Games Workshop does NOT test their products in a competitive environment, or any environment it seems.
I see click bait articles all the time complaining about one thing or another, ways they could improve the game, ect, and that would be wonderful it it actually accomplished a damn thing.
If you accept the above, why on gods green earth would you believe it will be improved? If i'm wrong i'd love to be proven so, please elaborate.
Grey Knights are the poster boys for GWs in-house test team and the perfect example of how completely out of tune they are with the competitive players who buy their products.
If you have a single faction that can't win tournaments for years on end you have a problem, and like i said it's been like this for years, the last GK winning list i saw ran 5-6 baby carriers so it was a while ago.
Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I buy a banana. I use the banana to clean wax out of my ears, and then complain loudly about how bad it is at that job. Is this Dole's fault, the banana's fault, or my fault?
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
SERIOUSLY.
It couldn't possibly be more clear that 40k is meant to be a fun, narratively-oriented, mostly-casual kind of game about spectacle and cool battles and funny moments and nice memories to enjoy with friends. That's the priority. It's always been the priority. It always will be the priority. People are welcome to focus on tournaments and competition and winning, of course, but it's just so weird to keep seeing people expecting, or demanding, that the game completely alter itself into something it isn't and never has been just to better match their particular style, when they could just … go play a different game with a more technical, competitive focus to it.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I buy a banana. I use the banana to clean wax out of my ears, and then complain loudly about how bad it is at that job. Is this Dole's fault, the banana's fault, or my fault?
That is a completely ridiculous comparison, but yes, if you knowingly sold a product to someone you knew was harming themselves with, yes, it's your fault.
I'm not using GW products to dig wax out of my ears. I use them to play a table top war game, i just play the game a little more "seriously", but i take the same approach to any game i play (i enjoy the competitive aspect of gaming).
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I buy a banana. I use the banana to clean wax out of my ears, and then complain loudly about how bad it is at that job. Is this Dole's fault, the banana's fault, or my fault?
That is a completely ridiculous comparison, but yes, if you knowingly sold a product to someone you knew was harming themselves with, yes, it's your fault.
I'm not using GW products to dig wax out of my ears. I use them to play a table top war game, i just play the game a little more "seriously", but i take the same approach to any game i play (i enjoy the competitive aspect of gaming).
So, you're saying you do everything one way (competitively), and you enjoy other games, but not GW's. Maybe the problem isn't with GW.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I am genuinely amazed by the number of people I've seen who argue from the assumption that they and they alone represent the customer base and who GW ought be appealing to.
See also: "GW should get rid of the useless trophy racks on CSM terminators and give us something we can USE like more combi-plasma" as though there's no such thing as people who's focus is on painting and aesthetics…
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I am genuinely amazed by the number of people I've seen who argue from the assumption that they and they alone represent the customer base and who GW ought be appealing to.
See also: "GW should get rid of the useless trophy racks on CSM terminators and give us something we can USE like more combi-plasma" as though there's no such thing as people who's focus is on painting and aesthetics…
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
There is a difference between being a competition game, where one person wins and another loses, and being competitive, where all permutations of all possible combinations are balanced and fair, meaning that decisions, skill, and tactics are the only deciding factor. WH40K is the former, not the latter.
Desubot wrote: I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I'd believe that if i wasn't watching the top selling products on GWs website for the last year or so, every single release you have some kind of meta breaking BS that just wipes out whatever stock GW had.
A good example of that recently was with the SM codices, IH hits and every single SM flyer in stock is gone within a day, and i don't think it was a bunch of casual gamers who just suddenly thought those flying bricks look really cool.
Another example would be with the IK release, for almost a year the top selling model on GWs website was the boogie man.
Casual players don't drop hundreds of dollars on the spot right after some new book drops, meta chasers do.
nataliereed1984 wrote: I am genuinely amazed by the number of people I've seen who argue from the assumption that they and they alone represent the customer base and who GW ought be appealing to.
See also: "GW should get rid of the useless trophy racks on CSM terminators and give us something we can USE like more combi-plasma" as though there's no such thing as people who's focus is on painting and aesthetics…
Yeah, see also the wysiwyg thread where if you don't have every-fething-thing specifically modeled the painter fascists will tell you to go home.
The difference is, as a painter/modeler primary, you can take the paste pot and glue whatever the feth you want to your plastic models and make up whatever happy story makes them special to you. Who cares?
Sadly, the competitive players, they have to actually model proper weapons, GW official models, consistent basing, yadda yadda yadda. So yeah, trophy racks can get bent.
The competitive environment isn't the problem. It's loaded with plenty of people who are happy to go to a lot of time and energy shaving edges off GW's square peg to make it fit in their round hole, and the players are perfectly happy to buy stuff just because it's powerful.
The casual narrative scene isn't the problem. Those people are perfectly happy to fiddle with things, build their own scenarios, and otherwise disregard GW's mistakes.
The problem is and always has been with pick-up games. If I go down to a game store and play a game on the fly with someone I haven't met before I have to negotiate the fine details of what I can and can't use or one of us is going to steamroll the other one because GW can't be bothered to make two armies of equal points be roughly similar in power.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
There is a difference between being a competition game, where one person wins and another loses, and being competitive, where all permutations of all possible combinations are balanced and fair, meaning that decisions, skill, and tactics are the only deciding factor. WH40K is the former, not the latter.
So it’s just bad at it.
Even in fully narrative games, it should not be as bad as 40k is, I do not even think most other GW games are as bad
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
There is a difference between being a competition game, where one person wins and another loses, and being competitive, where all permutations of all possible combinations are balanced and fair, meaning that decisions, skill, and tactics are the only deciding factor. WH40K is the former, not the latter.
Yep. There's also just… you know… degrees of priority. 40k prioritizes having a wide variety of distinct and characterful factions, units and special rules, and rules with a strong sense of narrative immersion in mind, over a more limited range of more comparable unit options, or more abstracted but competitively balanced rule systems, because they know the main "fun" of the game that draws people to it is the setting and the models and the aesthetic and such. That doesn't mean they disregard balance when designing rules and play testing, it's just not their sole and primary goal.
Also… if people really hate 40k and think it's such an awful game, why are they still playing it? There's lots of other games. You can even continue to collect the models and enjoy the IP without having to play the game.
Desubot wrote: I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I'd believe that if i wasn't watching the top selling products on GWs website for the last year or so, every single release you have some kind of meta breaking BS that just wipes out whatever stock GW had.
A good example of that recently was with the SM codices, IH hits and every single SM flyer in stock is gone within a day, and i don't think it was a bunch of casual gamers who just suddenly thought those flying bricks look really cool.
Another example would be with the IK release, for almost a year the top selling model on GWs website was the boogie man.
Casual players don't drop hundreds of dollars on the spot right after some new book drops, meta chasers do.
While its a clean assumption, its also entirely possible that:
IH: a faction that was horrifically under represented for a long time finally got a book and long time fans finally jumped into a full army. Flyers: GW is known for being REALLY bad at stocking properly. IK: Are Really cool. enough so that most collectors will probably end up getting one.
"casual" players may not be the ones dropping hundreds of dollars. but fans and collectors can and do.
Sadly, the competitive players, they have to actually model proper weapons, GW official models, consistent basing, yadda yadda yadda. So yeah, trophy racks can get bent.
Mate that isnt a GW thing thats your local or regional tournament rule as THEY decided that WYSIWYG is in effect.
AnomanderRake wrote: The problem is and always has been with pick-up games. If I go down to a game store and play a game on the fly with someone I haven't met before I have to negotiate the fine details of what I can and can't use or one of us is going to steamroll the other one because GW can't be bothered to make two armies of equal points be roughly similar in power.
Yup, Blizzard had the same problem years ago, when they tried to turn WoW into an E Sport.
GW does not properly test their products in the enlivenment their customers (at least some of them) play in, so how on earth would it ever be balanced?
Desubot wrote: I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I'd believe that if i wasn't watching the top selling products on GWs website for the last year or so, every single release you have some kind of meta breaking BS that just wipes out whatever stock GW had.
A good example of that recently was with the SM codices, IH hits and every single SM flyer in stock is gone within a day, and i don't think it was a bunch of casual gamers who just suddenly thought those flying bricks look really cool.
Another example would be with the IK release, for almost a year the top selling model on GWs website was the boogie man.
Casual players don't drop hundreds of dollars on the spot right after some new book drops, meta chasers do.
While its a clean assumption, its also entirely possible that:
IH: a faction that was horrifically under represented for a long time finally got a book and long time fans finally jumped into a full army.
Flyers: GW is known for being REALLY bad at stocking properly.
IK: Are Really cool. enough so that most collectors will probably end up getting one.
"casual" players may not be the ones dropping hundreds of dollars. but fans and collectors can and do.
Also "top selling item" does NOT reflect "majority of overall sales", it just means that one particular kit sold more than any ONE other kit. That's all.
even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
There is a difference between being a competition game, where one person wins and another loses, and being competitive, where all permutations of all possible combinations are balanced and fair, meaning that decisions, skill, and tactics are the only deciding factor. WH40K is the former, not the latter.
Yep. There's also just… you know… degrees of priority. 40k prioritizes having a wide variety of distinct and characterful factions, units and special rules, and rules with a strong sense of narrative immersion in mind, over a more limited range of more comparable unit options, or more abstracted but competitively balanced rule systems, because they know the main "fun" of the game that draws people to it is the setting and the models and the aesthetic and such. That doesn't mean they disregard balance when designing rules and play testing, it's just not their sole and primary goal.
Also… if people really hate 40k and think it's such an awful game, why are they still playing it? There's lots of other games. You can even continue to collect the models and enjoy the IP without having to play the game.
40k pays little mind to narrative, it’s kinda a joke. It really sells the idea.
But.. I am a narrative player, I play narrative in warmachine, infinity and dropzone. As well as a campaign in frost grave going for a long time now.
The idea that 40k does that particularly well of with much thought from design is just not really there.
But from a narrative perspective I loved turning up to games where purely on shoddy rules my army would lose with little thought from design on how my narrative focused army would function in even a quite soft environment. Or where I effectively had to quit one of my eldar army’s. Since bikes suddenly become a really good force. Despite not running it to its maximum and entirely within a narrative bounds of how it would function.
GW game design is just all over the place from a narrative point, with entire ranges left gutted narrative wise due to lack of access to models.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
There is a difference between being a competition game, where one person wins and another loses, and being competitive, where all permutations of all possible combinations are balanced and fair, meaning that decisions, skill, and tactics are the only deciding factor. WH40K is the former, not the latter.
Yep. There's also just… you know… degrees of priority. 40k prioritizes having a wide variety of distinct and characterful factions, units and special rules, and rules with a strong sense of narrative immersion in mind, over a more limited range of more comparable unit options, or more abstracted but competitively balanced rule systems, because they know the main "fun" of the game that draws people to it is the setting and the models and the aesthetic and such. That doesn't mean they disregard balance when designing rules and play testing, it's just not their sole and primary goal.
Also… if people really hate 40k and think it's such an awful game, why are they still playing it? There's lots of other games. You can even continue to collect the models and enjoy the IP without having to play the game.
40k pays little mind to narrative, it’s kinda a joke. It really sells the idea.
But.. I am a narrative player, I play narrative in warmachine, infinity and dropzone. As well as a campaign in frost grave going for a long time now.
The idea that 40k does that particularly well of with much thought from design is just not really there.
But from a narrative perspective I loved turning up to games where purely on shoddy rules my army would lose with little thought from design on how my narrative focused army would function in even a quite soft environment. Or where I effectively had to quit one of my eldar army’s. Since bikes suddenly become a really good force. Despite not running it to its maximum and entirely within a narrative bounds of how it would function.
GW game design is just all over the place from a narrative point, with entire ranges left gutted narrative wise due to lack of access to models.
I… I am not sure you and I are using the word "narrative" with the same meaning.
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
How? In what way? What evidence to you have to back that bold claim?
I've got evidence *points at the GKs in his closet*
Starcraft was not a competitive game. It was a game where the armies have different units when most RTS at the time usually had similar sides with maybe a few unique gimmicks, that had good back and forth unit balance. The people were surprised that a large scale tournament scene spawned out of it, because that's not what "it was made for"
Same with Street Fighter, same with Counter Strike. In every instance, they went on to make the game better balanced and interesting, and other people benefited. The idea of games "built for competition" is a recent one with stuff like Overwatch. At it's core, a game is built for what the user wants it to used for, and if it can be made better to benefit *the group as a whole* rather than trying to exclude people's desires because "that's not what it's built for",then it should.
I also fail to understand why painters/builders matter for how the rules should be done. Does making the rules worse make the people who don't play the game happier?
Desubot wrote: Mate that isnt a GW thing thats your local or regional tournament rule as THEY decided that WYSIWYG is in effect.
You're right, GW tournaments are even stricter.
though its getting off topic,
Well yeah as it should be. but that is sort of the point to play at a GW store or event and they will enforce WYSIWYG as they dont want people running around with 3rd party bits or having people run flamers as meltas or whatever as it makes things look bad for publicity and spectators. non GW tournaments made that decision as they want to avoid the oh these flamers are lascannons. ultimately in the case of Non GW events which is the majority of the events world wide, its a rule enforced not by GW but by the same competitive players that started the event in the first place. (in reference to the other thread)
nataliereed1984 wrote: Also "top selling item" does NOT reflect "majority of overall sales", it just means that one particular kit sold more than any ONE other kit. That's all.
When something is the top selling unit for 9 months in a row, that my friend is the majority of sales.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
At what point is 40k not competitive game, even in the most casual environment it is still competitive even if just for fun and with little to thought to the need to win.
At a certain point 40k is just kinda a bad game. Fun at times, but still kinda bad in so many places.
There is a difference between being a competition game, where one person wins and another loses, and being competitive, where all permutations of all possible combinations are balanced and fair, meaning that decisions, skill, and tactics are the only deciding factor. WH40K is the former, not the latter.
Yep. There's also just… you know… degrees of priority. 40k prioritizes having a wide variety of distinct and characterful factions, units and special rules, and rules with a strong sense of narrative immersion in mind, over a more limited range of more comparable unit options, or more abstracted but competitively balanced rule systems, because they know the main "fun" of the game that draws people to it is the setting and the models and the aesthetic and such. That doesn't mean they disregard balance when designing rules and play testing, it's just not their sole and primary goal.
Also… if people really hate 40k and think it's such an awful game, why are they still playing it? There's lots of other games. You can even continue to collect the models and enjoy the IP without having to play the game.
40k pays little mind to narrative, it’s kinda a joke. It really sells the idea.
But.. I am a narrative player, I play narrative in warmachine, infinity and dropzone. As well as a campaign in frost grave going for a long time now.
The idea that 40k does that particularly well of with much thought from design is just not really there.
But from a narrative perspective I loved turning up to games where purely on shoddy rules my army would lose with little thought from design on how my narrative focused army would function in even a quite soft environment. Or where I effectively had to quit one of my eldar army’s. Since bikes suddenly become a really good force. Despite not running it to its maximum and entirely within a narrative bounds of how it would function.
GW game design is just all over the place from a narrative point, with entire ranges left gutted narrative wise due to lack of access to models.
I… I am not sure you and I are using the word "narrative" with the same meaning.
Well, then you should explain. I play both in soft narrative, where we both turn up and wing a narrative. As well as more highly curated scenario and campaign play. 40k does nothing that really makes it better at ether, and as often though design can hinder such.
Not that it cannot, and it’s great that people do and have lots of fun at that. But using such as an excuse for the poor state of the rules is rather bothersome to me. Makes me think GW is more the EA of the tabletop world, puts out avg products with flashy paint. But is really just to big and mainstream to fail since no failure on there part can bring them down.
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
How? In what way? What evidence to you have to back that bold claim?
I've got evidence *points at the GKs in his closet*
You're asking me to provide *evidence* that I enjoy the game and find it relatively balanced and competent for the purpose of the kinds of friendly games I enjoy?
Seriously?
Yeah, I'm out. Have fun continuing to spend fortunes on a game you clearly despise?
I think I'm in the middle ground on this argument, thinking GW could do a little more... but just for the hell of it - can anyone honestly name a truly balanced (and importantly, continuously expanded) miniature wargame with as many customizable options pr. miniature and faction as 40k?
Luke_Prowler wrote: Starcraft was not a competitive game. It was a game where the armies have different units when most RTS at the time usually had similar sides with maybe a few unique gimmicks, that had good back and forth unit balance. The people were surprised that a large scale tournament scene spawned out of it, because that's not what "it was made for"
Same with Street Fighter, same with Counter Strike. In every instance, they went on to make the game better balanced and interesting, and other people benefited. The idea of games "built for competition" is a recent one with stuff like Overwatch. At it's core, a game is built for what the user wants it to used for, and if it can be made better to benefit *the group as a whole* rather than trying to exclude people's desires because "that's not what it's built for",then it should.
I also fail to understand why painters/builders matter for how the rules should be done. Does making the rules worse make the people who don't play the game happier?
AnomanderRake wrote: The competitive environment isn't the problem. It's loaded with plenty of people who are happy to go to a lot of time and energy shaving edges off GW's square peg to make it fit in their round hole, and the players are perfectly happy to buy stuff just because it's powerful.
The casual narrative scene isn't the problem. Those people are perfectly happy to fiddle with things, build their own scenarios, and otherwise disregard GW's mistakes.
The problem is and always has been with pick-up games. If I go down to a game store and play a game on the fly with someone I haven't met before I have to negotiate the fine details of what I can and can't use or one of us is going to steamroll the other one because GW can't be bothered to make two armies of equal points be roughly similar in power.
Aestas wrote: I think I'm in the middle ground on this argument, thinking GW could do a little more... but just for the hell of it - can anyone honestly name a truly balanced (and importantly, continuously expanded) miniature wargame with as many customizable options pr. miniature and faction as 40k?
Anyone know what Chief O'Brien was playing on DS9?
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
How? In what way? What evidence to you have to back that bold claim?
I've got evidence *points at the GKs in his closet*
Sadly I also have a GK army I spent lots of time, that was first gutted and struggles now to even compete in any way :(
Luke_Prowler wrote: I also fail to understand why painters/builders matter for how the rules should be done. Does making the rules worse make the people who don't play the game happier?
Always confuses me as well. If the rules are good, they can still make pretty models and painters can make up whatever narratives they want. If the rules are crap, who cares how pretty your plastic army people are? If the rules are crap, just go build dioramas and be done with it.
Aestas wrote: I think I'm in the middle ground on this argument, thinking GW could do a little more... but just for the hell of it - can anyone honestly name a truly balanced (and importantly, continuously expanded) miniature wargame with as many customizable options pr. miniature and faction as 40k?
Warmachine and hordes are not as far off as people really think, in a lot of cases the minor factions are way more diverse than the more minor factions of 40k.
As far as battlefield elements they are extremely similar.
40k could be a lot better if someone put the effort in to get it there, but I do not really think this is a rules issue. It’s a design issue, some of the 40k factions lack the basic ability to function in a game that is designed more to the ideas that 40k sells itself on.
nataliereed1984 wrote: You're asking me to provide *evidence* that I enjoy the game and find it relatively balanced and competent for the purpose of the kinds of friendly games I enjoy?
Seriously?
Yeah, I'm out. Have fun continuing to spend fortunes on a game you clearly despise?
Nope. No. Okay.
I was responding to what i quoted directly, but i'll break it down for you since your clearly confused.
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
Here you are arguing the game is balanced and has a competent set of rules.
Very few people want GW to put out a perfectly balanced game. Some things have to be better at an intended role than others or why not just play checkers.
The gripe is that GW seems to be intentionally bad at balance. Marines when they were first released vs what they are now. It's crazy that the same designers could think either of these designs was okay.
I play 40k because it is the only mini-wargame that I can find a constant player pool that isn't weird closet Nazi's (literally saw a guy playing a WWII game with nazi dice with the SS on them, that's a hard nope for me), has large social tournaments and I have a familiarity with (started playing WFB and 40k in '96).
GW's marketing seems concerned with balance (else why would we have 3 balance passes every year) so it is something GW pretends to try at, but the state of GK for the years since 8th started and the wild imbalance still left in game makes it feel like more of a marketing push than anything else.
Hell, the fact that they are holding my armies (DA/BA/SW) hostage behind a slow roll out of rules in order to maximize profits (the books/rules have been written for a while now) shows how GW uses balance.
If I could find another game in similar popularity/ubiquity I'd hop on that ship in a moment. I tried Warmachine but that died a bit before 8th came out, there are a few star wars gamers around but not enough to have a community.
Luke_Prowler wrote: I also fail to understand why painters/builders matter for how the rules should be done. Does making the rules worse make the people who don't play the game happier?
Always confuses me as well. If the rules are good, they can still make pretty models and painters can make up whatever narratives they want. If the rules are crap, who cares how pretty your plastic army people are? If the rules are crap, just go build dioramas and be done with it.
Why can't people like collecting and painting but also game occasionally? I put a lot of time into painting and re-basing my nids and don't want to yank the arms off my monsters every codex update because GW decided to change their options to keep the WYSIWYG/competitive pedants happy.
But I forget that the general opinion of the game on dakka is is "I had my fun and thats all that matters."
Luke_Prowler wrote: I also fail to understand why painters/builders matter for how the rules should be done. Does making the rules worse make the people who don't play the game happier?
Always confuses me as well. If the rules are good, they can still make pretty models and painters can make up whatever narratives they want. If the rules are crap, who cares how pretty your plastic army people are? If the rules are crap, just go build dioramas and be done with it.
Why can't people like collecting and painting but also game occasionally? I put a lot of time into painting and re-basing my nids and don't want to yank the arms off my monsters every codex update because GW decided to change their options to keep the WYSIWYG/competitive pedants happy.
But I forget that the general opinion of the game on dakka is is "I had my fun and thats all that matters."
You realise that under the current rules, that some players do not get to have as much fun as there chosen army is outmatched even at the avg.
And you cannot get angry at players when GW themselves aren’t removing options not represented by models in a lot of cases.
Trying to clarify my thoughts here, you seem to think the game is fine. And that players response to the rules is pedantic in some way, why also blaming them for things outside of there control why GW enforce there own form of WYSIWYG.
Ironically back when I started WYSIWYG was more of a casual thing at times, a way for casual players to simplify the game so they could focus more on the fun and narrative of the game.
With more competing players being far more in the middle ground.
Luke_Prowler wrote: I also fail to understand why painters/builders matter for how the rules should be done. Does making the rules worse make the people who don't play the game happier?
Always confuses me as well. If the rules are good, they can still make pretty models and painters can make up whatever narratives they want. If the rules are crap, who cares how pretty your plastic army people are? If the rules are crap, just go build dioramas and be done with it.
Why can't people like collecting and painting but also game occasionally? I put a lot of time into painting and re-basing my nids and don't want to yank the arms off my monsters every codex update because GW decided to change their options to keep the WYSIWYG/competitive pedants happy.
But I forget that the general opinion of the game on dakka is is "I had my fun and thats all that matters."
You realise that under the current rules, that some players do not get to have as much fun as there chosen army is outmatched even at the avg.
And you cannot get angry at players when GW themselves aren’t removing options not represented by models in a lot of cases.
My 40k armies are Sisters, Tyranids, Necrons, Grey Knights, AdMech and IG, the least played army is IG because they aren't painted so I'm fairly familiar with the bottom of the barrel thanks. And btw, I've won a majority of my 8th Ed games.
nataliereed1984 wrote: You're asking me to provide *evidence* that I enjoy the game and find it relatively balanced and competent for the purpose of the kinds of friendly games I enjoy?
Seriously?
Yeah, I'm out. Have fun continuing to spend fortunes on a game you clearly despise?
Nope. No. Okay.
I was responding to what i quoted directly, but i'll break it down for you since your clearly confused.
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
Here you are arguing the game is balanced and has a competent set of rules.
No, I was arguing the game is relatively balanced and has a competent set of rules for a game that doesn't prioritize competition. That was the conversation we were having.
Anyway, seriously, this thread is waaaaayyyyy too negative for me, so in terms of me, at least, can we please just leave it at you being welcome to hate the game and me being welcome to think it's mostly fine for what it is?
Without the competitive side of this game, you can kiss this game goodbye. I'm sorry, I'm not competitive, nor am I too naive to think that GW somehow cares enough to keep making this game for casuals like me. I spend less than 60/usd a month on this hobby, but there are 4 players I know personally in my area that spend roughly 200-400/month. GW has no interest in what I think would be a cool way to play the game.
Same with Starcraft (Or any major Multi-player video game), D&D, Diablo 3-Infinity, WoW, anything made by EA, Actavision, Konami, or Night Dive studios.
nataliereed1984 wrote: You're asking me to provide *evidence* that I enjoy the game and find it relatively balanced and competent for the purpose of the kinds of friendly games I enjoy?
Seriously?
Yeah, I'm out. Have fun continuing to spend fortunes on a game you clearly despise?
Nope. No. Okay.
I was responding to what i quoted directly, but i'll break it down for you since your clearly confused.
petrov27 wrote: even if not competitive, shouldn't it have at least a balanced competent set of rules? Is it "fun" even in casual games to have to go "guys, my army is total garbage, can you please not play with your broken OP stuff?"
Sure. And, in general, they tend to accomplish that.
Here you are arguing the game is balanced and has a competent set of rules.
No, I was arguing the game is relatively balanced and has a competent set of rules for a game that doesn't prioritize competition. That was the conversation we were having.
Anyway, seriously, this thread is waaaaayyyyy too negative for me, so in terms of me, at least, can we please just leave it at you being welcome to hate the game and me being welcome to think it's mostly fine for what it is?
Honestly I do not think anyone here really hates the game, maybe some do. It’s hard to tell In text.
Sim-Life wrote: Why can't people like collecting and painting but also game occasionally?
Super, go for it, given that you don't really care about rules balance, you can even make up whatever rules you want, you are free, unbound by GW's hideous rules! Run through the rainbows, oh future gothic summer child!
Sim-Life wrote: But I forget that the general opinion of the game on dakka is is "I had my fun and thats all that matters."
Yes, but your fun requires no structure, no definition, no rules and no balance, yet, painters insist on jumping in on rules discussions with spurious arguments about how keeping things fluffy, pretty and canonical is the pole star by which we should all navigate.
We can argue for days about what direction GW should take the game ruleset and that is essentially a subjective thing. What I think most of us can agree on at least is that overall GW is just bad at rules writing.
Sim-Life wrote: Why can't people like collecting and painting but also game occasionally?
Super, go for it, given that you don't really care about rules balance, you can even make up whatever rules you want, you are free, unbound by GW's hideous rules! Run through the rainbows, oh future gothic summer child!
Sim-Life wrote: But I forget that the general opinion of the game on dakka is is "I had my fun and thats all that matters."
Yes, but your fun requires no structure, no definition, no rules and no balance, yet, painters insist on jumping in on rules discussions with spurious arguments about how keeping things fluffy, pretty and canonical is the pole star by which we should all navigate.
Maybe swing that pendulum back the other way and think about what you said from the fluff-bunny perspective. Why do competitive players keep jumping into discussions about why unit X is marginally worse than unit Y and therefore worthless then start throwing maths and theoryhammer around like its the Be All and End All of the game.
Sim-Life wrote: Maybe swing that pendulum back the other way and think about what you said from the fluff-bunny perspective. Why do competitive players keep jumping into discussions about why unit X is marginally worse than unit Y and therefore worthless then start throwing maths and theoryhammer around like its the Be All and End All of the game.
Do we invite you to those threads? Do you feel you have something productive to add to such discussions of rules minutiae? Then why do you participate? I don't jump in on threads about why Magnus should be red and not green, I don't comment on why Roboute would never get coffee with Dante, because I DON'T fething CARE. Dakka has a whole forum for discussing fluff-bunny issues, I'm sure they'd happily put one up for modeling if you asked.
regarding pick up games, my last pick up game was a pretty relaxed "let's put our models down and play" affair. it's possiable to get that kinda game play even with a pick up game
Desubot wrote: Mate that isnt a GW thing thats your local or regional tournament rule as THEY decided that WYSIWYG is in effect.
You're right, GW tournaments are even stricter.
Having played at WHW a few times - that is not really the case at all. I have some seriously kitbashed and converted stuff and the most they ever asked was that I provide a model guide for my opponent so they would not be confused. They are totally cool with even quite extreme modeling conversions.
Now if you turn up with some lazy rubbish like blue-painted lasguns claimed to be plasma then you deserve all that you get.
Sim-Life wrote: My 40k armies are Sisters, Tyranids, Necrons, Grey Knights, AdMech and IG, the least played army is IG because they aren't painted so I'm fairly familiar with the bottom of the barrel thanks. And btw, I've won a majority of my 8th Ed games.
AnomanderRake wrote: The competitive environment isn't the problem. It's loaded with plenty of people who are happy to go to a lot of time and energy shaving edges off GW's square peg to make it fit in their round hole, and the players are perfectly happy to buy stuff just because it's powerful.
The casual narrative scene isn't the problem. Those people are perfectly happy to fiddle with things, build their own scenarios, and otherwise disregard GW's mistakes.
The problem is and always has been with pick-up games. If I go down to a game store and play a game on the fly with someone I haven't met before I have to negotiate the fine details of what I can and can't use or one of us is going to steamroll the other one because GW can't be bothered to make two armies of equal points be roughly similar in power.
This. This 100%.
Do none of you have social media?
Does nobody post ahead of time asking for a game and say roughly what sort of game they are after?
Like "Anyone up for a tournament practice game at 1750 this club night?" or alternatively "I'm free for a game, want to keep it casual if possible. Any takers?". You know, communicate online because i know you are all online because you are on Dakka.
Sim-Life wrote: Maybe swing that pendulum back the other way and think about what you said from the fluff-bunny perspective. Why do competitive players keep jumping into discussions about why unit X is marginally worse than unit Y and therefore worthless then start throwing maths and theoryhammer around like its the Be All and End All of the game.
Do we invite you to those threads? Do you feel you have something productive to add to such discussions of rules minutiae? Then why do you participate? I don't jump in on threads about why Magnus should be red and not green, I don't comment on why Roboute would never get coffee with Dante, because I DON'T fething CARE. Dakka has a whole forum for discussing fluff-bunny issues, I'm sure they'd happily put one up for modeling if you asked.
Calm it down. You're showing exactly why people get a negative impression of the competitive base. Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
I don't really care what ratio of tip 4 placements IH have in ITC tourneys in the US, but if it bothers other people it's worth consideration. Just like narrative players need to be considered.
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Fajita Fan wrote: GW games are competitive they’re just not very well balanced as such.
Most games are inherently competitive.
Its just not GWs primary focus to full balance it.
i forget who it was but in a AMA on reddit one of the big names stated that they dont care to get it to 99% perfect.
there is diminishing returns from 75% to 90% to 95%.
(but this might of been kirby era)
Pretty much. It’s not worth their time to play test it because there’s no money in it while game companies who make DotA, Overwatch, or Starcraft see big returns on their competitive scene so they spend the effort.
The points values in AoS look like pure guesses. /shrug It’s still fun to play given some semblance of balance or fairness.
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Bingo! Fluff bunnies are the last people that should be allowed to have any thoughts on game balance because, as shown, they don't actually care.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I am genuinely amazed by the number of people I've seen who argue from the assumption that they and they alone represent the customer base and who GW ought be appealing to.
See also: "GW should get rid of the useless trophy racks on CSM terminators and give us something we can USE like more combi-plasma" as though there's no such thing as people who's focus is on painting and aesthetics…
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
nataliereed1984 wrote: No, I was arguing the game is relatively balanced and has a competent set of rules for a game that doesn't prioritize competition. That was the conversation we were having.
Maybe that was the conversation you were having, but that's not what you said. I quoted you, twice.
nataliereed1984 wrote: Anyway, seriously, this thread is waaaaayyyyy too negative for me, so in terms of me, at least, can we please just leave it at you being welcome to hate the game and me being welcome to think it's mostly fine for what it is?
Sure, nuke SpikeyBits and the complaint sub forum - that should nip things in the bud.
Sim-Life wrote: Why can't people like collecting and painting but also game occasionally? I put a lot of time into painting and re-basing my nids and don't want to yank the arms off my monsters every codex update because GW decided to change their options to keep the WYSIWYG/competitive pedants happy.
But I forget that the general opinion of the game on dakka is is "I had my fun and thats all that matters."
The exodus of options is not the fault of "competitive pedants", but rather Game Workshop's "no models, no rules" policy after the Chapter House case. GW's flagrant use of it's legal team to bully 3rd party bit makers rather than just actually making kits with enough options for everyone finally caught up to them, and now they're slashing anything they don't support directly. Balance is just tangentially related and might be being used as a scapegoat at worse.
AnomanderRake wrote: The competitive environment isn't the problem. It's loaded with plenty of people who are happy to go to a lot of time and energy shaving edges off GW's square peg to make it fit in their round hole, and the players are perfectly happy to buy stuff just because it's powerful.
The casual narrative scene isn't the problem. Those people are perfectly happy to fiddle with things, build their own scenarios, and otherwise disregard GW's mistakes.
The problem is and always has been with pick-up games. If I go down to a game store and play a game on the fly with someone I haven't met before I have to negotiate the fine details of what I can and can't use or one of us is going to steamroll the other one because GW can't be bothered to make two armies of equal points be roughly similar in power.
This. This 100%.
Do none of you have social media?
Does nobody post ahead of time asking for a game and say roughly what sort of game they are after?
Like "Anyone up for a tournament practice game at 1750 this club night?" or alternatively "I'm free for a game, want to keep it casual if possible. Any takers?". You know, communicate online because i know you are all online because you are on Dakka.
"I want to bring an Imperial Knight, is that okay?"
"No, that's cheesy!"
"It's an Errant, and it's supporting my Grey Knights..."
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand. You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
It would be a lot easier to understand if you didn't make your points with dot-dash sentence shenanigans.
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Cool but some units should suck? They should just suck fairly. Grots should be cheap and terrible as per the fluff. Terminators should be wading through small arms fire and butchering standard infantry, as per the fluff.
Just point them to match those fluff descriptions, it's not a hard concept.
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
The decorative bits are not useless. They serve the purpose of making the models look cool, which is the main purpose of said models. Otherwise we could play with cardboard tokens. And sure, it would be nice if there were more weapons, but there isn't. It's not a huge deal, but if you need them for your min-maxing you can make them yourself.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand. You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
It would be a lot easier to understand if you didn't make your points with dot-dash sentence shenanigans.
Some of the white knights didn't understand it the first time, so separating every word for them to be able to grasp might help.
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
The decorative bits are not useless. They serve the purpose of making the models look cool, which is the main purpose of said models. Otherwise we could play with cardboard tokens. And sure, it would be nice if there were more weapons, but there isn't. It's not a huge deal, but if you need them for your min-maxing you can make them yourself.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand. You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
It would be a lot easier to understand if you didn't make your points with dot-dash sentence shenanigans.
Some of the white knights didn't understand it the first time, so separating every word for them to be able to grasp might help.
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
The decorative bits are not useless. They serve the purpose of making the models look cool, which is the main purpose of said models. Otherwise we could play with cardboard tokens. And sure, it would be nice if there were more weapons, but there isn't. It's not a huge deal, but if you need them for your min-maxing you can make them yourself.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
If you hate GW so much, don't buy it? I agree you should have all options out of the box, but being a douche to people who don't care isn't helping.
"It's an Errant, and it's supporting my Grey Knights..."
"Nope, I refuse to play an IK."
I'm so glad Central FL has a good community, my local club has a mix of competitive and casual players of all ages (we have senior citizens and teenagers) and i've never run into one of these neck beards (i use that term lovingly).
"It's an Errant, and it's supporting my Grey Knights..."
"Nope, I refuse to play an IK."
I'm so glad Central FL has a good community, my local club has a mix of competitive and casual players of all ages (we have senior citizens and teenagers) and i've never run into one of these neck beards (i use that term lovingly).
The point is that there's a lot more to be said than just "I want to play a casual/tournament/whatever game, at X points."
Hell, it's EASIER to arrange for tournament practice, since you can just say "Bring your hardest list."
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Bingo! Fluff bunnies are the last people that should be allowed to have any thoughts on game balance because, as shown, they don't actually care.
No, we don't "not care" we just have an ability to be able to enjoy the game in a different way to you. Balance is good for everyone regardless of if they're fluff-bunnies or competitive. If the game isn't perfectly balanced (and what game is?) thats not an issue, but it is tiring seeing people make sweeping generalisations about armies and the state of the game based on only the top 1% of players and how they win tournaments.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand. You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
It would be a lot easier to understand if you didn't make your points with dot-dash sentence shenanigans.
Some of the white knights didn't understand it the first time, so separating every word for them to be able to grasp might help.
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
The decorative bits are not useless. They serve the purpose of making the models look cool, which is the main purpose of said models. Otherwise we could play with cardboard tokens. And sure, it would be nice if there were more weapons, but there isn't. It's not a huge deal, but if you need them for your min-maxing you can make them yourself.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
If you hate GW so much, don't buy it? I agree you should have all options out of the box, but being a douche to people who don't care isn't helping.
I actually don't buy their printed materials anymore, especially after the insult towards us that was the Chaos Knights "codex", and I buy only minimal of what I need. I procured enough Calth and Prospero boxes that I'm able to just buy the odd kit here and there. Mostly just FW gets money for their Legion helmets and weapons sprues GW can't be bothered to do themselves. Not a bad thing because a lot of the stuff has been overly blinged as of late.
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Bingo! Fluff bunnies are the last people that should be allowed to have any thoughts on game balance because, as shown, they don't actually care.
No, we don't "not care" we just have an ability to be able to enjoy the game in a different way to you. Balance is good for everyone regardless of if they're fluff-bunnies or competitive. If the game isn't perfectly balanced (and what game is?) thats not an issue, but it is tiring seeing people make sweeping generalisations about armies and the state of the game based on only the top 1% of players and how they win tournaments.
I love you go straight for the heart of every fluff bunnies thought process: no game is perfectly balanced, so don't bother trying that's okay. Give daddy GW more money!
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period.
Frankly, you do not understand the point of Warhammer. Cool looking models are the thing the whole bloody thing hinges on. As you surely agree, the game itself is not exactly a masterpiece; if the modles would not capture the attention of people GW would have been dead a long time ago. So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers. And if you do not care about aesthetics, then just glue a empty paint pot on a 40mm base, and write 'terminator with p.axe and combi-plasma' on it.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
I'm a competitive player and that's total crap man. It might not have an impact for you, or me, but to someone who just wanted to paint a cool looking model?
I know for a fact i truly enjoy the customization options this game gives you and i love making themed armies, all my IKs have a theme, i have BA knight (example) with a bunch of custom 3d printed parts and i prob wouldn't have even started some of these armies if i didn't already have the whole theme planned out ahead of time.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period.
Frankly, you do not understand the point of Warhammer. Cool looking models are the thing the whole bloody thing hinges on. As you surely agree, the game itself is not exactly a masterpiece; if the modles would not capture the attention of people GW would have been dead a long time ago. So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers. And if you do not care about aesthetics, then just glue a empty paint pot on a 40mm base, and write 'terminator with p.axe and combi-plasma' on it.
It's your job to make the mods eye catching. It's GW's job to make a kit so that you can properly put units together. You seem to forget that in your constant white knighting.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
I'm a competitive player and that's total crap man. It might not have an impact for you, or me, but to someone who just wanted to paint a cool looking model?
I know for a fact i truly enjoy the customization options this game gives you and i love making themed armies, all my IKs have a theme, i have BA knight (example) with a bunch of custom 3d printed parts and i prob wouldn't have even started some of these armies if i didn't already have the whole theme planned out ahead of time.
Yeah see the below post. It isn't total crap. GW created a terrible kit, period, and people are going to be called out on defending it.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand. You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
It would be a lot easier to understand if you didn't make your points with dot-dash sentence shenanigans.
Some of the white knights didn't understand it the first time, so separating every word for them to be able to grasp might help.
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
The decorative bits are not useless. They serve the purpose of making the models look cool, which is the main purpose of said models. Otherwise we could play with cardboard tokens. And sure, it would be nice if there were more weapons, but there isn't. It's not a huge deal, but if you need them for your min-maxing you can make them yourself.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
If you hate GW so much, don't buy it? I agree you should have all options out of the box, but being a douche to people who don't care isn't helping.
I actually don't buy their printed materials anymore, especially after the insult towards us that was the Chaos Knights "codex", and I buy only minimal of what I need. I procured enough Calth and Prospero boxes that I'm able to just buy the odd kit here and there. Mostly just FW gets money for their Legion helmets and weapons sprues GW can't be bothered to do themselves. Not a bad thing because a lot of the stuff has been overly blinged as of late.
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Bingo! Fluff bunnies are the last people that should be allowed to have any thoughts on game balance because, as shown, they don't actually care.
No, we don't "not care" we just have an ability to be able to enjoy the game in a different way to you. Balance is good for everyone regardless of if they're fluff-bunnies or competitive. If the game isn't perfectly balanced (and what game is?) thats not an issue, but it is tiring seeing people make sweeping generalisations about armies and the state of the game based on only the top 1% of players and how they win tournaments.
I love you go straight for the heart of every fluff bunnies thought process: no game is perfectly balanced, so don't bother trying that's okay. Give daddy GW more money!
They literally said that balance is good and wanted, stop acting defensive that it's a lower priority for someone else despite them acknowledging it needs to happen.
Edit: slinging white knight at people actually makes your argument of less value as it kinda suggests your being petty.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand. You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
It would be a lot easier to understand if you didn't make your points with dot-dash sentence shenanigans.
Some of the white knights didn't understand it the first time, so separating every word for them to be able to grasp might help.
Boy you sure do love to not get things on purpose. Lemme tell you the problem and I'll make it REALLY slow and easy to understand.
You. Cannot. Make. The. Default. Unit. From. The. Damn. Box. And. The. Useless. Decorative. Bitz. Are. Part. Of. The. Problem. If. You. Want. Decorative. Bitz. Make. Them. Yourselves.
The decorative bits are not useless. They serve the purpose of making the models look cool, which is the main purpose of said models. Otherwise we could play with cardboard tokens. And sure, it would be nice if there were more weapons, but there isn't. It's not a huge deal, but if you need them for your min-maxing you can make them yourself.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period. If you want stuff that looks cool, maybe you should ask your ever loving GW to make upgrade kits instead of taking up space in a kit so you can't even build a default unit.
If you hate GW so much, don't buy it? I agree you should have all options out of the box, but being a douche to people who don't care isn't helping.
I actually don't buy their printed materials anymore, especially after the insult towards us that was the Chaos Knights "codex", and I buy only minimal of what I need. I procured enough Calth and Prospero boxes that I'm able to just buy the odd kit here and there. Mostly just FW gets money for their Legion helmets and weapons sprues GW can't be bothered to do themselves. Not a bad thing because a lot of the stuff has been overly blinged as of late.
Dudeface wrote: Sim-Life is as entitled to post about how balanced the game feels to them, in any thread they like.
Absolutely, and is welcome to be held accountable for said feelings. When he comes back with some fluff-bunny canonical reason why model X is 'supposed to suck' we can questions the validity of said contributions to such discussions.
Bingo! Fluff bunnies are the last people that should be allowed to have any thoughts on game balance because, as shown, they don't actually care.
No, we don't "not care" we just have an ability to be able to enjoy the game in a different way to you. Balance is good for everyone regardless of if they're fluff-bunnies or competitive. If the game isn't perfectly balanced (and what game is?) thats not an issue, but it is tiring seeing people make sweeping generalisations about armies and the state of the game based on only the top 1% of players and how they win tournaments.
I love you go straight for the heart of every fluff bunnies thought process: no game is perfectly balanced, so don't bother trying that's okay. Give daddy GW more money!
I love that you went straight to as many fallacies as you could fit in a single sentence.
Crimson wrote: So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers.
Why, why, why oh why does it have to be one or the other? If this isn't a why not both what is?
I can't have a great looking game of miniatures that doesn't suck? Are those two things mutually exclusive?
It's always the casuals vs the competitive players here, i seriously think a lot of us are on the same page. I enjoy the hobby aspects of this game at least as much as i do actually playing it.
This is like politics in the states, i gotta be on one team or the other?
Crimson wrote: So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers.
Why, why, why oh why does it have to be one or the other? If this isn't a why not both what is?
I can't have a great looking game of miniatures that doesn't suck? Are those two things mutually exclusive?
It's always the casuals vs the competitive players here, i seriously think a lot of us are on the same page. I enjoy the hobby aspects of this game at least as much as i do actually playing it.
This is like politics in the states, i gotta be on one team or the other?
Well, you get my vote if it is, why not have both.
And I will. But GW needs to produce kits that come with bits that make that possible. Making awesome looking models is literally their main priority.
It's GW's job to make a kit so that you can properly put units together.
And you can. You can build the Chaos Terminators in several differnt ways. Sure, you cannot build all possible permutations that the rules allow from a single box. This is often the case with units that have a lot of options. Deathwatch Veterans sprue for example has only one stalker bolter even though the rules allows giving one to every guy. Now due the whiners like you GW has recently started to just remove the options from the rules. So when in the next edition of CSM codex the Terminators come with powerfist as a default and only one of them can take a power axe we know who we can thank.
You seem to forget that in your constant white knighting.
I am not white knighting, I am just trying to explain to your poor robot brain how a human being with aesthetic sensibilities and not hell bent on winning in a beer and pretzels game might approach things. Because trust me, the GW guys are much more like me than they're like you.
No, you can make the trophy racks yourself. They have no in game impact, so they don't matter. Period.
Frankly, you do not understand the point of Warhammer. Cool looking models are the thing the whole bloody thing hinges on. As you surely agree, the game itself is not exactly a masterpiece; if the modles would not capture the attention of people GW would have been dead a long time ago. So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers. And if you do not care about aesthetics, then just glue a empty paint pot on a 40mm base, and write 'terminator with p.axe and combi-plasma' on it.
Despite playing the game competitively and absolutely loathing some of the weapon options in the recent boxes (chaos havocs and terminators), I definitely agree the Warhammer is carried by the aesthetics of the models and that alone. 40k's rules does not have a leg to stand on without the support of its fantastic range of models and lore.
But I gotta disagree with the reductive attitude of calling 40k a "silly game of toy soldiers" to dismiss people's concerns with rules and gameplay, especially since you guys are all about "inclusiveness and positivity". Why poison the well like that? They are trying to enjoy the hobby just like you are, why do you care so much about some plastic trophy. racks in a silly game of toy soldiers? See how anti-discussion and pointless this argument is?
I wonder if there would be a difference in the community if GW had not pushed it as a competitive game in its early years? Would people see it as a more casual hobby or would the competitive spirit still have arisen to push it as a primarily tournament-type game.
(Though I do agree GW could do a much better job balancing the game for competitive use, but at heart I’m just a filthy collector/casual).
In my experience working with companies who have continuous balance cycles, competitive players do not want balance.
They want a meta they can solve, feel good about solving, and complain about. Complaints give them that dopamine rush of knowing how the game is broken, and figuring out the broken new meta makes them feel like they know things others do not.
Then, some fraction of them goes out and buys the broken thing, enough to make it profitable anyway.
That's exactly the game people who invest heavily into the gameplay aspect buy into, even if they're extremely vocal about not WANTING that to be the case.
But this is capitalism. GW doesn't listen to your complaints, they listen to sales figures. And they know that they can get whales to buy more if balance follows the "wheel of fortune" model more than the "finely tuned scale" model.
People complaining about allies? Clearly the fix to that is to give armies a special bonus for not having allies!
We COULD release a PDF with the "purity bonus" that each faction gets for not taking allies in the list. If we did it all at once, we could balance them against each other, playtest them against each other, etc.
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooor we could pick our most popular faction, give them that bonus and package it with another half-dozen bonuses slathered on in order to justify selling it as a book, completely upend the competitive meta so that faction shoots from the bottom to the tippy top and everyone competitively minded makes a rage post about it, then runs out and buys the book and a few boxes of models.
nataliereed1984 wrote: If nothing else, the way some people have been acting in this thread sure has been a reminder of why I avoid the competitive scene...
It's the sign of a weak argument, when you resort to snide comments and insult the people who just don't agree with you.
nataliereed1984 wrote: If nothing else, the way some people have been acting in this thread sure has been a reminder of why I avoid the competitive scene...
It's the sign of a weak argument, when you resort to snide comments and insult the people who just don't agree with you.
I can't tell if this is a general statement, in which case I agree.
And I will. But GW needs to produce kits that come with bits that make that possible. Making awesome looking models is literally their main priority.
It's GW's job to make a kit so that you can properly put units together.
And you can. You can build the Chaos Terminators in several differnt ways. Sure, you cannot build all possible permutations that the rules allow from a single box. This is often the case with units that have a lot of options. Deathwatch Veterans sprue for example has only one stalker bolter even though the rules allows giving one to every guy. Now due the whiners like you GW has recently started to just remove the options from the rules. So when in the next edition of CSM codex the Terminators come with powerfist as a default and only one of them can take a power axe we know who we can thank.
You seem to forget that in your constant white knighting.
I am not white knighting, I am just trying to explain to your poor robot brain how a human being with aesthetic sensibilities and not hell bent on winning in a beer and pretzels game might approach things. Because trust me, the GW guys are much more like me than they're like you.
I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators. That's not a good kit, period. Also the Deathwatch box is fething garbage too, so that's not helping your argument either.
And no, none of those kits look "awesome" out of the box. Your love of hodgepodge messes is messy and not aesthetically pleasing. So there you go, GW didn't even do the job you said they're supposed to do!
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Yoyoyo wrote: There's chill people out there, they just know better than to post in the Dakka general discussion forum
This place has always been, shall we say, loosely moderated.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
SERIOUSLY.
It couldn't possibly be more clear that 40k is meant to be a fun, narratively-oriented, mostly-casual kind of game about spectacle and cool battles and funny moments and nice memories to enjoy with friends. That's the priority. It's always been the priority. It always will be the priority. People are welcome to focus on tournaments and competition and winning, of course, but it's just so weird to keep seeing people expecting, or demanding, that the game completely alter itself into something it isn't and never has been just to better match their particular style, when they could just … go play a different game with a more technical, competitive focus to it.
GW is marketing the new edition as playtested and a competitive one with matched play rules, balance changes, etc... They are just bad at it.
Yoyoyo wrote: There's chill people out there, they just know better than to post in the Dakka general discussion forum
This place has always been, shall we say, loosely moderated.
Nah, it's alright, most people here seem okay. Like in the WYSIWG thread people were strongly disagreeing but no one seemed, like, straight up angry or overly rude. It's just a couple people in this thread seemed just… not people I want to talk about 40k with.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple!
Dude you have 16,000 posts here and you straight up sound like an ashhole. You can't make an intelligent response without being super passive aggressive?
All of your posts in this thread can be summed in in 5 words: "You're wrong, so you".
JNAProductions wrote: D&D isn't about competition. Can't say the same for the others (having not played them) but D&D is NOT a competitive game.
You do know that D&D originally started as a competitive game, right? Gary G wanted the players to basically try to collect as much loot as possible and if that meant dicking over a member of your team, so be it. Temple of Elemental Evil ring any bells? You literally had to trick a teammate into going into one of the portals as a sacrifice before the party could go on. Later they amended this and allowed "minions" or "hirelings" to sacrifice.
The milk toast editions that exist today are basically a 4-8 hour version of read aloud My Little Pony.
And I will. But GW needs to produce kits that come with bits that make that possible. Making awesome looking models is literally their main priority.
It's GW's job to make a kit so that you can properly put units together.
And you can. You can build the Chaos Terminators in several differnt ways. Sure, you cannot build all possible permutations that the rules allow from a single box. This is often the case with units that have a lot of options. Deathwatch Veterans sprue for example has only one stalker bolter even though the rules allows giving one to every guy. Now due the whiners like you GW has recently started to just remove the options from the rules. So when in the next edition of CSM codex the Terminators come with powerfist as a default and only one of them can take a power axe we know who we can thank.
You seem to forget that in your constant white knighting.
I am not white knighting, I am just trying to explain to your poor robot brain how a human being with aesthetic sensibilities and not hell bent on winning in a beer and pretzels game might approach things. Because trust me, the GW guys are much more like me than they're like you.
I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators. That's not a good kit, period. Also the Deathwatch box is fething garbage too, so that's not helping your argument either.
And no, none of those kits look "awesome" out of the box. Your love of hodgepodge messes is messy and not aesthetically pleasing. So there you go, GW didn't even do the job you said they're supposed to do!
But they do look awesome and I enjoy seeing units with flair and character instead of same model with same loadout x10. The chaos termie box is a fantastic set of sculpts.
What has that got to do with how many guns are in there?
Presenting your argument in passive aggressive tones does not make your more correct, nor will it make your view seem more reasonable.
JNAProductions wrote: D&D isn't about competition. Can't say the same for the others (having not played them) but D&D is NOT a competitive game.
You do know that D&D originally started as a competitive game, right? Gary G wanted the players to basically try to collect as much loot as possible and if that meant dicking over a member of your team, so be it. Temple of Elemental Evil ring any bells? You literally had to trick a teammate into going into one of the portals as a sacrifice before the party could go on. Later they amended this and allowed "minions" or "hirelings" to sacrifice.
The milk toast editions that exist today are basically a 4-8 hour version of read aloud My Little Pony.
Do you play D&D? Because I'd have to assume, from that, that you don't
Crimson wrote: So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers.
Why, why, why oh why does it have to be one or the other? If this isn't a why not both what is?
I can't have a great looking game of miniatures that doesn't suck? Are those two things mutually exclusive?
It's always the casuals vs the competitive players here, i seriously think a lot of us are on the same page. I enjoy the hobby aspects of this game at least as much as i do actually playing it.
This is like politics in the states, i gotta be on one team or the other?
You can absolutely have both balance and cool aesthetics, at least in theory. I am pretty sure no one here has argued against balance. But Slayer argued that aesthetics should be sacrificed for the ease of min-maxing and that certainly seems like lunacy to many.
Furthermore, some people do not value balance so highly. This doesn't mean they're against balance or that they do not care about it at all. They merely find the game enjoyable despite certain balancing issues.
Also, when discussing about balance, one should bear in mind the environment (or the 'meta'.) Ultimately I feel that whether game is balanced for top tournament tables is far less important than whether it is (roughly) balance for casual pick up games in which people use their hodgepodge collections. In top end competitive environment people will always find the most broken thing, and there even tiny differences in power seem significant. And as someone said, I think many competitve people even enjoy that. 'Solving' the game, finding that optimal build. And as long as this does not become chess where everyone has an identical army that optimal build will always exist, no matter matter how well the game is balanced.
Now, balance for casual setting is far more important. This for me means that two people with random TAC armies can play a game with either of them haveing a reasonable chance of winning (40%ish, maybe, assuming equal skill.) Constantly getting curbstomped simply is not fun, and to many constantly winning without effort really isn't fun in the long run either. I don't think the game currently is quite is there; the marine supplements are obviously overtuned, and previously the Eldar stacked hit penalty shanenigans were pretty unfun as well.
JNAProductions wrote: D&D isn't about competition. Can't say the same for the others (having not played them) but D&D is NOT a competitive game.
You do know that D&D originally started as a competitive game, right? Gary G wanted the players to basically try to collect as much loot as possible and if that meant dicking over a member of your team, so be it. Temple of Elemental Evil ring any bells? You literally had to trick a teammate into going into one of the portals as a sacrifice before the party could go on. Later they amended this and allowed "minions" or "hirelings" to sacrifice.
The milk toast editions that exist today are basically a 4-8 hour version of read aloud My Little Pony.
God, yeah, I hate when a company puts out an edition of a game that regular non-hardcore gamer friends of mine want to actually play and enjoy instead of a hypercompetitive backstab-fest I have to go play with smelly strangers in a basement.
The new edition of DnD, whatever magic formula it has hit on, is some black magic wizardry. I have had so many friends of mine ask me "Scotsman, you play with miniatures and paint them and stuff, do you know how to play DnD, me and my girlfriend want to try it out!"
I dunno, it reads like the entry-level RPGDnD has been for several editions now to me, but they've done something right in a big way to make the appeal as mainstream as it is now.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators.
Yes, you keep repeating that and for some reason you seem to think that it matters. I don't know why. Would you be satisfied if they errated the starting melee weapon for them to be a power fist instead of the power axe? (I think the kit comes with enough fists.) I mean absolutely nothing would functionally change but your specific complain wouldn't apply anymore. The starting loadout is pretty arbitrarily chosen and is just one among many possible loadouts, it really isn't any more important than any other combination.
Crimson wrote: So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers.
Why, why, why oh why does it have to be one or the other? If this isn't a why not both what is?
I can't have a great looking game of miniatures that doesn't suck? Are those two things mutually exclusive?
It's always the casuals vs the competitive players here, i seriously think a lot of us are on the same page. I enjoy the hobby aspects of this game at least as much as i do actually playing it.
This is like politics in the states, i gotta be on one team or the other?
You can absolutely have both balance and cool aesthetics, at least in theory. I am pretty sure no one here has argued against balance. But Slayer argued that aesthetics should be sacrificed for the ease of min-maxing and that certainly seems like lunacy to many.
Furthermore, some people do not value balance so highly. This doesn't mean they're against balance or that they do not care about it at all. They merely find the game enjoyable despite certain balancing issues.
Also, when discussing about balance, one should bear in mind the environment (or the 'meta'.) Ultimately I feel that whether game is balanced for top tournament tables is far less important than whether it is (roughly) balance for casual pick up games in which people use their hodgepodge collections. In top end competitive environment people will always find the most broken thing, and there even tiny differences in power seem significant. And as someone said, I think many competitve people even enjoy that. 'Solving' the game, finding that optimal build. And as long as this does not become chess where everyone has an identical army that optimal build will always exist, no matter matter how well the game is balanced.
Now, balance for casual setting is far more important. This for me means that two people with random TAC armies can play a game with either of them haveing a reasonable chance of winning (40%ish, maybe, assuming equal skill.) Constantly getting curbstomped simply is not fun, and to many constantly winning without effort really isn't fun in the long run either. I don't think the game currently is quite is there; the marine supplements are obviously overtuned, and previously the Eldar stacked hit penalty shanenigans were pretty unfun as well.
Your aesthetics take up room on a sprue so that you can't build the default unit of 5 Combi-Bolters, 5 Chainaxes. Not sure why it's so hard for you to grasp that this DOES make it a bad kit.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators.
Yes, you keep repeating that and for some reason you seem to think that it matters. I don't know why. Would you be satisfied if they errated the starting melee weapon for them to be a power fist instead of the power axe? (I think the kit comes with enough fists.) I mean absolutely nothing would functionally change but your specific complain wouldn't apply anymore. The starting loadout is pretty arbitrarily chosen and is just one among many possible loadouts, it really isn't any more important than any other combination.
It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.
No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.
No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.
I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.
The default loadout could be sword for the champion and four fists like it is for loyalists. But it doesn't really matter. They even changed it from Power axes to Chainaxes between the codex versions. It is arbitrary, it doesn't matter, it is just one combination among many, all of which cannot simply be included in this box without adding an extra sprue. You would be satisfied with a purely symbolic errata that would have zero functional impact. Your argument is not based on any discernible logic and you're literally raging about nothing.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.
The default loadout could be sword for the champion and four fists like it is for loyalists. But it doesn't really matter. They even changed it from Power axes to Chainaxes between the codex versions. It is arbitrary, it doesn't matter, it is just one combination among many, all of which cannot simply be included in this box without adding an extra sprue. You would be satisfied with a purely symbolic errata that would have zero functional impact. Your argument is not based on any discernible logic and you're literally raging about nothing.
You must be new to this forum. Your last sentence is a summary.
No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.
1. The chaos terminator kit has literally nothing to do with the argument. You're using it to derail the argument because your position is weak.
2. The main argument was that 40k is is not and was never intended to be a high level competitive game and trying to force it into that role is a mistake but at a casual level the game is okay.
Desubot wrote: I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
I'd believe that if i wasn't watching the top selling products on GWs website for the last year or so, every single release you have some kind of meta breaking BS that just wipes out whatever stock GW had.
A good example of that recently was with the SM codices, IH hits and every single SM flyer in stock is gone within a day, and i don't think it was a bunch of casual gamers who just suddenly thought those flying bricks look really cool.
Another example would be with the IK release, for almost a year the top selling model on GWs website was the boogie man.
Casual players don't drop hundreds of dollars on the spot right after some new book drops, meta chasers do.
MiguelFelstone wrote:
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple!
Dude you have 16,000 posts here and you straight up sound like an ashhole. You can't make an intelligent response without being super passive aggressive?
All of your posts in this thread can be summed in in 5 words: "You're wrong, so you".
they're not sounding like one....
and this could sum up most of their posts.
GW plays the game fundamentally different than competitive players do. the design direction starts at the model and ends with the rules. so if their design direction is one that starts as narrative biased, then when it comes to rules, the model influences rules.
I will admit GW does "screw the pooch" when it comes to "balance". Hell primaris as a whole sucked for me up until recently. but the main issue is how "competitive" players, playing a game with different rules(ITC/ETC/whatever), complaining about how unbalanced the game is, in said different gameplay.
the major thing is, if the models looked like diarrhea, even if they had a "competitive" ruleset, would not be as successful as they are now.
Dudeface wrote: I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?
Not a damn thing.
Slayer just isn't going to quit until hes been vindicated/validated.
Slayer has two good songs, every single other song on every album sounds exactly the same - even to other fans of the genre. Even Pantera fans think they sound generic so what do you expect?
The new edition of DnD, whatever magic formula it has hit on, is some black magic wizardry. I have had so many friends of mine ask me "Scotsman, you play with miniatures and paint them and stuff, do you know how to play DnD, me and my girlfriend want to try it out!"
I dunno, it reads like the entry-level RPGDnD has been for several editions now to me, but they've done something right in a big way to make the appeal as mainstream as it is now.
I think the recent mainstream appeal isn't coming so much from anything about the new game edition as it is from simple cultural stuff like its appearance in Stranger Things and the success of let's-play podcasts like Critical Role.
Dudeface wrote: I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?
Not a damn thing.
Slayer just isn't going to quit until hes been vindicated/validated.
Slayer has two good songs, every single other song on every album sounds exactly the same - even to other fans of the genre. Even Pantera fans think they sound generic so what do you expect?
Yes we know, thing is you either make your peace with it and roll with the niggles or play other games (yep GW saturation can make this tricky and local conditions may vary), shouting at clouds makes no difference
Racerguy180 wrote: the major thing is, if the models looked like diarrhea, even if they had a "competitive" ruleset, would not be as successful as they are now.
It's not just the models (in fact i think the vast majority of imperium models look like crap), they have decades of great storytelling. Personally i quit in 3rd and didn't return until 8th when i bought a few audio books on a whim.
...What holds this game together is the lore combined with models, at least for some.
Because frankly, the rules and models are both leaving me wanting. if i wanted better models for display theres many many options , depending on aesthetic, and ones that don't shatter my costline.
Maybe getting more out of the models you ordered, via lowered prices or at least more functional rules would be nice, seeing as how to get anything else going depending where you live can be an effort or a stroke of luck. but fat chance of that.
It would be nice if boxes actually also had a few more weapon options. I went through an entire plan the other day because who woulda guessed base cultists have the look i want, but off to the convert-a-tron to make cultists work with any weapon options because the only chaos ones sold are snap-fit. oh well.
No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.
I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?
Someone else brought that into this thread. It was clearly referring to me and I replied.
Slayer-Fan123 wrote: It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.
The default loadout could be sword for the champion and four fists like it is for loyalists. But it doesn't really matter. They even changed it from Power axes to Chainaxes between the codex versions. It is arbitrary, it doesn't matter, it is just one combination among many, all of which cannot simply be included in this box without adding an extra sprue. You would be satisfied with a purely symbolic errata that would have zero functional impact. Your argument is not based on any discernible logic and you're literally raging about nothing.
It doesn't NEED an extra sprue. Look at how much they fit onto the Grey Knights sprues and that proves you incorrect like immediately.
No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.
1. The chaos terminator kit has literally nothing to do with the argument. You're using it to derail the argument because your position is weak.
2. The main argument was that 40k is is not and was never intended to be a high level competitive game and trying to force it into that role is a mistake but at a casual level the game is okay.
1. Someone else brought that into the thread not me.
2. Any game with a winner and loser is competitive by definition. You choosing to be CAAC for sake of virtue signaling is not my problem. That's also still not a defense for gak balancing whatsoever, or was it okay for Battle Demi Company to happen? Scatterbikes? Lash Princes? Castellans? No it's just laziness you're defending and nothing more.
Dudeface wrote: I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?
Not a damn thing.
Slayer just isn't going to quit until hes been vindicated/validated.
Slayer has two good songs, every single other song on every album sounds exactly the same - even to other fans of the genre. Even Pantera fans think they sound generic so what do you expect?
/giggle
You clearly only interacted with those KVLT kiddies that know nothing of music history whatsoever, who somehow think that deciding Kreator is better somehow makes them cooler and more underground, when in reality it doesn't as they don't actually have musical knowledge.
Ozomoto wrote: Ya because companies that "DO" test for the competitive scene never need balance changes, emergency bans, reworks etc
Not once in the history of mankind ever
its a fair point but GW still remain the High Lords of errata'ing the errata you just paid for
I don't quite see your point.
My point was that the hubris game designers have that they think they understand future metas that don't exsist yet and such things of that nature is a far worse design sin then anything GW does. Anecdotally I'll I've ever seen done from trying to balance the game at a competitive level (MTG, hearthstone etc) is collosal f ups. I've seen game companies constantly bring in ex pro level players for testing with minimal success. Let the players theory craft and the stats talk once the dust is settled.
Gw current stance is try and make things interesting, send it into the maelstrom that is the players hands and then take a relook at it once it's seen play. Much, much better then 'testing the product in a competitive environment' imo. Things are constantly to pushed or any interaction (that's a slip up) usually has more dire consequences. On top of that any 'ideal' competitive game is going to be a niche when only one individual preference is looked at, having the balance be 'competetive' pushes the game.in a direction where it's balanced for those designers niche rather then a general position
Value is subjective and as such so is valuing a game as 'competetive'. My issue list for 40k is much smaller then chess,.every card game over played, sports, shooters, autbattlers, list goes on. I think it's naive frankly to say 40k doesn't have competitive merit; where is this magical Christmas land game that's so amazing to play competitively for a long period of time.
Ozomoto wrote: Ya because companies that "DO" test for the competitive scene never need balance changes, emergency bans, reworks etc
Not once in the history of mankind ever
its a fair point but GW still remain the High Lords of errata'ing the errata you just paid for
I don't quite see your point.
My point was that the hubris game designers have that they think they understand future metas that don't exsist yet and such things of that nature is a far worse design sin then anything GW does. Anecdotally I'll I've ever seen done from trying to balance the game at a competitive level (MTG, hearthstone etc) is collosal f ups. I've seen game companies constantly bring in ex pro level players for testing with minimal success. Let the players theory craft and the stats talk once the dust is settled.
Gw current stance is try and make things interesting, send it into the maelstrom that is the players hands and then take a relook at it once it's seen play. Much, much better then 'testing the product in a competitive environment' imo.
Value is subjective and as such so is valuing a game as 'competetive'. My issue list for 40k is much smaller then chess,.every card game over played, sports, shooters, autbattlers, list goes on. I think it's naive frankly to say 40k doesn't have competitive merit; where is this magical Christmas land game that's so amazing to play competitively for a long period of time.
Really? You have less issues with CHESS than with 40k?
Really? You have less issues with CHESS than with 40k?
What's your list of gripes with them?
-Game data isn't obscured enough so I don't classify it as a strategy game (a long rant and argument for another time perhaps)
-this makes the game largely reduce to be knowledge base, based and makes the gameplay feel very derivative to me. I want my competive level game to have have more theory then study, the other way around is bland.
-eternally 'imbalanced' (I hate using the word balance Ugg) from a turn and faction standpoint . One player will always be barred from a faction (two players can't be white) unlike something like 40k and the turn order will always give out an edge.
- meta moves slowly so meta dependent innovation (why I play strategy games in the first place) is very difficult. Choosing between 'attacking a meta' or embracing it is a large appeal for competitiveness for me.
More but these are the immediate ones that come to mind.
Well nothing is perfect but moreso with 40k then chess yes. 40k isn't the end all be all but I've played thousands of different video, tabletop games etc and I quite like 40k for comp play and I find it relatively very good
'perfect balance' is the worst balancing sin possible. There are millions of ways in which something is balanced or imbalanced and almost every one of them to be a 1 requires another to be 0 to put it in binary terms. Balance isn't a yes or no, it's an opportunity cost.
Chess pays far to much for the type of balance it excels at and the cost paid on balance on many things I, for me as an individual care about. It works great for many(although iirc it less popular relative to population then ever)
Well nothing is perfect but moreso with 40k then chess yes. 40k isn't the end all be all but I've played thousands of different video, tabletop games etc and I quite like 40k for comp play and I find it relatively very good
'perfect balance' is the worst balancing sin possible. There are millions of ways in which something is balanced or imbalanced and almost every one of them to be a 1 requires another to be 0 to put it in binary terms. Balance isn't a yes or no, it's an opportunity cost.
Okay... I never said it was.
But in chess, two players of equal skill have a slight advantage to white.
In 40k, two players of equal skill have a massive discrepancy in a GK versus SM match-up.
I'm not saying you have to like chess more than 40k (it's fine to prefer 40k, for a whole variety of reasons) but to have BALANCE as a sticking point for chess but not 40k... That needs some SERIOUS explaining.
Well nothing is perfect but moreso with 40k then chess yes. 40k isn't the end all be all but I've played thousands of different video, tabletop games etc and I quite like 40k for comp play and I find it relatively very good
'perfect balance' is the worst balancing sin possible. There are millions of ways in which something is balanced or imbalanced and almost every one of them to be a 1 requires another to be 0 to put it in binary terms. Balance isn't a yes or no, it's an opportunity cost.
Okay... I never said it was.
But in chess, two players of equal skill have a slight advantage to white.
In 40k, two players of equal skill have a massive discrepancy in a GK versus SM match-up.
I'm not saying you have to like chess more than 40k (it's fine to prefer 40k, for a whole variety of reasons) but to have BALANCE as a sticking point for chess but not 40k... That needs some SERIOUS explaining.
I couldn't care less about inter-faction(or intra I get them mixed up) balance frankly. Each faction offers tools which each player chooses to use or not.
I know inter faction is the most qouted type of balance and lots of people care about it. I don't though, and like I said earlier value is.subjective.
Well nothing is perfect but moreso with 40k then chess yes. 40k isn't the end all be all but I've played thousands of different video, tabletop games etc and I quite like 40k for comp play and I find it relatively very good
'perfect balance' is the worst balancing sin possible. There are millions of ways in which something is balanced or imbalanced and almost every one of them to be a 1 requires another to be 0 to put it in binary terms. Balance isn't a yes or no, it's an opportunity cost.
Okay... I never said it was.
But in chess, two players of equal skill have a slight advantage to white.
In 40k, two players of equal skill have a massive discrepancy in a GK versus SM match-up.
I'm not saying you have to like chess more than 40k (it's fine to prefer 40k, for a whole variety of reasons) but to have BALANCE as a sticking point for chess but not 40k... That needs some SERIOUS explaining.
I couldn't care less about inter-faction balance frankly. Each faction offers tools which each player chooses to use or not.
What tools does GK have to beat a SM list? Assuming a minimum level of competency, so not a list comprised of nothing but Servitors on the SM end.
And you literally said:
Ozomoto wrote: -eternally 'imbalanced' (I hate using the word balance Ugg) from a turn and faction standpoint . One player will always be barred from a faction (two players can't be white) unlike something like 40k and the turn order will always give out an edge.
As in, balance is an issue for you. IN CHESS. Not 40k.
Fajita Fan wrote: 40k is a lot more balanced when everyone brings painted, WYSIWYG armies.
That's not true at all. That favors older or richer players with bigger collections, or those who happen to like what's good.
A grey plastic GK army versus a grey plastic SM army is exactly the same in terms of balance as a fully painted, WYSIWYGGK army versus a fully painted, WYSIWYGSM army, is exactly the same in balance as a grey plastic GK versus a fully painted SM.
-Game data isn't obscured enough: i could say the same about 40k. you know the missions you know what the enemy has the only real thing you dont know is your dice roll which most players will just do everything in their power to improve one way or another (spam, aura stacks, pyschic spells) and that is all predictable.
-I want my competive level game to have have more theory then study, the other way around is bland. : also kinda 40k as at the competative level its all studying of what all the other factions do, math hammer, most efficient load outs and the meta.
-eternally 'imbalanced' (I hate using the word balance Ugg) from a turn and faction standpoint : eh some one will always have to go first. yeah i can see this one being an issue and is also why i really hate seize the initiative. you deploy on a 1/6th chance to get seized and when you do well all you can do is shrug and hope for the best.
- meta moves slowly so meta dependent innovation (why I play strategy games in the first place) is very difficult: 40k competitive meta is weird. it changes whenever a new book comes out but it really doesn't as 1) the missions really never change and are always predictable itc, brb or otherwise, and 2) every player will always try and maximize at least 1 of 3 variables (cheese (i.e 2+ rerollables, stacking as many saves as possible, wound moving with los, CP Spam) killyness (spamming certain weapons, or smite at the best cost of points) or overall consistency in general. even though the edition changes its pretty much all the same thing. imho (this is also not really limited to 40k. all competitive formats always functions as a way of maximizing consistency)
Fajita Fan wrote: 40k is a lot more balanced when everyone brings painted, WYSIWYG armies.
That's not true at all. That favors older or richer players with bigger collections, or those who happen to like what's good.
A grey plastic GK army versus a grey plastic SM army is exactly the same in terms of balance as a fully painted, WYSIWYGGK army versus a fully painted, WYSIWYGSM army, is exactly the same in balance as a grey plastic GK versus a fully painted SM.
Sigh, I thought it was obvious I was referencing the other hot topic of the day in a light hearted way.
Fajita Fan wrote: 40k is a lot more balanced when everyone brings painted, WYSIWYG armies.
That's not true at all. That favors older or richer players with bigger collections, or those who happen to like what's good.
A grey plastic GK army versus a grey plastic SM army is exactly the same in terms of balance as a fully painted, WYSIWYGGK army versus a fully painted, WYSIWYGSM army, is exactly the same in balance as a grey plastic GK versus a fully painted SM.
Sigh, I thought it was obvious I was referencing the other hot topic of the day in a light hearted way.
Fajita Fan wrote: 40k is a lot more balanced when everyone brings painted, WYSIWYG armies.
That's not true at all. That favors older or richer players with bigger collections, or those who happen to like what's good.
A grey plastic GK army versus a grey plastic SM army is exactly the same in terms of balance as a fully painted, WYSIWYGGK army versus a fully painted, WYSIWYGSM army, is exactly the same in balance as a grey plastic GK versus a fully painted SM.
Sigh, I thought it was obvious I was referencing the other hot topic of the day in a light hearted way.
Senses of humour are not balanced. The meta CLEARLY privileges puns over topical references.
-Game data isn't obscured enough: i could say the same about 40k. you know the missions you know what the enemy has the only real thing you dont know is your dice roll which most players will just do everything in their power to improve one way or another (spam, aura stacks, pyschic spells) and that is all predictable.
-I want my competive level game to have have more theory then study, the other way around is bland. : also kinda 40k as at the competative level its all studying of what all the other factions do, math hammer, most efficient load outs and the meta.
-eternally 'imbalanced' (I hate using the word balance Ugg) from a turn and faction standpoint : eh some one will always have to go first. yeah i can see this one being an issue and is also why i really hate seize the initiative. you deploy on a 1/6th chance to get seized and when you do well all you can do is shrug and hope for the best.
- meta moves slowly so meta dependent innovation (why I play strategy games in the first place) is very difficult: 40k competitive meta is weird. it changes whenever a new book comes out but it really doesn't as 1) the missions really never change and are always predictable itc, brb or otherwise, and 2) every player will always try and maximize at least 1 of 3 variables (cheese (i.e 2+ rerollables, stacking as many saves as possible, wound moving with los, CP Spam) killyness (spamming certain weapons, or smite at the best cost of points) or overall consistency in general. even though the edition changes its pretty much all the same thing. imho (this is also not really limited to 40k. all competitive formats always functions as a way of maximizing consistency)
1) that isn't what I meant by game data being obscured, I mispoke. I meant game descions being the correct/incorrect.
2) possibly true but that study is more interesting for me for w e reason
3) in ITC for example many armies want to go first but also many want to go second. I generally prefere going 2nd in ITC. The fact that neither is objectively better is already sufficient for the turn order aspect to be better (more 'balanced')then chess.
Let me try another angle-if you have two players of equal skill sitting down to play a game of chess, and simply pick whichever color is their favorite, who's more likely to win? And by how much?
Then, if you have two players of equal skill sitting down to play a game of 40k, and simply pick whichever faction is their favorite, who's more likely to win? And by how much?
JNAProductions wrote: Let me try another angle-if you have two players of equal skill sitting down to play a game of chess, and simply pick whichever color is their favorite, who's more likely to win? And by how much?
Then, if you have two players of equal skill sitting down to play a game of 40k, and simply pick whichever faction is their favorite, who's more likely to win? And by how much?
.
While I understand that and agree with it; I also think it takes a narrow view of what balance is.i didn't choose a random faction I like; my choice for what I play is always deliberate and it will almost exclusively be so at the top tables of any big gt or major. While I think outside of game mechanics it is a economical shame some faction are trash at times I also think from a comp gaming perspective it's better .
JNAProductions wrote: Let me try another angle-if you have two players of equal skill sitting down to play a game of chess, and simply pick whichever color is their favorite, who's more likely to win? And by how much?
Then, if you have two players of equal skill sitting down to play a game of 40k, and simply pick whichever faction is their favorite, who's more likely to win? And by how much?
Sorry, I totally agree with your overall point and what you're trying to get at, but this isn't the best way of phrasing it. If the players really are of a hypothetical equal skill, white will indeed win most games, with the rate going up depending on how skilled those players are (like the more advanced a computer chess program is, the more likely white is to win if it plays itself). Whereas in the 40k example, it will vary wildly by which faction is the respective favourite, and how optimized the units they choose within that faction are.
Again, I get you, I 100% agree with you, I just think this particular example muddies the issue more than simplifies it.
It depends. Do we mean 40k or Kill Team? A strongly melee-focused White Scars team can be quite competitive against Iron Hands in Kill Team…
If where taking a tangent into the current meta, Imows marine soup is better then IH in 40k; the data for IH is a little skwed due to how easy IH is to build a listfor and play compared to ws soup. Combine this with IH being a math hammer bully (where as was soup not as much) mid table players are just generally going to go get beat up by IH.
(Also due to the fact ws soup power is largely in the form of on board choices and stratagem use vs IH just blatent powerfull built in rules that just happen)
Ozomoto wrote: I think that question is a little bit of an absurdity. Every element of balance requires another imbalanced.
There can't truely be a answer that involves anything but taste.
In this way the question becomes what do you prefer which isn't at all what was asked.
I prefere what is balanced in 40k over what is balanced in chess however.
This really sounds like trying to avoid committing to a demonstrably bad take.
40K is ludicrously imbalanced. Far more so than chess. You can demonstrate it mathematically: certain factions consistently overperform compared to others. Certain units overperform compared to others. There's not just different choices for the sake of variety or strategy, there are objectively good and bad choices too.
I remember back in the early days of Warmachine having a lot of fun at the local club, just playing with equally-pointed armies. It was far from perfect, but we didn't have to discuss whether we were running 'casual' or 'competitive' lists or any of the other heuristic self-segregation that goes into trying to wrangle a fun game out of 40K's imbalance.
Ozomoto wrote: I think that question is a little bit of an absurdity. Every element of balance requires another imbalanced.
There can't truely be a answer that involves anything but taste.
In this way the question becomes what do you prefer which isn't at all what was asked.
of this.
I prefere what is balanced in 40k over what is balanced in chess however.
This really sounds like trying to avoid committing to a demonstrably bad take.
40K is ludicrously imbalanced. Far more so than chess. You can demonstrate it mathematically: certain factions consistently overperform compared to others. Certain units overperform compared to others. There's not just different choices for the sake of variety or strategy, there are objectively good and bad choices too.
I remember back in the early days of Warmachine having a lot of fun at the local club, just playing with equally-pointed armies. It was far from perfect, but we didn't have to discuss whether we were running 'casual' or 'competitive' lists or any of the other heuristic self-segregation that goes into trying to wrangle a fun game out of 40K's imbalance.
Again, narrow view of balance imo. You can't qoute inter/intra faction and inter/intra unit balance as the primary source of imbalance of 40k and expect me to care when I've already stated multiple times I frankly don't care about that small sliver of balance type multiple times in the thread.
Chess mathamatically fails also one of the most blatent examples being the 52-56% winrate.
Its not avoiding a bad take. Its being consistent with what im arguing for;
e
-Millions of "balance" types available
-Generally for any micro(or macro) aspect to be balanced in some way requires the imbalance of another, there is no 'error free balance' which into-->
-Balance is fundamentally a opportunity cost, it is balanced in X way because of y
Therefore it does not make sense to say something (as a whole) is any more or less then anything else.You can talk about micro elements (such as intra-inter unit and faction balance as everyone absolutely loves to) or turn order balance etc, being more or less then another system. As a whole though it really doesn't make sense.
Hence the comment about preference, I like how x and y game are balanced in y way. My argument is that the types of balance chess exceeds at comes at a cost to high(considering I find what its balanced well at bland anyway) for balance archetypes It throws to the dust to do so.
Saying chess is generically more balanced then 40k is, an absurdity. Likewise is the reverse. All counter arguments to this from this thread have taken the form of X and Y aspect of 40k is imbalanced see example; which again exist in the realm of dealing with pieces but not the whole and say nothing about any of this.
People have the presupposition that 'balance' is a linear scale. Which only holds true for any specific subset of 'balance'. Which is why at any time anyone can say take X-Z subsets of balance and treat them as unimportant as one has the right to do.
Value is subjective, 'balance' is a value. Saying 40k does/does not merit as a competitive game is like saying i'm person Y and you as person X think this picture is ugly; when in fact there is a very real possibility of that person thinking the picture is in fact not ugly.
Interestingly enough it does not matter whether that person thinks the picture is ugly or not; what matters is the possibility of either event.
This is such because saying something that, as matter of fact, Chess is more balanced then 40k, equates to saying this picture is ugly.
Bdrone wrote: ...What holds this game together is the lore combined with models, at least for some.
Because frankly, the rules and models are both leaving me wanting. if i wanted better models for display theres many many options , depending on aesthetic, and ones that don't shatter my costline.
Maybe getting more out of the models you ordered, via lowered prices or at least more functional rules would be nice, seeing as how to get anything else going depending where you live can be an effort or a stroke of luck. but fat chance of that.
It would be nice if boxes actually also had a few more weapon options. I went through an entire plan the other day because who woulda guessed base cultists have the look i want, but off to the convert-a-tron to make cultists work with any weapon options because the only chaos ones sold are snap-fit. oh well.
Never going to happen, look at the Start Collecting box prices over the last 2 years. All the best deals are from the limited release box sets (see: Renegade) and even those are getting hammered recently (see: SoB release).
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Fajita Fan wrote: 40k is a lot more balanced when everyone brings painted, WYSIWYG armies.
I like you.
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Ozomoto wrote: Ya because companies that "DO" test for the competitive scene never need balance changes, emergency bans, reworks etc
Not once in the history of mankind ever
Not sure if your being sarcastic or even what your really arguing here, but if they are testing their products competitively - they had 30 years to get this right (you had one job!)
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nataliereed1984 wrote: Bishops? Way too weak!!! And rooks are OP and need a serious nerf in the next edition.
First it was "D&D is a competitive game" and now it's Chess?
Imagine showing up to play a game in the park one day and your opponent pieces happen to be twice as powerful as yours just because it's a different color. Or how about an army with no pawns? See: Adeptus Custodies
Not sure if your being sarcastic or even what your really arguing here, but if they are testing their products competitively - they had 30 years to get this right (you had one job!
Yes sarcastic. One of the main things I have been advocating is how many competitive failures in games is due to the developers hubris in thinking they understand future meta's as well as achieving this 'balance' without data sets to fall back too. This is to address the OP title; yes its good in a competitive sense they don't test this way as the system they currently use for it is better imo.
This has led into a rabbit hole of people being very confused as to why very loosely speaking I said 40k is a better balanced game for competitive play then chess.
Ozomoto wrote: This is to address the OP title; yes its good in a competitive sense they don't test this way as the system they currently use for it is better imo.
The first GT, the very first one after the Iron Hands release half, HALF of a GRAND TOURNAMENT was a single faction, and damn near the same lists.
So NO, whatever "system" they are using isn't working.
Ozomoto wrote: This is to address the OP title; yes its good in a competitive sense they don't test this way as the system they currently use for it is better imo.
carefully
The first GT, the very first one after the Iron Hands release half, HALF of a GRAND TOURNAMENT was a single faction, and damn near the same lists.
So NO, whatever "system" they are using isn't working.
The pieces used in chess are identical for each faction. Mono lists, mono faction is the balance dream to some.
Not mine and probably not yours perhaps.
IMO both to little and to much diversity are problematic for competitive games; my opinion is however a small niche and has as much merit as the next persons. Some of which would see IH vs IH as an epitome for balanced play. (people who like mono gun shooter formats is an example off the top of my head)
I fail to see your point honestly, would you please elaborate; you seem to have quoted an example which goes against your argument. The original IH rules where nerfed fairly swiftly in the crusade of game 'balance'; this frankly seems like a terrible example to showcase 40k having bad balance as all it does is spearhead an example of a game company attempting to work with a player base. Rome wasn't built in a day and drastic 180 emergency changes are arguably very voltile. Most people would agree reeling things in methodically until the storm has achieved calmness is better. In addition it doesn't even draw comparison to anything which was "balanced for competitive environments" for whatever that was worth.
Ozomoto wrote: The pieces used in chess are identical for each faction. Mono lists, mono faction is the balance dream to some.
Space Marines: A single faction that uses the same unit pool but drastically changes the power of said units based solely on the color of the model. That's the most insane thing i can think of, honestly i'm sitting here SMH tapping this out.
Ozomoto wrote: Some of which would see IH vs IH as an epitome for balanced play. (people who like mono gun shooter formats is an example off the top of my head)
If you had gone to a tournament in the last 3 months you probably had a good shot of seeing this randomly.
GW's rules are horrid, and their lore is increasingly bad. But they make some very nice models. The problem with poor rules is that it creates toxic phenomena like netlists which crawl into casual games, affecting people who have nothing to do with the tournament scene.
Ozomoto wrote: The original IH rules where nerfed fairly swiftly in the crusade of game 'balance';
Your mistaken, Iron Hands wernt touched until the first massive GT failure, GW never makes balance changes unless it's breaking the game. It took GW over a year to nerf IKs.
Also if they had tested their products properly they wouldn't run into this embarrassing where they have to rush out some band-aid PDF.
....Maybe getting more out of the models you ordered, via lowered prices or at least more functional rules would be nice, seeing as how to get anything else going depending where you live can be an effort or a stroke of luck. but fat chance of that...
Never going to happen, look at the Start Collecting box prices over the last 2 years. All the best deals are from the limited release box sets (see: Renegade) and even those are getting hammered recently (see: SoB release).
there's a reason i said fat chance of that, after all. prices have only gone up, and i just know the sisters release will cost extra for all the bling everyone else loves i don't care for. as for the rules... well, ill keep waiting my turn for each army i like to see how that shakes out. as someone who only likes marines at all because of Rogal Dorn, and still wont even do imperial fists... i'll be waiting a good while.
More value per dollar, one way or another, would be nice.
Space Marines: A single faction that uses the same unit pool but drastically changes the power of said units based solely on the color of the model. That's the most insane thing i can think of, honestly i'm sitting here SMH tapping this out.
Interestingly one of the biggest complaints about primaris was how each chapter of primaris lacked identity and felt samey among each other. Outside of power level concerns the supplements are fantastic at showcasing different play styles and archetypes can operate using the same pool. Between mathhammer attrition IH vehicles, RG deployment shenanigans , White scar speed and utilty, Salamander dps combo womboes, blood angels delivery and ferocity all of them honestly do really sweet and unique stuff.
To argue that from a design standpoint they are anything but fantastic is kind of insane imo.
Now the implementation and powerlevel? sure ya that's out of whack.
Ironically nu-marines are everything that the player base requested. 1) primaris identity thing, 2)marines actually being good, 3) Being disliking soup (doctrines). etc. What people say they want isnt what they actually want, which leads into my rants about balace...on average any given person really has no idea what they are talking about or what they actually want.
Ozomoto wrote: The original IH rules where nerfed fairly swiftly in the crusade of game 'balance';
Your mistaken, Iron Hands wernt touched until the first massive GT failure, GW never makes balance changes unless it's breaking the game. It took GW over a year to nerf IKs.
Also if they had tested their products properly they wouldn't run into this embarrassing where they have to rush out some band-aid PDF.
The Knight nerf was a mistake and not backed up by data. It was done to calm down the majoirty of the player base who desired it. See above about giving players what they think they want. It took so long because frankly the answer to knights was git gud but people refused too. The knight nerf shows how players get in the way of competitive integrity. Not how how long it takes them to get things done.
You should have used ynnari, would have been a much better example and I would have actually had to delve into a real reply.
Alkaline_Hound wrote: GW's rules are horrid, and their lore is increasingly bad. But they make some very nice models. The problem with poor rules is that it creates toxic phenomena like netlists which crawl into casual games, affecting people who have nothing to do with the tournament scene.
I must be the only person here who plays Beer Hammer AND Warhammer. Nothing is better than getting up and geeking out with my fellow nerds, but it would be nice if the competitive scene wasn't such a show.
GW clearly does not check, test anything. Its painfully obvious to anyone participating in the hobby. It took everyone all of 5 minutes from reading the previews for the marine books to see the testing wasn't a thing.. The never ending stream of errata's and FAQs shows of quality control/proof reading isint a thing.
Its a premium turd sandwich ya eating if you into GW. Demand refunds, write complaints, and if enough people do it something might change. Otherwise it is what it is..
That being said I do not think GW cares about balance or rules. Its primary objective is hobby and miniatures sales. The rules/books are a very lucrative minimal effort icing on top.
Alkaline_Hound wrote: GW's rules are horrid, and their lore is increasingly bad. But they make some very nice models. The problem with poor rules is that it creates toxic phenomena like netlists which crawl into casual games, affecting people who have nothing to do with the tournament scene.
I can definitely agree with you that it's really gross, cheesy and pathetic when people want to use netlists in casual, friendly, or otherwise low-stakes games, but… is it really all that bad for competitive play? I mean, it introduces some accessibility for players who aren't as good at list construction, right? While posing a bit of increased challenge for the serious players? And it's not like a netlist is suddenly going to make someone who sucks at the game win a tournament. Or even place. Just cos you have the "right" models doesn't mean you know how to use them. Like I could spam kabalites-on-venoms, blasters, and reavers in my Drukhari like winning lists tend to do, but it wouldn't magically make up for me being crap at deploying properly!
(not that I would, of course. Wyches, wracks, khymerae, voidravens and scourges are waaaaay too cool for me to ever pass up using )
Edit:
Actually, re-reading your post, it seems like you're saying that netlists crawling into casual play is the toxic phenomenon, not that netlists are a toxic phenomenon that crawls into casual play. Which I 100% agree with. Sorry for misunderstanding.
Ozomoto wrote: The Knight nerf was a mistake and not backed up by data. It was done to calm down the majoirty of the player base who desired it. See other posts about giving players what they think they want. It took so long because frankly the answer to knights was git gud but people refused too.
You got a verbal "what the " out of me reading this, it's super entertaining but .. wut?
The IK nerf was not a mistake. If you had played agasint or as IK in any competitive form over the last year you'd know that's not true.
The Castellan was the top selling unit for 9 months in a row, and 9/10 imperium armies had a knight of some kind in almost every GT, i can start posting win/losses + lists if you really need it
Just to reiterate, you're wrong, it's backed up by data and you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Ozomoto wrote: The Knight nerf was a mistake and not backed up by data. It was done to calm down the majoirty of the player base who desired it. See other posts about giving players what they think they want. It took so long because frankly the answer to knights was git gud but people refused too.
You got a verbal "what the " out of me reading this, it's super entertaining but .. wut?
The IK nerf was not a mistake. If you had played agasint or as IK in any competitive form over the last year you'd know that's not true.
The Castellan was the top selling unit for 9 months in a row, and 9/10 imperium armies had a knight of some kind in almost every GT, i can start posting win/losses + lists if you really need it
Just to reiterate, you're wrong, it's backed up by data and you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Hell, Castellan is STILL pretty comically OP when paired with a necromechanic dominus that has the autocaduceus of Arkahn Land.
That said, knights ARE really cool, and I would bet at least a solid 25% of the people buying any given knight kit just wanted a really cool big centrepiece model for their Imperial armies, with no particular thought to competition.
Did they distinguish the sales figures between Castellan and Warden?
Like I've been thinking about maybe getting a Paladin for my Sororitas just because I want a big striking centrepiece, and I'm going to be painting them up as Ebon Chalice which means Junith is out and Celestine doesn't really make a lot of sense. It won't be NEARLY as strong a points investment as the Crusader I wanna get for my AdMech will be, but it would be a really cool modelling thing: put a ton of candles and torches and spare cherubim on that badboy, paint it white and gold, give it the "helmet" faceplate…
Ozomoto wrote: The Knight nerf was a mistake and not backed up by data. It was done to calm down the majoirty of the player base who desired it. See other posts about giving players what they think they want. It took so long because frankly the answer to knights was git gud but people refused too.
You got a verbal "what the " out of me reading this, it's super entertaining but .. wut?
The IK nerf was not a mistake. If you had played agasint or as IK in any competitive form over the last year you'd know that's not true.
The Castellan was the top selling unit for 9 months in a row, and 9/10 imperium armies had a knight of some kind knight in almost every GT, i can start posting win/losses + lists if you really need it
Just to reiterate, you're wrong, it's backed up by data and you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
Your argument is: your wrong? and it saw play? .......
You mistake prevalence as oppression. Was the Castellan good? yes. Was it very beatable? yes.Was it meta defining? yes. Could you play the mission vs it reasonably? yes. yes Did it even top 8 adepticon(the last big tournament before its nerf)? no. Why did it not top 8 adepticon, beasue it was beatable and good players built for it. It honestly was a net positive for the meta at the time as ynnari (which was oppressive) struggled to beat it consistently.
I both played with and vs it (without using one myself) and frankly never had a problem vs playing very good players utilizing it. It was quite easy to build a list that did not care about its fire power and now they where stuck with a 604 (593) model that could never make its point back. Like I said, if you where in the camp of "this thing is to good" you likely need someone to tell you honestly to get good. It shows lack of adaptability. Its a strategy game, not being able to adapt means you should lose frankly and inst justification for a nerf. GW knew this and that is why it didn't get nerfed in chapter approved 2018.
Lets take a look at something that was oppressive, Pre nerf iron hands
Was it good? yes. Was it beatable? not by attrition and no matter what archetpye you played it had acvantage in the mission (assuming itc). Was it meta defining? yes. COuld you play the mission reasonably agaisnt it? no.
The difference is counterplay my dude. On the table and in list building phase.
Ozomoto wrote: Your argument is: your wrong? and it saw play? .......
Okay so you said "The Knight nerf was a mistake and not backed up by data." and then i replied, with data to back it up
You can keep arguing this point but it's not going to change numbers, i backed up my opinion with data, you backed yours with more hyperbole.
Ozomoto wrote: Did it even top 8 adepticon(the last big tournament before its nerf)? no. Why did it not top 8 adepticon, beasue it was beatable and good players built for it.
Tyler Devries, 8th place full Imperial Knights
Braden Kohl, 6th place ~700 points worth of knights
Now we have people here defending the Castellan? What the hell? Saying there isn't any data is living in a fantasy land. Like, did you follow any of the tournament data at all?
Ozomoto wrote: You think pulling lists from random places counts as data your delusional. Guess what I just found out necrons and GK are op, look at these wins….
Dude, i don't even know where to go with this one...
You tried to quote Adepticon results to me in some sad attempt to reinforce your argument, problem is i actually followed Adepticon last year and called you on your fake-stat FFS a simple google search could have told you as much.
That's a hard pass, if you gave a about any of this you'd already know where to look. I'm not going to hold your hand while you learn the ins and outs of competitive play or the current state of the meta.
Ozomoto wrote: Oh but wait, you have confirmation bias *cough data* on your side so you are obviously right my bad..
I'm not going to spend all night cutting and pasting from Blood of Kittens tournament results just to prove some casual was wrong about the meta.
Ozomoto wrote: You think pulling lists from random places counts as data your delusional. Guess what I just found out necrons and GK are op, look at these wins….
Dude, i don't even know where to go with this one...
You tried to quote Adepticon results to me in some sad attempt to reinforce your argument, problem is i actually followed Adepticon last year and called you on your fake-stat FFS a simple google search could have told you as much.
That's a hard pass, if you gave a about any of this you'd already know where to look. I'm not going to hold your hand while you learn the ins and outs of competitive play or the current state of the meta.
Ozomoto wrote: Oh but wait, you have confirmation bias *cough data* on your side so you are obviously right my bad..
I'm not going to spend all night cutting and pasting from Blood of Kittens tournament results just to prove some casual was wrong about the meta.
There is no castellans in the top 8 as I said.A simple google search would have told you so. So no ur bs ing me. My comment on confirmation bias was specifically because I know you misinterpreted the stats for you own narrative on this one.
I couldn't care less about competitive 40k - I left that behind many years ago and now play for the fun of it.
All I hope for out of balance in 40k is for two people to be able to pick any faction they like the look of and have a game where at the beginning, either person has a chance of winning.
I dont understand why people say Chess is unbalanced because white have a slightly higher win rate. White and black arent 2 factions you choose before a game /tournament but just a way to distinguish the pieces. If it was a random die roll after each player set up the pieces and 50% of the time black went first the game would be perfectly balanced? Who gets to play what color is random, before its decided its 50-50 on who is favored. And you can play more than 1 game and changes who goes first to make it more fair. If you play a best of 7 in chess its pretty much 50-50.
Also skill is much more of a factor in chess than in 40k. You can easily overcome the tiny advantage of going first if you are slightly better player not to mention if the skill gap is higher.
If we see Black and White as 2 different factions then we can compare it to IH vs GK. Probably doesnt matter who starts or any slight skill differences the IH player is likely to win. Way less balanced than chess.
If we just see black and white as who goes first then we could do the same in 40k. Take a good IH list vs an equally good IH list in a format that favors going first. You think the player going first is gonna be less favored than white in chess? I dont think so.
People use chess as an example in a dishonest way. Its not white that is better because its white but because it goes first if you take 1000 games and just rotate who goes first its extremely balanced. Doesnt matter the amount of times you let GK choose(way better than altetnating) who starts IH will have an insane advantage.
Chess win% is also from mostly equal matches. 40k isnt. IH's winrate is from playing on top tables and other good armies, not from beating DA/Tyranids or GK at bottom tables. After 2-3 rounds the top armies and bottom armies arent really facing each other anymore so their winrates flattens out as they ate both facing more equal opposition. Marines facing other marines prevents high winrates at the top and DA gets to face equally bad armies at the bottom and start getting some wins as well stopping their fall in win%. If it was totaly random who you would face each round in a Tournament and not based on wins/losses you would see the new marines have much higher win rates and the bottom armies would look way worse. Now its mostly a 60-40 difference but if GK/DA/SW could meet IH in round 4 and 5 as well the difference would be above 70-30 and probably closer to 80-20 win rates and really show how badly balanced 40k is. A 55% winrate army against a 45% army isnt just slightly favored to win but overwhelmingly so. Might look like a 20% nudge to the 55% army but its more like 90-10 in actuality.
Looked up some stats. Space Marines have like 53% winrate and blood angels 38%, space marines vs blood angels have it at 90-10 on the other hand. Tyranids are at 44% overall but against marines they are only at 20%. 40k is way more unbalanced than people realise.
I've been thinking for a while now that GW are aiming firmly at the US tournament scene. Why else is there an emphasis in the brb on tournament rules (matched play?)?
That's not to say they balance and test their rules though - well they do to a certain extent, it's why we keep getting sold yearly FAQs, er I mean Chapter Approved...
Social media wise US meta-gamers seem to be the biggest slice of the market, Brits, their supposed home market, don't seem to feature much on social media at all, and even less so British tournament players. And we all know that social media is king these days, if "professional" Warhammer "journalists" (how did we end up with "professional" Warhammr "journalists" anyhow?!!) such as Rob Baer start deriding a particular unit/faction/ruleset GW get worried...
GW even have a patronising US woman for their "how to play" videos...
Don't know why GW don't up sticks and move to the US!
Rob Lee wrote: if "professional" Warhammer "journalists" (how did we end up with "professional" Warhammr "journalists" anyhow?!!) such as Rob Baer start deriding a particular unit/faction/ruleset GW get worried..
I was with you until this. If Rob Baer is a journalists then Spikey Bits is the National Enquirer of the Warhammer world, nothing but click bait with no real information, i get more reliable news from 4chan.
Rob Lee wrote: if "professional" Warhammer "journalists" (how did we end up with "professional" Warhammr "journalists" anyhow?!!) such as Rob Baer start deriding a particular unit/faction/ruleset GW get worried..
I was with you until this. If Rob Baer is a journalists then Spikey Bits is the National Enquirer of the Warhammer world, nothing but click bait with no real information, i get more reliable news from 4chan.
When your staff consists of people who are permanently banned from major tournaments... yeah, not really reliable. And as I understand, SB doesn't have the best reputation among actual Games Workshop honchos.
Adeptus Doritos wrote: You know, at some point- someone's going to make a program that can calculate 40k armies against one another.
And that guy is going to get rich, and then strangled to death for not helping GW sell new Shinies.
Yeah people have said that before about all kinds of other E Sports and it never works, at least with any accuracy. I wonder if people really understand the complexity of what they are asking/dreaming of.
It tookteams of code monkeys decades to come up with the current NOAA model and all that does is help us predict the weather and it doesn't even do that well.
MiguelFelstone wrote: Yeah people have said that before about all kinds of other E Sports and it never works, at least with any accuracy. I wonder if people really understand the complexity of what they are asking/dreaming of.
It tookteams of code monkeys decades to come up with the current NOAA model and all that does is help us predict the weather, and it doesn't even do that well.
So you're saying it's still safe to gamble on the Weather and it can't be forecast that easily...
Adeptus Doritos wrote: So you're saying it's still safe to gamble on the Weather and it can't be forecast that easily...
Get me my bookie, stat.
I'm a Floridian. The NOAA model is complete when compared to the Europeans. Thats why on TV you'll see 50 different tracks for a hurricane.
If they had any kind of accuracy Trump wouldn't have needed a sharpy.
Most weather models are hilariously deprecated, but the Europeans actually invested in theirs and that's why they have the most accurate weather forecasts in the world.
MiguelFelstone wrote: Most weather models are hilariously deprecated, but the Europeans actually invested in theirs and that's why they have the most accurate weather forecasts in the world.
I think we are already seeing a shift at GW into a more tournament focused development. It is there in AoS despite the occasional blunders(HoS and OBR), Warcry was definitely made with tourneys in mind, and lest us not forget how both Warhammer Underworlds and even Kill Team have been very focused on it as they both received tourney kits.
However, 40k is lagging(or resisting depending on your view of tourneys) behind in that development most likely due to the fact that 40k is still being developed by the old vanguard of people who have been there for decades.
I am of the opinion that tourneys will become a bigger things as time goes on. Tourneys are a big thing and they tend to garner more revenue due to increased exposure of the product. Whether GW manages to capitalize on it is another matter entirely, but I would argue that in some extent they are moving towards this. Competitive scenes are big money which is why a lot of game companies are hoping to be the next eSport franchise. If GW is like any other company they will want to get in on the action.
In regards to testing I think the main issue of GW is that their processes are still not up to spec and I wouldn't be surprised if some of that aforementioned old vanguard is still very secretive about their entire process due to how GW ran things for over 10 years.
Eldarsif wrote: In regards to testing I think the main issue of GW is that their processes are still not up to spec and I wouldn't be surprised if some of that aforementioned old vanguard is still very secretive about their entire process due to how GW ran things for over 10 years.
Never played an ETC but if the European scene is anything like what it's been described in this thread - that wouldn't surprise me in the least
It's a shame because some of my favorite content creators are European, how do you up a game you created? That's like the US losing at BASEketball
It's alright, no one is taking this seriously anyway.
I frequently forgot how toxic (and bad at 40k) dakka is and have to realign myself. A reflection of life i guess.
IOW: you were proven wrong and in a way to avoid admitting you were wrong you make claims of toxic.
And how exactly was I proven wrong? All i've seen where people not following through with what they said and ghosting once they themselves have been proven wrong. In fact If you pay attention I actually did end up commenting on everything I redacted meaning there is no basis for your comment.
So ya, thanks for further demonstrating how toxic the community is. (as well as your conjecture and unfounded claims)
GW hasn't playtested in the past as we all know.
Can't say much about the current situation.
Playtesting in a competitive environment needs players that are more professional than the GW employees.
Its not hard to find those players but it appears that GW doesn't do so.
Just have a look at their battle reports in WD.
Ozomoto wrote: And how exactly was I proven wrong? All i've seen where people not following through with what they said and ghosting once they themselves have been proven wrong. In fact If you pay attention I actually did end up commenting on everything I redacted. (but why would you ever do that??????)
So ya, thanks for further demonstrating how toxic the community is.
You just made a bunch of snide / sarcastic comments and then immediately, the very next sentence said it's the "community" that's toxic. Really?
Also i could keep going back and forth with you but it's not worth the effort to regurgitate the same thing again and again. If your still sticking to your guns on this "IKs did nothing wrong" crap then i'll just start quoting better players than I:
Abe Apfel from Bell of Lost Souls
The release of the Admech book gave them a boost, but it wasn’t until Codex Imperial Knights dropped that they really took off. With new units, powerful stratagems, and some fantastic soup options, Knight quickly shot up in the rankings, came to dominate the meta. As the star of the Ynnari waned, Knights took the top spot as the easy, go-to army, and became the list to beat.
Since last June, Knights have dominated the meta. When Imperial Knights faded a bit due to nerfs, Chaos Knights were quick to step in and take their spot. However, over the past few weeks, as Space Marine lists come into play, we’ve seen a dramatic shift, and it seems like the era of Knightly chivalry may be dead.
Ozomoto wrote: And how exactly was I proven wrong? All i've seen where people not following through with what they said and ghosting once they themselves have been proven wrong. In fact If you pay attention I actually did end up commenting on everything I redacted. (but why would you ever do that??????)
So ya, thanks for further demonstrating how toxic the community is.
You just made a bunch of snide / sarcastic comments and then immediately, the very next sentence said it's the "community" that's toxic. Really?
Also i could keep going back and forth with you but it's not worth the effort to regurgitate the same thing again and again. If your still sticking to your guns on this "IKs did nothing wrong" gak then i'll just start quoting better players than I:
Abe Apfel from Bell of Lost Souls
The release of the Admech book gave them a boost, but it wasn’t until Codex Imperial Knights dropped that they really took off. With new units, powerful stratagems, and some fantastic soup options, Knight quickly shot up in the rankings, came to dominate the meta. As the star of the Ynnari waned, Knights took the top spot as the easy, go-to army, and became the list to beat.
Since last June, Knights have dominated the meta. When Imperial Knights faded a bit due to nerfs, Chaos Knights were quick to step in and take their spot. However, over the past few weeks, as Space Marine lists come into play, we’ve seen a dramatic shift, and it seems like the era of Knightly chivalry may be dead.
You should look in the mirror, We both had the same disposition. Im I also not part of the community for commenting by definition? That article is also irrelevant. It's just a historical take.and you are extrapolating a lot out of a fairly innocent quote again, unsurprisingly to fit your biased narrative.
You also didnt back out of a back and forth. You backed out of one thing, your itc record after you claimed I was a scrub.
Ozomoto wrote: That article is also irrelevant. It's just a historical article.
It's an article discussing the meta over the last year, if you had bothered to read it you'd know that. Imperial Knights were released in June of last year, it's not a "historical article" it just doesn't support your point of view and you didn't want to read it.
Ozomoto wrote: That article is also irrelevant. It's just a historical article.
It's an article discussing the meta over the last year, if you had bothered to read it you'd know that. Imperial Knights were released in June of last year, it's not a "historical article" it just doesn't support your point of view and you didn't want to read it.
I actually did read it. It is an article going over a history of something....so a historical account or historical article. pretty simple stuff. Ill reiterate it because this because I know you need a little bit of extra help. You extrapolated a lot out of something small to fit your narrative. The article was largely not discussing what we where talking about. It was a historical article.
Something is always the the 'top' or 'best', that alone is not grounds for nerfing/banning. The first thing I said about it was you mistake prevalence for oppression. A single qoute from a technically off top article saying "they where played", or "where the army to beat". Cool so they where prevalent? and this is supposed to be new information ?
Ozomoto wrote: It is by definition an article going over a history of something....
The mental gymnastics you're doing just to prove you're not wrong is amazing to behold. Did an old gypsy woman curse you? If you admit fault will your first born die or something?
Even if it was an "historical account" or whatever you want to call it. It was an article that had specifically to do with how well IKs had performed over the last year and everything you argued agasint is in that article.
Edit: We went back and forth for 3 pages about IKs and now you say it's not relevant when i show you an opinion you don't agree with? Alright i'm done, you win dude.
Ozomoto wrote: It is by definition an article going over a history of something....
The mental gymnastics you're doing just to prove you're not wrong is amazing to behold. Did an old gypsy woman curse you? If you admit fault will your first born die or something?
Even if it was an "historical account" or whatever you want to call it. It was an article that had specifically to do with how well IKs had performed over the last year and everything you argued agasint is in that article.
No offence but you are delusional. It was an account of knights rules releases and nerfs.
I have never argued they where not popular or meta defining. In fact I called them so. Like i agreed/agree with what the article says.
It really doesn't comment on however what the debate was about; which is whether the knight nerf was justified or not. Where knights oppressive, could they have stayed where they where etc. It makes a one comment in the entire article saying they are the list to beat, which is and was true. However that is not calling them oppressive, its not calling them nerf worthy; but you are extrapolating such, which just isn't true(the author might have had that opinion but its not stated in the article). You are bs ing me and yourself with your narrative you are pushing. The rest ( and majority) of the article is just general irrelevant claims (to our discussion) like, after the nerf imperium knights fell out of favour or marines took chaos knight out of the meta.
Something is always the best/top. I will say it for the third time, that alone is not grounds for being nerfed. In fact considering there is always something(s) at the top it can actually be good for particular things to be there over others. Something can be the list to beat and its a very healthy meta for that list to be at the top.
This will have to call it for me; if you think an irrelevant text of writing (that i agreed with) was/should be earth-shattering revelation to my 40k knowledge/opinion, then your fundamental misunderstanding for how things are is so great no amount of text or conversation will ever be enough.
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Edit: We went back and forth for 3 pages about IKs and now you say it's not relevant when i show you an opinion you don't agree with? Alright i'm done, you win dude.
No it's irrelevant because it's irrelevant. Read why I stated its irrelevant. If it talked about the nuances of beating knights/ knights beating you. What you can do about, and the before and after snap shot of the meta (everyone not just the knights themselves) and the health of the game) and compared it then ya it would be relevant.
It has nothing to do with me 'disagreeing with it" . I just said I agree with it
Desubot wrote: I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.
Apparently locally we have more painters than players, it caused my FLGS to re-work their displays to show more 'cool models' rather than names players know.
Holy gak, as someone with a philosophy degree in undergrad I am embarrassed to be even in the same category as Ozymoto.
I can't wait for the solipsism argument to come out (which he has bordered on already with the "balance is subjective" thing). Something like "balance is a construct of the human mind and doesn't objectively exist."
Well yes it does mother . You can measure it, juggle it, you could get a grant to write research papers on it.
How important balance is to someone is subjective, but that is a tautology. "That rock is/isn't important" is subjective. "That rock exists" is not.
40k is objectively, measurably, mathematically less balanced than Chess.
How important that is to you is subjective.
It is the height of stupidity, though, to come into a subjective discussion leading with "I disagree that your concerns should be discussed because I don't find them important." Like, okay, some people *do* find them important, and should be allowed to discuss them. Saying "it is okay that 40k is imbalanced as it is" is not the argument being made anyways...
I'm not done reading the whole thread yet but some thoughts:
The major issues is that GW seemingly doesn't TRY. They claim that they have playtesters, who are apparently tournament organizers, but either their testing isn't testing anything meaningful or they ignore feedback. Since it's all under NDA we have no way of knowing, which is also a big overall issue in that everything isn't transparent enough to determine where it works and where it needs to be improved.
People don't want a perfectly balanced game, which doesn't exist anyways (even chess isn't perfect). But the combination of bloated product lines, bloated factions (some of which don't really need to be totally separate) and now bloated rules along with seemingly a lack of being able to put 2 and 2 together and figure out that X + Y + Z ability is really really good means that the game, while it might be fun, is a mess.
Pickup games are part of the issue since it's random if you get someone who is primarily a collector and threw together some models from their collection for a game, someone preparing for a tournament and bringing a filth list, an donkey-cave who just likes to crush people, or anything in between. But it's not the only issue and a big part of the problem is that there is so little internal and external balance that your army can be amazingly good or total doggak seemingly at random (and sometimes fluctuate between the two every edition/update).
Warhammer is one of the only games I'm familiar with where the balance is SO bad that one of the following things often happens:
1) You pick the units you like the look/fluff of and they are the OP cheese du jour so you curbstomp players just because you happened to like the "good" units, and risk being lumped in the WAAC player category through no fault of your own and/or people don't want to play you because your army isn't fun, despite you not actually intending to build a top-tier army. 2) You pick the units you like the look/fluff of and they are awful trash, and you lose every single game you play often before even getting a chance to do anything because they are so bad. 3) You ignore 90% of the book to focus on the broken 10% which is immediately apparent to be broken within minutes of looking through the book, despite at least some unknown period of time being devoted to playtesting 4) You lucked out and GW fethed up your book in some way, meaning your entire army is trash until they get around to fixing it, if they ever do. 5) You hit the lottery and GW, for whatever reason, made your book insanely good and no matter what you pick it's probably going to be better than your opponent. 6) They hit the sweet spot and your book actually isn't bad, but since very little else also hit the sweet spot you're actually at a disadvantage since you don't have any crazy combos like everybody else has.
No other game I've seen has this level of issue; sure every game has problems. But a lot of it is self-created: The combination of an emphasis on models above rules, whch seems to indicate that the models are designed with zero input or communicaton with the rules team and the rules team get thrown the finished model and told to come up with how it fits, the bloated release schedule which has to eat into design and testing time resulting in sloppy work, the fact the design team apparently does not communicate with each other but writes books in isolation, resulting in totally missing synergies between books, and the bloated rules where it's been shown that GW often forgets their own rules or errata they've done to the rules all combines to make things worse than they really should be.
IF GW is playtesting internally then I doubt anyone on the team is really competent enough to pick up on the potential issues or they simply don't have enough time to test it properly. Allegedly they have external playtesters who are tournament people (FLG has outright stated they are playtesting but can't go into more detail) but from the bits and pieces that have been gleaned the testing is less about finding combos and more about if the rules interactions fit. In other words they don't let playtesters build armies to demonstrate that X+Y+Z is a broken combo, but instead want them to see if X, Y and Z work in isolation. Which is important but totally misses the bigger picture. Thre is a fundamental issue with your testing if broken combos are found within minutes when your supposedly professional team of designers completely missed it.
But a game with army books is going to be inherently asymmetric in at least a good chunk of games. Think about it - if two codices are just about equal in power but each have three different builds we can probably assume that only one build from each army versus each other will produce a close game. If you take a more extreme build from each book you’ll probably get a stomp, that’s means in this hypothetical example that 2/3 of games probably won’t be close before we add probability of dice rolls.
To put it another way: what if GW invests their modicum of balance testing with the intention of producing close games if each player goes with pretty generic WD battle report style armies? Trying to balance a couple dozen army books with all the possible permutations that could fit into the old traditional 1-2 HQs, 2-6 troops, 0-3 elites, 0-3 fast attack, and 0-3 heavy supports force org would be a pretty daunting task for anyone. Add in a community of mouth breathing Internet neckbeards like us clamoring that our spam-of-the-month list isn’t as powerful as someone else’s and it’s no wonder GW walked away from official tournament support.
Fajita Fan wrote: But a game with army books is going to be inherently asymmetric in at least a good chunk of games. Think about it - if two codices are just about equal in power but each have three different builds we can probably assume that only one build from each army versus each other will produce a close game. If you take a more extreme build from each book you’ll probably get a stomp, that’s means in this hypothetical example that 2/3 of games probably won’t be close before we add probability of dice rolls.
To put it another way: what if GW invests their modicum of balance testing with the intention of producing close games if each player goes with pretty generic WD battle report style armies? Trying to balance a couple dozen army books with all the possible permutations that could fit into the old traditional 1-2 HQs, 2-6 troops, 0-3 elites, 0-3 fast attack, and 0-3 heavy supports force org would be a pretty daunting task for anyone. Add in a community of mouth breathing Internet neckbeards like us clamoring that our spam-of-the-month list isn’t as powerful as someone else’s and it’s no wonder GW walked away from official tournament support.
/shrug
There is something to be said about the fact that 40k was more or less shoehorned into a competitive game. Sure they had GTs before, but they were much more low-key affairs and not as serious as today. The desire to make everything a competitive almost-sport with grand tournaments and cash prizes and livable wages has sort of corrupted the idea (and this isn't a joke, there are actually people who want to make 40k/AOS a "t-sport" with sponsorships and such). But even back in the day, it was commonly known GW's battle reports used terrible armies (mostly due to them using studio armies which were built to show the range not build a good army for gaming). It's actually been lessened now that it's usually the person's personal army so they tend to have more good options.
I think the major double-edged sword here is that there is just too much to balance properly. Too many options, too many factions, too many rules. It's a surefire sign things are bloated, but Pandora's box has been opened and even if GW wasn't focused on models above everything, there would be no way to "go back". That said though things were still pretty crazy when there were only like 10 factions, not however many we have today, so there's no guarantee even if they were able to get rid of the bloat (they can't, but hypothetically speaking) that it would fix anything.
Ultimately trying to balance for WAAC level where people intentionally try to break the game is futile. Unless the variety of units and options is massively curtailed there always will be edgecase combos that will be anomalously powerful.
The balancing should be focused on casual TAC level, and this is why I think many of the marine supplements are a problem. They're just massive universal power boosts to the whole army. You don't need to intentionally try to build a power combo; merely using a perfectly average marine collection with the IH book will result very lopsided games against casual collections of many other factions.
Ozomoto wrote: Ironically nu-marines are everything that the player base requested. 1) primaris identity thing, 2)marines actually being good, 3) Being disliking soup (doctrines). etc. What people say they want isnt what they actually want, which leads into my rants about balace...on average any given person really has no idea what they are talking about or what they actually want.
I guess if you don't actually understand what people want, it can look like they're contradicting themselves. Those three things you identified were overwhelmingly praised by the community, they're not what people criticize. Heck, almost every time I see people complain about Marines being too powerful, it's usually prefaced with 'I agree they needed a boost, but'.
Specifically, nobody was asking for Marines to:
1. Be better at specialized roles than the factions that revolve around those roles, and get rules exceptions nobody else does (see: Drop Pods ignoring T1 DS restrictions, Impulsors letting you move and then disembark, WS being better at fast assault than DE/CWE), or
2. Be the most powerful army in the game by a non-negligible margin. I can understand you not getting this since for some baffling reason you don't recognize cross-faction balance as a legitimate issue, but for anyone who doesn't play exclusively mirror matches it's a problem.
Crimson wrote: Ultimately trying to balance for WAAC level where people intentionally try to break the game is futile. Unless the variety of units and options is massively curtailed there always will be edgecase combos that will be anomalously powerful.
The balancing should be focused on casual TAC level, and this is why I think many of the marine supplements are a problem. They're just massive universal power boosts to the whole army. You don't need to intentionally try to build a power combo; merely using a perfectly average marine collection with the IH book will result very lopsided games against casual collections of many other factions.
Yes but if you don't focus on the WAAC level you miss the combos. You don't need to balance for that, but I would expect some concern about it in order to try and prevent those breaks from happening in the first place. You'll miss some (and that's why errata exists) but it feels like GW doesn't pick up on ANY, so there's so many slipping through the cracks that they can't/won't fix them all. So when they fix one thing there are still several more that didn't get touched and continue to break the game.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
SERIOUSLY.
It couldn't possibly be more clear that 40k is meant to be a fun, narratively-oriented, mostly-casual kind of game about spectacle and cool battles and funny moments and nice memories to enjoy with friends. That's the priority. It's always been the priority. It always will be the priority. People are welcome to focus on tournaments and competition and winning, of course, but it's just so weird to keep seeing people expecting, or demanding, that the game completely alter itself into something it isn't and never has been just to better match their particular style, when they could just … go play a different game with a more technical, competitive focus to it.
This is 1000% true. Beerhammer is what its designed around, not olympic levels of competitiveness.
I'm very much a casual player (couldn't care less about tournament play), but I want my units to be balanced at a WAAC level. I take no pleasure in being either a roflstomper or a roflstompee, and tight, balanced codexes would reduce the chance of this happening unintended in the list building phase. This would give me more freedom in choosing my army.
Example
Spoiler:
I like howling banshees, striking scorpions and storm guardians. However, I know that when I field my fluffy list with these units against my friend's guardsmen horde I'll get obliterated. This is not because they're a powergamer (they aren't), or because I make intentionally bad decisions (I mostly don't), but because guardsmen are far more efficient per point than my beloved melee spelfs.
Unit1126PLL wrote: How important balance is to someone is subjective, but that is a tautology. "That rock is/isn't important" is subjective. "That rock exists" is not.
I made it back to the thread in time for the proper use of the word tautology! This thread delivers.
Eldarsif wrote:I think we are already seeing a shift at GW into a more tournament focused development. It is there in AoS despite the occasional blunders(HoS and OBR), Warcry was definitely made with tourneys in mind, and lest us not forget how both Warhammer Underworlds and even Kill Team have been very focused on it as they both received tourney kits.
In regards to Kill Team, I don't believe it was ever designed for tournament balance since the game went to great effort not to change data sheets and points (at the time Kill Team came out) from what would be found in full 40k. With Arena efforts were placed to control the battlefield and Line of Sight variables, but no changes to actually occurred among factions. So given the new battlefield conditions some factions move up in the meta playing Arena compared to a more typical game of Kill Team. But that was about it., The standard meta of faction that has access to chaff units and several powerful special/heavy weapons remained unchanged. So I would argue not much balance was added to Kill Team over full 40k, save a limited scope of units and standard Command Point generation. Which allows the game to be much more balanced, but it still has fairly well defined Upper, Mid and Lower tier factions.
Wayniac wrote:I'm not done reading the whole thread yet but some thoughts:
Spoiler:
The major issues is that GW seemingly doesn't TRY. They claim that they have playtesters, who are apparently tournament organizers, but either their testing isn't testing anything meaningful or they ignore feedback. Since it's all under NDA we have no way of knowing, which is also a big overall issue in that everything isn't transparent enough to determine where it works and where it needs to be improved.
People don't want a perfectly balanced game, which doesn't exist anyways (even chess isn't perfect). But the combination of bloated product lines, bloated factions (some of which don't really need to be totally separate) and now bloated rules along with seemingly a lack of being able to put 2 and 2 together and figure out that X + Y + Z ability is really really good means that the game, while it might be fun, is a mess.
Pickup games are part of the issue since it's random if you get someone who is primarily a collector and threw together some models from their collection for a game, someone preparing for a tournament and bringing a filth list, an donkey-cave who just likes to crush people, or anything in between. But it's not the only issue and a big part of the problem is that there is so little internal and external balance that your army can be amazingly good or total doggak seemingly at random (and sometimes fluctuate between the two every edition/update).
Warhammer is one of the only games I'm familiar with where the balance is SO bad that one of the following things often happens:
1) You pick the units you like the look/fluff of and they are the OP cheese du jour so you curbstomp players just because you happened to like the "good" units, and risk being lumped in the WAAC player category through no fault of your own and/or people don't want to play you because your army isn't fun, despite you not actually intending to build a top-tier army.
2) You pick the units you like the look/fluff of and they are awful trash, and you lose every single game you play often before even getting a chance to do anything because they are so bad.
3) You ignore 90% of the book to focus on the broken 10% which is immediately apparent to be broken within minutes of looking through the book, despite at least some unknown period of time being devoted to playtesting
4) You lucked out and GW fethed up your book in some way, meaning your entire army is trash until they get around to fixing it, if they ever do.
5) You hit the lottery and GW, for whatever reason, made your book insanely good and no matter what you pick it's probably going to be better than your opponent.
6) They hit the sweet spot and your book actually isn't bad, but since very little else also hit the sweet spot you're actually at a disadvantage since you don't have any crazy combos like everybody else has.
No other game I've seen has this level of issue; sure every game has problems. But a lot of it is self-created: The combination of an emphasis on models above rules, whch seems to indicate that the models are designed with zero input or communicaton with the rules team and the rules team get thrown the finished model and told to come up with how it fits, the bloated release schedule which has to eat into design and testing time resulting in sloppy work, the fact the design team apparently does not communicate with each other but writes books in isolation, resulting in totally missing synergies between books, and the bloated rules where it's been shown that GW often forgets their own rules or errata they've done to the rules all combines to make things worse than they really should be.
IF GW is playtesting internally then I doubt anyone on the team is really competent enough to pick up on the potential issues or they simply don't have enough time to test it properly. Allegedly they have external playtesters who are tournament people (FLG has outright stated they are playtesting but can't go into more detail) but from the bits and pieces that have been gleaned the testing is less about finding combos and more about if the rules interactions fit. In other words they don't let playtesters build armies to demonstrate that X+Y+Z is a broken combo, but instead want them to see if X, Y and Z work in isolation. Which is important but totally misses the bigger picture. Thre is a fundamental issue with your testing if broken combos are found within minutes when your supposedly professional team of designers completely missed it
.
This year I have been on both ends of the spectrum with my Primaris marines going meta with the new codex and my Slaves to Darkness being played before their battletomb. I haven't made full use of the Space Marine codex and don't use Supplements, so my 40k games have been rather enjoyable since I have a dialed back army which is probably still very good since I can actually tie/win games and I am a terrible player. However, on the other end, I played my Slaves to Darkness army vs. Bonereapers and got stomped (each wound caused is a point an I lost 0-40 or something) so badly I wanted to quit wargaming all together and felt dumb buying the models. And this was from an opponent that was also relatively new to AoS who just happened to like the Bonereapers. It was only fact that I had years of wargaming experience, knowledge of how GW game work and the fact my army was getting an update in a couple weeks, I didn't pack up/sell/throw away my models. Yes, it felt that bad. When you play a game that you literally would have done better just setting your army on the table and just leaving them there where they deployed you know you had a really bad game. With the new battletome and a few more unit choices available to me, I think AoS won't be as bad.
***
As for pick-up games, I tend to go for about 3/4 strength of what I think the faction could accomplish if fully optimized. Adjusted depending on my perceived strength of the faction and any previous experience I have with them. In Kill Team I have got pretty good at building teams around this power level so they are strong but if my opponent builds a team the is very optimized/optimized the game isn't going to be a blow out. For the most part, my group has done the same. The best player in our group shelved his Thousand Sons completely since nothing was able to tackle them. This more of no one has good kill teams to face it, and for myself, I haven't solved the psybolt/rubic issue with how play. I know there is a solution, I just can't get my brain to position right to absorb them. I do feel a little bad for the Thousand Sons player, while he does have other kill teams, I know he wants to play Magnus's sons every now and again.
The point is, I think GW games work pretty well right now if players aim for a 3/4 strength, +/- the local meta. I know some players balk at that, but I don't mind it so much as it allows me to field units I like no matter how bad they are since if they are really bad, I can shore them up with really good units. At the end of the day, I am looking for close games in the small margin where my choices on the table and swings of luck decided the game more than having a mathematically better army. I think playing GW games in this strength range works out pretty well for what I want. Sure, it is possible for a new player to accidentally stumble of powerful units/combos but they are more likely to not. And that sort stuff usually works itself out over time as a gaming group matures playing each other.
Can Games Workshop games be better balanced? Absolutely. It is fairly easy to see they are not. Are they going to become better balanced through better play testing? Probably not anytime soon as I expect GW had amazing profits this year with no end on the near horizon. These profits say whatever they are doing is good enough. And you know what, I do think they are good enough. We can create all manner of sound and fury, but I really don't see anything changing so I think it is best to accept things as they are or find something else to do with one's time. It can't be healthy arguing over something you have no power to change and isn't changing.
Unit1126PLL wrote: How important balance is to someone is subjective, but that is a tautology. "That rock is/isn't important" is subjective. "That rock exists" is not.
I made it back to the thread in time for the proper use of the word tautology! This thread delivers.
Saturmorn Carvilli wrote: We can create all manner of sound and fury, but I really don't see anything changing so I think it is best to accept things as they are or find something else to do with one's time.
I accept this is the way things are, and it's not likely to change any time soon (it was also the intent of my post), but i sure as don't accept that this is the way things should be.
For sake we have an entire sub forum devoted to this wish listing / complaining and it doesn't every accomplish a damn thing other than remind the more competitive players how truly up this game is in terms of balance.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Strg Alt wrote: Learn to play chess and you can have the time of your life at your precious tournaments.
As soon as Chess has a 200 ft tall murder bots i'm all over it.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Crimson wrote: Unless the variety of units and options is massively curtailed there always will be edgecase combos that will be anomalously powerful.
Here's the problem i have with this argument, if they had tested their products correctly they'd catch most of these "edgecase combos".
I'll give you a recent example - anyone who saw the Iron Hands leaks knew was going to broken as hell if the rumors were true, and as soon as that GT finished with half the armies being Iron Hands they FAQd that real quick, like within a few days i believe. It would have been obvious to any competent tester, i mean it was obvious to the dozens of people that showed up with Iron Hands.
I find it bizarre that some people believe game balance and fairness are properties of a competitive game. It's actually the opposite: these are needed far more for a casual, fun, weekend-at-your-friends-house game. Games where one player has or can manifest an unfair advantage are *terrible* for friends to play with one another. They cause resentment and hurt feelings and friends stop playing them with one another.
Competitive games are the ones that can withstand a lack of perfect balance and a constantly shifting metagame, because these attributes become features for the game to remain interesting over time. And competitive players generally don't have strong social relationships with one another that can become strained if someone milks an advantageous rule or unit for all it's worth.
Pointed Stick wrote: I find it bizarre that some people believe game balance and fairness are properties of a competitive game. It's actually the opposite: these are needed far more for a casual, fun, weekend-at-your-friends-house game. Games where one player has or can manifest an unfair advantage are *terrible* for friends to play with one another. They cause resentment and hurt feelings and friends stop playing them with one another.
Competitive games are the ones that can withstand a lack of perfect balance and a constantly shifting metagame, because these attributes become features for the game to remain interesting over time. And competitive players generally don't have strong social relationships with one another that can become strained if someone milks an advantageous rule or unit for all it's worth.
lol
My gaming group of 20+ years is all highly competitive 40k players, I've been a best man in a few of their weddings. But sure, I'll bet there's a ton of data out there to support your entirely pulled out of your ass anecdotal conclusion that competitive players are simply misanthropic trolls throwing gak out of the cave entrance at the rest of the community.
Pointed Stick wrote: Competitive games are the ones that can withstand a lack of perfect balance and a constantly shifting metagame, because these attributes become features for the game to remain interesting over time.
I love it when the thing i hate most about this game suddenly becomes a virtue ...
Rob Lee wrote: if "professional" Warhammer "journalists" (how did we end up with "professional" Warhammr "journalists" anyhow?!!) such as Rob Baer start deriding a particular unit/faction/ruleset GW get worried..
I was with you until this. If Rob Baer is a journalists then Spikey Bits is the National Enquirer of the Warhammer world, nothing but click bait with no real information, i get more reliable news from 4chan.
When your staff consists of people who are permanently banned from major tournaments... yeah, not really reliable. And as I understand, SB doesn't have the best reputation among actual Games Workshop honchos.
Frankly, how does anyone even read that site under the 9000 autoplaying ads anyway?
MiguelFelstone wrote: Here's the problem i have with this argument, if they had tested their products correctly they'd catch most of these "edgecase combos".
I'll give you a recent example - anyone who saw the Iron Hands leaks knew was going to broken as hell if the rumors were true, and as soon as that GT finished with half the armies being Iron Hands they FAQd that real quick, like within a few days i believe. It would have been obvious to any competent tester, i mean it was obvious to the dozens of people that showed up with Iron Hands.
They would catch more of them and they definitely should catch more of them. Some things in the unerrated IH supplement for example were so blatantly and obviously broken that it is pretty incomprehensible how no one at the GW noticed this. But still, there is always some less obvious combos. There is always the best list as long as lists are different. I am not saying that they shouldn't do better, but the perfection is nevertheless unattainable. The goal should be a balance good enough for random casual games. In casual game one faction winning 48% time and onother 52% time is close enough. It still feels that you win about half your games. But in top tier competitive environment that 48% win faction would be deemed as pointless trash.
Rob Lee wrote: if "professional" Warhammer "journalists" (how did we end up with "professional" Warhammr "journalists" anyhow?!!) such as Rob Baer start deriding a particular unit/faction/ruleset GW get worried..
I was with you until this. If Rob Baer is a journalists then Spikey Bits is the National Enquirer of the Warhammer world, nothing but click bait with no real information, i get more reliable news from 4chan.
When your staff consists of people who are permanently banned from major tournaments... yeah, not really reliable. And as I understand, SB doesn't have the best reputation among actual Games Workshop honchos.
Frankly, how does anyone even read that site under the 9000 autoplaying ads anyway?
It's cool, you can pay $5 a month and get access to their even slower and somehow more broken members only website.
Edit: Totally off topic, but Goonhammer is what Spikey Bits could have been
MiguelFelstone wrote: Here's the problem i have with this argument, if they had tested their products correctly they'd catch most of these "edgecase combos".
I'll give you a recent example - anyone who saw the Iron Hands leaks knew was going to broken as hell if the rumors were true, and as soon as that GT finished with half the armies being Iron Hands they FAQd that real quick, like within a few days i believe. It would have been obvious to any competent tester, i mean it was obvious to the dozens of people that showed up with Iron Hands.
They would catch more of them and they definitely should catch more of them. Some things in the unerrated IH supplement for example were so blatantly and obviously broken that it is pretty incomprehensible how no one at the GW noticed this. But still, there is always some less obvious combos. There is always the best list as long as lists are different. I am not saying that they shouldn't do better, but the perfection is nevertheless unattainable. The goal should be a balance good enough for random casual games. In casual game one faction winning 48% time and onother 52% time is close enough. It still feels that you win about half your games. But in top tier competitive environment that 48% win faction would be deemed as pointless trash.
Yeah, this is the thing. All of this. As someone said before, there's diminishing returns the more balanced you try to get the game. Getting it 75% balanced is easy. Getting it 90% balanced is really effing hard. Getting it 95% balanced is damn near impossible. And getting it 100% balanced is literally impossible without making all the armies exactly the same.
The point so many of us are trying to make but people seem determined to ignore is that GW's goal, obviously, when doing their playtesting, is just to get it balanced enough for the kinds of friendly games most people are playing. If a big mistake breaks through the cracks and totally screws up the tournament meta, like Iron Hands or the Castellan, they correct that with FAQ / Errata as quickly as they can. They're going to stick with this model, because no matter what the top-selling kits are (I've already explained why that's a stupid metric; and seriously, GW has a lot more sales data and sales analysis then any of us in this thread do), they know that their bread and the butter is the IP, and the breadth of the hobby's appeal, not tournaments and hardcore competitors. They're even deliberately gearing other games more towards the tournament scene - like Underworlds - specifically to cash in more on tournaments while maintaining the wide ranging appeal of 40k.
That's what it boils down to. If you want to be a competitively focused player, that's 100% fine. And heck, if you wanna be really really angry that 40k isn't priority built for the competitive scene, that's fine too, but it's really not going to ever change, and you might be better off playing something different if possible. And if you demand 40k change in ways that would come at the expense of other players' priorities, well, that's not as okay, and will probably ruffle a few feathers. Likewise with being a snide, condescending jerk to people just because they don't share your aggressive, negative outlook on the game.
Also, finally: a really good player can still do a hell of a lot better with Grey Knights than a naive newcomer can do with Space Marines.
Pointed Stick wrote: Competitive games are the ones that can withstand a lack of perfect balance and a constantly shifting metagame, because these attributes become features for the game to remain interesting over time.
I love it when the thing i hate most about this game suddenly becomes a virtue ...
It's not wrong though. The competitive players seem to WANT there to be uber broken combos so they can feel superior by finding them (the irony being that GW's combos are so poor that anyone with a brain could look at them and figure out the "best" one) compared to your average scrubs who don't know. So yes, it would appear that comp players really don't want balance because they find the most interesting part to be finding and using the unbalanced things, and if things were balanced then they wouldn't be able to do that. At least that's how it often seems since a key part of being a competitive player is finding the broken combos and using them to the max, so those existing have to factor into the picture.
I also feel that bad balance hurts casual more than competitive because your comp players are going to inevitably drift to the broken combos anyways, no matter what they are, so if 90% of the units in an army suck it won't matter to the competitive person who will just focus on the 10% that are good anyways and ignore the rest because they are only interested in the good. The person really hurt is the casual person who really likes the 90% that suck and doesn't like the 10% that is good, because now what they've chosen is detrimental to them winning games simply by existing. That's not to say that competitive players wouldn't benefit from better balance, but in the end, it doesn't affect them as much because they will just jump to whatever is good to stay competitive. Usually (but not always) your comp players aren't kept interested in an army by anything other than how well it performs so are more likely to swap armies without the same sort of emotional attachment your more casual players tend to have.
In regards to Kill Team, I don't believe it was ever designed for tournament balance since the game went to great effort not to change data sheets and points (at the time Kill Team came out) from what would be found in full 40k. With Arena efforts were placed to control the battlefield and Line of Sight variables, but no changes to actually occurred among factions. So given the new battlefield conditions some factions move up in the meta playing Arena compared to a more typical game of Kill Team. But that was about it., The standard meta of faction that has access to chaff units and several powerful special/heavy weapons remained unchanged. So I would argue not much balance was added to Kill Team over full 40k, save a limited scope of units and standard Command Point generation. Which allows the game to be much more balanced, but it still has fairly well defined Upper, Mid and Lower tier factions.
I agree that KT originally wasn't meant for any tourney play, but KT Arena was basically GW admitting that they saw a market in catering to a more tourney playerbase. Now whether they follow through with that is another matter.
I am honestly of the opinion that GW desires the tourney money more and more, but aren't really sure how they should approach it or how it will affect their processes.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
Well yeah, if they keep chucking money at something they profess to hate, then it's not the people making the thing that keeps selling who are the problem, tbh.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
Well yeah, if they keep chucking money at something they profess to hate, then it's not the people making the thing that keeps selling who are the problem, tbh.
Unrelated but this goes down the slope of "good enough" and mediocrity. And when you accept mediocrity you have no reason to improve. Doubly so when mediocrity gets you record-breaking profits. I would argue it's partially GW's fault for following the "eh good enough" mindset but more on the players who accepted the mediocrity that was 8th with "Well it's better than 7th!" and fell for most of GW's smoke and mirrors. That's who is really to blame, because 7th was the slap in the face to GW that things needed to change but 8th wasn't change enough (rather, it quickly spiraled out of control) but just better enough to make everyone forget the issues.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
Well yeah, if they keep chucking money at something they profess to hate, then it's not the people making the thing that keeps selling who are the problem, tbh.
Unrelated but this goes down the slope of "good enough" and mediocrity. And when you accept mediocrity you have no reason to improve. Doubly so when mediocrity gets you record-breaking profits. I would argue it's partially GW's fault, but more on the players who accepted the mediocrity that was 8th with "Well it's better than 7th!" and fell for most of GW's smoke and mirrors.
Or, and here's a crazy thought, maybe the players that "accepted the mediocrity" actually LIKE 8th, didn't "fall for" anything, and genuinely have fun using the rules for a narrative combat simulation game without needing it to be 100% perfect.
Wait, that'll probably get me called a White Knight.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
Well yeah, if they keep chucking money at something they profess to hate, then it's not the people making the thing that keeps selling who are the problem, tbh.
Unrelated but this goes down the slope of "good enough" and mediocrity. And when you accept mediocrity you have no reason to improve. Doubly so when mediocrity gets you record-breaking profits. I would argue it's partially GW's fault, but more on the players who accepted the mediocrity that was 8th with "Well it's better than 7th!" and fell for most of GW's smoke and mirrors.
Or, and here's a crazy thought, maybe the players that "accepted the mediocrity" actually LIKE 8th, didn't "fall for" anything, and genuinely have fun using the rules for a narrative combat simulation game without needing it to be 100% perfect.
Wait, that'll probably get me called a White Knight.
Oh look at the white... no, seriously. I mean, sure. But there's no way of knowing that. Definitely Dakka has a bigger share of people who are overly concerned about competitive balance and competitive play. But really is 8th all that better than 7th? It started out that way sure but now? I'm not so sure. It seems like it's gotten overly bloated just like 7th did before.
I do think that there's a whole lot of people who don't play uber competitively that have no issues, but to me that's more "It doesn't affect me so there's no problem"
Unrelated but this goes down the slope of "good enough" and mediocrity. And when you accept mediocrity you have no reason to improve. Doubly so when mediocrity gets you record-breaking profits. I would argue it's partially GW's fault for following the "eh good enough" mindset but more on the players who accepted the mediocrity that was 8th with "Well it's better than 7th!" and fell for most of GW's smoke and mirrors. That's who is really to blame, because 7th was the slap in the face to GW that things needed to change but 8th wasn't change enough (rather, it quickly spiraled out of control) but just better enough to make everyone forget the issues.
It rather quickly spiraled out of control and then it was dealt with, spiraled again and then it was dealt with, and so on. Flyers can't cap, rule of 3, CA17 w/ Bobby and Asscan nerfs, beta smite, etc.
GW hasn't been complacent. There are noticeable and distinct differences of GW's behavior between 7th and 8th that go far beyond smoke and mirrors. To suggest otherwise is being deliberately misleading.
I kind of gak myself over GSC and it turns out they're way harder to manage, but nearly the entire community is collectively gaking itself over marines...like every god damn day. We get it. GW tried to give an option to move away from soup and it isn't going well right this moment. Calm down for like two or three months and give feedback so they can fix it.
Would you rather wait an entire edition for GW to do something or just the Spring FAQ?
nataliereed1984 wrote: or the Castellan, they correct that with FAQ / Errata as quickly as they can.
If they corrected it as quickly as they could it wouldn't have taken nearly a year to address it.
nataliereed1984 wrote: Likewise with being a snide, condescending jerk to people just because they don't share your aggressive, negative outlook on the game.
If that's how i came across i apologize.
nataliereed1984 wrote: Also, finally: a really good player can still do a hell of a lot better with Grey Knights than a naive newcomer can do with Space Marines.
Maybe if they had no idea how the game worked, like the basic systems of play - and then realistically only if they brought a single Purgation spearhead.
Sim-Life wrote: Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.
It's the customers who are wrong!
Well yeah, if they keep chucking money at something they profess to hate, then it's not the people making the thing that keeps selling who are the problem, tbh.
I love this game. I've been playing it off and on since 3rd, and if i didn't (love it) i wouldn't care this much about a single aspect. It just happens to be the one aspect that kept my local club / community strong for at least the last decade.
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Daedalus81 wrote: Would you rather wait an entire edition for GW to do something or just the Spring FAQ?
I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
MiguelFelstone wrote: I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
Well, this goes back to their release schedule being unsustainable. Nobody wants to go back to the days when some books weren't updated for years, but the rate they are putting out material is just exacerbating sloppy editing/proofreading and has got to be eating into development and playtesting time.
I am sure that some of the issues indeed stem from the swift release schedule and this is not something that can even necessarily be fixed by hiring more people. Writers simply have no time to compare notes, and this would obviously be highly important for achieving balance between factions.
Like it is decided that marines of all sorts need buffs, and one writer works on updated CSM book and another on updated loyalist marine book, and sure enough, both give buffs to these factions. It just happens that the CSM writer gives quite moderate buffs and the SM writer gives massive buffs. It is even possible that the marine supplements were written by different people, as they're so uneven.
MiguelFelstone wrote: I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
Well, this goes back to their release schedule being unsustainable. Nobody wants to go back to the days when some books weren't updated for years, but the rate they are putting out material is just exacerbating sloppy editing/proofreading and has got to be eating into development and playtesting time.
This could honestly be solved overnight if they just started open beta testing rather than all this NDA / non testing crap. If the community had access to the proposed changes they could test it under "real world" conditions and then maybe we wouldn't have to deal with the year of the Knight and the year(s? /cry) of the Space Marine.
but that's a pipe dream, it would probably eat into their profits
MiguelFelstone wrote: I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
Well, this goes back to their release schedule being unsustainable. Nobody wants to go back to the days when some books weren't updated for years, but the rate they are putting out material is just exacerbating sloppy editing/proofreading and has got to be eating into development and playtesting time.
This could honestly be solved overnight if they just started open beta testing rather than all this NDA / non testing crap. If the community had access to the proposed changes they could test it under "real world" conditions and then maybe we wouldn't have to deal with the year of the Knight and the year(s? /cry) of the Space Marine. but that's a pipe dream, it would probably eat into their profits
I dont think they are going to undermine their own published book empire by giving away points for beta testing. (for full on beta testing. its different with minor beta rules like bolter drill and smite)
imho and i know people hate it, they should go full azyr with a reasonable subscription based platform that gives you both a list builder and an automatically updating rules with options for beta rules. it gives you up to date information on armies and gives gw an idea of what people are building.
Crimson wrote: I am sure that some of the issues indeed stem from the swift release schedule and this is not something that can even necessarily be fixed by hiring more people. Writers simply have no time to compare notes, and this would obviously be highly important for achieving balance between factions.
Like it is decided that marines of all sorts need buffs, and one writer works on updated CSM book and another on updated loyalist marine book, and sure enough, both give buffs to these factions. It just happens that the CSM writer gives quite moderate buffs and the SM writer gives massive buffs. It is even possible that the marine supplements were written by different people, as they're so uneven.
It's hard to tell with the fact they don't give much information about their design process, but that seems like it's exactly what happens. The bits and pieces revealed seem to indicate that the initial parts at least are done essentially in isolation without communicating with the other designers about interactions. Likely without comparing multiple books (so missing the whole take X detachment with Y detachment combos) and, it would seem, even their own errata.
MiguelFelstone wrote: I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
Well, this goes back to their release schedule being unsustainable. Nobody wants to go back to the days when some books weren't updated for years, but the rate they are putting out material is just exacerbating sloppy editing/proofreading and has got to be eating into development and playtesting time.
This could honestly be solved overnight if they just started open beta testing rather than all this NDA / non testing crap. If the community had access to the proposed changes they could test it under "real world" conditions and then maybe we wouldn't have to deal with the year of the Knight and the year(s? /cry) of the Space Marine.
but that's a pipe dream, it would probably eat into their profits
No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Speaking of, PP DO playtest their game and even hired Warmachine's top level players to do it for them in house. Didn't work and there was still unbalanced stuff.
MiguelFelstone wrote: I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
Well, this goes back to their release schedule being unsustainable. Nobody wants to go back to the days when some books weren't updated for years, but the rate they are putting out material is just exacerbating sloppy editing/proofreading and has got to be eating into development and playtesting time.
This could honestly be solved overnight if they just started open beta testing rather than all this NDA / non testing crap. If the community had access to the proposed changes they could test it under "real world" conditions and then maybe we wouldn't have to deal with the year of the Knight and the year(s? /cry) of the Space Marine. but that's a pipe dream, it would probably eat into their profits
No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Speaking of, PP DO playtest their game and even hired Warmachine's top level players to do it for them in house. Didn't work and there was still unbalanced stuff.
Nowhere near the level of GW's unbalanced stuff, and if you look at all the possible permutations and interactions of abilities in WM/H it dwarfs the "options" that 40k has. Their beta testing was actually a really good thing.
Sim-Life wrote: No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Verses all of us not knowing what models are going to change when? Because that's the state of the game right now (see: NDAs). At least then it would be publicly available information.
I've been waiting for them to fix GK smite for years. Will it happen in a FAQ tomorrow? Next campaign book? Never? Your guess is as good as mine.
Edit: In lore every single Grey Knight is the psyker equivalent of a Librarian and yet in-game they have a laughable if it wasn't so sad "smite" and the worst spells of any Space Marine chapter.
MiguelFelstone wrote: I don't accept that it has to be one or the other, how about you develop and test something competently and THEN release it.
Well, this goes back to their release schedule being unsustainable. Nobody wants to go back to the days when some books weren't updated for years, but the rate they are putting out material is just exacerbating sloppy editing/proofreading and has got to be eating into development and playtesting time.
This could honestly be solved overnight if they just started open beta testing rather than all this NDA / non testing crap. If the community had access to the proposed changes they could test it under "real world" conditions and then maybe we wouldn't have to deal with the year of the Knight and the year(s? /cry) of the Space Marine.
but that's a pipe dream, it would probably eat into their profits
No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Speaking of, PP DO playtest their game and even hired Warmachine's top level players to do it for them in house. Didn't work and there was still unbalanced stuff.
Nowhere near the level of GW's unbalanced stuff, and if you look at all the possible permutations and interactions of abilities in WM/H it dwarfs the "options" that 40k has. Their beta testing was actually a really good thing.
It wouldn't call it "really" good. Okay maybe. Overall its improved the game but at high levels there's still a bunch of lists dominating all the others.
That's going to happen in any game with a competitive scene; there will always be something that's better and dominates, which is why "perfect balance" is a pipe dream and not a real goal. Last time I played WM/H though there was more of a variety among armies (no "one good list and the rest junk"), and a lot more of "how do I make Unit X work" without the answer of "Don't take it, take Unit Y instead" like is almost all the case in 40k.
Sim-Life wrote: No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Verses all of us not knowing what models are going to change when? Because that's the state of the game right now (see: NDAs). At least then it would be publicly available information.
I've been waiting for them to fix GK smite for years. Will it happen in a FAQ tomorrow? Next campaign book? Never? Your guess is as good as mine.
Except we know rules changes happen every 6 months?
Sim-Life wrote: No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Verses all of us not knowing what models are going to change when? Because that's the state of the game right now (see: NDAs). At least then it would be publicly available information.
I've been waiting for them to fix GK smite for years. Will it happen in a FAQ tomorrow? Next campaign book? Never? Your guess is as good as mine.
Except we know rules changes happen every 6 months?
But zero idea what might change or what's even on their radar. The process is too opaque so we have no idea what they even consider worth looking into or what they think is fine since they don't say anything.
Wayniac wrote: That's going to happen in any game with a competitive scene. Last time I played WM/H though, there was more of a variety and a lot more of "how do I make Unit X work" without the answer of "Don't take it, take Unit Y instead" like is almost all the case in 40k.
Which neatly brings us back to the point some people in this thread have been making. The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
Sim-Life wrote: No it wouldn't. Privateer Press do public beta testing and anyone who isn't super into the competitive side of the game hate it because they never know what models are going to change when. A lot of people even attribute the decline of the game partly to it.
Verses all of us not knowing what models are going to change when? Because that's the state of the game right now (see: NDAs). At least then it would be publicly available information.
I've been waiting for them to fix GK smite for years. Will it happen in a FAQ tomorrow? Next campaign book? Never? Your guess is as good as mine.
Except we know rules changes happen every 6 months?
Yeah but we don't know what those changes are ...
We just know it will happen, maybe, something, god knows what, but something is going to happen
How is that in any way useful?
Wayniac wrote: That's going to happen in any game with a competitive scene. Last time I played WM/H though, there was more of a variety and a lot more of "how do I make Unit X work" without the answer of "Don't take it, take Unit Y instead" like is almost all the case in 40k.
Which neatly brings us back to the point some people in this thread have been making. The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
See I don't think that's a valid point though. The game can and should be balanced better so there's LESS broken combos. What you said just goes back to "eh good enough" and reinforcing mediocrity rather than at least try to be better.
Wayniac wrote: That's going to happen in any game with a competitive scene. Last time I played WM/H though, there was more of a variety and a lot more of "how do I make Unit X work" without the answer of "Don't take it, take Unit Y instead" like is almost all the case in 40k.
Which neatly brings us back to the point some people in this thread have been making. The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
Except if you balance for the competitive well, you'll get balance for casual play too.
Or, to put it another way (or possibly to go off on a tangent), if you want to play a Narrative game of a small contingent of Space Marines holding out against an endless horde of Nids, that's an unbalanced scenario. You can achieve that in the game, as it stands, right now, by giving the Marines something like 1,500 points and the Nids 3,000, plus infinitely respawning dudes.
However, it's only with great difficulty that you can get a FAIR match-up between the Nids and the Marines, if both players are skilled. Nids are just too pricey/lack the options that Marines have.
It's easy to unbalance a balanced game. It's not nearly as easy to balance an unbalanced one. And when the rules cost hundreds of dollars, I damn well expect them to be doing the hard work instead of me.
JNAProductions wrote: It's easy to unbalance a balanced game. It's not nearly as easy to balance an unbalanced one. And when the rules cost hundreds of dollars, I damn well expect them to be doing the hard work instead of me.
This 100%. It's much easier to relax tight rules than tighten up loose ones. At least that way you minimize the imbalances (they will still exist of course but you want to minimize it) but provide the option to relax restrictions if it fits.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Crimson wrote: I am sure that some of the issues indeed stem from the swift release schedule and this is not something that can even necessarily be fixed by hiring more people. Writers simply have no time to compare notes, and this would obviously be highly important for achieving balance between factions.
Like it is decided that marines of all sorts need buffs, and one writer works on updated CSM book and another on updated loyalist marine book, and sure enough, both give buffs to these factions. It just happens that the CSM writer gives quite moderate buffs and the SM writer gives massive buffs. It is even possible that the marine supplements were written by different people, as they're so uneven.
It's hard to tell with the fact they don't give much information about their design process, but that seems like it's exactly what happens. The bits and pieces revealed seem to indicate that the initial parts at least are done essentially in isolation without communicating with the other designers about interactions. Likely without comparing multiple books (so missing the whole take X detachment with Y detachment combos) and, it would seem, even their own errata.
The rumor in older editions (and it’s so silly it actually sounds like GW) is that the codex writers all did their books by themselves with just their circle of friends playtesting so each book was done in a silo. The allure of 8th Ed with its massive reset to points values and paring down of useless rules into those four indexes was the hope that they’d plan the codices together for once instead of in separate cycles years apart.
It appears likely there was far less of a reboot in the codices than there was in the rule book sadly. Still I think everyone tried to build more balanced take all comers lists we’d see a more balanced game instead of trying spam min/max deathstar combos.
JNAProductions wrote: Except if you balance for the competitive well, you'll get balance for casual play too.
His point was balance isn't a priority to majority of the (casual) player base and thus isn't one for the company who makes it, and i can't say i disagree, but it shouldn't be this way.
JNAProductions wrote: Except if you balance for the competitive well, you'll get balance for casual play too.
His point was balance isn't a priority to majority of the (casual) player base and thus isn't one for the company who makes it, and i can't say i disagree, but it shouldn't be this way.
That's a fair statement, but only partially true, I feel.
If I play my Nurgle Daemons against someone's Nids, we'll have a good game in all probability.
If I play GK against your SM... Not so much.
I think this statement is true: "Casual players don't care as much about balance as tournament players" where tournament players are those who want a good challenge and game, not including meta-chasing netlisters who just want easy wins. But to say they DON'T care is, far as I can tell, false.
Crimson wrote: I am sure that some of the issues indeed stem from the swift release schedule and this is not something that can even necessarily be fixed by hiring more people. Writers simply have no time to compare notes, and this would obviously be highly important for achieving balance between factions.
Like it is decided that marines of all sorts need buffs, and one writer works on updated CSM book and another on updated loyalist marine book, and sure enough, both give buffs to these factions. It just happens that the CSM writer gives quite moderate buffs and the SM writer gives massive buffs. It is even possible that the marine supplements were written by different people, as they're so uneven.
It's hard to tell with the fact they don't give much information about their design process, but that seems like it's exactly what happens. The bits and pieces revealed seem to indicate that the initial parts at least are done essentially in isolation without communicating with the other designers about interactions. Likely without comparing multiple books (so missing the whole take X detachment with Y detachment combos) and, it would seem, even their own errata.
The rumor in older editions (and it’s so silly it actually sounds like GW) is that the codex writers all did their books by themselves with just their circle of friends playtesting so each book was done in a silo. The allure of 8th Ed with its massive reset to points values and paring down of useless rules into those four indexes was the hope that they’d plan the codices together for once instead of in separate cycles years apart.
It appears likely there was far less of a reboot in the codices than there was in the rule book sadly. Still I think everyone tried to build more balanced take all comers lists we’d see a more balanced game instead of trying spam min/max deathstar combos.
Well yes. The idea seems to be that people are building TAC lists at best or hodgepodge "I bought these kewl models let me use them" at worst, not heavily min/maxed uber lists. That's always been the case though, and GW has never really focused on building anything remotely resembling a "strong" list but usually something with a variety that, I would guess, makes for a fun game at the club over a pint. Whether that's intentional is up for debate.
The design process is hard to nail down. It appears at some point they do communicate, but it doesn't appear to be during the actual design of the rules, or if they do it seems like there's little or no discussion about how this interacts with X in another codex. From the bits I've read about their external playtesting it's very basic. Things like here take this 1500 point army we designed and play a game or two and see if the rules feel like they work. So completely ignoring the fact that the main issues come up in listbuilding. Since all the playtesters are under NDA it's impossible to really tell but that's the rumor.
JNAProductions wrote: Except if you balance for the competitive well, you'll get balance for casual play too.
His point was balance isn't a priority to majority of the (casual) player base and thus isn't one for the company who makes it, and i can't say i disagree, but it shouldn't be this way.
That's a fair statement, but only partially true, I feel.
If I play my Nurgle Daemons against someone's Nids, we'll have a good game in all probability.
If I play GK against your SM... Not so much.
I think this statement is true: "Casual players don't care as much about balance as tournament players" where tournament players are those who want a good challenge and game, not including meta-chasing netlisters who just want easy wins. But to say they DON'T care is, far as I can tell, false.
Pointed Stick wrote: Competitive games are the ones that can withstand a lack of perfect balance and a constantly shifting metagame, because these attributes become features for the game to remain interesting over time.
I love it when the thing i hate most about this game suddenly becomes a virtue ...
It's not wrong though. The competitive players seem to WANT there to be uber broken combos so they can feel superior by finding them (the irony being that GW's combos are so poor that anyone with a brain could look at them and figure out the "best" one) compared to your average scrubs who don't know. So yes, it would appear that comp players really don't want balance because they find the most interesting part to be finding and using the unbalanced things, and if things were balanced then they wouldn't be able to do that. At least that's how it often seems since a key part of being a competitive player is finding the broken combos and using them to the max, so those existing have to factor into the picture.
What you're describing isn't imbalance, though. You're just describing the game having tactical components. Some strategies, combos, etc being better than others is just an inherent part of ANY game of skill with win/lose conditions. Finding and exploiting them to their best potential is the skill in question. Balance is about different factions or units or characters within a game that offers such choices having relatively comparable abilities to succeed; like if ALL the best combos / strategies / moves / whatever were for a certain faction / character / whatever, and all the worst ones were for another, that would be an example of (severe) imbalance.
Like, it's not "unbalanced" for King's Pawn to King Four to be the best opening move in chess.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Name a mini wargame with good balance at high level competitive play. I'll wait.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Name a mini wargame with good balance at high level competitive play. I'll wait.
Good balance? Take your pick of any non-GW game.
Perfect balance with no crazy combos? There's your "I'll wait" but again nobody is asking for that, just for GW to do better which clearly IS possible since all their competitors can achieve better balance.
Now now. I get what they're going for, even if I disagree. I think they are missing the idea that just because other games have balance issues:
A) Those issues are inevitably less profound than the issues in 40k at best, and at worst take more than 10 minutes flipping through a "tested" book to discover. B) That doesn't mean GW isn't doing a piss poor job and should do better C) Every game imaginable is going to have SOME balance issues. Eliminating them isn't the goal, but minimizing them should be.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Name a mini wargame with good balance at high level competitive play. I'll wait.
X-Wing was pretty balanced for a few years but a single good dice roll could change a game on turn 2.
Now now. I get what they're going for, even if I disagree. I think they are missing the idea that just because other games have balance issues:
A) Those issues are inevitably less profound than the issues in 40k B) That doesn't mean GW isn't doing a piss poor job and should do better.
The game seems to work "fine" (for varying definitions of fine) for people who don't try to push it to the breaking point and see what snaps. Using it as an ultra-competitive game and expecting balanced rules is a fool's errand. I contend (and will likely continue to do so) that the fault lies with the consumer for using the product in a manner inconsistent with its intended usage, and then being upset that the product doesn't work "as advertised."
We can debate all day the varying levels of "fine" the game may or may not be. We can debate whether or not GW "should" do "better" for varying definitions of should and better. However, the fact remains that it is the best-selling wargame on the market, and I think it's disingenuous to claim that is solely due to people buying a sub-standard product out of some misplaced loyalty to a company.
Now now. I get what they're going for, even if I disagree. I think they are missing the idea that just because other games have balance issues:
A) Those issues are inevitably less profound than the issues in 40k B) That doesn't mean GW isn't doing a piss poor job and should do better.
The game seems to work "fine" (for varying definitions of fine) for people who don't try to push it to the breaking point and see what snaps. Using it as an ultra-competitive game and expecting balanced rules is a fool's errand. I contend (and will likely continue to do so) that the fault lies with the consumer for using the product in a manner inconsistent with its intended usage, and then being upset that the product doesn't work "as advertised."
We can debate all day the varying levels of "fine" the game may or may not be. We can debate whether or not GW "should" do "better" for varying definitions of should and better. However, the fact remains that it is the best-selling wargame on the market, and I think it's disingenuous to claim that is solely due to people buying a sub-standard product out of some misplaced loyalty to a company.
I'm not sure. I think it's the best-selling by happenstance and not by actual effort; remember there was a long period of time (and still is in many areas) where Warhammer was the only game in town. But I agree with your first point. Trying to make it this uber-competitive min-maxed to the nines game just exposes all of the broken flaws, and were that not a thing I think it would be at least tolerable. It's just when you have people who want to use it in that way, the rest sort of have a go along or get crushed mindset.
Any argument that relies on claiming a majority of any given human community or population are all "duped", acting under false motivations, and/or just don't do or say what they really want, is a bad argument. People are irrational, sure, and don't always act in their best interests, but you can't just handwave away the fact that people aren't acting as they presumably would if your argument was true.
Wayniac wrote: It's just when you have people who want to use it in that way, the rest sort of have a go along or get crushed mindset.
While i'm not a huge fan of hive mind:
This is exactly why i apologized earlier for generalizing. There are "casual" ("hobby" whatever you want to call it) aspects of this game i love. The story in all its glorious forms, learning to airbursh, building my first diorama and terrain pieces, hell i enjoy the banter on 40klore - but none of that negates the fact i want a balanced game for both the tournament scene / weekly games with the club, and i honestly don't think i'm asking much.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Name a mini wargame with good balance at high level competitive play. I'll wait.
Good balance? Take your pick of any non-GW game.
Perfect balance with no crazy combos? There's your "I'll wait" but again nobody is asking for that, just for GW to do better which clearly IS possible since all their competitors can achieve better balance.
But again I contend that 40k does have decent balance at a casual level. Competitive play is based entirely around crazy combos because that's the standard that competitive players judge a units rules at and claiming that 40k is unbalanced because of competitive outliers is a mistake. Look at that Sisters review thread from a few weeks back. The poster compared the entire codex to what was the strongest faction on the competitive scene and judged it to be weak, whereas most people who played Sisters at a casual level seemed to think there was a lot of good stuff in there.
If you want to play highly competitive ANYTHING you need to accept that you'll be playing/comparing against what is most broken at a given time because there will always be a dominant list in any given mini wargame because no game can have good balance when pushed to extremes that the competitive scene encourages, even with stuff like public testing so to demand balance where it isn't wanted is silly.
Sim-Life wrote: But again I contend that 40k does have decent balance at a casual level.
That seems to be the crux of a lot of these arguments, different players have different views on what they'd consider "decent" balance.
Someone like myself for example, a "competitive" player (someone who gets to play 2 games a week if i'm lucky) would not consider the current state of the game balanced for anyone.
Say two best friends start collecting together, one picks Necron, the other Iron Hands - that would be the end of that friendship
Casual / competitive / whatever the game is not balanced in any format, and to argue otherwise seems laughable (to me).
Say two best friends start collecting together, one picks Necron, the other Iron Hands - that would be the end of that friendship
I'm not sure that's necessarily true, though? How hardcore is the guy who picked Iron Hands? Is he min/maxing and looking for hardcore combos and ideal ways to exploit the factions and such, or did he pick them just because he likes grumpy cyborgs and he enjoys the story of a legion that have unknowingly utterly perverted the values of their primarch, and focuses on using lots of dreadnaughts and tech-priests and servitors and tarantulas and stuff, because that fits the feel of the chapter? How about the one who picked Necrons? Is she a good sport? Does she mind losing? Is she more focused and competitive than the IH player, and consequently puts much more attention into choosing optimal units, traits and strategems than he does?
This sounds like a tangent, but it really is key to our entire point that while it's not perfect, the game really isn't THAT bad for the purpose of friendly games between people mostly drawn in by the IP and the models. For most pairings of armies, if built by people who are primarily choosing their units around which models they like best and suit the "story" they have in mind for their army, the relative skill of the players will matter far more than which faction they chose (with the exception of those pairings with a clear rock-paper-scissors issue going on).
Also, if those two friends keep those two armies for a few years, sooner or later the rules and tiers will shift, and Necrons will become the "better" army anyway.
Thing is IH are pretty damn crazy without any attempts to intentionally break the game. They just get a crazy amount of powerful bonus rules.
So yeah, if one people chooses an army made out of random IH units and another makes an army out of random Necron units, the former will have a significant advantage and will probably result an unfun gaming experience.
Crimson wrote: Thing is IH are pretty damn crazy without any attempts to intentionally break the game. They just get a crazy amount of powerful bonus rules.
So yeah, if one people chooses an army made out of random IH units and another makes an army out of random Necron units, the former will have a significant advantage and will probably result an unfun gaming experience.
IH is one of those outliers that everyone can see getting nerfed from a mile away but meta-chasers buy into anyway.
Crimson wrote: Thing is IH are pretty damn crazy without any attempts to intentionally break the game. They just get a crazy amount of powerful bonus rules.
So yeah, if one people chooses an army made out of random IH units and another makes an army out of random Necron units, the former will have a significant advantage and will probably result an unfun gaming experience.
IH is one of those outliers that everyone can see getting nerfed from a mile away but meta-chasers buy into anyway.
And I look forward to post FAQ threads talking about how the Iron Hands nerf clearly indicates that GW must have sold enough Marine models, so they moved on to selling all those Necron kits they had in the warehouse (Please, GW. I'd love to be the new hotness. Just this once).
Crimson wrote: Thing is IH are pretty damn crazy without any attempts to intentionally break the game. They just get a crazy amount of powerful bonus rules.
So yeah, if one people chooses an army made out of random IH units and another makes an army out of random Necron units, the former will have a significant advantage and will probably result an unfun gaming experience.
IH is one of those outliers that everyone can see getting nerfed from a mile away but meta-chasers buy into anyway.
This is my inner b**** coming through, but I sort of feel like anyone who bought an Iron Hands army just to exploit a temporary meta advantage for a couple months kiiiiiiinda deserves what they inevitably get.
I also think the Grey Knights situation is somewhat funny, because in lore they're the Big Awesome Ultra-Elite Incorruptibly-Pure Even-Better-Than-Astartes Astartes Top-Secret Weapon Of The Imperium, and the idea of players who wanted them for that "most elite" aspect (before Custodes, anyway) ending up stuck with the worst army in-game is… well, with due sympathy for GK players, you still gotta admit it's kinda hilarious.
Back in 3rd ed when marines were 14 pts/model GK were 25. Terminators were 46 pts/model, the psycannon only had special rules vs demons, and their only ranged anti tank were lascannons on dreads or LRs. In 3rd edition it was appropriate to paint a bullseye on your dread because they were dead on turn 1.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Name a mini wargame with good balance at high level competitive play. I'll wait.
Good balance? Take your pick of any non-GW game.
Perfect balance with no crazy combos? There's your "I'll wait" but again nobody is asking for that, just for GW to do better which clearly IS possible since all their competitors can achieve better balance.
But again I contend that 40k does have decent balance at a casual level. Competitive play is based entirely around crazy combos because that's the standard that competitive players judge a units rules at and claiming that 40k is unbalanced because of competitive outliers is a mistake. Look at that Sisters review thread from a few weeks back. The poster compared the entire codex to what was the strongest faction on the competitive scene and judged it to be weak, whereas most people who played Sisters at a casual level seemed to think there was a lot of good stuff in there.
If you want to play highly competitive ANYTHING you need to accept that you'll be playing/comparing against what is most broken at a given time because there will always be a dominant list in any given mini wargame because no game can have good balance when pushed to extremes that the competitive scene encourages, even with stuff like public testing so to demand balance where it isn't wanted is silly.
Yeah I'm calling BS on this argument. Somebody playing a casual Grey Knights or Harlequins or Dark Angels list will always have a disadvantage against a casual Iron Hands or Eldar or Imperial Knights. Casual lists for those armies are hurt because they get less out of trying to do the same exact combos (especially for Dark Angels compared to even the base Marine codex without Supplements).
If you're saying casual means "nobody cares what happens and sometimes you'll charge your Fire Warriors into melee just because it's fun", then you don't even need to buy GWs garbage rules to do that. You could simply just roll dice, not even pay attention to the value, and go "pewpew". HOWEVER, you are paying for rules, and the rules aren't even "good enough". They're just bad.
Sim-Life wrote: The game is balanced for a casual level, so expecting it to be balanced for high level competition is unrealistic and never going to happen.
That's quite the defeatist attitude. If the Broom Makers Kabal had thought like - Curling wouldn't be an Olympic sport
Name a mini wargame with good balance at high level competitive play. I'll wait.
Good balance? Take your pick of any non-GW game.
Perfect balance with no crazy combos? There's your "I'll wait" but again nobody is asking for that, just for GW to do better which clearly IS possible since all their competitors can achieve better balance.
But again I contend that 40k does have decent balance at a casual level. Competitive play is based entirely around crazy combos because that's the standard that competitive players judge a units rules at and claiming that 40k is unbalanced because of competitive outliers is a mistake. Look at that Sisters review thread from a few weeks back. The poster compared the entire codex to what was the strongest faction on the competitive scene and judged it to be weak, whereas most people who played Sisters at a casual level seemed to think there was a lot of good stuff in there.
If you want to play highly competitive ANYTHING you need to accept that you'll be playing/comparing against what is most broken at a given time because there will always be a dominant list in any given mini wargame because no game can have good balance when pushed to extremes that the competitive scene encourages, even with stuff like public testing so to demand balance where it isn't wanted is silly.
Yeah I'm calling BS on this argument. Somebody playing a casual Grey Knights or Harlequins or Dark Angels list will always have a disadvantage against a casual Iron Hands or Eldar or Imperial Knights. Casual lists for those armies are hurt because they get less out of trying to do the same exact combos (especially for Dark Angels compared to even the base Marine codex without Supplements).
If you're saying casual means "nobody cares what happens and sometimes you'll charge your Fire Warriors into melee just because it's fun", then you don't even need to buy GWs garbage rules to do that. You could simply just roll dice, not even pay attention to the value, and go "pewpew". HOWEVER, you are paying for rules, and the rules aren't even "good enough". They're just bad.
Right. The thing is, it's not good enough for casual play. Someone who picks the army du jour unintentionally will curbstomp someone who picks a weak army. It doesn't matter if the guy playing IH is cheesing or not; he will likely crush his friend who plays Necrons no matter what because his army is just so much better because they got lucky. That's the antithesis of "good enough" for casual play unless you think it's okay that someone is unfairly punished just because they liked how the "terminator zombie robots" (i.e. Necrons) look.
That's why it's not good enough at any level: The game tells you pick what you think is cool, and then turns around and kicks you in the balls if you picked one of the factions that haven't gotten love.
If you're saying casual means "nobody cares what happens and sometimes you'll charge your Fire Warriors into melee just because it's fun", then you don't even need to buy GWs garbage rules to do that. You could simply just roll dice, not even pay attention to the value, and go "pewpew". HOWEVER, you are paying for rules, and the rules aren't even "good enough". They're just bad.
Uh… there's worth to rules beyond just determining who wins.
Like… actually conveying an immersive story? If a player decides to have their fire warriors charge into melee because it's fun, they probably want the rules to reflect what would happen if a bunch of riflemen try to punch people to death: they die when they hit close combat, inflicting only minor injuries. You can't get that just by "rolling a die".
For narratively-focused players, the rules and balance aren't there for winning vs losing, it's for having the battle play out in a way that shows an interesting story that "makes sense" for the lore and the units involved and the modelling thereof, and that the players can't overly anticipate in advance.
But again, IH are a temporary outlier that will get nerfed in March (if not before), so you can't really base an argument on the overall state of the game on one temporary cherry picked example.
believe that, for sure, look at the 
Sigh, I thought it was obvious I was referencing the other hot topic of the day in a light hearted way.
