special characters and Lords of War, or other deviations in force organization with opponent's concurrence. May have limits on taking repeats of specialist units (TBD). Single detachment. No allies except with opponent's concurrence.
Are there other rule dimensions that would feed into this?
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Right, that's why points were so well balanced that Guard ended up needing to have a whole other set of points costs added to them for BS4+ and BS3+ weapons.
Because points "make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon".
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
PL is balanced in a situation where you're actively involved in a community that talks about their lists and isn't just there to tell people to "git gud"...
I can see why you wouldn't know that though. Git gud.
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Right, that's why points were so well balanced that Guard ended up needing to have a whole other set of points costs added to them for BS4+ and BS3+ weapons.
Because points "make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon".
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
PL is balanced in a situation where you're actively involved in a community that talks about their lists and isn't just there to tell people to "git gud"...
I can see why you wouldn't know that though. Git gud.
In a situation where your actively involved in a community that talks about their lists and how to balance them you don't need points, or PL.
PL is the exact same thing as points, but less precise.
There is no situation in which using PL gives a more 'balanced' result then using points would have done.
In your community situation, the exact same thing would happen if you used points and then talked about your lists with eachother.
auticus wrote: I've long stated that in gw-land points don't equal balance and never have. They provide structure to optimize within.
You can't have strong listbuilding impact along with strong balance. You can have one or the other (or a mix of the two - a little balance and a little listbuilding).
Right now its all about the structure provided to min/max within. Listbuilding is all about finding the combos that make your 2000 point list fight at a higher weight class / act like its 4000 or 5000 points.
If Points == Balance then 2000 points would be 2000 points at its most extreme end, and any 2000 point list would have a good game against any other 2000 point list.
Thats how a lot of people infer points, and how I myself would like points to be (and how I design games to be) but the listbuilding folks do not like that because it removes listbuilding from mattering as much so I see
this as a perpetual struggle between those two styles clashing.
Accurate, but the majority of players are not game designers and don't understand that points are a shaping mechanism rather than a balancing mechanism, nor what those distinctions mean and why they wont see "balance" the way they want it. If you try to educate them on it, they'll usually just try to argue the point with you or insist upon the idea that the game can be adequately balanced by making x cost y points as though that will magically correct everything and bring it all into line.
Frankly, I don't think the design studio fully understands that distinction either, but thats neither here nor there.
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kanluwen wrote: Honestly, they just need to make a big ol' statement to the effect of:
Power is meant for pick-up games where people might need to make changes to their lists on the fly to ensure both parties can have an enjoyable game without requiring swapping units out wholesale.
Points are made for a more structured and granular play experience where both players have agreed to a more cutthroat experience, such as a tournament.
I'm sick and tired of people assuming points = balance.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
Points make you pay *a* cost, that doesn't mean that the cost is automatically appropriate. One would be inclined to think that a weapon with a longer range, more shots, higher strength, better ap, or higher damage stat, etc. should cost more than the default but there are various tradeoffs that can be made or inferred between weapons with varying stats that would otherwise make the cost between them a wash. In some cases GW has already acknowledged that, with the tendency to price heavy bolters and autocannons identically, likewise meltaguns and plasmaguns, and flamers/grenade launchers sometimes being simply a free upgrade over a bolter, etc. There are many variables that need to be considered in terms of how these weapons actually perform vs how they look on paper, etc. In some cases, even free weapon upgrades will get passed up vs just keeping the stock weapon, sometimes you would rather have an extra lasgun for FRSR than take a flamer or whatever, etc. This doesn't even begin to address the differences that the *platform* has on the utility of a weapon.
A meltagun on a BS5+ model with Mv 2", T2, W1, Sv 6+ and no options for transports or deep strike, etc. is not the same as a meltagun on a BS2+ model with Mv 20", T8, W12, Sv 3+. Same weapon, completely different results, ergo completely different levels of "appropriate cost". You can make the costs for the melta weapon variable from unit to unit to try to achieve "balance" but in reality all what you're accomplishing is making one platform a more efficient source for meltaguns than the other, which actually creates imbalance - because now you've incentivized the use of one unit over the other by attempting to cost something "appropriately", potentially rendering one option a must-take and the other a never-take by comparison. The resulting internal imbalance feeds into the external imbalance of the wider meta (and vice versa). You can play with the internal balance all you want but you will never get it to the point that both options are equally viable choices where the player has to make a meaningful decision between the two selections because its never just these two weapons on just these two units and you're essentially always trying to hit a moving target. Raising/dropping the price of one or the other may adjust the relationship the two units have with eachother, but it also adjusts their relationship with the rest of the codex/army list they exist within. Something will always become more/less effective than something else, and what that something is will change as other armies are updated, because the entire meta exists within an interconnected structure, and changing one small thing can butterfly effect its way into completely rewriting the meta and how the game is being played, thereby throwing off every algorithm, calculation, and playtest game you ran previously to try to determine what "appropriate" is.
Our group exclusively uses PL because it's more akin to AoS point system (and we much prefer that as opposed to micro of 40k points).
We don't have anyone bringing absolutely every possible upgrade you can think of because "lol it's free" We adhere to strict WYSIWYG and the "would you take that loadout if it were points?" clause.
Basically the list building is not enjoyable in 9th to any of us so we prefer to minimize the amount of time spent in that aspect of the Hobby, PL lets us achieve that, but we typically bring loadouts we would normally take if we were using points, but now we don't need to actually waste time adding it up etc.
One of the things I like about PL, is that you can swap things in or out of units once both players put their armies on the table without needing to rebuild your list.
So if I bring fully optimized squads and the opponent turns out to be someone who did not, I can say, "Ahh. Let me swap out some of these heavies for normal dudes, otherwise I'm going to crush you." And it doesn't change the value of the army.
I could also say to the dude "Oh, you should take a few of the upgrades," and again, his list is still going to work.
PenitentJake wrote: One of the things I like about PL, is that you can swap things in or out of units once both players put their armies on the table without needing to rebuild your list.
So if I bring fully optimized squads and the opponent turns out to be someone who did not, I can say, "Ahh. Let me swap out some of these heavies for normal dudes, otherwise I'm going to crush you." And it doesn't change the value of the army.
I could also say to the dude "Oh, you should take a few of the upgrades," and again, his list is still going to work.
Have had this happen a few times and I agree, it is so much easier to just swap a few options to level the playing field.
Of course this is in a casual-competitive setting, would never fly in a tournament scene.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
I don't even know how anyone makes the "PL is better for balance" argument with a straight face. Sure points don't give us perfect balance but I fail to see how making a plasma or melta the same cost as a bolt pistol will lead to better balance.
Kanluwen wrote: Right, that's why points were so well balanced that Guard ended up needing to have a whole other set of points costs added to them for BS4+ and BS3+ weapons.
That is how weapons should be balanced, yes. Different costs for different bearers/profiles.
The issue is that GW's rules exist solely to sell more models, and all other concerns are secondary.
Frankly, we'd just be buying one or two models of each type if it weren't for the rules GW was peddling. Their pricing - 10 "troops" costing $35 or so, and 3 "elite" costing $55 is just a sample of the artificial pricing model they do, its not because the plastic for the "elite" kit costs them any more.
Requiring armies of 2K points is just icing, and to further sell things each rulebook has to one-up the last, otherwise everyone would just stick with what they already have - both book and model wise. If a model isn't selling, they change the rules about to encourage sales - but because their concern isn't the game itself but the sale of models, they're as apt to make things worse ruleswise than better. They won't put too much effort in the rules because with the money they're making hand over fist, "good enough" is sufficient effort to keep the purchases flowing - and why bother dumping money into good rules when your customer base will fall over themselves to buy your product regardless how lousy your rules are*?
* Though there is an apparent basement to how bad folks will let the rules go before they start wandering away, as evidenced by 7th edition.
It's a self-feeding cycle that only benefits GW. Why would they change a system that is working to their benefit?
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Right, that's why points were so well balanced that Guard ended up needing to have a whole other set of points costs added to them for BS4+ and BS3+ weapons.
Because points "make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon".
At least the codex costs recognized a difference between a lasgun and a plasma gun, even if it didn't recognize the difference between BS4+ and BS3+. Nobody said points are perfect, just that they're better.
And holding up the fact that GW then improved on deficiencies in the points system as an argument for why points are bad is weird.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
PL is balanced in a situation where you're actively involved in a community that talks about their lists and isn't just there to tell people to "git gud"...
I can see why you wouldn't know that though. Git gud.
If you're performing a heuristic assessment of the relative strengths of two PL-equivalent forces to figure out how to actually balance them, obviously the PL isn't balanced.
This reminds me of the AoS release, when some people said it wasn't a problem that the points system amounted to '1 model = 1 point' because you could always just take on the effort of figuring out balanced forces on your own. Well, sure, if you have a good understanding of the game, the relative capabilities of two forces, and both have the same subjective impressions of overall strength, then you can compose a balanced matchup regardless of what balancing mechanisms have been provided by the designers.
That approach falls apart as soon as you run into someone who has a different impression of your armies' relative power, cannot come to a consensus, and have to rely on a mechanical means of assessing relative strength.
PenitentJake wrote: One of the things I like about PL, is that you can swap things in or out of units once both players put their armies on the table without needing to rebuild your list.
So if I bring fully optimized squads and the opponent turns out to be someone who did not, I can say, "Ahh. Let me swap out some of these heavies for normal dudes, otherwise I'm going to crush you." And it doesn't change the value of the army.
I could also say to the dude "Oh, you should take a few of the upgrades," and again, his list is still going to work.
I mean, you can just as easily downgrade some weapons to come in under points, or give them extra points to work with. There's no functional difference between points handicaps and using the inherent inaccuracy of PL to adjust your army's power while maintaining the same PL.
I'd love to see a sideboard mechanic in 40K to allow you to swap things around before a game starts. Or take a page out of AoS and balance equipment as sidegrades that can be swapped out without changing points costs. AOS does a good job of using points to provide granularity without getting into the weeds with individual equipment producing different costs.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
I don't even know how anyone makes the "PL is better for balance" argument with a straight face. Sure points don't give us perfect balance but I fail to see how making a plasma or melta the same cost as a bolt pistol will lead to better balance.
The people claiming it are just making bad faith arguments.
I absolutely agree that PL is less of a hassle and makes it much easier to throw lists together without having to calculate all the little points and upgrades.
Nothing wrong with sacrificing a bit of balance in the name of easy of use, so long as you recognise that is what your doing.
Stormonu wrote: * Though there is an apparent basement to how bad folks will let the rules go before they start wandering away, as evidenced by 7th edition.
Is this accurate?
Anecdotal, but there was a much much larger community playing 40k in 6th-7th than there are currently playing 9th in my area, in fact almost all local clubs (5 of them) are now exclusively running blood bowl, warcry, AoS, necromunda or kill team and if you show up looking for a game of 40k, you will rarely find an opponent willing. 7th never ever had a lack of players around here. Though this could also be due to the increased in amount of side games supported by GW now.
Also noticing more and more talks among locals (as well as my own group ~7 or so people) of abandoning 9th to go back to 7th or earlier.
EDIT: On the PL vs Points Balance debate, I am not advocating PL is any more balanced than points, its purely a time:enjoyment factor for my group
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Right, that's why points were so well balanced that Guard ended up needing to have a whole other set of points costs added to them for BS4+ and BS3+ weapons.
Because points "make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon".
At least the codex costs recognized a difference between a lasgun and a plasma gun, even if it didn't recognize the difference between BS4+ and BS3+. Nobody said points are perfect, just that they're better.
And holding up the fact that GW then improved on deficiencies in the points system as an argument for why points are bad is weird.
If you're going to pretend that "points equal balance", then you need to acknowledge what the issue was.
It wasn't plasma guns in squads of veterans or infantry squads that were the big problem. It was the stupid Scion Command Squads getting allied in by other factions for suicide drops.
But I mean hey, what do I know. IM JUST A DUMB CASUAL LOLOL.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
PL is balanced in a situation where you're actively involved in a community that talks about their lists and isn't just there to tell people to "git gud"...
I can see why you wouldn't know that though. Git gud.
If you're performing a heuristic assessment of the relative strengths of two PL-equivalent forces to figure out how to actually balance them, obviously the PL isn't balanced.
This reminds me of the AoS release, when some people said it wasn't a problem that the points system amounted to '1 model = 1 point' because you could always just take on the effort of figuring out balanced forces on your own. Well, sure, if you have a good understanding of the game, the relative capabilities of two forces, and both have the same subjective impressions of overall strength, then you can compose a balanced matchup regardless of what balancing mechanisms have been provided by the designers.
That approach falls apart as soon as you run into someone who has a different impression of your armies' relative power, cannot come to a consensus, and have to rely on a mechanical means of assessing relative strength.
Except that approach only "fell apart" because of people like some of these posters who cannot seem to grasp that a game is a two-sided affair. There was so much disingenuous garbage about how lists like 15 Nagashes or whatever would become prevalent.
Accurate, but the majority of players are not game designers and don't understand that points are a shaping mechanism rather than a balancing mechanism, nor what those distinctions mean and why they wont see "balance" the way they want it. If you try to educate them on it, they'll usually just try to argue the point with you or insist upon the idea that the game can be adequately balanced by making x cost y points as though that will magically correct everything and bring it all into line.
Frankly, I don't think the design studio fully understands that distinction either, but thats neither here nor there.
Spoiler:
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Kanluwen wrote: Honestly, they just need to make a big ol' statement to the effect of:
Power is meant for pick-up games where people might need to make changes to their lists on the fly to ensure both parties can have an enjoyable game without requiring swapping units out wholesale.
Points are made for a more structured and granular play experience where both players have agreed to a more cutthroat experience, such as a tournament.
I'm sick and tired of people assuming points = balance.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
Points make you pay *a* cost, that doesn't mean that the cost is automatically appropriate. One would be inclined to think that a weapon with a longer range, more shots, higher strength, better ap, or higher damage stat, etc. should cost more than the default but there are various tradeoffs that can be made or inferred between weapons with varying stats that would otherwise make the cost between them a wash. In some cases GW has already acknowledged that, with the tendency to price heavy bolters and autocannons identically, likewise meltaguns and plasmaguns, and flamers/grenade launchers sometimes being simply a free upgrade over a bolter, etc. There are many variables that need to be considered in terms of how these weapons actually perform vs how they look on paper, etc. In some cases, even free weapon upgrades will get passed up vs just keeping the stock weapon, sometimes you would rather have an extra lasgun for FRSR than take a flamer or whatever, etc. This doesn't even begin to address the differences that the *platform* has on the utility of a weapon.
A meltagun on a BS5+ model with Mv 2", T2, W1, Sv 6+ and no options for transports or deep strike, etc. is not the same as a meltagun on a BS2+ model with Mv 20", T8, W12, Sv 3+. Same weapon, completely different results, ergo completely different levels of "appropriate cost". You can make the costs for the melta weapon variable from unit to unit to try to achieve "balance" but in reality all what you're accomplishing is making one platform a more efficient source for meltaguns than the other, which actually creates imbalance - because now you've incentivized the use of one unit over the other by attempting to cost something "appropriately", potentially rendering one option a must-take and the other a never-take by comparison. The resulting internal imbalance feeds into the external imbalance of the wider meta (and vice versa). You can play with the internal balance all you want but you will never get it to the point that both options are equally viable choices where the player has to make a meaningful decision between the two selections because its never just these two weapons on just these two units and you're essentially always trying to hit a moving target. Raising/dropping the price of one or the other may adjust the relationship the two units have with eachother, but it also adjusts their relationship with the rest of the codex/army list they exist within. Something will always become more/less effective than something else, and what that something is will change as other armies are updated, because the entire meta exists within an interconnected structure, and changing one small thing can butterfly effect its way into completely rewriting the meta and how the game is being played, thereby throwing off every algorithm, calculation, and playtest game you ran previously to try to determine what "appropriate" is.
To just add to the above, this "appropriate cost" varies for any particular match, depending on the opposing force. So a list that is effectively worth 2000pts in one matchup, can be effectively worth 1800pts in another and 2500pts in a "hard counter" matchup and there is no way around it. None. Now, the defenders of "quest of balance through points" raise a statistical results as a metric here, but in this very thread it has been illustrated, that 50% win rate can be a result of loosing 70% of one kind of matchup/scenario and winning 70% of another matchup/scenario. Hardly an example of a balanced system.
Since my return to the hobby in the middle of 7th this has been discussed countless of times and the discussion never ended with "balance through points" advocates learning anything. It usually ends with "stop defending GW incompetence" posts.
There’s also issues that come up with some squads getting a way better deal out of PL. ork boyz get like no wargear compared to something like kabalites which you can kit out to the teeth.
Kanluwen wrote: If you're going to pretend that "points equal balance", then you need to acknowledge what the issue was.
It wasn't plasma guns in squads of veterans or infantry squads that were the big problem. It was the stupid Scion Command Squads getting allied in by other factions for suicide drops.
But I mean hey, what do I know. IM JUST A DUMB CASUAL LOLOL.
I'm not pretending points are perfectly balanced, refusing to acknowledge what the issue was with plasma spam, or calling you 'casual'. You seem to be engaged in a very spirited argument with a straw man.
I am only saying granular points are better as a balancing mechanism than what is, functionally, a much coarser points system that doesn't account for wargear.
Now, in fairness, you can always balance Scion Command Squads by hiking up their PL cost. But then the fluffy players have their command squads overpriced because they're costed as if they're taking quad plasma, rather than a banner and a medic, because again, it's just a coarse points system that doesn't account for wargear.
Kanluwen wrote: Except that approach only "fell apart" because of people like some of these posters who cannot seem to grasp that a game is a two-sided affair. There was so much disingenuous garbage about how lists like 15 Nagashes or whatever would become prevalent.
You can want to have a balanced, fun, casual game and still disagree over the power disparity between your armies. Points are still a useful tool for casual play as it gets you closer than PL.
A lack of balancing mechanism is my #1 complaint about Spectre. Not because I'm trying to min-max it, but because I do not have enough experience to gauge whether four hardcore Navy SEAL operators against twenty insurgents is a fair game or a stomp one way or the other, or how equipment changes the metric. Is a grenade better than upgrading a guy's rifle to an RPG? I don't know, but I shouldn't have to become an expert in a game system before I can set up a fair fight.
If you know the game inside and out and only play against people who share your impressions of balance, then great- you don't need points, and you don't really need PL either.
I likePL as a way to quickly set up matches with my friends, but saying it's just as balanced because you can do the work of balancing it yourself is unreasonable.
Some_Call_Me_Tim wrote: There’s also issues that come up with some squads getting a way better deal out of PL. ork boyz get like no wargear compared to something like kabalites which you can kit out to the teeth.
I've not met/seen anyone who will say PL is inherently more balanced than Points, most people I know that prefer PL do so because it's less time consuming, and the illusion of balance that points provide is not worth the decrease in enjoyability it brings to make the list.
I do not believe PL advocates want it to become the de-facto system used by all competitive players, but the competitive crowd always dunks on anyone who voices any semblance of respect for the PL system and what it stands for.
I don't know how this topic turned into Point vs PL since there are plenty of larger issues with 9th edition than the point/pl debate.
EviscerationPlague wrote: No it's because points make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon compared to the "take whatever you want" approach of PL.
Right, that's why points were so well balanced that Guard ended up needing to have a whole other set of points costs added to them for BS4+ and BS3+ weapons.
Because points "make you pay a more appropriate cost for a weapon".
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
PL is balanced in a situation where you're actively involved in a community that talks about their lists and isn't just there to tell people to "git gud"...
I can see why you wouldn't know that though. Git gud.
Under your logic you don't need PL either if you're just actively talking about lists.
Points aren't perfectly balanced right now, but they're certainly more balanced than PL. To pretend otherwise is pure denial in the land of "GW perfect!!!1!"
I fail to see how making a plasma or melta the same cost as a bolt pistol will lead to better balance.
Ignoring the "better" part - because thats a separate can of worms - differentiating the cost is unnecessary. PL are "wide brackets" that (in theory) argue that pound for pound each power level basically buys you the same value of capability (which is not actually how matched play points work), any two units at an equivalent power level built "optimally" (or maybe "ideally"? "averagely"? whatever the term here is) will be approximately equivalent in terms of cost-efficiency and value. There is no sense asking you to pay extra for the plasma gun replacing your bolter, because the expectation is essentially that both you and your opponent will select the plasma gun, or one of you will select the plasma gun and the other will select two flamers, or whatever it is that both players feel is an approximation of equivalency whereby each players collection of units remain roughly equivalent to one another in terms of value and capability. This is why its used for narrative play and not matched play, because it relies on the assumption that you and your opponent will *communicate* and that neither player is arriving at the table with the intent of maximizing their advantage in the listbuilding step in order to brutalize their opponent. The points cost of the plasmagun is irrelevant, because the points system that is power level is attempting to balance the game at the macro level (with the assistance of the social contract) as opposed to the micro level used by matched play points.
Its tough to wrap your head around if you've been coddled by the more common system of building a list of an agreed upon points value in a vacuum without real consideration for your opponent as another individual and your shared gameplay experience. Building a PL based list instead is a much more dynamic and open process that requires a good amount of discussion and negotiation, done correctly you are building your opponents list almost as much as you are building your own, and vice versa, where in matched the only input you have is on your own list. If you don't go into a PL game ready and prepared for this dynamic and treat it the same way you would matched, of course you're not going to get a balanced outcome, because theres no constraints or process to prevent either player from taking the maximalist approach and tooling up their units with all the wargear options available or aggressively spamming the most OP units.
If you're performing a heuristic assessment of the relative strengths of two PL-equivalent forces to figure out how to actually balance them, obviously the PL isn't balanced.
This reminds me of the AoS release, when some people said it wasn't a problem that the points system amounted to '1 model = 1 point' because you could always just take on the effort of figuring out balanced forces on your own. Well, sure, if you have a good understanding of the game, the relative capabilities of two forces, and both have the same subjective impressions of overall strength, then you can compose a balanced matchup regardless of what balancing mechanisms have been provided by the designers.
That approach falls apart as soon as you run into someone who has a different impression of your armies' relative power, cannot come to a consensus, and have to rely on a mechanical means of assessing relative strength.
Yep, which is why its really meant to play with friends or people you know well, preferably so that you can negotiate/discuss in advance of gametime, rather than walking into a store and just pointing at someone and saying 'lets go'. This is a big failure of the PL system, in that its not very useful for playing pickup games, which is theoretically the domain of the casual gamer moreso than it is the competitive gamer (serious competitive gamers generally seem to prefer to schedule their games with select opponents in advance as it doesn't do them much good as a practice game to play a pickup game against a casual non-optimized list being played by a scrub), therefore it doesn't get used as much as matched play does, and when it does get used it often produces bad results.
That being said, IIRC the 1 model = 1 point system came after release, as I recall the original system used on release was essentially 1 warscroll = 1 point, with the intent being that you and your opponent would agree to a game based on a fixed number of warscrolls, and then basically alternate taking turns nominating which warscrolls you would use so that you could attempt to hard-counter your opponents choices. Its a system that works in theory, but only if both players have equally large and flexible collections of models to choose from. If you have 2 dragons, but your opponent only has 1 unit of dragon-killers, you can very easily overpower them.
Stormonu wrote: * Though there is an apparent basement to how bad folks will let the rules go before they start wandering away, as evidenced by 7th edition.
Is this accurate?
Anecdotal, but there was a much much larger community playing 40k in 6th-7th than there are currently playing 9th in my area, in fact almost all local clubs (5 of them) are now exclusively running blood bowl, warcry, AoS, necromunda or kill team and if you show up looking for a game of 40k, you will rarely find an opponent willing. 7th never ever had a lack of players around here. Though this could also be due to the increased in amount of side games supported by GW now.
Also noticing more and more talks among locals (as well as my own group ~7 or so people) of abandoning 9th to go back to 7th or earlier.
This seems so outlandish I'm tempted to think you're making it up. The vast majority of us seem to have more or less agreed over the years that we have had the opposite experience, where the community steadily declined through 6th and 7th to the point that nobody was playing games locally (certainly the case in the NJ, NYC, Philly area, everyone went over to Warmachine at the time and 40k was all but dead), and that 8th and 9th have brought back a huge number of veterans along with many new players into the fold. I'm seeing discontent with 9th, but I've yet to see anyone (other than maybe you) seriously with a straight-face claim that they would rather play 7th or even advocate for that. The very few people Ive seen pushing alternatives either go back to 4th/5th or 8th, if they even call for that at all.
EDIT: On the PL vs Points Balance debate, I am not advocating PL is any more balanced than points, its purely a time:enjoyment factor for my group
I'm pretty sure they know that nobody is advocating it as a more balanced system, they're just making bad faith arguments to derail discussion about the value and usage of PL.
To just add to the above, this "appropriate cost" varies for any particular match, depending on the opposing force. So a list that is effectively worth 2000pts in one matchup, can be effectively worth 1800pts in another and 2500pts in a "hard counter" matchup and there is no way around it. None. Now, the defenders of "quest of balance through points" raise a statistical results as a metric here, but in this very thread it has been illustrated, that 50% win rate can be a result of loosing 70% of one kind of matchup/scenario and winning 70% of another matchup/scenario. Hardly an example of a balanced system.
Since my return to the hobby in the middle of 7th this has been discussed countless of times and the discussion never ended with "balance through points" advocates learning anything. It usually ends with "stop defending GW incompetence" posts.
Indeed true. Bringing 20 meltaguns to the table might be really helpful if you're up against a list heavy on monsters/vehicles, etc. but bring it into a match against a list of 250 guardsmen on foot with no vehicle support and they might as well be wasted points that would have been better invested into flamers or grenade launchers or bolters, etc.
"This means that you cannot change the number of models in that unit, the wargear they are equipped with, or any of the abilities, Warlord Traits, Relics, psychic powers etc. you have chosen for that unit."
You cannot change wargear after you show up to a Narrative game. You're being silly.
auticus wrote: I just watched a game of 40k this past weekend where the one list was very much about 50% capability of the other list and got destroyed. But they were both "2000 points". One was a casual list, the other an optimized LVO list. They were in no way shape or form in the same ballpark as each other, it was like watching a high school football team go up against an NFL team. The only similarity was "40k" was the game they were playing.
There are no lists that are more than 20% overcosted or more than 20% undercosted, it doesn't take more than 10% for there to be a dramatic difference that looks very unfair and then there are all the things that can swing a match in someone's favour, terrain, skills, luck, having counters to enemy units and the enemy having insufficient counters.
The problem is this leads into how much babysitting can be expected.
Lets say I run an Imperial Fists list, with some random characters, some bogstandard tactical marines to make up my troops, and then two thirds or so of my list is 30 Reivers and 30 Assault Marines. Who are just going to jog across the table and try to stab stuff.
Its one dimensional with no synergy. In most games I can imagine, its going to be ripped to bits.
How much handholding should there be to try and make such a list viable - or encourage the player to take something else, and recognise that if they want to do this, it sucking is a feature rather than a bug.
There are no lists that are more than 20% overcosted or more than 20% undercosted, it doesn't take more than 10% for there to be a dramatic difference that looks very unfair and then there are all the things that can swing a match in someone's favour, terrain, skills, luck, having counters to enemy units and the enemy having insufficient counters.
Having counters and not having counters translates exactly to "having effective point advantage" as explained above.
And in an IGOUGO system, where single turn damage output can be as high as 90% (a recent case) and is commonly around 50%, 10% difference in relative strength of the armies has exactly zero meaning, let alone create "dramatic difference".
I've not met/seen anyone who will say PL is inherently more balanced than Points
There's a frequent commenter in this thread who has made that statement repeatedly without any argument other than "but points aren't perfectly balanced" as if that magically makes any other balancing system better...
I've not met/seen anyone who will say PL is inherently more balanced than Points
There's a frequent commenter in this thread who has made that statement repeatedly without any argument other than "but points aren't perfectly balanced" as if that magically makes any other balancing system better...
As chaos0xomega tries to explain above, PL system creates more balanced gaming experience exactly because it is known and accepted that it is not precise enough for "no cross-tailoring" approach known from point system. I know this seems paradoxical, but it's how it always worked even with points in narrative context and PLs are just more convenient for that. Two players sit and build the expected flavour of a given gaming session with tools "good enough" as a language to express approximate size of the forces involved.
No matter if we are talking about points or PLs, both try to be a linear approximation of n-dimensional phase space, so both are bound to be an utter failure. The difference is that points advocates don't accept the reality of it, while PL users accept this fact.
vict0988 wrote: "This means that you cannot change the number of models in that unit, the wargear they are equipped with, or any of the abilities, Warlord Traits, Relics, psychic powers etc. you have chosen for that unit."
You cannot change wargear after you show up to a Narrative game. You're being silly.
auticus wrote: I just watched a game of 40k this past weekend where the one list was very much about 50% capability of the other list and got destroyed. But they were both "2000 points". One was a casual list, the other an optimized LVO list. They were in no way shape or form in the same ballpark as each other, it was like watching a high school football team go up against an NFL team. The only similarity was "40k" was the game they were playing.
There are no lists that are more than 20% overcosted or more than 20% undercosted, it doesn't take more than 10% for there to be a dramatic difference that looks very unfair and then there are all the things that can swing a match in someone's favour, terrain, skills, luck, having counters to enemy units and the enemy having insufficient counters.
Also strongly disagree. You can do a simple output differential using the game statics to compare offensive and defensive output scores to see that the tuned lists often run at 200% of what a non tuned list runs.
If I have an army that on average does 10 points of damage and can take 20 points of damage that costs X and my opponent also has an army that costs the same X but only does 5 damage and can only take 10 points of damage, there is a 200% difference in the two. Army A doubles the output of Army B for the same price. One can also easily apply statistical probability and algebra to determine those same output scores for a 40k army to get a baseline output score and compare it to point cost to see that.
Most armies that I have analyzed when I was doing points analysis were usually on average 25-40% output different from each other, with the tuned lists going as high as 300% more (outlier). This particular matchup when we did the analysis it was 185% higher so not quite double but the equivalent of say 3800 vs 2000 point match (if you assumed points == balance) and watching that guy get erased in 2 turns - yeah it sure did look like a 3800 vs 2000 point game too.
Toofast wrote: There's a frequent commenter in this thread who has made that statement repeatedly without any argument other than "but points aren't perfectly balanced" as if that magically makes any other balancing system better...
There's one person in this thread who thinks that points are the root of all evil and that PL are better and balanced (ignoring the fact that points have been part of the game since Rogue Trader and that PL are inherently unbalanced by their very nature, but whatever...), usually brings up plasma guns (in this and other topics, weirdly), blames tournament players for all the ills in the world, and gets maniacally hyperbolic even in the face of some of the calmest and most measured people at this site (like Catbarf) when presented with reasonable (and completely devastating) counter-arguments. I find the whole thing delicious, but I can see how it would frustrate others.
All PL is is quicker. It takes a lot of the fiddling out. It's also inherently imbalanced. "This unit of 5 models is 6PL, but if I take just 1 more model, it doubles to 12PL... so I might as well take the full extra 5, as 1 more model costs as much PL as 5 more models". That's not balanced. Anyone who thinks that this is somehow more balanced than paying points for individual models is a lunatic.
ton of dice & wiped the opponent off the board. Doesn't have to be a Guard list.
