I see quite a few opinions about GW not play testing enough before releasing a product so that led me to thinking. Is it actually possible to play test this game? So perhaps a little math hammering can help with this conundrum. And so I proceeded to try to do Maths again.

We have now 17 armies being sold on the Gw site. If we include data slates, chapters, FW lists (dark harvest etc) that's probably 25? It's just an approximate number.

So to test a new edition, we need every army to play against every army. That'll be a total of 300. The formula being games = (25 x (24+11))/2

So each army playing another army once is not enough for an average. Perhaps 5 games? And perhaps 5 that army 1 starts first and 5 that army 2 starts first? That'll be 10.

So right now, 3000 games would need to be played to play test a new edition. If each games takes 3 hours (we don't want to rush the play testers who are looking for mistakes), that'll be 9000 hours of play.

If Gw hires ten playtesters, who play for 9 hours a day due to labour laws, that's 45 hours a week (flouting it a bit), or 225 hours for them. So in 40 weeks, play testing completes.

This is without adding in different permutations of psychic disciplines. So perhaps maybe 120 weeks in all? And different types of list? DA has regular, Deathwing and Ravenwing. Eldar has Biel Tan, Sain Han and I can't remember the rest.

So perhaps in a game this broad, play testing under controlled situations is next to impossible. It's a pity that is so, if not everyone would be happy with a well playtesters product. And it is also a pity that perhaps this is requested by many but the thought of this task being daunting never crossed anyone's mind.

But this ones I really pity are the 10 guys who spent 120 weeks playing warhammer 40k everyday. I hope they found a good place to recuperate for the rest of their lives.

...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

But alas, GW has repeatedly stated / shown that they are not interested in putting effort in releasing a balanced and well-rounded ruleset.

Is it possible? Yes. But GW doesn't care, either because they're really that stupid or more likely because they aren't taking into account that you can do something, because they'd never think of it.

It reminds me very much of 3.5 D&D, which while it was (supposedly...) playtested, it was common knowledge and verified by third-party playtesters that WotC had specific ideas of how the game should be played, so willfully ignored things that were broken because they'd never in a million years consider doing it and therefore incapable of realizing that it was broken and needed to be fixed. For example, in base D&D it was possible for a high-level Druid to completely break the game by using Wildshape to turn into something ridiculous like a Dire Bear or a T-Rex or whatnot (I forget the specifics). But no designer would ever consider that, so it was never addressed (of course D&D being D&D, there was at least the DM who could reel in abuse). Or, Wizards/Sorcerers commonly used utility spells to render creatures out of a fight (what was commonly known as "save or suck" spells), but WotC played Sorcerers as blasters, taking offensive spells that generally were lackluster compared to utility. Then you had the Character Optimization group (aka the powergamers) who would purposely find those broken combos, sometimes just for the lulz but often to point out "This is broken and needs to be fixed, here's why" and to showcase the lack of general thought given by the designers. All in all though that's not a huge deal in a tabletop RPG because you have a GM to arbitrate things and nip abusive combos in the bud. Not so in a wargame in the vast majority of circumstances.

I think GW is in the same boat - you'll never see half the abusive combos come up in their games because that's not how they play, so they can't fathom that anyone would play like that at all. The fact that 40k (as of 6th edition anyways) is clearly meant to be played casually with a gaming club or known group lends itself more to that fact, as what kind of spanker would play something deliberately broken against their mates, knowing it would ruin their fun, just to win?

 Sigvatr wrote:
...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

Umm

Competitive players clearly refuse to even acknowledge how the game is to be played, much less know how to do it.

With the current way GW develops the game, no, real playtesting is impossible. Or, perhaps, a better term would be unfeasible. New editions of core rules, with older editions of codices that have been released over a long spread of years, played at varying points levels, makes it incredibly difficult for truly effective playtesting.

GW really needs to reboot the whole game a la 3rd Edition with a complete rewrite and new editions of all the codices (preferably all at the same time to prevent balance issues between older and newer codices). I am, in fact, quite surprised GW has not done this, as it means they get to sell lots of rulebooks and codices all at once to make their yearly financials look good.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

Umm

Competitive players clearly refuse to even acknowledge how the game is to be played, much less know how to do it.

I completely disagree. Competitive players, particularly those who frequent tournaments, generally have a much greater understanding of the rules and various rule interactions and overpowered combos than casual players due to the lens through which they view the game, they would make far better playtesters as they have trained themselves to look at how they can "game the system" (for want of a better term) in order to win.

 Sigvatr wrote:
...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

But alas, GW has repeatedly stated / shown that they are not interested in putting effort in releasing a balanced and well-rounded ruleset.

They have. The rules team from what have been able to gather is made up of actual players. They key word being players, not player, and you can see the contradiction in some of the wording used in the BRB

I think a lot of the problems just come from not using a wide enough group of people for play testing and not accepting feedback from the community that finds flaws in order to fix those flaws.

A small group of people may play for a very long time and never stumble across some of the broken combos across various books and may never notice some of the incorrectly or vaguely written rules.

Widen that group up a bit and one person will notice one thing and share it then another will notice another thing and share it and before you know it, your sloppy pathetic excuse for a set of rules actually starts to come together in a somewhat balanced and cohesive way.

Of course you still need a small group at the head to actually implement things, too many cooks spoil the broth and all that jazz, the actual writing team should be small, but the playtesting group should be as large as is practical.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

Umm

Competitive players clearly refuse to even acknowledge how the game is to be played, much less know how to do it.

You have your threads, not interesting in further baits - keep them to yourself. Thanks.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Zodiark wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

But alas, GW has repeatedly stated / shown that they are not interested in putting effort in releasing a balanced and well-rounded ruleset.

They have. The rules team from what have been able to gather is made up of actual players. They key word being players, not player, and you can see the contradiction in some of the wording used in the BRB

There's a glaring difference between "player" and "competitive player", though, with the latter a much deeper and more analytic understanding of the rules.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I think a lot of the problems just come from not using a wide enough group of people for play testing and not accepting feedback from the community that finds flaws in order to fix those flaws.

A small group of people may play for a very long time and never stumble across some of the broken combos across various books and may never notice some of the incorrectly or vaguely written rules.

Widen that group up a bit and one person will notice one thing and share it then another will notice another thing and share it and before you know it, your sloppy pathetic excuse for a set of rules actually starts to come together in a somewhat balanced and cohesive way.

Of course you still need a small group at the head to actually implement things, too many cooks spoil the broth and all that jazz, the actual writing team should be small, but the playtesting group should be as large as is practical.

This. Plus hiring all those play testers would cost a lot of money, (which as a share holder I'm suppose to hate).

In a perfect world GW should take a page from Privateer Press, and hold a world wide open beta.... You would get 9000 hours worth of FREE play testing in 1 week. It's why the warmachine rule set is really tight & balanced, only using in-house play testing for new releases.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
I think a lot of the problems just come from not using a wide enough group of people for play testing and not accepting feedback from the community that finds flaws in order to fix those flaws.

A small group of people may play for a very long time and never stumble across some of the broken combos across various books and may never notice some of the incorrectly or vaguely written rules.

Widen that group up a bit and one person will notice one thing and share it then another will notice another thing and share it and before you know it, your sloppy pathetic excuse for a set of rules actually starts to come together in a somewhat balanced and cohesive way.

Of course you still need a small group at the head to actually implement things, too many cooks spoil the broth and all that jazz, the actual writing team should be small, but the playtesting group should be as large as is practical.

Word, this is a common flaw in all sorts of "test groups" if they are self selecting (volunters) or hired, you run the risk of "group think".

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Sigvatr wrote:
...or, you could just ask the people who know the game and how to play it (read: competitive players) and hire some of them for their advice.

Umm

Competitive players clearly refuse to even acknowledge how the game is to be played, much less know how to do it.

Given that until 6th edition GW acknowledged competitive gaming, this part about "how the game is to be played" is a bunch of bollocks. A sane company would let the competitive crowd playtest to make sure the game is balanced.

Actually there are a lot of interesting points brought up. Like the point about it being not feasible as too many codices are still out of date. And tge other point about not play testing, but hearing from the community.

But just to stir up thoughts,, I will attempt to play Devils Advocate for a while, hopefully avoiding damage in the process, for the stones thrown at me.

It is hard to define a broken combo. When the new edition first hit, intuitively a lot of us were thinking OMG what if I face an opponent with 56+1D6 psychic dice?? That must be a broken combo. Yet, we have not really tested it in many games to really confirm it. Yes, I know it is pretty obvious but so was a flat world obvious to many people in the past, before a dude, through scientific study, said it was a sphere.

To expect GW to take anyone's word for it and FAQ a broken combo, is akin to a scientific study taking another scientist's anecdotal evidence, and changing the conclusion. (Boss, this guy in xxx country did our experiment once and got a different result. We must have been wrong the last 2000 times.)

Also, how do we define a good/competitive player? One who played many games? One who won many games? One who has the most armies? One who is most vocal? There is never a good criteria that GW can possibly find that will satisfy all.

So with all that, there seems no real viable solution besides spending 120 weeks with another 10 guys, everytime a broken combo is submitted to them through gwplc.

I think the problem is that your hypothetical is taking the opposite extreme and trying to hammer in all of the possible problems to try and achieve a 100% balanced game. That is as unreasonable as 0% play testing which I feel we are closer to.

The issue at large is that a unit like the Pyrovore/Rough Riders exist in the same game as the Riptide/Heldrake. Just a preliminary glance at these units tells ANYONE that something is not quiet right.

That isn't even counting for the extremely and obviously broken list you can make when abusing psychic powers.

Arbiter_Shade wrote:
I think the problem is that your hypothetical is taking the opposite extreme and trying to hammer in all of the possible problems to try and achieve a 100% balanced game. That is as unreasonable as 0% play testing which I feel we are closer to.

The issue at large is that a unit like the Pyrovore/Rough Riders exist in the same game as the Riptide/Heldrake. Just a preliminary glance at these units tells ANYONE that something is not quiet right.

That isn't even counting for the extremely and obviously broken list you can make when abusing psychic powers.

Nobody is talking about 100% balance, which is just as impossible as 0%. But competitive gamers playtesting things, or even if GW looked beyond their own little bubble, it'd be a lot better than what we have now.

 milkboy wrote:
Actually there are a lot of interesting points brought up. Like the point about it being not feasible as too many codices are still out of date. And tge other point about not play testing, but hearing from the community.

But just to stir up thoughts,, I will attempt to play Devils Advocate for a while, hopefully avoiding damage in the process, for the stones thrown at me.

It is hard to define a broken combo. When the new edition first hit, intuitively a lot of us were thinking OMG what if I face an opponent with 56+1D6 psychic dice?? That must be a broken combo. Yet, we have not really tested it in many games to really confirm it. Yes, I know it is pretty obvious but so was a flat world obvious to many people in the past, before a dude, through scientific study, said it was a sphere.

I'd just like to point out that people knew the Earth was round over 7000 years ago.

 milkboy wrote:

It is hard to define a broken combo. When the new edition first hit, intuitively a lot of us were thinking OMG what if I face an opponent with 56+1D6 psychic dice?? That must be a broken combo. Yet, we have not really tested it in many games to really confirm it. Yes, I know it is pretty obvious but so was a flat world obvious to many people in the past, before a dude, through scientific study, said it was a sphere.

To expect GW to take anyone's word for it and FAQ a broken combo, is akin to a scientific study taking another scientist's anecdotal evidence, and changing the conclusion. (Boss, this guy in xxx country did our experiment once and got a different result. We must have been wrong the last 2000 times.)

If a scientist spots an error in a theory, and proves that error through rigorous and peer-reviewed research, then it would indeed overturn the existing theory.

 milkboy wrote:
Also, how do we define a good/competitive player? One who played many games? One who won many games? One who has the most armies? One who is most vocal? There is never a good criteria that GW can possibly find that will satisfy all.

So with all that, there seems no real viable solution besides spending 120 weeks with another 10 guys, everytime a broken combo is submitted to them through gwplc.

Or, as has been mentioned, an open beta. As well as Warmachine, Malifaux 2E did the same. Rules PDF's would be issued, and errors or abusive combos would be reported on the forums, and adjusted in time for the next release. The end result was a tight and well-balanced game. Of course, GW would probably never do that, because it might lessen the amount they can charge for rulebooks.

At the very least, if 40K players are expected to shell out the amount they do for rules, then yes, there should be a rigorous and scientific approach to making sure those rules work, there are no game-breakers sneaking through and that everything in the codexes are worth their points.

WayneTheGame wrote:


Nobody is talking about 100% balance, which is just as impossible as 0%.

No, but you are talking about balance as if it were a universally good thing, and more balance better than less balance. That is not the case.

 Zweischneid wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:


Nobody is talking about 100% balance, which is just as impossible as 0%.

No, but you are talking about balance as if it were a universally good thing, and more balance better than less balance. That is not the case.

Oh are we back to this again? Balance *is* a universally good thing, infinitely better than lack of balance.

If you really want to have this discussion again, let's take it elsewhere.

I can't even imagine 40k ever getting to the point where becoming more balanced would detract from the game, it took Starcraft ages to reach that point and they had weekly patches instead of having to wait for a new edition and a once-in-a-blue-moon FAQ.

Oh Zwei, you're so funny.

On topic, a beta test team would find much of the glaring issues. There'd still be powerful builds and weak units, but given a decent sized team of people playing from a variety of backgrounds would find the worst of the issues in quick order. Its not hard to bring 40k up to a sensible level of internal balance, and the external balance between codices/top builds would be a little harder but still reasonable.

Its like anything in life really; effort in equals results out. Put more effort in, you'll get a better product. Unfortunately, 40k is the opposite of that.

So yes, it is absolutely a reasonable thing to expect and be able to accomplish. It wouldn't be perfect, but no one wants or even expects that. Just better.

Like making Rough Riders halfway decent.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
I can't even imagine 40k ever getting to the point where becoming more balanced would detract from the game, it took Starcraft ages to reach that point and they had weekly patches instead of having to wait for a new edition and a once-in-a-blue-moon FAQ.

You dont' want to go down that rabbit hole with Zwei.

 PrinceRaven wrote:
I can't even imagine 40k ever getting to the point where becoming more balanced would detract from the game, it took Starcraft ages to reach that point and they had weekly patches instead of having to wait for a new edition and a once-in-a-blue-moon FAQ.

And the game is still by no means balanced

Which game?

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Which game?

I think Starcraft, based on your reference that was quoted.

 Blacksails wrote:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Which game?

I think Starcraft, based on your reference that was quoted.

Correct. Starcraft is by far nowhere near a balanced game.

Well of course Starcraft isn't really balanced any more, not only have they released a new game but after it got to the point where the game was so balanced the matches were decided more on micro and button clicking than tactics and strategy they shook it up and introduced a bit more imbalance into the game.

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Well of course Starcraft isn't really balanced any more, not only have they released a new game but after it got to the point where the game was so balanced the matches were decided more on micro and button clicking than tactics and strategy they shook it up and introduced a bit more imbalance into the game.

It was never balanced from its original inception tbh. But adding new things definitely did not help.

Sweet. Looks like we have another Zwei thread in the making. I'll go ahead and get things started in an on-topic way and see if we can skip a couple of preliminary pages:

Some people think the game is better because it's ludicrously unbalanced, so why should GW fix it? For example, the Penitent Engine is virtually unusable for its points cost. Playtesting it (or maybe even critically thinking about it for 30 seconds) would point out that its point cost is insanely high for what it does.

I contend that it would be a good thing if they lowered the points cost. However, other posters have been known to contend that lowering the cost, effectively making it more balanced, would somehow be a bad thing for the game.

Therefore, GW should not play test.

 slowthar wrote:
Sweet. Looks like we have another Zwei thread in the making. I'll go ahead and get things started in an on-topic way and see if we can skip a couple of preliminary pages:

Some people think the game is better because it's ludicrously unbalanced, so why should GW fix it? For example, the Penitent Engine is virtually unusable for its points cost. Playtesting it (or maybe even critically thinking about it for 30 seconds) would point out that its point cost is insanely high for what it does.

I contend that it would be a good thing if they lowered the points cost. However, other posters have been known to contend that lowering the cost, effectively making it more balanced, would somehow be a bad thing for the game.

Therefore, GW should not play test.

I see nothing wrong with lowering the cost. Then again I see any model that a player owns that never gets played as a waste of money.

WayneTheGame wrote:
Is it possible? Yes. But GW doesn't care, either because they're really that stupid or more likely because they aren't taking into account that you can do something, because they'd never think of it.

It reminds me very much of 3.5 D&D, which while it was (supposedly...) playtested, it was common knowledge and verified by third-party playtesters that WotC had specific ideas of how the game should be played, so willfully ignored things that were broken because they'd never in a million years consider doing it and therefore incapable of realizing that it was broken and needed to be fixed. For example, in base D&D it was possible for a high-level Druid to completely break the game by using Wildshape to turn into something ridiculous like a Dire Bear or a T-Rex or whatnot (I forget the specifics). But no designer would ever consider that, so it was never addressed (of course D&D being D&D, there was at least the DM who could reel in abuse). Or, Wizards/Sorcerers commonly used utility spells to render creatures out of a fight (what was commonly known as "save or suck" spells), but WotC played Sorcerers as blasters, taking offensive spells that generally were lackluster compared to utility. Then you had the Character Optimization group (aka the powergamers) who would purposely find those broken combos, sometimes just for the lulz but often to point out "This is broken and needs to be fixed, here's why" and to showcase the lack of general thought given by the designers. All in all though that's not a huge deal in a tabletop RPG because you have a GM to arbitrate things and nip abusive combos in the bud. Not so in a wargame in the vast majority of circumstances.

I think GW is in the same boat - you'll never see half the abusive combos come up in their games because that's not how they play, so they can't fathom that anyone would play like that at all. The fact that 40k (as of 6th edition anyways) is clearly meant to be played casually with a gaming club or known group lends itself more to that fact, as what kind of spanker would play something deliberately broken against their mates, knowing it would ruin their fun, just to win?

true but following D&D 3.5 WOTC relased a new edition that was balanced, and everyone agreed 4th edition sucked.

BrianDavion wrote:
true but following D&D 3.5 WOTC relased a new edition that was balanced, and everyone agreed 4th edition sucked.

But at least it doesn't suck because of balance issues.

BrianDavion wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:
Is it possible? Yes. But GW doesn't care, either because they're really that stupid or more likely because they aren't taking into account that you can do something, because they'd never think of it.

It reminds me very much of 3.5 D&D, which while it was (supposedly...) playtested, it was common knowledge and verified by third-party playtesters that WotC had specific ideas of how the game should be played, so willfully ignored things that were broken because they'd never in a million years consider doing it and therefore incapable of realizing that it was broken and needed to be fixed. For example, in base D&D it was possible for a high-level Druid to completely break the game by using Wildshape to turn into something ridiculous like a Dire Bear or a T-Rex or whatnot (I forget the specifics). But no designer would ever consider that, so it was never addressed (of course D&D being D&D, there was at least the DM who could reel in abuse). Or, Wizards/Sorcerers commonly used utility spells to render creatures out of a fight (what was commonly known as "save or suck" spells), but WotC played Sorcerers as blasters, taking offensive spells that generally were lackluster compared to utility. Then you had the Character Optimization group (aka the powergamers) who would purposely find those broken combos, sometimes just for the lulz but often to point out "This is broken and needs to be fixed, here's why" and to showcase the lack of general thought given by the designers. All in all though that's not a huge deal in a tabletop RPG because you have a GM to arbitrate things and nip abusive combos in the bud. Not so in a wargame in the vast majority of circumstances.

I think GW is in the same boat - you'll never see half the abusive combos come up in their games because that's not how they play, so they can't fathom that anyone would play like that at all. The fact that 40k (as of 6th edition anyways) is clearly meant to be played casually with a gaming club or known group lends itself more to that fact, as what kind of spanker would play something deliberately broken against their mates, knowing it would ruin their fun, just to win?

true but following D&D 3.5 WOTC relased a new edition that was balanced, and everyone agreed 4th edition sucked.

4e sucked because they took away flexibility and shoehorned in a specific way to play (which 40k does too) that made it feel super bland (I liked 4e, but it was really bland). And instead we have Pathfinder which largely fixed a lot of the issues with 3.5 but didn't go to the other extreme.

It's a lot easier than the 9999999999 hours estimate, for several reasons:

1) Playtesting doesn't necessarily mean full games between 2000 point armies. You can test the opening turns, set up a scenario halfway through the game and see how an army's endgame position looks, etc. The goal isn't just to compile a win-loss record, it's to see how things function. If something is significantly overpowered then it should be pretty obvious, and you can just end the game and send the unit/rule back for redesign.

2) You don't have to test every possible combination. 40k has a lot of armies that are very similar, so you can combine all marine armies into a single opponent to test against, group similar armies into a single archetype, etc. After all, what matters for initial balance testing is how an army deals with gunline opponents, the precise differences between Tau gunlines and IG gunlines aren't all that important.

3) You don't have to do it all at once. GW only faces the potential of 9999999999 hours of playtesting because they've been so incompetent in the past and created a situation where they need to redesign and rebalance the entire game just to get it up to an adequate level (forget making an excellent game, that's probably years of work away from where GW is now). If GW hadn't failed so spectacularly at maintaining the game then all they would need to do is playtest each new release as it happens.

4) You can hire more than ten playtesters. Hire a hundred playtesters and cut that down to four weeks of playtesting. Or, since a new edition is a major event that should involve years of development time, you can spend the same amount of weeks on playtesting while doing a much better job of it.

Peregrine hit the nail on the head. Proper playtesting isn't just playing a game, it's playing something specific and setting up conditions. So you might set up a hypothetical in-progress game to test some rule, not play out a full game and if nobody actually does that, not care, which is how GW seems to playtest.

For instance to playtest the daemon spam nonsense, you'd set up that kind of situation to see what happens.

MMOs seem to manage this, and they are even more complicated than 40K

Computer simulation could speed it up a lot. Run models through high power servers. Add basic programing it could basic play test just about maybe.

Leave advanced stuff to humans it just handles the basics however and saves a lot off time,

I've playtested for other games.

To determine point values, you take you new unit and play it against the same amount of points of similar units that you already trust the point value of. Have a bunch of testters do this do this 2-3 times against each comparative foe and compare the results.

When the win/loss ration is about 50/50 you've hit the right point value.

 scottmmmm wrote:
MMOs seem to manage this, and they are even more complicated than 40K

Every MMO out there has numerous bugs on a regular basis and nothing in them is ever balanced though

Zodiark wrote:

 scottmmmm wrote:
MMOs seem to manage this, and they are even more complicated than 40K

Every MMO out there has numerous bugs on a regular basis and nothing in them is ever balanced though

MMOs are arguably a different beast. You strive for some balance but not a lot because a lot of it comes down to player skill in PVP, and PVE has no equivalent in 40k. 40k still has almost worthless levels of balance.

Also, MMO developers listen to their customers, and explain their reasoning when they believe something. And MMO developers never play some bullgak like "forge the narrative" to handwave away imbalances; gross imbalances get fixed, and everything is close enough that skill matters the most. You'd never see a WoW developer for example say that it's part of the narrative that a Rogue can defeat a Warrior in PVP, so the Warriors should stop complaining.

yet that argument works for 40k.

Yeah, so why doesn't everyone stop comparing 40k to anything other than another miniatures wargame?

Makes sense to me.

WM/H, Flames of War...far superior rules. Companies actively listen to their customers. Including competitive players.

I know Spartan Games runs a beta test team.

I don't know much about Dystopian Wars, but Firestorm Armada has seen some vast improvements since their first edition, both in terms of rules clarity/depth, and balance between factions.

Further, they actually use the concept of a living ruleset. Changes, tweaks, and additions are ongoing.

All of these things take effort, but they're well worth it.

The surest way to playtest (though playtesting internally while caring about balance does help) is to crowdsource it to your playerbase. As a designer you can be pretty sure that there's going to be some flaw in your game, somewhere, probably a lot actually, and it's the huge numbers of eyes of your players that will locate them.

Talk about "competitive players" is fine, and it's good to have those types of players testing your stuff, but they aren't the be all and end all. Balance doesn't "trickle down" - some things are great in the hands of or against experienced players, but not weaker players, and that's true all the way through the skill spectrum. You need to have a variety of players testing your game. Fortunately, crowdsourcing is great for that too.

The other problem is when it comes to actual balance rather than clarity of rules, just testing before you release isn't enough. It will likely turn out that models you thought were going to work don't, because for whatever reason their upsides just aren't useful or their downsides are worse than you thought they would be. I'll point to Warmachine for an example of this, because there are certain models that could have been good in a different world, but just aren't in this one, like the Dire Troll Blitzer, a model that can fire numerous shots that can't hit anything it can kill and can't kill anything it can hit. There's nothing to say this couldn't have been a fine model - it could work in a game, just it doesn't work in Warmachine. When stuff like that happens, you need to be able to correct it after the fact. It won't necessarily be apparent until the metagame has had time to develop.

) You can hire more than ten playtesters. Hire a hundred playtesters and cut that down to four weeks of playtesting. Or, since a new edition is a major event that should involve years of development time, you can spend the same amount of weeks on playtesting while doing a much better job of it.

why don't they do open playtests . It took how long for people to notice that eldar can get a++2 hit and run abomination in 6th ?5 min tops after reading the ally section . Same with buffmanders joining centurion stars etc.
FW seems to do something like open playtesting that with their experimental rules. They show rules , get feed back about it being crap or OP , and then when the model gets real rules in a book it is either still bad or nerfed or stays the same if it is eldar.

Makumba wrote:

) You can hire more than ten playtesters. Hire a hundred playtesters and cut that down to four weeks of playtesting. Or, since a new edition is a major event that should involve years of development time, you can spend the same amount of weeks on playtesting while doing a much better job of it.

why don't they do open playtests . It took how long for people to notice that eldar can get a++2 hit and run abomination in 6th ?5 min tops after reading the ally section . Same with buffmanders joining centurion stars etc.
FW seems to do something like open playtesting that with their experimental rules. They show rules , get feed back about it being crap or OP , and then when the model gets real rules in a book it is either still bad or nerfed or stays the same if it is eldar.

Open playtests go against GW's mentality and thought process, keep that in mind. They don't *need* to playtest because they're the best in the business. They don't need to playtest because nothing can be broken or OP, and if it is then it's the fault of the players for not properly discussing the game beforehand.

Since no one has mentioned it yet, perhaps we should talk about the realistic feasibility of large scale playtesting. We know that they *do* playtest - we've seen early playtest versions of very broken things leak that were cleaned up later. But people feel that isn't enough (as evidenced by this thread and hundreds others like it). There are two problems here.

The first is that suggesting "hiring competitive players" not only assumes that they don't do this already, but also gives an overabundance of credit to the current competitive player scene. While the giant braintrust (and I mean that without irony) that is the competitive gaming circuit does eventually find all of the holes in the game, they don't do so within a matter of weeks. It takes months, sometimes up to six months, before the competitive gamers have worked out a codex's full potential. The competitive scene always focuses on breaking the big things that end up pretty well balanced while ignoring the smaller ones that crop up and become a problem in the scene later. Right now, even in this very thread, people are mentioning summoning demon engines as the biggest problem in the game, ignoring that it's not consistently winning. Same thing happened with Superheavies back in December. The Revenant Titan made everyone wet themselves, the competitive community banned it, called it unbalanced. Then people actually playing against it, adapted, and found it wasn't scary after all. Those RT armies began to consistently lose. And 2++ rerollable demons didn't show up until months after the codex was out. Before then Flying Circus was all the rage and it took a while for anyone to notice the real problem.

So how long exactly do we expect them to playtest the rules publicly, using all of this brain power? Three months? Six months? FW does that with its weirder models and the result is that fewer people buy the models. Players want to wait to see if they get nerfed after the playtest and competitive players refuse to play against them because they aren't balanced or not part of the meta they're training for.

Which leads to the second problem, which is that of GWs business model. The largest games in the world are so because they either A) consistently shift the balance of power in the meta (codex creep) B) phase out older units/cards and/or C) change the rules between editions radically enough that you have to buy all new things to stay current. GW needs to move models; it's the point of their business. Creating a truly balanced game means allowing customers to buy enough models to play, never needing to buy more. Some companies do this. The companies that do don't stay around long. The sad truth is that by creating a perpetual state of shifting imbalance, competitive players keep buying new models.

So GW could publicly playtest, but the process would be longer than what is being suggested and the end result would be fewer models sold. This is, at least, the thinking that gets us here.

They fail at one of the most basic rules of design. Always show your work to someone who had no part in making it before you publish. Thats it.

GW doesnt do that, so they will never achieve the perfect product (or get close).

So when they make the rules they have made it for themselves and only themselves. The way the book is written is in a way that assumes we know how certain things interact (which to them makes perfect sense I assume). However if they just showed the rules to someone who did not have any role in design then they would (in theory, if they where dedicated enough to look into it) spot a lot of discrepancies within the text.

Before I publish anything professional I get someone else to look through it and check everything. Even if they have nothing to do with it. Its the most basic way of creating something decent.

In terms of playtesting, I think it improves nothing unless the play testers have nothing to do with the creation of the game itself. Who cares if the designers playtest it and think its great, it only matters if someone random gets selected for it and can figure it out and give it an honest review.

It would solve a lot of problems if they did that. But instead they themselves (I assume) playtest the rules and dont have any fresh perspective or uninformed opinions on their work.

 Swastakowey wrote:
It would solve a lot of problems if they did that. But instead they themselves (I assume) playtest the rules and dont have any fresh perspective or uninformed opinions on their work.

Pretty much. They play in a specific way, so it's likely they'd never consider playing something before like Eldar + Dark Eldar with Baron whatshisface to give the 2++ rerollable without a "narrative" behind it (i.e. almost never). So they err in the case of allowing a variety of playstyles or themed armies, but never bother to look into what it allows because they can't imagine doing it. In most cases if you look at how they create armies, they're usually very generic, with little or no tricks to it. So things like CSM armies with mostly CSM squads in Rhinos, maybe one Heldrake, no Plague Marines because it doesn't fit the army, etc. and they never realize that CSM are weak because they're playing against something like footslogging Guardians, Howling Banshees and Striking Scorpions because their opponent likes how the Banshees look and dislikes Wave Serpents (or doesn't have any) so he never fields them. Thus they think that Banshees are great and Wave Serpents aren't anything to write home about.

That's how they think and operate, so it's no wonder that things are broken.

 milkboy wrote:
I see quite a few opinions about GW not play testing enough before releasing a product so that led me to thinking. Is it actually possible to play test this game? So perhaps a little math hammering can help with this conundrum. And so I proceeded to try to do Maths again.

We have now 17 armies being sold on the Gw site. If we include data slates, chapters, FW lists (dark harvest etc) that's probably 25? It's just an approximate number.

So to test a new edition, we need every army to play against every army. That'll be a total of 300. The formula being games = (25 x (24+11))/2

Thats not playtesting, its just random words you've strung together. Theres no need to play every army against every other army, let alone all the little sub-armies in FW.

I think we are in the infancy for these type of things.

You look at the companies starting to record statistics, give it a year or so and GW will start looking at these stats and gleaning from them which armies are currently OP.

I find it frustrating that people completely ignore the balances that GW bring to the game in new releases. It also frustrates me when people say "GW don't do this" but have absolutely no clue how the company actually operates.. and no "but I heard it from this one guy" does not equate to proof and frankly neither does "Jervis said this one line once 4 years ago"

In the OPs example you would need to spend roughly $180000 pounds for purely play testing after release. I'm not sure if you can't find other more productive ways to maintain some balance.

bodazoka wrote:
I think we are in the infancy for these type of things.

You look at the companies starting to record statistics, give it a year or so and GW will start looking at these stats and gleaning from them which armies are currently OP.

I find it frustrating that people completely ignore the balances that GW bring to the game in new releases. It also frustrates me when people say "GW don't do this" but have absolutely no clue how the company actually operates.. and no "but I heard it from this one guy" does not equate to proof and frankly neither does "Jervis said this one line once 4 years ago"

In the OPs example you would need to spend roughly $180000 pounds for purely play testing after release. I'm not sure if you can't find other more productive ways to maintain some balance.

In theory each release would cost you less in terms of playtesting as a lot of the playtesting results would still be there from the last edition. After the initial Testing phase is complete, each phase of playtesting should get easier. So if it had been done properly from day one, then the only changes to each edition will be changes to make the game exciting or include new stuff rather than to tweak it.

The way I see it is there are at least three different aspects of the game that we would like to see fixed by playtesting (or fixed by grots, or Eldrad--Just fix them!):

Rules that are confusing, contradictory, or otherwise illogical:

This doesn't actually need playtesting, but playtesting is one way to discover it. This is an area where GW really, desperately needs to bring in outside help. Not because they are incompetent nincompoops, but because when you are very, very familiar with something, you tend to gloss over it and fill in details yourself. Remember GW forgetting to tell you that you could use the highest leadership in the unit? That's this kind of error. GW needs outside readers to find this type of problem, and ideally, you need some playtesting with that (because it's most important that the rule isn't confusing IN PLAY.

Rules that don't reflect the background.

Again, this doesn't actually require playtesting, if you have experienced players reading over the rules, but you still might discover some stuff that you hadn't though about. For example, whether or not dreadnoughts are effective, they certainly aren't effective in the way that the 40K universe depicts them (as lords of war, striding unharmed through the battlefield). They are sometimes viewed as effective throwaway units, or effective artillery platforms, or effective using a specific CSM option, but not like the background portrays them. This is a really important thing that GW seems to keep missing. Your rules for a unit need to match what that unit is supposed to be doing, if your intellectual property is so valuable. People shouldn't be fielding ChaosTerminators as 3 man deep-striking melta bombs, but they are, because terminators aren't particularly good at what they are 'supposed' to be doing.


Units that are over (or under) costed

Obviously, this needs to be fixed, but, unlike the first two problems, it doesn't need advance playtesting.

I know that GW is totally paranoid about leaks and rumors and advance information, but this would help them so much if they would think about this. The first two types of playtesting/editing need to be done, but they can be done on a small scale with a select group of playtesters, so you could still quash rumors if you really needed to (you could also just do open playtests, but let's not stretch credibility that much). In any case, though, you need to get both of the first two right BEFORE you print the book. Poorly written rules and poorly implemented rules HAVE to get fixed in the books. It's too much trouble and drama to fix them in FAQs and updates. It's unrealistic for people to keep FAQs around to find out how their units actually work, or how the rules actually play.

On the other hand, incorrectly costed units can get fixed during the release cycle. If something turns out to be way more effective than expected, or way more prevalent in tournaments (or gets used not at all), then just adjust the cost. It would be a really short, simple document to download from Black Library if the FAQ and Updates didn't have all these rules clarifications and changes, but just UPDATED POINTS COSTS. Can you imagine how easy that would be? Just find your army, and print out the page with the updated points. Once you've made your army list you don't even need the FAQ!

If GW could be brought around to this style of thinking, they could spend their pre-release testing on the areas that urgently needed it, and then interact with their players and tournaments to see what needs adjusted on points. Think of how much more balanced 40K would be if the obviously great choices had their points increased, and the obviously bad stuff went down in cost. Even if you didn't take bad stuff, because it was 'bad', you'd be paying the premium for taking the good units.

It would also mean that you could adjust the 'meta' on the fly, not release by release. If some new unit becomes the new hotness, and everyone spams it, then increase the points cost! No need to nerf it in the next codex, if it is working as intended. If it's too useful, then make it cost more points! You wouldn't have broken units dominating play through an entire edition (or until the next release of their codex). You could fix these things promptly.

 Swastakowey wrote:
In theory each release would cost you less in terms of playtesting as a lot of the playtesting results would still be there from the last edition. After the initial Testing phase is complete, each phase of playtesting should get easier. So if it had been done properly from day one, then the only changes to each edition will be changes to make the game exciting or include new stuff rather than to tweak it.

I put up exhibit A) 7th edition.

7th edition completely changes the way the game plays and is arguably not that big of a change to the actual rules, I doubt you could get much out of the previous set of data last edition. If you wanted to play test properly you would absolutely have to complete the process again, which as the OP suggests is basically paying around 5-6 guys a wage each year to just play the game.

As I mentioned sites like TOF which collate some stats would be well worth supporting (at least after a few years) from GW as they can basically do all that work for them for much much cheaper. So give it a few years and im sure they will be looking at that sort of site (if they still exist).

bodazoka wrote:

 Swastakowey wrote:
In theory each release would cost you less in terms of playtesting as a lot of the playtesting results would still be there from the last edition. After the initial Testing phase is complete, each phase of playtesting should get easier. So if it had been done properly from day one, then the only changes to each edition will be changes to make the game exciting or include new stuff rather than to tweak it.

I put up exhibit A) 7th edition.

7th edition completely changes the way the game plays and is arguably not that big of a change to the actual rules, I doubt you could get much out of the previous set of data last edition. If you wanted to play test properly you would absolutely have to complete the process again, which as the OP suggests is basically paying around 5-6 guys a wage each year to just play the game.

As I mentioned sites like TOF which collate some stats would be well worth supporting (at least after a few years) from GW as they can basically do all that work for them for much much cheaper. So give it a few years and im sure they will be looking at that sort of site (if they still exist).

The basics have not changed. Many units and guns are not effected. So MOST of the rules do not need to be extensively tested again. Only the changes and then how those changes can effect the current rules. No need to test the movement phase every edition. It wont be hard to test how the psychic phase effects the game, rather then test the whole game again.

It would also help, if each edition was made to fix the game and change things up, rather than just change things up. It will get to the point where the game is near perfect and each edition is a change up (which only the changes need to be studied rather than the whole game). Hence why I said if they did it properly from Day 1 then the issue wouldnt be so big. Because the problems will only get smaller from day 1.

Zodiark wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Which game?

I think Starcraft, based on your reference that was quoted.

Correct. Starcraft is by far nowhere near a balanced game.

Zodiark wrote:

 PrinceRaven wrote:
Well of course Starcraft isn't really balanced any more, not only have they released a new game but after it got to the point where the game was so balanced the matches were decided more on micro and button clicking than tactics and strategy they shook it up and introduced a bit more imbalance into the game.

It was never balanced from its original inception tbh. But adding new things definitely did not help.

Wow you guys have never actually played Starcraft have you. First thing to know is, what you read about Starcraft from people whining that their race is underpowered is nearly always false. People's skills are whats lacking not the power of the race.

Your opponent can be a league or two below you in playskill, if you don't use proper tactics and strategy and build say a bunch of Colossi vs his army of Corrupters and Broodlords, you are going to lose. The game being balanced does not mean that every unit is just as useful for every situation. Being dependant on micro macro and all things encompassed by "button-clicking" is merely a product of the nature of the game. If you are at the same or even a similar skill level as your opponent, the game has always very much been decided by tactics and strategy. If your opponent is well below you in terms of macro, well, it doesn't really matter what you build as you are just going to steamroll him regardless.

That isn't to say there is not balance issues among certain units. I personally think they are minor, because at the end of the day almost every race as a whole is very balanced and functioning very well. Saying SC2 is badly balanced just leads me to believe that you will never be happy with the 40k ruleset no matter what happens, which is disheartening as there is a lot of critical issues here that have broken the game, for some of us it's not just a whine-fest offshoot of our disappointement at GW's ridiculous prices.

Its a good thing we're no longer comparing 40k to Starcraft, eh?

Forgive me I must have been somehow mistakenly led into believing the events on the prior page happened somewhat recently

Comparing Video Games and Table Top games is a waste of time in my opinion.

Maybe play testers don't play full games? Maybe they just use situations and circumstance

 Swastakowey wrote:
Comparing Video Games and Table Top games is a waste of time in my opinion.

Yeah.

Its the same reason you can't compare how cheap 40k is to luxury yachting, or how expensive it is to watching grass grow.

It's a good thing I never drew a comparison between 40k and Starcraft even once in my post then. The closest I got was the correlation I made between the complaints about non-existent bad balancing when there isn't none, and to my hopes that the reason every 40k player complains about balance isn't secretly because they want their own army to be OP and won't be happy otherwise.

Good thing.

And to be honest, its not often you see a Tau or Eldar player ever complaining that the assault mechanics need to be buffed

Again I will try to think like a creator of a game, at risk of being stoned.

There are two situations where I wonder if there are easy solutions.

Fixing a broken combo. One example brought up was dark eldar and eldar with the baron providing a good save to the unit. How would you, as a creator, prevent this? Change the rules for the Baron? Disallow dark eldar and eldar allying? Would this rule change have no other effect? And would this rule change make everyone happy, including Dark Eldar players?

I am thinking of a situation of software changes. A change in software options and capabilities would usually require testing to make sure the change does not bug something out somewhere. So even with what we may think is a fix, may end up with unintended changes to the game and produce another loophole.

The second situation is point cost. Since we have solutions suggested about how to arrive at a point cost, perhaps we can attempt to cost something correctly. If we do the Penitent Engine, what is the right point cost? 75? 80? 85? 35? I suspect even as a community of a brain trust (good term) that we are, we will find no agreement even on that.

I find it interesting that people thing 40k isn't supposed to be balanced when it has a points system.

 SHUPPET wrote:
It's a good thing I never drew a comparison between 40k and Starcraft even once in my post then. The closest I got was the correlation I made between the complaints about non-existent bad balancing when there isn't none, and to my hopes that the reason every 40k player complains about balance isn't secretly because they want their own army to be OP and won't be happy otherwise.

Yea you are right. But I still dont think video games and Wargames should be compared.

I had a huge reply typed up... but for some reason it didnt post.

In a much nicer and shorter way, video gamers contain a huge amount of degenerates hungry to fulfill some creepy power fantasy at others expense. This is far less common in hobbiests who place more importance on skill and competition than personal gratification.

So do not worry. Most 40k players arent after OP units to feel powerful and crush all those in their path.

Playtesters don't need to play hundreds or thousands of permutations of games. Fundamentally, a game doesn't really matter if it is Tau vs Eldar or Necrons vs Daemons: you look at archetypes of units/abilities, rather than units/abilities themselves. Once you know roughly how a walker functions, and roughly how a lascannon functions, you have a decent idea of how a walker with a lascannon works. And after years of experience with very similar rule sets, you could consider 6th ed to be a kind of extensive beta for 7th ed anyway: 95% of the base mechanics did not change.


I think the thing is that the GW playtesters just aren't interested in tournament level balance. They design for campaign level balance, with game masters and forged narratives and whatever. And as far as I can tell, they are a relatively insular group - not heading out to tournaments but rather just playing their 'oh wouldn't it be cool if I had a radical inquisitor today' games. Coming from a software testing background - they are testing the program the way they want people to use it, making sure that everyone inputs stuff in the correct format in all fields, but they're not testing what happens if people don't use the game in the 'correct' way as envisaged by the designers.



The issues in 7th ed were pretty much all noticed within hours of the book release (if not before from leaks). Some of them are only potential issues (is the daemon factory really a viable game-winning list, or is it simply annoying?) but others are real issues. You would think that with even a month of open beta these things could have been found, playtested and resolved, and everyone would have been better off.

LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results. Sure you canskew the odds in your favour, but there's no rule saying you can't roll seven 1's in a row.

Balance is for a game built for tournament play. This game is about creating a sandbox world (and selling models and books) where you and a friend can get together and play a narrative game with real world results. The rules really are just guidlines for a recipe for fun.

 Gibblets wrote:
LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results.

Do you consider games like Backgammon or Poker random?

 Gibblets wrote:
LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results. Sure you canskew the odds in your favour, but there's no rule saying you can't roll seven 1's in a row.

The chance of rolling seven 1's in a row is around three-and-a-half million against. A player who plays such that the odds are in their favour will beat a player that thinks: "this could happen so I'll play as if it might".

Well, at least three million four hundred and ninety-nine times out of three and a half-million, they will.

The game could be playtested by an open beta and by computer modelling.

As mentioned above, it doesn't take long for the internet to find out the flaws in any new rules edition or codex from GW.

Modelling would be cheap and easy though the results probably would be less useful than human testing. If I were in charge I would use both approaches.

It would be better, but they will view it as possible loss of profits on over-priced Rulebook sales, and being that they are already desperately struggling to keep their profits up, combined with the fact that even at the best of times they are still one of the most money-hungry businesses I've ever dealt with, it's never gonna happen.

 milkboy wrote:
Again I will try to think like a creator of a game, at risk of being stoned.

There are two situations where I wonder if there are easy solutions.

Fixing a broken combo. One example brought up was dark eldar and eldar with the baron providing a good save to the unit. How would you, as a creator, prevent this? Change the rules for the Baron? Disallow dark eldar and eldar allying? Would this rule change have no other effect? And would this rule change make everyone happy, including Dark Eldar players?

I am thinking of a situation of software changes. A change in software options and capabilities would usually require testing to make sure the change does not bug something out somewhere. So even with what we may think is a fix, may end up with unintended changes to the game and produce another loophole.

The second situation is point cost. Since we have solutions suggested about how to arrive at a point cost, perhaps we can attempt to cost something correctly. If we do the Penitent Engine, what is the right point cost? 75? 80? 85? 35? I suspect even as a community of a brain trust (good term) that we are, we will find no agreement even on that.

The thing is, we're not the professional game designers. The whole point of playtesting and betas is to get feedback. If you see a consensus in the feedback that X in undercosted or Y produces a gamebreaker, then that's all the playtesters need to do--draw your attention to something that needs fixing. So adjust it in the way you as a game designed consider best, and then see if the players consider it fixed or if feedback still agrees that there's a problem. This isn't a hypothetical scenario, this is how betas & playtesting work.

It's a very annoying straw man to say "lawl, you can't agree on exactly what to do, so the opinion of every player on the planet is 100% worthless".

In the case of your examples, you try out different solutions with the playtesters to see what the best way to eliminate the 2+ rerolled is, or the point cost / rules changes where people field Penitent Engines but don't consider them an auto-include. Simple as that.

Hi Elemental, just as an example about something which was stated to be either broken or not to the fluff. The fact that Tau could ally with multiple factions, battle brothers in some cases as well. Maybe the player base feedback was heard by the testing team. Maybe they tested it and removed the ability of multiple possible Tau alliances. But in the end, it shifted the equilibrium towards the Imperium armies. So we see forum posts disagreeing with this move. There are also those who felt it to be an improvement.

So my point it, perhaps they do listen, perhaps they do play test somewhat. But it does not guarantee that the end result will have no hatred posts concerning. With the large player base 40k has, there will always be dissenting views. Another case in point would be the helldrake change. Some may feel that the helldrake needed the needing. Some may feel that it is unwarranted. So perhaps for that they have listened and they have playtested as well.

I guess I am just trying to be fair. It is easy to join in with the GW bashing and scream bloody murder everytime a broken combination/tactic is discovered and that they should have picked his up etc.

I am just thinking that perhaps everyone's opinion of what is balanced may be different. It is not to say that since no one thinks alike, screw balance and be done with it. More of, whatever we choose, some groups will say its unbalanced. Lets test it, make a decision and move on. After all, GW playtesters and designers are human? Errors still happen.

The Heldrake example has two schools; those who wanted the nerf because its a pretty powerful unit, while those think it was too strong because the rest of the chaos book isn't that great.

Continuing with the example, if GW listened to feedback (they don't), they'd find that the solution to the Heldrake problem was to nerf it, but simultaneously buffing several other units and otherwise improving on the codex's internal balance.

Its not a simple answer, but that's the whole point of having a beta test team. Further, you don't listen to what everyone has to say. Some people are more right than others. When someone claims that X is OP, while another claims that X is UP, you weigh the arguments and test. You don't throw your hands up and claim the community is too conflicted to ever help balance anything.

For game design, you want to have conflicting opinions. Having everyone agree is a bad thing. I'd argue that's what happening with the current design team with 40k; they all just agree with whoever is the project/team lead.

Which is why a beta test team of different people with different views, opinions, and experiences is a very good thing for a game. Debates may get heated, but leveler heads will prevail and find the solution somewhere along the spectrum between the two ends.

I can assure you that GW has not done any testing outside of their own group, which is hardly any real testing. Balance issues aside, there are some pretty significant mechanical issues that were caught not even a few hours into the release by the player base. The FAQs were another example of general laziness/carelessness.

So while errors happen, having an outside perspective of people who are going to be the consumers is always a benefit to a game. They all check eachother and reduce those errors to a reasonable amount, which can than be later caught with some minor FAQs after the wider community takes a look.

How is it possible that GW didn't see that a ++2 with re-rolls hit and run etc maybe a bit edition warping ? It is not even the case of differnt design team as both eldar and dark eldar were writen by the same dude.

Same with tau buff commanders joining Riptides.

Sometimes I think that people working for GW not only aren't testing the game at all, but they don't even know the rules for their own game .

There is no reason why GW can't do an open Beta like PP or Wyrd did. Both companies combined don't equal a fraction of GW resources.

GW could do it, they simply choose not to. And before anyone says '40k is too complex' consider that Warmachine has over 800 different unit rules/traits NOT including the USRs.

Possible? Yes.

Will they? Haha.

I think they just don't care, the design team has one idea of how the game is played and literally lives in a insulated bubble.

You can tell just by reading their battle reports.

They purposely don't play that way.

Why would you playtest something that is meant to be "casual", who cares they state change things if you want.

 milkboy wrote:


Fixing a broken combo. One example brought up was dark eldar and eldar with the baron providing a good save to the unit. How would you, as a creator, prevent this? Change the rules for the Baron? Disallow dark eldar and eldar allying? Would this rule change have no other effect? And would this rule change make everyone happy, including Dark Eldar players?

In this case, using something like Warmachines "Friendly Faction" would probably help- basically, only models from the same army book benefit from at least one of the rules. This would really help balance out some of the allies problems, by eliminating some of the broken combos.

When Jervis (iirc) talks about them buffing Psykers because everyone in the studio takes Chaplains, you know they don't play test. They literally play a different game.

There are some things that they have put out that are so bad (or strong) that you dont even have to play test it to see its crazy powerful (or bad).

Vespid. Their rules make 0 sense, theyre suppose to be anti-MEQ in a codex that excels at anti-MEQ as it is and they do it insanely bad compared to other, similar costed models. I dont need to playtest to see theyre worthless. Too expensive for how easy they die and how lamely they kill.

Wave serpents. Unless they gave them the same dedicated-transport treatment as necron fliers in terms of firepower, this thing screams "I am strong, spam me" without even diving into the math on it. No play testing needed to see how crazy it is for the cost/spammability.

Things like that are just sad to have happen as often as they do (just a quick off the top of my head example without diving into it too deep). Other things that are found after awhile using Allies or something are excusable as if you arent a tournament player or close, you probably wont even know the rules well enough to see those tricks in the first place.

 Zweischneid wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:


Nobody is talking about 100% balance, which is just as impossible as 0%.

No, but you are talking about balance as if it were a universally good thing, and more balance better than less balance. That is not the case.

Stop just stop. Everyone is tired of having that conversation with you.

Makumba wrote:
How is it possible that GW didn't see that a ++2 with re-rolls hit and run etc maybe a bit edition warping ? It is not even the case of differnt design team as both eldar and dark eldar were writen by the same dude.

Same with tau buff commanders joining Riptides.

Sometimes I think that people working for GW not only aren't testing the game at all, but they don't even know the rules for their own game .

They don't see it because they play a specific way that would never ever think of such a combination. You have to keep in mind that GW plays the game in a certain fashion: Scenario games, typically fluff-driven. They choose and build armies the same way. The Studio army has a lot of varied units to showcase all the different things, and generally is built for show, not for gaming per se so you often find lackluster and not-used units there because they look cool or show off some aspect of the faction. I recall in the past some WDs where a designer lamented the fact that the Studio army was built in a certain way for variety and they didn't have the units they wanted but had to make do with what was available.

However, this has largely bled into how the staffers build their own armies. You will typically see an army built around a cool concept or fluffy idea; so for example outside of a White Scars or Ravenwing army (or their successors) you will never see a SM army using all bikes, and if you did they wouldn't all have grav weapons; you're more likely to see a "balanced" SM army with a couple of tac squads, assault squads, maybe a dev squad, and tanks because they look cool. For a Chaos army you'll never see Typhus Zombie Spam unless the battle report was specifically to replay out that scenario - you would see lots of CSM squads, maybe a cult unit or two (but rarely multiples), possibly a daemon engine. You would *never* see Eldar + Dark Eldar together unless the battle report was some kind of weird Eldar alliance narrative. GW staff has never built armies based around what works, they by intention build armies around what looks cool or to fit a specific theme or idea. A unit's effectiveness is irrelevant. If a designer thinks that Vespid are cool looking, or likes the fluff, or whatever, you'll see them in his Tau army based on that alone.

That's why they don't see it. It's not so much they don't test, it's that they don't theorycraft and look at options in combinations, they look at options as a whole. You won't see Tigurius fielded because the person likes how Sicarius looks or his army is the 5th Company or something so he made up his own character and converted a cool model.

That's how GW has always played the game. You rarely if ever see anything remotely resembling a netlist, and that's indicative of their entire design standpoint. They allow these things because they don't want to restrict you from doing anything, but they don't balance it because they'd never think of all the permutations that break the game. I bet if you asked about fielding Baron Sathonix or whatever his name is in an Eldar Seer Council, you'd get some kind of response like "What are you, crazy? My Farseer would never ally with that blackhearted monster!" The fact that it would make the unit almost invincible with a 2++ reroll or however it works wouldn't even factor into the equation.

That's how they think. They treat 40k almost like a roleplaying game so their "concept" trumps effectiveness. I've seen exactly that behavior in D&D in the past - "that guy" who has his leather armor wearing, dagger using Fighter (no, he won't play a Rogue. Fighter fits his concept better!) who used to be a basket weaver before becoming an adventurer. The guy who's an awesome roleplayer, but totally useless outside of that and gets angry when you point it out because he's not a powergamer and clearly anyone wanting to be effective is a munchkin powergamer who isn't playing the game right.

Trasvi wrote:
I think the thing is that the GW playtesters just aren't interested in tournament level balance. They design for campaign level balance, with game masters and forged narratives and whatever. And as far as I can tell, they are a relatively insular group - not heading out to tournaments but rather just playing their 'oh wouldn't it be cool if I had a radical inquisitor today' games. Coming from a software testing background - they are testing the program the way they want people to use it, making sure that everyone inputs stuff in the correct format in all fields, but they're not testing what happens if people don't use the game in the 'correct' way as envisaged by the designers.

Except the problem is that they don't design for "campaign level balance", because campaign balance is exactly the same as tournament balance. What they actually do is fail to playtest sufficiently and then throw in a statement about "forge the narrative and invent your own rules" as an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the shameful quality of their work.

 Gibblets wrote:
LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results. Sure you canskew the odds in your favour, but there's no rule saying you can't roll seven 1's in a row.

Well, you just convincingly demonstrated that you don't know anything about game design. 40k involves dice, but dice (in sufficient quantities) have a nice bell curve of outcomes that allows you to make a balanced game with interesting decisions.

Balance is for a game built for tournament play. This game is about creating a sandbox world (and selling models and books) where you and a friend can get together and play a narrative game with real world results. The rules really are just guidlines for a recipe for fun.

And yep, confirmed your lack of knowledge even more. Balance is just as important in "sandbox" games as it is in tournaments. And GW's "the rules are just guidelines" statements are nothing more than an attempt to sell you garbage and convince you that the problem is the people who expect more than garbage from their $50 rulebooks, not the fact that you just paid $50 for garbage.

You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

Johnnytorrance wrote:
Maybe play testers don't play full games? Maybe they just use situations and circumstance

They shouldn't need to play full games. Five starting draws of Tactical Objective cards was enough to make it plainly obvious that the system is nonfunctional for an evaluative game.

Similarly, the opening two or three turns will tell you a huge amount about whether there is a problem with a unit, or a type of army build. Unfortunately, GW also seems to be in love with fielding bad armies which can't possibly be giving them good playtesting data.

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

They make cell phones for the older generations, with big buttons and simple interfaces. : D

We got my mom one last year.

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

And so the pot calls the kettle black

 Swastakowey wrote:
The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

Which is a terrible point, because that's not what's happening. This isn't a case of GW designing an amazing narrative game at the expense of making it less than ideal for tournament play, it's a case of GW publishing garbage and using "forge the narrative" as an excuse for why you should buy it anyway. 40k is actually a pretty bad narrative game, GW (and their white knights on the forums) have just created a marketing concept that a good casual/narrative game is entirely defined as "bad for tournaments", and turned all of their failures into "successes". It's a brilliant bit of marketing, but it doesn't change the fact that they're still publishing and selling garbage.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

Except that's not a good analogy because 40k doesn't function well for ANY intended customer. The better analogy would be if your boss was complaining about the new iphone coming with a cracked screen, constant software bugs that never get patched, and no phone service without a $500 upgrade that doesn't even work half the time. And meanwhile the white knights would still defend the iphone and insist that you're TFG if you want a screen that works because all decent people use voice commands instead.

I think I may have sounded like a Gw apologist but I was just trying to see if I can understand their side. Still, I do also feel that there could be balance issues especially once you start opening up allies. Controlling combos would be harder. Tactical objectives also brought too much randomness to a game where army composition in each army is driven by different factors.

Unfortunately, it is also correct that GW can choose to do what they like because they are creating it. It disgruntled players because they have started 40k previously in a welcome edition but it has now morphed to something which was not what they liked in the first place. So probably, whatever balance we may want, would have to be player created balance, because if it is true that GW has the metaphorical hand over their ears, no amount of feedback to gwplc will change anything.

Player created balance such as limiting your own list. Or house rules. Or restrictions on known star builds (maximum reroll able invulnerable save to be 4++ etc) these seem like a good start. I know many have already been doing it, or even playing previous editions.

One of the good suggestions which actually came up during this discussion which is interesting is computer modelling. I can't even program in C for nuts, let alone attempt anything like this. These days we can use Excel for mathhammer, but perhaps in future, this may be more available to us as players to finally help to balance things somewhat. What with technology improving so rapidly


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And I'll probably pick up the rules for those other games where balance seems to have been achieved, just to see the difference. I've only been playing 40k so I probably can't see the draw of the other games.

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

You know this is one of the most mild mannered posts i have ever seen on a forum, and yet he got banned for this ( a 2 day ban, ad i know this because i know him and he told me elsewhere), and yet Peregrine was far more insulting and condescending in his post and yet wasn't banned. Dakka mods, what is up with this?

The answer is they used too. I had to sign an NDA agreement to participate.

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

You know this is one of the most mild mannered posts i have ever seen on a forum, and yet he got banned for this ( a 2 day ban, ad i know this because i know him and he told me elsewhere), and yet Peregrine was far more insulting and condescending in his post and yet wasn't banned. Dakka mods, what is up with this?

Site policy is not to discuss moderation of individual cases except with the people involved.

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

You know this is one of the most mild mannered posts i have ever seen on a forum, and yet he got banned for this ( a 2 day ban, ad i know this because i know him and he told me elsewhere), and yet Peregrine was far more insulting and condescending in his post and yet wasn't banned. Dakka mods, what is up with this?

Now, now, mate, let's not turn it into a crusade for justice and derail the topic from playtesting to ad hominem attacks and personal.. differences. Let's just stick to the subject that was discussed here, shall we?

So! Playtesting, huh? Such a bright idea. I think that a limited version of it could be applied, but as the simple mathhammering in the first post proved, it'd be impossible to try all the varying combos, army types and crap like that, so either check a few combinations and hope nothing else was touched by the change... which not always is the case, as you can imagine. So let's think about other options. Like.. open testing. I see two issues, not necessarily bad or good, just existing - first is the thing that GW really loves to act like a backyard magician with all their UNEXPECTED RELEASES! And little spoilers and crap like that. Obviously a new book that everyone both knows AND playtested through and.. you know what I mean. There won't be any curiosity or OOMPH! when it hits the shelves. But the other issue at hand is that... it's actually hard to listen to a community so big. There will always be few different huge crowds that'll send conflicting feedback and whenever you decide to please one group, the other will say the game is broken and gakky and that it needs to be rewritten or that they're leaving. I know that there always will be some patterns with the most OP gak being really over the top day one, and while daemon factory is a good example that -anyone- could've came up with after just seeing the rules, some things are harder to predict and they'd be perfect targets for...

...a FAQ. Yuuop, a FAQ. GW has recently launched new ones and it'd be a matter of a few minutes to edit them and add an entry that will mercilessly smother any cheesy idea in the crib. That'd take a bit of effort and listening to people on forums but yeah. They're paid to make a game after all, so it's not even going an extra mile - that's their job! BUT. Just remember that some things that people whine about actually get worked around and turn into a part of the game sooner or later(flyers or allies, anyone?), so GW can't just cut everything people cry about, because after a moment they'll turn out as actually playable.

 Klerych wrote:

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

You know this is one of the most mild mannered posts i have ever seen on a forum, and yet he got banned for this ( a 2 day ban, ad i know this because i know him and he told me elsewhere), and yet Peregrine was far more insulting and condescending in his post and yet wasn't banned. Dakka mods, what is up with this?

Now, now, mate, let's not turn it into a crusade for justice and derail the topic from playtesting to ad hominem attacks and personal.. differences. Let's just stick to the subject that was discussed here, shall we?
.

Fear not for i come not to derail your threads!!! Its gone to a PM discussion so no more off topic banter from me

 Peregrine wrote:

 Swastakowey wrote:
The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

Which is a terrible point, because that's not what's happening. This isn't a case of GW designing an amazing narrative game at the expense of making it less than ideal for tournament play, it's a case of GW publishing garbage and using "forge the narrative" as an excuse for why you should buy it anyway. 40k is actually a pretty bad narrative game, GW (and their white knights on the forums) have just created a marketing concept that a good casual/narrative game is entirely defined as "bad for tournaments", and turned all of their failures into "successes". It's a brilliant bit of marketing, but it doesn't change the fact that they're still publishing and selling garbage.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

Except that's not a good analogy because 40k doesn't function well for ANY intended customer. The better analogy would be if your boss was complaining about the new iphone coming with a cracked screen, constant software bugs that never get patched, and no phone service without a $500 upgrade that doesn't even work half the time. And meanwhile the white knights would still defend the iphone and insist that you're TFG if you want a screen that works because all decent people use voice commands instead.

Sometimes, Peregrine just nails it better than anyone. +1


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Runicmadhamster wrote:

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

You know this is one of the most mild mannered posts i have ever seen on a forum, and yet he got banned for this ( a 2 day ban, ad i know this because i know him and he told me elsewhere), and yet Peregrine was far more insulting and condescending in his post and yet wasn't banned. Dakka mods, what is up with this?

Meh in this situation Peregrine was well within Dakka rules, driving a point home harder and with more logic is not equivalent to being condescending, just because it makes you feel silly. Peregrine wasn't at all rude in this post I think your friend was quite demeaning and insulting. The other guy is obviously your friend though so maybe it will help ease the confusion as to how this ruling is fair if I point out that it probably looks unfair only due to your personal bias.



OT, whiteknighting GW's rules when you know they are lacking, with the reasoning that it's aimed at a different audience - why do people do this? Is it just to be a contrarian? What gain is there from it, you want the rules to remain bad competively? How does this affect your "narrative"? Is it impossible to admit that improving one could only improve the other, not make it worse?

Lets keep from talking about the ban as the MOD and other party has mentioned it's a PM discussion.

As for white knighting, I think the term may be too easily used in this case. Different parties can have views and opinions about Gw. Even though the dislike GW community is so vocal, it does not mean that everyone agrees. A person may actually like GW and like 7th Ed and we should agree to disagree on their opinion. If we discuss it and see each others point, that would be good. But to say one is supporting GW because they are trying to be contrarian for the sake of it, it might offend, if they truly believed the game to be balanced, in their view.

Ultimately, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Just that in a forum where words may not convey the right emotions, one should be careful in phrasing.

 SHUPPET wrote:
OT, whiteknighting GW's rules when you know they are lacking, with the reasoning that it's aimed at a different audience - why do people do this? Is it just to be a contrarian? What gain is there from it, you want the rules to remain bad competively? How does this affect your "narrative"? Is it impossible to admit that improving one could only improve the other, not make it worse?

I think it happens for two reasons:

1) Reluctance to accept that something is simply broken. Some people find it hard to accept that GW are lazy and incompetent and the rules they paid $150 for are garbage, so they'll embrace any alternative explanation that lets them avoid that answer. It's not incompetence and bad design, it's just different design. If 40k is bad for tournament play, as it indisputably is, it must be because it's great for something else. You'll often see a similar thing happen with bad units, whenever most people recognize that a unit sucks there will be a small but vocal minority insisting that you're just using it wrong and there must be something good about it. They'll fight to the death to defend the idea that every unit has a purpose, and never accept that sometimes (or often!) GW just screws up and publishes a weak unit.

2) "Casual at all costs". Some people aren't interested in competitive play, don't care very much about winning, and therefore just play some casual non-tournament games with whatever they feel like using. Other people go far beyond mere lack of interest and decide that caring about winning is objectively wrong, and people who play competitively are all sociopath TFGs. They define themselves and their hobby by how much they don't care about winning, and define the perfect game as the one that is as bad as possible for competitive play. Casual/narrative play doesn't just tolerate bad rules, it requires bad rules. So every balance problem and unclear rule GW publishes magically makes the game better for casual/narrative play, simply because it makes it worse for tournament play.

Thankfully most people fall into the first category, and the second is a small (but incredibly obnoxious) minority.

The "problem" with any type of open testing is that GW is a company that values secrecy and hates publicity SO MUCH that no one even knows their products are coming out until a week or two before release. If they have this backwards attitude about information about products they sell, why would they ever let any type of open playtesting occur at all,? Let alone for the months and months that would be required to make a good ruleset?

That being said, I also think the attitude some people have of making a playtest team of exclusively "competitive" players is backwards also. While those players are good at finding and exploiting rules holes, they also will only test using the best 2 or 3 armies in the game. Which leads to another huge problem with the game in general. No amount of playtesting will ever make a game close to balance when specific factions in the game are constantly changing entirely within the system. If they are writing a ruleset in 2014, they are writing it for the armies that aleady exist in game. What happens in 2015 when new codices are vomited out? Imbalance occurs again.

I also can't believe it's 2014 and there's no rules templating in 40K. They just word abilities however they please, which leads to insane scenarios where two contradictory abilities have no resolution other than rolling a D6 or waiting for an FAQ to tell you which trumps which. The FAQ by the way will have no logic other than picking one of the abilities to win, and they will often be internally inconsistent with very similar calls they make on other things because again... no templating. It's just basic stuff like that, things that companies have been doing for years that provide huge value in a ruleset that GW just ignores entirely. The worst part is that they could probably make it an initiative to rework all their codices to use templating and spell out clearly how the rules work and interact with each other, and sell a new codex to every single player of every single army and make a lot of money. But that is work and they'd rather just continue to put out terrible rules.

The issue is - they used to playtest with peopel ouside the company. Those people then leaked the rules, etc out - even with the NDAs - to others, letting punters know the upcoming armies in advance of when they should.

For a cyclical release cycle hobby model, which is what GW have, this hurts sales (a bit like Apple controlling iPhone news as long as possible - they cannibalise existing (more profitable, usually) sales as people wait for the new shiny) of their existing line. It can also lead to, if people only leak / see a portion of the rules, wildly inaccurate discussions on the power level of the new books, etc. Can be very damaging.

So, as the community showed they couldnt be trusted*, GW turned inwards. And while they absolutely DO internal playtesting, they have a lowturnover of staff (which can be a good and bad thing - bad for this) who suffer from the same issue all low change groups suffer - not seeing the wood for the trees. Theyre too close to it.

PP et al can do a beta test, as they splash out all armies at once, meaning they dont have the same hobby cycle issues.

Now, is it GWs fault they are in htis situation? Almost certainly, yes. However they *did* try external playtesting, and it bit them - hard. So, like elephants with a long memory, theyre loathe to try it again.

They do get the occassional external - Dreadball creator being one recent example - rules guys in, but really they need to be more formalised in their testing, almost with dev, test and prod guys. Regression testing is a must

*as a whole no, on an individual or even wider group level yes - trouble is, I think we're seen as one "blob"

 Blacksails wrote:
The Heldrake example has two schools; those who wanted the nerf because its a pretty powerful unit, while those think it was too strong because the rest of the chaos book isn't that great.

Continuing with the example, if GW listened to feedback (they don't), they'd find that the solution to the Heldrake problem was to nerf it, but simultaneously buffing several other units and otherwise improving on the codex's internal balance.

Its not a simple answer, but that's the whole point of having a beta test team. Further, you don't listen to what everyone has to say. Some people are more right than others. When someone claims that X is OP, while another claims that X is UP, you weigh the arguments and test. You don't throw your hands up and claim the community is too conflicted to ever help balance anything.

Exalted. There's a difference between "listen to your community" and "mob rule".

Amen.

It's scary how I agree with everything Peregrine wrote on this thread, considering that my opinions are usually the complete opposite of his.

Currently the most successful German P&P system is being remade (The Dark Eye, English versions have also been called Tales of Arcania in the past) with lots of involvement from the community. They realized that balance is an important thing for everyone, role-players, powergamers, convention player and hack&slay players alike. It's a game all those people enjoy, otherwise they wouldn't have invested so much money and time into it. They way to improve the system is not to kick hack&slay players and powergamers into a well, but rather ensuring that everyone can have fun at the same table. Make sure the powergamer can't break the game hard enough to outshine the role-player, while he can still enjoy finding those feats which are 2% more efficient than others. Make sure that the hack&slay player can still enjoy slaughtering enemies with with their range of abilities while keeping the game system simple enough to enable shot adventures during conventions.
To achieve this hard, but not impossible task, they did something unexpected: They simply put out the entire beta rules, four adventures to play and a bunch of drafts for expert rules out to the community and are processing feedback right now.

The same has to be done for WH40k. GW needs to close the gap between competitive, casual and fluff gamers. A fluff player shouldn't be force to chose between fielding a fluffy army and winning. A competitive player shouldn't be able to create armies that reliably evaporate non-competitive armies. They desperately need a competitive viewpoint in their design team. Someone that points out that some unit is strictly worse than another. Someone that tells them that no one would ever consider a certain unit to be useful. Someone that points out that the rules don't do what the designers intended them to do. Either they employ people to do that job, or they get the community to do this, like forgeworld does.

 Jidmah wrote:
Amen.

It's scary how I agree with everything Peregrine wrote on this thread, considering that my opinions are usually the complete opposite of his.

Yeah same, I usually find he's overly cynical (after a long day of arguing on the forums I guess) to the point that it even detracts from his point of view. He has been very concise and logical in here and not over the top at all, shame he's not always like this.

nosferatu1001 wrote:
The issue is - they used to playtest with peopel ouside the company. Those people then leaked the rules, etc out - even with the NDAs - to others, letting punters know the upcoming armies in advance of when they should.

Question because I'm unaware - where those people punished according to the NDA? If there's no teeth it's a worthless agreement.

For a cyclical release cycle hobby model, which is what GW have, this hurts sales (a bit like Apple controlling iPhone news as long as possible - they cannibalise existing (more profitable, usually) sales as people wait for the new shiny) of their existing line. It can also lead to, if people only leak / see a portion of the rules, wildly inaccurate discussions on the power level of the new books, etc. Can be very damaging.

FWIW Apple doesn't hold back information on the new iPhone because of it potentially hurting sales - since they always announce new products at WWDC their sales dip around then no matter what.
They hold information back because they don't want other phone/software/pc companies to take their ideas and run with them before the public has them.

So, as the community showed they couldnt be trusted*, GW turned inwards. And while they absolutely DO internal playtesting, they have a lowturnover of staff (which can be a good and bad thing - bad for this) who suffer from the same issue all low change groups suffer - not seeing the wood for the trees. Theyre too close to it.

Even that would be fine if they'd address issues they let slip through the cracks. After releasing a codex it's okay to say "... Oops. We didn't think of that." and errata it. The goodwill gained from admitting it would far outweigh the negatives of "You let this through!?"

 Peregrine wrote:

 Swastakowey wrote:
The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

Which is a terrible point, because that's not what's happening. This isn't a case of GW designing an amazing narrative game at the expense of making it less than ideal for tournament play, it's a case of GW publishing garbage and using "forge the narrative" as an excuse for why you should buy it anyway. 40k is actually a pretty bad narrative game, GW (and their white knights on the forums) have just created a marketing concept that a good casual/narrative game is entirely defined as "bad for tournaments", and turned all of their failures into "successes". It's a brilliant bit of marketing, but it doesn't change the fact that they're still publishing and selling garbage.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

Except that's not a good analogy because 40k doesn't function well for ANY intended customer. The better analogy would be if your boss was complaining about the new iphone coming with a cracked screen, constant software bugs that never get patched, and no phone service without a $500 upgrade that doesn't even work half the time. And meanwhile the white knights would still defend the iphone and insist that you're TFG if you want a screen that works because all decent people use voice commands instead.

To be fair to GW, the one thing that 40k does well is that it has an expansive and well filled out range for a lot of armies. That may not be relevant to having good rules, but it is relevant to having a good game and why I'm sure many people stick with 40k despite the bad rules. If all you want is an expansive universe and expansive range of miniatures to go with it, it can be the best game even with subpar rules.

nosferatu1001 wrote:
The issue is - they used to playtest with peopel ouside the company. Those people then leaked the rules, etc out - even with the NDAs - to others, letting punters know the upcoming armies in advance of when they should.

For a cyclical release cycle hobby model, which is what GW have, this hurts sales (a bit like Apple controlling iPhone news as long as possible - they cannibalise existing (more profitable, usually) sales as people wait for the new shiny) of their existing line. It can also lead to, if people only leak / see a portion of the rules, wildly inaccurate discussions on the power level of the new books, etc. Can be very damaging.

So, as the community showed they couldnt be trusted*, GW turned inwards. And while they absolutely DO internal playtesting, they have a lowturnover of staff (which can be a good and bad thing - bad for this) who suffer from the same issue all low change groups suffer - not seeing the wood for the trees. Theyre too close to it.

This is the same argument that music companies made for not wanting free music to be played on the radio or, many years later, streamed. The false belief that people will not pay for something if they can sample it for free. The reality, of course, is that it's free marketing and the product will usually sell better if people know something about it in advance. To extend your analogy, similar to the way Apple is alleged to have faked a developer leaving a prototype iPhone in a bar -- it creates hype.

I'm not disagreeing with your analysis of GW's logic, just pointing out that from a business standpoint, it's pretty much backwards thinking. From GW? Go figure.

This is also the exact same reason it would be a good idea for them to do an open beta, and the mentality that keeps that from happening.

nosferatu1001 wrote:
The issue is - they used to playtest with peopel ouside the company. Those people then leaked the rules, etc out - even with the NDAs - to others, letting punters know the upcoming armies in advance of when they should.

That's definitely a problem, but it still doesn't account for the fact GW completely ignore community feedback. Even if they released their hunk of junk rules because they don't want things leaked, it shouldn't stop them from treating the first release as a paid beta and then updating it with actual improved rules.

GW game designers seem to love their random tables so much that they treat rule design the same way. Just give the game a random shake up, make some things more balanced, some things more unbalanced, overall don't improve things.

Even if they don't have a huge pre-release playtest, which I can totally understand not wanting to do, it doesn't explain why we are in our 7th edition of 40k after 27 years and the rules are still a pile of poo.

That is because GW are not interested in perfecting the rules. Their business model is to keep ringing minor changes to avoid the effort of developing a new fluff backround and rule system.

The way they work, everyone has to buy a new set of books every few years and they can keep releasing updated or new models that fit into the existing system without major changes.

If GW finished the rules, got them as good as they could be, which certainly could have been done by now, then they would have to invent whole new games.

how is people knowing stuff in advance a bad thing , unless maybe if you make bad rules , but why would you do that.

I play warmachine for a year and I was told that when they were switching from one edition to another , they did public testing and gave rules to all people and later if something was raported as too good , they changed it.

I also don't understand when people say that w40k has bad rules , because it is casual , what ever that suppose to be considering the game always had clear win conditions.
IMO it is the opposit. If someone would be interested only in tournaments , then buying something like a eldar+ally army for 6th was awesome. At the same time someone who plays a non optimal army , be it because of his style or cash he has for an army , can either steam roll other people or get steam rolled and it doesn't depend on his skill. I have no idea why they make it possible for armies like Raven wing and sm biker lists in the same edition. There should be one biker army and not one good and one bad , but both using the same models .

I get that GW is insulated in their own little world, but they are a business and their goal is to make money. So what I don't understand is why are they actively chasing away a large percentage of their player base? They know that there are competitive and fluffy players and the spectrum in between that most players fall into. But why purposefully push away one group of people and lose all their business when they could just as easily market to both? If I was a suit in the corporate board room, I think I'd question that strategy. It's like Coke saying "We're only making diet Coke now. We're a healthy company now!" And then lose all the customers that like Coke but don't like diet Coke.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
That is because GW are not interested in perfecting the rules. Their business model is to keep ringing minor changes to avoid the effort of developing a new fluff backround and rule system.

The way they work, everyone has to buy a new set of books every few years and they can keep releasing updated or new models that fit into the existing system without major changes.

If GW finished the rules, got them as good as they could be, which certainly could have been done by now, then they would have to invent whole new games.

I don't really mind GW mixing up the rules to keep things fresh, I'd be happy enough to see them do errata or more minor releases that actually improves the game then every 4-6 years release a whole new edition that mixes things up. Really, the game hasn't changed all that much since 3rd edition, it's just been a juggling of things from one edition to the next with no meaningful change.

They could also do what they did back in the day and release other games like Necromunda, GorkaMorka, Epic 40k and so on to keep the core systems of 40k and WHFB from becoming stale.

 MWHistorian wrote:
I get that GW is insulated in their own little world, but they are a business and their goal is to make money. So what I don't understand is why are they actively chasing away a large percentage of their player base? They know that there are competitive and fluffy players and the spectrum in between that most players fall into. But why purposefully push away one group of people and lose all their business when they could just as easily market to both? If I was a suit in the corporate board room, I think I'd question that strategy. It's like Coke saying "We're only making diet Coke now. We're a healthy company now!" And then lose all the customers that like Coke but don't like diet Coke.

Two reasons, both driven by limiting their investment and running as lean as possible:

1. Rules are a cost center, or, at best, marketing material. They seek to minimize their investment in development (including playtesting) as much as possible.

2. Similarly, the optimal customers for them to target are new ones, who will purchase the most in the shortest period of time. To them, there are an infinite number of new players, and the investment of pursuing those players is lower than trying to get existing players to buy more.

It's not that they don't want you to keep buying their stuff, it's that it's not as efficient for them to try and get you to buy more as it is for them to try and get new people to buy more. So they're not going to be bothered with keeping you happy because it would cost them more than they believe it's worth.

In their eyes, they could either up their investment in rules tenfold to get you to buy 20% more models a year, or they could leverage that funding elsewhere to come out with a bunch of new giant model kits that will appeal to both existing and new players. The later, which is the one that makes them more money, is the route they choose.

 Peregrine wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
OT, whiteknighting GW's rules when you know they are lacking, with the reasoning that it's aimed at a different audience - why do people do this? Is it just to be a contrarian? What gain is there from it, you want the rules to remain bad competively? How does this affect your "narrative"? Is it impossible to admit that improving one could only improve the other, not make it worse?

I think it happens for two reasons:

1) Reluctance to accept that something is simply broken. Some people find it hard to accept that GW are lazy and incompetent and the rules they paid $150 for are garbage, so they'll embrace any alternative explanation that lets them avoid that answer. It's not incompetence and bad design, it's just different design. If 40k is bad for tournament play, as it indisputably is, it must be because it's great for something else. You'll often see a similar thing happen with bad units, whenever most people recognize that a unit sucks there will be a small but vocal minority insisting that you're just using it wrong and there must be something good about it. They'll fight to the death to defend the idea that every unit has a purpose, and never accept that sometimes (or often!) GW just screws up and publishes a weak unit.

2) "Casual at all costs". Some people aren't interested in competitive play, don't care very much about winning, and therefore just play some casual non-tournament games with whatever they feel like using. Other people go far beyond mere lack of interest and decide that caring about winning is objectively wrong, and people who play competitively are all sociopath TFGs. They define themselves and their hobby by how much they don't care about winning, and define the perfect game as the one that is as bad as possible for competitive play. Casual/narrative play doesn't just tolerate bad rules, it requires bad rules. So every balance problem and unclear rule GW publishes magically makes the game better for casual/narrative play, simply because it makes it worse for tournament play.

Thankfully most people fall into the first category, and the second is a small (but incredibly obnoxious) minority.

I think for some people, they see people who enjoy being competitive and because they don't relate to this as something fun in and of itself, seek explanations other than that for why people would engage in such behaviour. And they then commonly turn to the idea that it's about proving you're better than other people, propping up your own ego, all that rot. I have seen exactly that attitude turned on me in some cases from some of the less pleasant posters (which thankfully are a minority). But I believe that to be a common reason for this attitude.

But there are no infinite number of table top players. If anything the market for new young players that impulse buy is getting smaller.

I think for some people, they see people who enjoy being competitive and because they don't relate to this as something fun in and of itself, seek explanations other than that for why people would engage in such behaviour. And they then commonly turn to the idea that it's about proving you're better than other people, propping up your own ego, all that rot. I have seen exactly that attitude turned on me in some cases from some of the less pleasant posters (which thankfully are a minority). But I believe that to be a common reason for this attitude.

You know I just thought that maybe it is the same mechanism you seen in schools or work places or families. The over achiver is always branded the most. Nothing you do will get you more hate at school then saying that the thing most failed at was easy.. The person that does 150% of norm at work is the one who will have no friends. Being bad is ok , it is never your foult. Being mediocre is the goal. I have a friend who went to piano lessons with me. I did ok , but she was briliant , her mother cut the lessons for her by half , because , and am not kidding you those were her exact words , she didn't want other children to dislike her for being good at something . And then send her to tenis lessons she hates.

Brother Gyoken wrote:
That being said, I also think the attitude some people have of making a playtest team of exclusively "competitive" players is backwards also. While those players are good at finding and exploiting rules holes, they also will only test using the best 2 or 3 armies in the game.

Two things:

1) Nobody wants playtesting exclusively with competitive players. What we want is for GW to stop pretending that competitive play doesn't exist and use that resource. Obviously this should be supplemented by casual/narrative/etc players to make sure the game works well for those groups, even if they don't provide much useful balance feedback.

2) There is no issue with competitive players only testing the best units/armies because that's not how playtesting works. You don't just give someone the rules and say "have fun", there's a formal structure to it. You have models for every army, and you say "this month you're playing orks". Or you want feedback on a specific new unit, so every single game your playtesters play has that unit in it somewhere. And even if you do see that your competitive playtesters are favoring certain units/armies when they have a choice of what to use (and remember, you're documenting all of those choices) that is incredibly useful feedback, as it tells you that you need to look carefully at the power level of those units/armies and make sure that they aren't being over-used because they're too good.

nosferatu1001 wrote:
For a cyclical release cycle hobby model, which is what GW have, this hurts sales (a bit like Apple controlling iPhone news as long as possible - they cannibalise existing (more profitable, usually) sales as people wait for the new shiny) of their existing line. It can also lead to, if people only leak / see a portion of the rules, wildly inaccurate discussions on the power level of the new books, etc. Can be very damaging.

This only happens if, like GW, you publish garbage at vastly inflated prices and depend on impulse buys from people who might not buy a new product if they have time to think about it. If you publish a quality product that people are going to want to matter how much time they have to think about it then leaks aren't as much of a problem, and probably just help build excitement for the new release.

 MWHistorian wrote:
So what I don't understand is why are they actively chasing away a large percentage of their player base?

Because, in GW's opinion, it isn't a large percentage of their player base. They think that their target market is two groups:

1) Dedicated Hobbyists™ who love Buying™ Citadel™ Miniatures, and don't really care about the rules.

2) New customers, especially kids, who are recruited through a Games™ Workshop™ Hobby™ Center™ and buy lots of intro products. Since most of them won't ever make it to the point of playing a game the rules don't really matter, as long as there's the idea of playing a game with their new toys to get them to buy stuff.

So why put effort into developing better rules when your target market doesn't care about them? Just throw something together as quickly as possible and start bringing in sales.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Even if they released their hunk of junk rules because they don't want things leaked, it shouldn't stop them from treating the first release as a paid beta and then updating it with actual improved rules.

3rd and 6th Editions were essentially payed Betas, they just didn't call them that.

nosferatu1001 wrote:
The issue is - they used to playtest with peopel ouside the company. Those people then leaked the rules, etc out - even with the NDAs - to others, letting punters know the upcoming armies in advance of when they should.

But why is foreknowledge bad? One way or the other you're going to give the rules to the players- the only debate here is the state and quality you give them out in. If you go 'Here's some playtest rules' and get back 'this is broken/poorly worded/unclear' you can shrug and go 'well it is a beta...' then fix them. No one is going to be upset over glitchy playtests and betas. The same is not true of final product.

Can you imagine the confidence you'd have in 40k if it'd had an open beta playtest? To say nothing of how many issues may have been caught?

nosferatu1001 wrote:
Now, is it GWs fault they are in htis situation? Almost certainly, yes. However they *did* try external playtesting, and it bit them - hard. So, like elephants with a long memory, theyre loathe to try it again.

How exactly did it bite them? I mean what was the damage?

 MWHistorian wrote:
I get that GW is insulated in their own little world, but they are a business and their goal is to make money. So what I don't understand is why are they actively chasing away a large percentage of their player base? They know that there are competitive and fluffy players and the spectrum in between that most players fall into. But why purposefully push away one group of people and lose all their business when they could just as easily market to both? If I was a suit in the corporate board room, I think I'd question that strategy. It's like Coke saying "We're only making diet Coke now. We're a healthy company now!" And then lose all the customers that like Coke but don't like diet Coke.

The obvious answer is that GW's management think they have got the better strategy that way.

Time will tell.

 Kojiro wrote:
But why is foreknowledge bad?

Because GW is obsessed with impulse buys. They want your first knowledge of a new product to be when you see it on the shelf at your local GW store, preferably with a "limited edition, buy now!!!!" sign on it, so that you'll have the obvious "wow that is awesome" reaction and then buy it immediately. They're afraid that if you have time to think about it and more information about the new product you'll realize that you don't really want it after all. From that perspective playtesting leaks are terrifying, they give out information far in advance of release day, and they're an obviously unfinished product that might make the new release look bad and make it even less likely that you'll buy it.

Now, obviously this demonstrates a very low level of confidence in their own products, which suggests that GW's management know they're publishing garbage that doesn't deserve confidence. Companies with better products don't worry about this as much, since they know that learning more about a new product will only add to your desire to buy it, and impulse buys are a lot less important. In fact, they'll "leak" information in their own previews to build interest in a new release. And since their customers know the final product will be awesome it's not a big deal if unfinished rules leak, because everyone knows they're unfinished and the problems will be fixed in the final product.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kojiro wrote:
But why is foreknowledge bad?

Because GW is obsessed with impulse buys. They want your first knowledge of a new product to be when you see it on the shelf at your local GW store, preferably with a "limited edition, buy now!!!!" sign on it, so that you'll have the obvious "wow that is awesome" reaction and then buy it immediately. They're afraid that if you have time to think about it and more information about the new product you'll realize that you don't really want it after all. From that perspective playtesting leaks are terrifying, they give out information far in advance of release day, and they're an obviously unfinished product that might make the new release look bad and make it even less likely that you'll buy it.

Now, obviously this demonstrates a very low level of confidence in their own products, which suggests that GW's management know they're publishing garbage that doesn't deserve confidence. Companies with better products don't worry about this as much, since they know that learning more about a new product will only add to your desire to buy it, and impulse buys are a lot less important. In fact, they'll "leak" information in their own previews to build interest in a new release. And since their customers know the final product will be awesome it's not a big deal if unfinished rules leak, because everyone knows they're unfinished and the problems will be fixed in the final product.

That is interesting and I wonder if some part of that is why GW creates an iron curtain around themselves. With Warmachine they tell you far in advance what's coming out. People get excited and say "Oh, I want that in my army." or "That's cool, I can make an alternate list for that." Or whatever. It builds excitement and talk. With the latest GW releases, we get lies, half truths and a few actual hard facts so it creates a mess of negativity, disappointment and confusion. That can't be a good thing.

I imagine that playtesting at GW is a very simple process where they bring in some units and "give 'em a go" - a few games later you've got a unit ready for print in a new codex free of blatant spelling or grammatical errors.

If editorial is so weak at GW, why would they playtest thoroughly?

 Peregrine wrote:

Because GW is obsessed with impulse buys. They want your first knowledge of a new product to be when you see it on the shelf at your local GW store, preferably with a "limited edition, buy now!!!!" sign on it, so that you'll have the obvious "wow that is awesome" reaction and then buy it immediately. They're afraid that if you have time to think about it and more information about the new product you'll realize that you don't really want it after all. From that perspective playtesting leaks are terrifying, they give out information far in advance of release day, and they're an obviously unfinished product that might make the new release look bad and make it even less likely that you'll buy it.

Well personally I'll be giving my money to Privateer and other companies who put out finished products.

 Peregrine wrote:
Now, obviously this demonstrates a very low level of confidence in their own products, which suggests that GW's management know they're publishing garbage that doesn't deserve confidence. Companies with better products don't worry about this as much, since they know that learning more about a new product will only add to your desire to buy it, and impulse buys are a lot less important. In fact, they'll "leak" information in their own previews to build interest in a new release. And since their customers know the final product will be awesome it's not a big deal if unfinished rules leak, because everyone knows they're unfinished and the problems will be fixed in the final product.

Oh man. Can't playtest because people will see how bad the rules are. Rules are bad because not playtesting enough.

But this is something they really need to bite the bullet on. Especially now when they're doing naked cash grabs. I mean, imagine if they'd done the exact same thing Privateer had done. Imagine they released a beta of new rules- free to all- and every single unit in the game- at once. Then let the player base submit tens of thousands of pieces of feedback and, after six more months of their own testing and balancing released a new edition. Then one book/codex per month for the next year. Can you imagine the cash they'd be making if *everyone* got an update? If *everyone* had been listened to and had their concerns addressed? If you knew with absolute certainty that- even if you were *last* you were still only a year from a codex (and you had the free rules until then)? Other than the fact it would take effort and community interaction where is the downside to all this?

 Kojiro wrote:
Oh man. Can't playtest because people will see how bad the rules are. Rules are bad because not playtesting enough.

Well, they can't use external playtesters. GW's obsessive secrecy means that they'd have to hire their own playtesters, under strict NDAs. It's not impossible though, MTG does their own playtesting (with a fairly large group of people, largely composed of former high-level competitive players) and doesn't really have any problems with playtest cards leaking. It just means that they would have to be a lot more careful than they would if they had more confidence in their products.

But yeah, it's definitely not a good situation. Years of laziness and incompetence have put the game in a really bad state, where there are no easy solutions and attempting to fix everything could be almost as bad as just letting it continue to fail. This is why GW should be a lesson on what not to do, if you're a hopeful future game designer.

Other than the fact it would take effort and community interaction where is the downside to all this?

Cost. See my previous post about how GW believes that their target market doesn't actually play the game. It would involve spending a lot of money on improving the game for a group that GW doesn't care about, which would directly contradict their policy of making short-term profits a priority over absolutely everything else, including future growth potential.

 Peregrine wrote:

Well, they can't use external playtesters. GW's obsessive secrecy means that they'd have to hire their own playtesters, under strict NDAs.

The sad thing is that they think they can't. They could- others have shown that to be possible. They just have the foregone conclusion that information control is paramount because... well for some reason.

 Peregrine wrote:
Cost. See my previous post about how GW believes that their target market doesn't actually play the game. It would involve spending a lot of money on improving the game for a group that GW doesn't care about, which would directly contradict their policy of making short-term profits a priority over absolutely everything else, including future growth potential.

I wonder how much playtesting the Chapterhouse lawsuit could have paid for?

But seriously they have to know- they surely can't be so deluded- that they believe that an inferior product serves them as well or better than a polished one? It'd be like Marvel putting out an Avengers comic, but with shoddy art and a crap story and insisting that 'fans just want to buy Avengers/Marvel stuff- there's no reason to pay good artists and writers!' Done right it would cost them but it would be an investment. If they were a start up- if they didn't have a fan base- let alone a vocal contingent crying out for it- I could see how you could say 'the investment is too risky at this point'. But at this point with a legion of hungry fans such an investment can only pay off- no one is going to complain about tight rules and good balance.

Maybe their business model specifically prevents them from creating a balanced game.

In quite a few moral tales, perfection is frowned upon. Like the artist who creates a perfect picture, permanently spoils himself for other artworks.

So maybe it is an intentional swing of balance between edition, as ruled by their business model. After all, no one is looking forward to second edition monopoly or cluedo but enough players with enough investment would catch up to the latest edition in warhammer.

Cool things like psychic phase, chariots etc. there would be enough players who would subscribe to the new edition and perhaps buy more models. And after a while, GW will release a new edition with new toys, to stir up interest again.

Games companies are like sharks who need to keep swimming. If they ever create the perfect game system, they stop moving and they die.

Young games systems don't need to swim so fast - they're still adding things to the game, they're still reaching new customers.

Old games systems are mature, people have what they need. You have to keep moving things around to keep swimming because you're grown too big for your tank.

And all this doubly-so for miniatures companies. If GW ever invent bio-degradable miniatures, it will be a happy day for them. I imagine they've got Brian Nelson locked in a potting shed working with plant matter even as we speak.

The problem with that is that things like rough riders haven't been good in forever (ever?) so they won't sell many ever.

It might work well with say, vehicles being great, then crap the next edition, but it's a terrible idea, or at least being handled terribly, when you look at the finer points.

And realistically introducing new units and factions, or new expansions should be more than enough to keep players interested (it works for every other game).

These points are interesting to discuss and I agree with a lot of what is being said.

However, the topic is about whether it is possible for GW to play test the game, and we ought to stick to that.

If people want to discuss why GW don't want to play test, that would make a good thread in its own right.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
However, the topic is about whether it is possible for GW to play test the game, and we ought to stick to that.

The problem with that 'discussion' is that it's short and simple- yes. Other companies with vastly less resources manage it for games equally if not more complex. As I said, Warmachine has some 130 feats, around 80 unique spells, two dozen USRs and over eight hundred model abilities. Look at the YMDC page- the average number of replies to a given question is about 5 (49 topics, 248 answers).

If GW don't want to get that complex fine, if they don't want to get that tight on balance fine, but for the love of Jeff that level of clarity should be expected of company of their age, experience and resources.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kojiro wrote:
But why is foreknowledge bad?

Because GW is obsessed with impulse buys. They want your first knowledge of a new product to be when you see it on the shelf at your local GW store, preferably with a "limited edition, buy now!!!!" sign on it, so that you'll have the obvious "wow that is awesome" reaction and then buy it immediately. They're afraid that if you have time to think about it and more information about the new product you'll realize that you don't really want it after all. From that perspective playtesting leaks are terrifying, they give out information far in advance of release day, and they're an obviously unfinished product that might make the new release look bad and make it even less likely that you'll buy it.

Now, obviously this demonstrates a very low level of confidence in their own products, which suggests that GW's management know they're publishing garbage that doesn't deserve confidence. Companies with better products don't worry about this as much, since they know that learning more about a new product will only add to your desire to buy it, and impulse buys are a lot less important. In fact, they'll "leak" information in their own previews to build interest in a new release. And since their customers know the final product will be awesome it's not a big deal if unfinished rules leak, because everyone knows they're unfinished and the problems will be fixed in the final product.

The funny thing is, this exactly describes what they are doing RIGHT NOW with the ork codex. Instead of showing off all their new models at once, and dropping the codex two weeks later, we get them one unit at a time, sorted from least competitive to most competitive. Anyone who thought about buying a Morkanaut for some reliable anti-tank in a green tide has now completely discarded the possibility due to being able to choose between Flash Gits (far superior models) or Mek Gunz (far superior on the tabletop). Instead of actually making the Morkanauts useful for orks, they just hoped that people would buy them before they revealed their other new heavy support choices.

 knas ser wrote:
Games companies are like sharks who need to keep swimming. If they ever create the perfect game system, they stop moving and they die.

Young games systems don't need to swim so fast - they're still adding things to the game, they're still reaching new customers.

Old games systems are mature, people have what they need. You have to keep moving things around to keep swimming because you're grown too big for your tank.

And all this doubly-so for miniatures companies. If GW ever invent bio-degradable miniatures, it will be a happy day for them. I imagine they've got Brian Nelson locked in a potting shed working with plant matter even as we speak.

Even if this is a fear GW has, it's far from reality. While they'll reach the point where they are hard pressed to find something new to add to their armies, that point is still far away for most armies. Even then. during 6th they've added a lot of stuff to the game that not has been done before: non-apoc formations, new single Characters, specialist codices focusing on a few units, supplements representing a faction from the fluff, a book full of fortifications et cetera. All those things are great for shaking up the game for at least a decade. However, this would require them to understand how their game works. For example, Cipher didn't have any impact at all, because they failed at creating rules interesting enough to build armies around him. Unlike some Inquisitor and his cyber-eagle who seem to be everywhere at once.

 Kojiro wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
However, the topic is about whether it is possible for GW to play test the game, and we ought to stick to that.

The problem with that 'discussion' is that it's short and simple- yes. Other companies with vastly less resources manage it for games equally if not more complex. As I said, Warmachine has some 130 feats, around 80 unique spells, two dozen USRs and over eight hundred model abilities. Look at the YMDC page- the average number of replies to a given question is about 5 (49 topics, 248 answers).

If GW don't want to get that complex fine, if they don't want to get that tight on balance fine, but for the love of Jeff that level of clarity should be expected of company of their age, experience and resources.

Yes, I totally agree with you.

I don't know why the topic has to drag on so long, it seems too obvious that GW could do play testing if they wanted.

Obvious that they should and frustrating that they don't. *grumbles* Not a cent for rules form me until they fix them.

 Yonan wrote:
Obvious that they should and frustrating that they don't. *grumbles* Not a cent for rules form me until they fix them.

Same here- I opted not to buy the 7th ed rulebook for fear it would not be worth the bother (let alone the cost) despite the 20% off presale the FLGS offered, and seeing the final product reaffirmed that decision.

I'll make do with the in-store copy (and other means ) until I feel they give me a product that's worth mt money.

Their incompetence has also seriously put me off of buying new models...

 Kojiro wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
However, the topic is about whether it is possible for GW to play test the game, and we ought to stick to that.

The problem with that 'discussion' is that it's short and simple- yes.

Well it's not an epic discussion, but there's still some mileage in it. The primary issue with the OPs argument (no offence OP, this is just my analysis and feedback) is that it presumes that playtesting requires testing of all the different combinations. This is unfeasible as they point out and it also doesn't cover correct usage of models either. For example, one might say Striking Scorpions are woefully underpowered vs. Dire Avengers if one assessed by shooting, rather than close combat. How does one weight the different aspects of units against each other? And then you have synergies. Is a farseer overpowered? Is a jetbike? Is a warlock? Is a farseer plus warlocks on jetbikes overpowered? I think you see where I'm going with that.

It's been suggested that computer simulations could do this. Yes, they could do a lot of this if a lot of work was put in. Whilst that is less of a mammoth effort than actually playing all the combinations, it is still a huge effort and likely still unfeasible.

The OP has a reasonable point in rejecting doing all this. But it is wrong to take a binary approach of saying you need to do this in order to playtest. There are many smaller or more sophisticated approaches one can take. You can compare units to units in terms of points. You can look at the average armour saves and AV values between armies and say: "okay, this armour save on Space Marines actually isn't going to apply in all these cases with the preponderance of low AP weapons these days, so it shouldn't add so much cost".

I think most would agree with the OP that what they suggest is not possible. But most would disagree that there isn't a lot GW still could do in order to play test and balance the game.

Rigeld - nope, nothing. The problem they had (one of many, rather) is poor leak control. The company was a hobbyist company run by hobbyists with little to no business sesne, so they came up with an idea and implemented it with poor controls. Thus they were never able to reliably identify where the leaks were from (remember this is from a time when stock control was manual, and non-loss was anyones discretion essentially. Waqsnt abused by staff, ever, honest)

As to previews hurting them - they have a theory, internally and that was fairly well borne out in sales, that hobbyists are cyclical - their interest naturally waxes and wanes. By controlling release schedules and when information is released you tap into that cycle. Get it wrong and information falls flat, isnt exciting to the right people at the right time,e tc. Anyone who was a black / blue shirt should have heard of this, certaiunly my husband had this when he was there a few years back.

Of course that was also when they generally had release schedules with time to build up to a release - usually a release had a month build up, with the staff aware of it, able to see models etc and get THEM excited about it.

Its only a lot more recently, sadly tied to Hobbit leak control, that theyve moved to "surprise!" releases with a weeks notice.

nosferatu1001 wrote:
As to previews hurting them - they have a theory, internally and that was fairly well borne out in sales, that hobbyists are cyclical - their interest naturally waxes and wanes. By controlling release schedules and when information is released you tap into that cycle. Get it wrong and information falls flat, isnt exciting to the right people at the right time,e tc. Anyone who was a black / blue shirt should have heard of this, certaiunly my husband had this when he was there a few years back.

I can see the logic in that. You do want to have some control about when you announce things. New edition of D&D or release of X-Wing: you don't want your new game or codex going toe-to-toe with that. Likewise if you think you can build more interest by doing a steady build of "what ork miniature have they released today?" rather than a quick "bang - there's orks!", there's nothing inherently wrong with that.

I guess the problem is if it prevents useful feedback into the design process.

The last thing Chambers did when he was at GW was essentially have an open beta of 4th edition. While 4th was not perfect, it was arguably the most air tight and well understood edition ever to have existed. GW also did a lot better financially at that time. I think that GW has drawn the wrong conclusions from the recession and that the marketing guys more or less are running the asylum.

What they really need are a group of playtesters who are not their best buds and who have the stones to tell them when something is bad design. The problem now is not that they lack playtesting, its just that the inner circle is stacked full of yes men.

 Phazael wrote:
The last thing Chambers did when he was at GW was essentially have an open beta of 4th edition. While 4th was not perfect, it was arguably the most air tight and well understood edition ever to have existed. GW also did a lot better financially at that time. I think that GW has drawn the wrong conclusions from the recession and that the marketing guys more or less are running the asylum.

This is just an aside, but I remember when they first started doing battle reports in White Dwarf and most often it was Andy Chambers vs. Jervis Johnson.

And pretty much every one of them ended with Jervis Johnson losing.

 knas ser wrote:

 Phazael wrote:
The last thing Chambers did when he was at GW was essentially have an open beta of 4th edition. While 4th was not perfect, it was arguably the most air tight and well understood edition ever to have existed. GW also did a lot better financially at that time. I think that GW has drawn the wrong conclusions from the recession and that the marketing guys more or less are running the asylum.

This is just an aside, but I remember when they first started doing battle reports in White Dwarf and most often it was Andy Chambers vs. Jervis Johnson.

And pretty much every one of them ended with Jervis Johnson losing.

Obviously the reason for that was the deplorable lack of utterly random sh*t in the game back then, which grossly tipped the balance by simultaneously preventing Jervis from Forging a Narrative™ and giving an unfair advantage to Andy with his "understanding of the rules" and "tactics".

Thankfully, that oversight has been rectified.

4th had the , to this day, least understood terrain system I am aware of. The levels mixed with tlos mixed with area terrain misunderstanding was horrific.

 Phazael wrote:
The last thing Chambers did when he was at GW was essentially have an open beta of 4th edition. While 4th was not perfect, it was arguably the most air tight and well understood edition ever to have existed. GW also did a lot better financially at that time. ...

...

It didn't, actually. They had some of their worst years during 2005 to 2008 which was 4th edition time.

Really? Because I remember full sized stores with specialist games thriving at the time, but maybe it was eclipsed by the Apoc Craze, I guess.

Problems with playtesting:

Having broken combos encourages people who want to be competitive to play those broken combos and are usually new units that cost a lot of $$$ and so GW loses money by making the new shiny stuff just as good as the old stuff for efficiency.

Playtesters can leak rules. Bad for GW as their records show that utter secrecy makes them money.



SSSSSOOOOO...GW ain't playtesting.

The only 'problem' with play testing is GW plc s view of it.

IF all the units in the game are viable choices, people buy new units because they like the look /function of them.
And everyone can buy what they want when they want and enjoy playing.And then they tell their friends how much fun this game is, and they buy armies to enjoy playing.
And the customer base grows and the company sell higher volumes of minatures.

You can add new releases into the game, but they do not have to generate all your new income.

Every other company in the table top war games market seems to understand the importance of play testing , editing and proof reading .

 Phazael wrote:
Really? Because I remember full sized stores with specialist games thriving at the time, but maybe it was eclipsed by the Apoc Craze, I guess.

I am talking about their financial results, which are the only data that count for business.

Lanrak wrote:
The only 'problem' with play testing is GW plc s view of it.

IF all the units in the game are viable choices, people buy new units because they like the look /function of them.
And everyone can buy what they want when they want and enjoy playing.And then they tell their friends how much fun this game is, and they buy armies to enjoy playing.
And the customer base grows and the company sell higher volumes of minatures.

You can add new releases into the game, but they do not have to generate all your new income.

Every other company in the table top war games market seems to understand the importance of play testing , editing and proof reading .

There is a difference between a new model being a slightly better choice than the existing ones, and a new model tossing the entire game into a state of imbalance like riptide, wave serpent and helldrake did. And I highly doubt the sold a single new model for the Grimoire.

New models and new rules like Allies are what did it.

 MWHistorian wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kojiro wrote:
But why is foreknowledge bad?

Because GW is obsessed with impulse buys. They want your first knowledge of a new product to be when you see it on the shelf at your local GW store, preferably with a "limited edition, buy now!!!!" sign on it, so that you'll have the obvious "wow that is awesome" reaction and then buy it immediately. They're afraid that if you have time to think about it and more information about the new product you'll realize that you don't really want it after all. From that perspective playtesting leaks are terrifying, they give out information far in advance of release day, and they're an obviously unfinished product that might make the new release look bad and make it even less likely that you'll buy it.

Now, obviously this demonstrates a very low level of confidence in their own products, which suggests that GW's management know they're publishing garbage that doesn't deserve confidence. Companies with better products don't worry about this as much, since they know that learning more about a new product will only add to your desire to buy it, and impulse buys are a lot less important. In fact, they'll "leak" information in their own previews to build interest in a new release. And since their customers know the final product will be awesome it's not a big deal if unfinished rules leak, because everyone knows they're unfinished and the problems will be fixed in the final product.

That is interesting and I wonder if some part of that is why GW creates an iron curtain around themselves. With Warmachine they tell you far in advance what's coming out. People get excited and say "Oh, I want that in my army." or "That's cool, I can make an alternate list for that." Or whatever. It builds excitement and talk. With the latest GW releases, we get lies, half truths and a few actual hard facts so it creates a mess of negativity, disappointment and confusion. That can't be a good thing.

I am not totally sure, but it is possible as a publically traded company GW may be prevented from revealing information about new products. I work for a software company which is public and we have to be very careful what we share in the public realm about our develpment. If we reveal features of software prior to release and then fail to deliver those features, it can prevent us from recognizing ANY revenue until said features are released. The are SEC rules. We would like to share plans.etc with customers but in many cases are not able to.

This COULD be the same situation for GW. if they announce product and then for some reason fail to deliver it at the time they said (things happen a the time) then they may have a revenue recognition problem as well if the same kinds of rules apply to them as they do for my company.

I have no real idea if this is why GW is "secretive". I am just throwing it out as a possible reason.

Loborocket wrote:
I am not totally sure, but it is possible as a publically traded company GW may be prevented from revealing information about new products. I work for a software company which is public and we have to be very careful what we share in the public realm about our develpment. If we reveal features of software prior to release and then fail to deliver those features, it can prevent us from recognizing ANY revenue until said features are released. The are SEC rules. We would like to share plans.etc with customers but in many cases are not able to.

A lot of that is because of the competition. GW doesn't have competition in the same manner.

I suppose it is possible but as regards GW we are only talking about plastic toy soldiers. It is hardly rocket science -- they were invented in the 1940s.

There was also rumours the restrictions were put in place by New Line Cinema in order to secure the Hobbit contract. NLC didn't want any information about the film (new models, sourcebooks or the like to spoil plotpoints, a Smaug model).

 Deadshot wrote:
Having broken combos encourages people who want to be competitive to play those broken combos and are usually new units that cost a lot of $$$ and so GW loses money by making the new shiny stuff just as good as the old stuff for efficiency.

Except there are three issues with this:

1) GW doesn't do a very good job of this. Yeah, Riptides are overpowered and every competitive Tau player had to spend hundreds of dollars on them, but the same new release included new flyers with weak rules and (presumably) poor sales. IG got a plastic Hydra after competitive players already converted all the Hydras they could ever need, and the big kit with new rules was an ugly abomination with weak rules. I think there's obviously a desire to make new releases appealing and it potentially produces balance issues, but I think that has more to do with failure to playtest sufficiently and catch the mistakes than a deliberate desire to make new releases overpowered.

2) The people who buy stuff based on broken combos are a tiny minority. As a percentage of GW's total sales the difference between a broken combo and balanced rules is almost nonexistent. On the other hand there are probably a lot more people who will suffer the bad side of unbalanced rules, and potentially quit the game in frustration (or just never start playing because everyone knows the game sucks). I don't think the one guy spending $500 to buy the latest broken unit is really worth having them kill the whole local community and drive several customers (or potential customers) away.

3) Buying broken stuff usually just means not buying something else. If you assume that a player has a relatively fixed budget for 40k then it doesn't really matter whether they buy the new overpowered thing or an older kit. And, again, there is a high price to pay in lost sales. I can't imagine the small number of people who change their budget for something overpowered really offset those losses.

 knas ser wrote:
Old games systems are mature, people have what they need. You have to keep moving things around to keep swimming because you're grown too big for your tank.

I disagree with this need. 40k right now has way more models and options than anyone (except maybe an obsessive collector or two) will ever buy. Even if GW stopped adding new stuff to the game a new player would be able to keep buying stuff that is new to them until they spend all the money they're going to spend. Changing the rules does get some people to buy new stuff, but most of them probably would have spent that money anyway since they're still active players with more models available to buy. A new game-changing release just drives immediate purchases at the cost of losing customers who are tired of all the changes.

The only real benefit changing the rules has is selling more rulebooks without having to invest any meaningful design and development time like you'd have to do for a new army or awesome campaign/fluff book. Change a few rules and you can sell another copy of the same $50 book they just bought. Of course this has the same problem of driving people out of the game. I wonder which is bigger: the additional sales of 7th edition rulebooks to veteran players who otherwise wouldn't have bought anything, or the lost sales to people who decided that they don't really feel like spending money on a new edition only two years after the last one.

Loborocket wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Kojiro wrote:
But why is foreknowledge bad?

Because GW is obsessed with impulse buys. They want your first knowledge of a new product to be when you see it on the shelf at your local GW store, preferably with a "limited edition, buy now!!!!" sign on it, so that you'll have the obvious "wow that is awesome" reaction and then buy it immediately. They're afraid that if you have time to think about it and more information about the new product you'll realize that you don't really want it after all. From that perspective playtesting leaks are terrifying, they give out information far in advance of release day, and they're an obviously unfinished product that might make the new release look bad and make it even less likely that you'll buy it.

Now, obviously this demonstrates a very low level of confidence in their own products, which suggests that GW's management know they're publishing garbage that doesn't deserve confidence. Companies with better products don't worry about this as much, since they know that learning more about a new product will only add to your desire to buy it, and impulse buys are a lot less important. In fact, they'll "leak" information in their own previews to build interest in a new release. And since their customers know the final product will be awesome it's not a big deal if unfinished rules leak, because everyone knows they're unfinished and the problems will be fixed in the final product.

That is interesting and I wonder if some part of that is why GW creates an iron curtain around themselves. With Warmachine they tell you far in advance what's coming out. People get excited and say "Oh, I want that in my army." or "That's cool, I can make an alternate list for that." Or whatever. It builds excitement and talk. With the latest GW releases, we get lies, half truths and a few actual hard facts so it creates a mess of negativity, disappointment and confusion. That can't be a good thing.

I am not totally sure, but it is possible as a publically traded company GW may be prevented from revealing information about new products. I work for a software company which is public and we have to be very careful what we share in the public realm about our develpment. If we reveal features of software prior to release and then fail to deliver those features, it can prevent us from recognizing ANY revenue until said features are released. The are SEC rules. We would like to share plans.etc with customers but in many cases are not able to.

This COULD be the same situation for GW. if they announce product and then for some reason fail to deliver it at the time they said (things happen a the time) then they may have a revenue recognition problem as well if the same kinds of rules apply to them as they do for my company.

I have no real idea if this is why GW is "secretive". I am just throwing it out as a possible reason.

This is sort of true. Kind of basically, what would happen if GW releasd a "open" beta of their product would that their stock would actually go down because of the reaction to that beta. There can be "closed" betas, but yeah just a open here are the rules type thing probably wouldn't work.


Now what GW could do is provide each of their stores with a individual , numbered copy of rules and people could playtest the game at their stores and in a enviroment o their creation. Which would encourage people to come out to GW stores to try out the new rules and give input.

But they'll never ever do that in a million years.

Hollismason wrote:
This is sort of true. Kind of basically, what would happen if GW releasd a "open" beta of their product would that their stock would actually go down because of the reaction to that beta. There can be "closed" betas, but yeah just a open here are the rules type thing probably wouldn't work.

Well now it all depends on the quality of the product doesn't it? If the open beta shows an absolute train wreck of a game it'll hurt but probably not a lot. People might hold off on buying model A if it sucks in the new system but equally they may pick up B if it's looking good. That could well be a wash and most stock owners only care about the money coming in.

But even if they release a train wreck it's not the end. If they do the same as the WH/H beta and set up a website where players can go and register and provide feedback that will still provide mountains of useful (though a fair bit of useless) data. If they go the step further like PP and based on the info start issuing corrections for obvious typos/formatting, issue tightened up wording on rules and abilities and of course adjusting points costs/restrictions, it could be gold. Imagine you get handed a steaming pile of beta rules. You play them and submit feedback (with thousands of others) and a few weeks later GW puts out the beta 1.1 rules. Two weeks later the 1.2 rules. Whatever the timeframe is, every player gets to watch the game get neater, tighter and better right in front of their eyes. Those with good ideas may even see their very ideas incorporated. After six months of testing the steaming pile that was the original beta should look like a decent if not actually good product and a significant number of play groups will feel directly responsible for some of that. You want people to be interested in a new edition? Let them help make it.

I would dearly like to see this happen. We just got 7th so not for a while obviously but man.. You want to see investors happy? Tell them you did a playtest, got 100,000 pieces of feedback and this version has unprecedented player support and interest. That preorders are going nuts because your entire customer base has been able to watch and help craft the best version of the game yet.

And this is all possible. All GW has to do is wake up to the fact that the quality of the rules matter.

Agreed. Quality of the rules matters a great deal.
The question is, do you, the Dakka community, think GW will learn their lesson and pull up from their decline?

 MWHistorian wrote:
The question is, do you, the Dakka community, think GW will learn their lesson and pull up from their decline?

Nope.

Not without an upper management shakeup.

 -Loki- wrote:
Not without an upper management shakeup.

Incidentaly, how did the upper management manage to avoid getting fired after the February stock debacle?

Deschenus Maximus wrote:

 -Loki- wrote:
Not without an upper management shakeup.

Incidentaly, how did the upper management manage to avoid getting fired after the February stock debacle?

The fact the guy holding both top management positions is also the largest single stock holder may be a contributing factor...

Though to be fair it's rather rare that upper management gets sacked, even in the case of a major debacle.

GW's main problem is that they think they're a miniatures company that sells an associated rules set, when in reality most of their gamer base sees them as a gaming company that sells miniatures. This is mainly evidenced by the fact that you commonly see people buying alternative minis to play 40k and Fantasy, but you hardly ever see people buying GW minis to play other games.

The crap rules have prevented me from buying minis or rules over the last two editions. I'm not going to pay $15 for a dataslate PDF, rules for ONE model, that some intern slapped together in half an hour with zero playtesting.



They don't have to playtest every possible permutation of the game to find balance. They merely have to have a formula and stick to it. Every unit should have an associated power / points scale. BS3 costs X points, BS4 costs Y points, BS5 etc. Based on this formula, and allowing for slight deviations to reflect a specific army's strengths and weaknesses (i.e., Space Marines pay less for a 3+ save. Eldar pay less for I5 or Fast vehicles), you could easily balance the game by points costs alone. SUPER EASY. And all it would take is some forethought and an Excel spreadsheet.

Contract an actual scientist (or small group of scientsits) with a background in game design or applied statistics, and you'll fix 40k. If you contract out the work, it'll cost maximum $20,000 / yr to keep up with the codex updates, and it would be very easy to find willing volunteers.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
it'll cost maximum $20,000 / yr 

The heart of the problem. Specifically

it'll cost

 SHUPPET wrote:
OT, whiteknighting GW's rules when you know they are lacking, with the reasoning that it's aimed at a different audience - why do people do this? Is it just to be a contrarian? What gain is there from it, you want the rules to remain bad competively? How does this affect your "narrative"? Is it impossible to admit that improving one could only improve the other, not make it worse?

I find this whole discussion quite interesting, I play 40k for the fluff, the stories I can make from it and the sheer randomness of it, however this does not mean that I would like the game MORE random and more unbalanced. And for the most part, I don't believe many people want a more unbalanced game perse, it's just that we're not interested in the little details that don't pertain to us for the most part.

Those who are satisfied the way 40k is set up now are a detriment to the longevity of our long running hobby, although I believe the "Forging a Narrative" sections can be quite amusing and give interesting new ways to play, they should not be an excuse for a balanced game for everyone to enjoy. "Narrative" gamers such as myself, tend to by a little of everything for the purposes of story, and I'm sure GW LOVES players like me, whom don't concern themselves so much the with overall balance of the game. But what GW is doing is ONLY catering to gamers like me, whether it's be because of a concious decision to make the game a mess or because of sheer laziness, which I believe is ridiculous.

Look at a game like Infinity, although the studio is relatively new (compared to GW at least) and the game is for the most part in it's infancy, it's recieved a huge following over the past few years because of the balance of narrative, random, and competitive elements to the game.

GW is far from being the end all, be all miniature wargaming company these days, with games like Malifaux, Warmachine/Hordes, and Infinity butting heads for attention from hobby gamers, GW really needs to get it's head in the game (No pun intended) if they want to keep any sort of ground.

 MWHistorian wrote:
Agreed. Quality of the rules matters a great deal.
The question is, do you, the Dakka community, think GW will learn their lesson and pull up from their decline?

I certainly hope so, I don't wish ill of the company or it's employees, there's no reason to

 Deadshot wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
it'll cost maximum $20,000 / yr 

The heart of the problem. Specifically

it'll cost

Well, for a company that sinks unimaginable amounts of money into a dream team of lawyers that would have made OJ Simpson proud, and a creative staff that comes up with names like Asthma Militampon, it would represent a vast improvement in terms of return on investment.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
Well, for a company that sinks unimaginable amounts of money into a dream team of lawyers that would have made OJ Simpson proud, and a creative staff that comes up with names like Asthma Militampon, it would represent a vast improvement in terms of return on investment.

If they had a "dream team pf lawyers" I'd imagine at least one of them would have the sense to dissuade them from some of the sillier legal attacks they've launched in recent years...

Why ? what ever they win or lose they get paid anyway. If you know your going to lose , the best thing to do is to stall. Each day brings more moneyz for your team.

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:

 Deadshot wrote:

 NuggzTheNinja wrote:
it'll cost maximum $20,000 / yr 

The heart of the problem. Specifically

it'll cost

Well, for a company that sinks unimaginable amounts of money into a dream team of lawyers that would have made OJ Simpson proud, and a creative staff that comes up with names like Asthma Militampon, it would represent a vast improvement in terms of return on investment.

They are the Nazis. They buy up the free press to stop the press posting bad stuff about them. In this case, they bully and intimidate upstarts into silence, closing and paying them money so they can continue to pay the DT minimum wage and still have wargamers crawling after them.

 milkboy wrote:
I see quite a few opinions about GW not play testing enough before releasing a product so that led me to thinking. Is it actually possible to play test this game?

Celestians.

Yup, that's my answer : Celestians.

I'm nice, I could have mentionned these good old WDex preachers...

If the writers actually played one game and fielded a couple of them, maybe they'd have figured what was wrong with them. Maybe. A W1T3 regular human that provides a modest assault buff to an army that's only marginally better than taus in melee? 25 pts each one? Totally worth it.