I just recently watched the "Tabletop Titans" video on how to play Orks in 9th edition. For a quick TL;DW, their assessment of orks was essentially:
Pros: Games last only 5 turns now, and morale is a bit better with huge unsupported hordes, so orks can much more often win games by controlling the board and outlasting their opponent.
Cons: Multicharge, changes to "always fight first" rules and coherency changes make screens even more difficult to deal with as a melee army - their advice was, huddle around KFFs and Painboyz and let the enemy come to you! Also, as one of the three factions in the game that will be bringing 11+ model squads, a lot of enemy lists will gain arbitrary power spikes against you with blast weapons they would be including in their armies.
I finished up the video, sat back in my chair, and thought "Huh, what a perfect encapsulation of why balancing for competitive tournament play DOESN'T automatically make the game better for casual narrative play!"
This is a chestnut oft brought up by the more competitively minded crowd, wishing that GW would just balance for the top-level tournament and ignore "garage hammer" or "Narrative hammer" when it comes to their gameplay changes. As long as the focus is maintained on competitive winrates and keeping the competitive meta diverse, casual players will automatically receive a better, more balanced experience!
Except....
Looking at a faction's winrate in a competitive setting alone to determine how good they're doing, and looking at the # of factions represented in the top-level competitive meta alone to determine overall game health introduces major blindspots that can make the game miserable to actually experience for the players.
Here's some stuff that's perfectly fine in a game balanced around competitive parameters alone:
1) Two factions are narratively supposed to be the "good and evil" opposites of one another. however, the "good" faction has a number of significant gameplay advantages that lead to them absolutely slaughtering the "evil" faction's troops in a straight up fight, requiring the "evil" faction to rely on a few specific combos that revolve around fringe elements of their codex, while the "good" faction can field a well-balanced mix of units that looks like something right off the codex cover art. As long as both have a 50% competitive winrate, this is a healthy game state!
2) A faction can field 4-5 essentially unkillable models at a given game size. Any opponent of them spends the entire game playing a punching bag, often losing all the weapons they could possibly affect their opponent's models turns 1-2. As long as missions rely on board control and the unkillable models do not have above a 50% winrate, this is a healthy game state!
3) A faction whose background is melee-based, belligerent aggression can win 50% of their competitive games, but only by huddling around defensive buffs and screens, sitting on objective markers and taking it on the chin. This is a healthy game state!
4) Meta A includes the following dominant factions: Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, Tau, Orks, Tyranids, Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar, Space Marines. Meta B includes the following dominant factions: Space Marines, Grey Knights, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Deathwatch, Eldar, Tau. Meta A and Meta B are exactly as healthy as one another - same number of different factions!
5) For the same number of points, a player can take a super-heavy walker, or 50 light infantry units. At a given game size, most models cannot meaningfully interact with the super-heavy walker, while most weapons can harm the light infantry models. However, it takes significantly more time to move the light infantry models than the superheavy walker, meaning that it is more important to incentivize players taking the former over the latter in a game designed around ensuring that players can complete a tournament game within the desired timeframe!
You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.
However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!
Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.
ryuken87 wrote: You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.
However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!
Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.
That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.
1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.
2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!
3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!
Any developer worth his salt knows that balancing for the top end of the competitive bracket of a game is a completely different beast than balancing the game for the medium or casual level.
Theres a ton of interactions that become clear and easy to top players and help balance the game that are just impossible for less skilled people, making interactive and unfun realities in the gameplay.
The "Git Gud "mentality applied outside some specific instances is just a non sequitur, because becoming better at something doesn't implies that it is actually worth becoming better at that specific skill or that it is even desired to just have a fun time.
8th edition was extremely balanced pre space marine supplements and post february space marine nerf in the competitive level, and assault was probably the most important phase of the game but just to supress your opponent and move around, not to actually kill him. Dominating charges, pile ins and consolidations, tripointing, etc... was probably the most relevant parts of the skillset of a top competitive player of 8th. All of those "skills" are objetively irrelevant and just not a skill worth working for.
But nothing of that applies to mid level or casual level play, and you have a ton and ton of unfun experiences of people being blasted of the table without knowing what has gone wrong because they feel powerless many times by unintuitive interactions.
TLR; A good developer will try to achieve a easy to understand game with intuitive interactions and enough depth so that both casual players can have a fun time and let room for skill to show. But when a casual player loses in a intuitive game to a more skilled one, it is not a unfun experience, because they can understand, even if they aren't capable of doing it, why they have lose. The skill is right there. But in an unintuitive enviroment they'll lose to some abstract rule interaction they just can't wrap their heads around.
All of this becomes even more relevant in warhammer were miniatures are expensive and time consuming to build, paint ,etc... and you can't change your "options" on the whim.
Yes, just looking at tournament wins and loses to see how good a competitive product it is something out of arm-chair developers. It is usefull data of course but not the only relevant one.
I've often wondered what the draw was for the super competitive players. 40k has never been particularly well balanced. There's always the new hotness. Like in 5th edition when everyone ran ultramarines until someone noticed that Salamanders were better. Suddenly we had green marines everywhere, but only until the Space Wolves codex dropped and they started turning gray until the Blood Angels codex came out and they started turning red again. The competitive players don't seem to show any allegiance to any faction. They will always field the best army they can and if they have the resources to buy a whole new army like (again back in the days of 5th) GK or Necrons they will. So again I wonder what the draw is.
If competition is the thing, aren't there much, much better-designed games out there? Is GW's market dominance the only reason? Because it's clear that they don't care about army theme or playstyle.
As I see it balance is an evolving process. In a perfect world everything would be balanced, there would be no trap factions and no trap units and no trap equipment options. Force Org charts would be restored to ensure people couldn't take skew lists (which would be disliked, because people like choice, but if you have choice you can choose to skew.) People would then get reasonably balanced rather than one-sided games.
But that is obviously incredibly hard, and very rarely achieved in any game system I can think of. Even if you had perfection in isolation, some things will tend to be better than other things just because of what meta exists.
While I can appreciate you might not like hiding on KFFs and Painboys (and I'm not sold that is how Orks should play but go with it) - if it works, its better than a system where Orks simply don't work, and are a punching bag for a huge number of other factions in the game - as was the case for Orks (and indeed many other factions) in certain editions of the game.
Having established that each faction has "a competitive build", you can then hopefully try to bring other things into alignment - so you have a range of options. But historically just getting to the first step is a major advance over not having one at all.
I mean as said - *how a faction should play* is to a degree subjective. I think to a degree everyone should be able to play as they like and not get completely creamed - but really, the way to that is to dull the damage of most units in the game. Unfortunately it does not appear GW has not gone down that road (although getting points for everything would confirm it.)
What happens at the top feeds down relatively quickly to everyone else. If something overpowered is identified, it quickly becomes common place. So trying to balance at the top seems to make more sense than trying to balance for two people who don't really know how to play using armies that have been essentially built at random. You want those players to have a good idea - but its unclear that making the game balanced for competitive players hurts that.
I mean I think the blast rule is a screw up that is going to make hordes almost extinct. As far as I can see however this is a rule for casual players. I.E. "Doesn't it suck having 1 shot with your Leman Russ? Now you can blast your opponent's Orks to bits like a tank should by always getting six!"
For competitive players the risk on D6 shots (much like D6 damage) was annoying - but whether you took it or not was still just a question of the points rather than "fun".
I'm not really sure I follow your core argument here - balancing for competitive play is bad because... the current unbalanced game means that the aggressive melee army can only win by huddling up?
Surely the competitive players in this case have identified the flaw in the ork design. Asking them to balance it would logically then move on to trying to fix it, but you seem to suggest that it actually means keeping them in their broken meta state and then tweak points until they win half their games this way.
Tyel wrote: Afraid I'm struggling to follow the argument.
...
Having established that each faction has "a competitive build", you can then hopefully try to bring other things into alignment
The argument is that competitive balancing efforts cease when each faction has one competitive build without regard to theme, fluff et al. because that's all extraneous noise to the competitive guys who are, apparently,in charge of this process now.
In a game balanced around tournament play, if an army has a list that achieves top tables then that army is balanced from a competitive standpoint.
How well that list achieves the gameplay fantasy of the faction, or represents how that faction is portrayed in the fiction, or whether the list is fun to play as or against, or whether the way that the list wins games is something that casual players might even know about is irrelevant.
You see this in competitive video games a lot: A particular faction, or character, will be either abysmally bad or ridiculously strong when you look at the macro-play data that they collect, but since they balance around organized play, they'll leave that character in that state for years at a time.
Since 40k has no way to collect data from average players, and because the differential between a tournament player and an average player has more to do with, as a beloved Star Wars 1950s diner owner might put it "How good your manners are, how big your pocketbook is" than a player's skill, that would be less of a consistent problem. But the issue of having a winning playstyle that is the antithesis of a faction's intended playstyle seems to be something that is going to be pretty obnoxious going into 9th.
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A.T. wrote: I'm not really sure I follow your core argument here - balancing for competitive play is bad because... the current unbalanced game means that the aggressive melee army can only win by huddling up?
Surely the competitive players in this case have identified the flaw in the ork design. Asking them to balance it would logically then move on to trying to fix it, but you seem to suggest that it actually means keeping them in their broken meta state and then tweak points until they win half their games this way.
If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.
being aggressive with that aggressive melee army is, therefore, a mistake, and they are not in fact an "aggressive melee army" - they are a defensive huddling army!
Maybe the tournament mind set with design isn't always good for narrative games, but it should beats out what GW did in early 8th ed, or when armies are made to sub standard rules.
No army should be X, but worse. Or not ment to be played outside of of closest of friends in a western country.
Having one good build sure beats out having no good build.
Specialy when most of the games being played are not of the narrative kind.
To be fair the Ork codex was made for 8th so if it plays weirdly it is most likely due to some incompatibility between two editions.
Second I'd say that hoping for a narrative/lore appropriate representation is hopeless. Aeldari Aspect Warriors are supposed to be elite and the Aeldari are supposed to be very protective about themselves. Still doesn't change the fact that they fall like flies on the table and the elite aspects do next to nothing unless they are Shining Spears.
What I have found to be true is that it is near impossible to balance for casual gaming. Casual games are super wonky and would require hardcore army construction limits to just make it kinda workable. By balancing for competitive they can at least provide a fighting chance to the army owner even if the outcome can end up pretty stale until a new book comes out. Is it annoying if you are building your army around a different concept? Yes, but at least a solution is provided even if it is not the one someone likes.
Now, to correct myself I think casual can be balanced if the units and rules are simplified considerably. All special rules and shenanigans on datasheets removed. That way you don't have any accidental force multipliers that screw things up. The reason I say that is that a unit with subpar datasheet rules compared to another is usually garbage unless they get so cheap you can use them as dirty chaff on the field.
I noticed this in a recent narrative event with my Slaanesh daemons. I was the talk of the town, winning so many games that my faction of Chaos (Slaanesh Daemons) basically single-handedly took a planet. I got the honor of naming it, making it a daemon world, etc. etc. which is all cool long term fluff...
...but I won the games in totally un-narrative ways. It would be things like: "BEHOLD, CZUMNETH ERESHKIGAL, ARCHDAEMON OF CARCOSA AND ARCHITECT OF AGONY! SHE IS YOUR DOO-" *deleted by shadwosword*
"A cavorting carnival of Daemonettes, lithely bouncing across the battlefield to deliver the caress of death to unwitting opp-" *aggressor'd*
"Sinusous legs raced through the murky fog, Seekers hollering in a riot of color and sound as they-" *torn apart by intercessors with more attacks in melee after getting the charge*
I won the games through sheer brute stupid. I sat on objectives, pinned the enemy in their DZ, and then finagled my models to be out of LOS as often as possible, wiggling in single-file lines behind a small ruin and gak like that to hold objectives. It left a bad taste in my mouth. But the only alternatives were: 1) Lose my games heroically and narratively, charging forwards the way Slaanesh Daemons would, braying and lusting. 2) Win my games awkwardly and stupidly, becoming "the army to beat" and winning the long-term fluff rewards (and the 'most narrative' award to boot, which is dumb, haha). But doing nothing actually... narrative or thematic. You could've replaced most my army with scoring beer kegs and it wouldn't've had an impact because all they did was hide and die slowly enough to win.
The game is "balanced". Indeed, in the narrative, my daemons became the girls to beat, and the next round of the campaign post-COVID is likely to see that daemon world coming under attack from all sides. But I'm considering just giving up and not playing; I don't know how many more games I can tolerate where my army just gets punching-bag'd to victory, its narrative accomplishments in any given battle being "they were slaughtered wholesale, but a lucky squad of Daemonettes found the macguffin/was standing on some arbitrary point, therefore victory."
At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.
On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.
bullyboy wrote: At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.
On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.
9th ed now helpfully gives my fluffy marine opponent
-Automatic max hits on any random shot weapon vs any of my units above min size
-The ability to fight first on my charge phase even on my turn (oh look a helpful new primaris unit that just happens to have that ability right on his datasheet, what a coinkidink!)
-The ability to cause double or more the casualties from the new coherency rules unless I'm slavishly checking and rechecking my unit's adherence to new coherency
-Removal of my ability to fight with 3 rows of orks thanks to the new 1/2" engagement range rule
-dense terrain that cuts my shooting effectiveness by 45% while cutting my opponent's shooting effectiveness by 12%
-A new board size with deployment zones small enough that I can't fit my army physically inside them
But because in competitive play, someone can squat on objectives under a KFF bubble and survive 5 turns, orks are perfectly fine and need no changes. In fact, they may need nerfs if the KFF-huddling strategy is effective enough!
ryuken87 wrote: You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.
However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!
Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.
That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.
1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.
2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!
3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!
Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.
Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.
Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.
This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.
It's not got much to do with competitive play per se, it's more a side effect of turning 9th into a shooting edition by vastly nerfing LOS-blocking compared to what was the standard in competitive 8th edition, and at the same time moving to progressive scoring.
It doesn't take a genius to see that the orky playstyle of flooding forward and beating stuff up isn't going to work well in a game where you (1) win by holding objectives at the start of your turn and (2) fall back is baseline free, can be done even when wrapped, and there are no countermeasures in the ork codex.
ryuken87 wrote: You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.
However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!
Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.
That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.
1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.
2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!
3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!
Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.
Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.
Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.
This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.
That's my point, though. The argument of "let competitive players balance the game" LEADS to failures in design. of course those are all failures in design: If competitive balance rather than design is the focus, then design will suffer.
As we are seeing, right now, with the horrible design present in the 9th edition core rules.
The core rules that appear, at least to me, to be designed around creating a game state where the greatest amount of player skill expression is in micromanagement of model placement, spacing, and movement.
9th is a game state where you can easily double the casualties you can inflict on your opponent by knowing the intricasies of the new coherency rule better than them. Or where you can double your potential targets with a shooting unit by knowing the precise wording of the new Obscuring Terrain rule. This is excellent for competitive tournament play, and absolute dogshit design.
the_scotsman wrote: If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.
Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.
Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.
bullyboy wrote: At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.
On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.
9th ed now helpfully gives my fluffy marine opponent
-Automatic max hits on any random shot weapon vs any of my units above min size
-The ability to fight first on my charge phase even on my turn (oh look a helpful new primaris unit that just happens to have that ability right on his datasheet, what a coinkidink!)
-The ability to cause double or more the casualties from the new coherency rules unless I'm slavishly checking and rechecking my unit's adherence to new coherency
-Removal of my ability to fight with 3 rows of orks thanks to the new 1/2" engagement range rule
-dense terrain that cuts my shooting effectiveness by 45% while cutting my opponent's shooting effectiveness by 12%
-A new board size with deployment zones small enough that I can't fit my army physically inside them
But because in competitive play, someone can squat on objectives under a KFF bubble and survive 5 turns, orks are perfectly fine and need no changes. In fact, they may need nerfs if the KFF-huddling strategy is effective enough!
-Which is true of basically every faction and is thematic as all hell. A cannonball kills more people when fired in to a block of 300 than a block of 3.
-A lot of armies have these abilities. Slaanesh and DE are all about that stuff. Oh no, one mediocre beatstick character gets an incredibly common melee ability. Shock. Horror.
-Which is true of any unit that fails a morale check, and is actually on average BETTER for hordes than it used to be because now you have a 16% chance of passing the test outright even if you lose 50 models in a 51 model unit with Lead 3. Take a boys unit that loses 20 models. In 8th that unit was just dead. In 9th you have a chance to not lose anything AND will only lose 3 more boyz on average.
-Or you could just put your boyz closer together? It's honestly not particularly hard to stay within 2" of 2 models with bases less barely an inch wide.
-This is annoying but is solvable, don't put your orkz in 3 rows.
-So? You have 100X the number of shots a space marine army does and now he can't stack those buffs to screw everyone else in the game up.
-You should be outflanking on the smaller boards with at least some of those units, not because you have to but because it's just better.
Also, you've overplayed your hand here. You don't give one runny dump about competitive balance or thematic army construction, or fun play. That's not what any of this has been about.
You are 100% just salty that you think marines will still be OP in 9th and that your faction might not be as good. You're trying to hide it behind blaming competitive players and competitive balance and army design or whatever, but it's just salt. If Marines are OP it's because GW made a mistake in re-pointing them out of fear of making their cash cow less profitable, not a result of 'competitive players balancing the game around competitive play!'
At least when I whine about Eradicators I admit that I'm salty because they're 3x better than my retributors with only 8 points per model more.
It is hard to compare the balance in starcraft and in table top games though. Both require training to learn how to play properly, but people playing starcraft, RTS or MOBAs, don't have to spend money like table top playing people have to, if they decide to switch armies.
There is a huge difference between changing the comp of build in star craft and making a 800+$ army bad for a seson or two. Specialy when GW updating isn't no where near as fast as that the exists for digital mediums.
ERJAK wrote: Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.
Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.
Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.
This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.
The entire point of playtesting is to reveal those design errors; saying 'it's not the playtesters at fault for not reporting design problems, it's the designer's fault for creating those problems' is completely missing the point.
If the playtesters are giving the thumbs-up on the current game state because their primary concern is mechanical balance, with no investment in whether the game matches the theme and fiction or is inherently fun to play, that's a problem with the playtesting- more specifically the demographics chosen for playtesting.
Videogame developers typically use a mixture of casual and competitive players for playtesting for this exact reason. Competitive playtesters are great for determining whether something is balanced at a high level of competitive play. Casual players are better for determining whether something is actually fun to play to begin with for a majority of the consumer base. If you don't use playtester demographics that match your target audience, the game is going to suffer.
the_scotsman wrote: In a game balanced around tournament play, if an army has a list that achieves top tables then that army is balanced from a competitive standpoint.
How well that list achieves the gameplay fantasy of the faction, or represents how that faction is portrayed in the fiction, or whether the list is fun to play as or against, or whether the way that the list wins games is something that casual players might even know about is irrelevant.
You see this in competitive video games a lot: A particular faction, or character, will be either abysmally bad or ridiculously strong when you look at the macro-play data that they collect, but since they balance around organized play, they'll leave that character in that state for years at a time.
Since 40k has no way to collect data from average players, and because the differential between a tournament player and an average player has more to do with, as a beloved Star Wars 1950s diner owner might put it "How good your manners are, how big your pocketbook is" than a player's skill, that would be less of a consistent problem. But the issue of having a winning playstyle that is the antithesis of a faction's intended playstyle seems to be something that is going to be pretty obnoxious going into 9th.
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A.T. wrote: I'm not really sure I follow your core argument here - balancing for competitive play is bad because... the current unbalanced game means that the aggressive melee army can only win by huddling up?
Surely the competitive players in this case have identified the flaw in the ork design. Asking them to balance it would logically then move on to trying to fix it, but you seem to suggest that it actually means keeping them in their broken meta state and then tweak points until they win half their games this way.
If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.
being aggressive with that aggressive melee army is, therefore, a mistake, and they are not in fact an "aggressive melee army" - they are a defensive huddling army!
1) You're far too premature
2) GW producing a tournament mission pack gets everyone on the same page - as long as we force ITC there, too
3) Things like forcing relics, strats, and spells on rosters gives us more data for what is used and how armies work
4) The painting requirement creates a difficult hurdle for meta-chasing (assuming it is followed)
5) Asserting that play-testers know that *a* build exists =/= play-testers are satisfied
People need to stop conceptualizing melee as "I get to your deployment zone and smack you around". That's stupid and non-objective based gameplay. Controlling the board is the game now *as it should be*. Melee happens mid-table and not in the opponent's zone.
ryuken87 wrote: You're right in that balancing at the competitive end of the spectrum probably has only weak or moderate effects on what happens at the casual end.
However, I would argue that it's exceedly difficult to balance the casual end because different people/local groups have different ideas of what's fluffy/narrative/broken/etc. Most fluffy armies are unoptimised, but just sometimes a fluffy army happens to be really powerful!
Balancing at the competitive end is more possible because in theory everyone has a more similar mentality of designing the best list, using their best tactics, beating the other person as efficiently as possible, using balanced missions, etc.
That is true, but my point is that when you balance solely with competitive winrate in mind, you must ignore several things that are extremely important to players.
1) Do the various factions play in the style they are presented as in the game's fiction? If Orks can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sittting with their thumbs up their butts under KFF and Painboy auras and taking hits for 5 turns, that's A-OK for a game balanced competitively. If Eldar can achieve a competitive winrate of 50% by sending wave after wave of disposable infantry to their deaths, perfectly fine.
2) Are the lists that achieve a balanced competitive winrate actually fun to play as or against? If absolutely nothing in the game can actually beat space marines in a firefight, and they just carve up any opponent without ever having to move out of their deployment zone, that can be an utterly miserable experience for anyone who plays against them...buuuuut as long as they don't win over 50% of their games, they're fine!
3) is the game actually a fun experience? When you sit down at a table, do you actually have a good time, or do you just spend a brisk 3 hours rolling piles of dice and removing models from the board? Doesn't matter! As long as a solid spread of factions see play at top tables, that is a doubleplusgood healthy game right there! Sure, making pretty much everything die instantly to any attack and making the board so small that all weapons and units start in range turn 1 makes the distinction between factions essentially meaningless, but think how DIVERSE the competitive meta will be!
Point 1 isn't a balance issue, it's an army design issue. If GW makes an Ork codex that's effectively designed around bunkering down under defensive auras, that's a failure at the design stage.
The problem is that the design stage doesn't get feedback on anything except balance from tournament results. This is the problem with quantitative and qualitative data; tournaments provide quantitative data (e.g. winrates) but not qualitative data - at least not beyond what "the warhammer community guys wandered around and looked at the armies" is. And even that doesn't actually inform how the army plays; it merely informs the types of lists that are being built. If you want to get to how the army plays, you need to look elsewhere than competitive tournaments for data - or, if you want to look at competitive tournaments, you need to have a clearly defined "I WANT THE ARMY TO DO X" understanding as a baseline for comparison.
ERJAK wrote: Point 2 is subjective, your description is also dripping in hyperbole. Even besides that, if nothing in the game can beat space marines in a firefight that's a failure of balance, not a result of the game being designed for competitive level games.
It's not a failure of balance if there's a 50% win rate, that's the problem. The issue the_scotsman is pointing out is that "competitive balance" is not the exact same as "fun".
ERJAK wrote: Point 3 is also subjective. Evenly matched armies make for incredibly fun games in my opinion, you might not agree. The so called 'supporting points' are just more examples of failures of balance or just your imagination running wild. The board is 4" shorting and no man's land hasn't changed at all. All that means is that you can't RETREAT as far, so that 'marines win every firefight' problem from earlier should be much easier to deal with.
Again, "evenly matched" isn't sufficient for "fun". It's possible for armies to be evenly matched without the game being fun, therefore "evenly matched" is necessary, but not sufficient - and tournament data can only get you to the 'evenly matched' state, which is not sufficient.
ERJAK wrote: This is all just a combination of misunderstanding what competitive balance is, blaming attempts to balance the game for totally unrelated failures in thematic army design, with a lot of unfounded outrage/fear over things that haven't happened yet.
Things have happened like this all through 8th. Did you read my example post about how it poisoned a narrative campaign experience for me?
And no, it's not blaming attempts to balance the game for unrelated failures in thematic army design. It is pointing out that "balancing around tournament players" isn't enough, it's not sufficient, to make a fun game. So the source of balancing and army design input should be elsewhere, or at least augmented by another source.
the_scotsman wrote: If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.
Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.
Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.
Like I said in my last post, he doesn't care about competitive play or competitive players balancing the game. He's salty about marines, and to a lesser extent orkz and trying to smokescreen it as a systematic issue rather than just whining, which until points come out for both factions it pretty much is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of whining, but blaming every competitive player ever because Greentide Orkz don't faceroll win as often as you would like is silly. Especially considering we don't actually know that Greentide Orkz aren't a 95% winrate strat until we actually get into the edition. For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.
Daedalus81 wrote: People need to stop conceptualizing melee as "I get to your deployment zone and smack you around". That's stupid and non-objective based gameplay. Controlling the board is the game now *as it should be*. Melee happens mid-table and not in the opponent's zone.
That's not how the fluff is written, though. Slaanesh Daemons don't wander onto objectives and dig in for the long haul. The army theme should be, indeed, "I get to your army and smack you around." Because that's their fluff, and it's what they do. "Controlling territory" isn't and should never be how Daemons work when fighting an army in reality; indeed, in the long run its quite impossible for them to hold ground because the warp will fade and reality will reassert itself.
In 30k, Daemons get their own objectives to choose from and can ignore the primary mission for precisely this reason - "Go and stand on a point for an arbitrary length of time" isn't very daemon-y. Nor is it orky, nor world-eaters-y, etc.
"Board control" is a competitive concern, not a narrative one. Which is precisely the problem.
I've often wondered what the draw was for the super competitive players
* the massive player base. Gittin gud and being seen on the international level as gittin gud is a huge ego draw.
* the massive player base. Money money money. Cottage industries pop up like livestreams.
* the massive player base.
I have pointed this EXACT SAME ARGUMENT many times, in the AOS forum mostly where its seen as "the game is great balance because tournaments are not won by the same faction" and then I remember my last AOS game where I brought a "for fun" slaanesh army with one keeper and got demolished by the triple keeper of secrets army that summoned +1800 points on top of his 2000 points. No one is going to have a fun game playing 3800 pts vs 2000 pts. No one. And the rules allow that.
40k is similar. My last 40k game I brought a for fun rubric marine army. And faced a "for fun" ITC 5 knight army that tabled me in two turns. The game lets them do that. The game is not balanced, I don't care what it looks like at the ITC top tables... the game is not balanced.
I am a game designer. I have been for many years. I have played dozens upon dozens of games. And it is true NO GAME is perfectly balanced, but most games get a lot closer than this mess. These imbalances are done intentionally to move models and to appease to the hyper spike crowd that must win games. They are following the magic the gathering design protocols almost to a "T". And they are rewarded with forklifts of money so why change?
the_scotsman wrote: If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.
Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.
Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.
Like I said in my last post, he doesn't care about competitive play or competitive players balancing the game. He's salty about marines, and to a lesser extent orkz and trying to smokescreen it as a systematic issue rather than just whining, which until points come out for both factions it pretty much is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of whining, but blaming every competitive player ever because Greentide Orkz don't faceroll win as often as you would like is silly. Especially considering we don't actually know that Greentide Orkz aren't a 95% winrate strat until we actually get into the edition. For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.
I think he makes a good point and you're dismissing him unreasonably (as well as ignoring my replies to your posts).
the_scotsman wrote: If the aggressive melee army huddling up means they can win 50% of their games, from the competitive players' perspective there is no "current unbalanced game." The game is balanced, and perfectly fine, because the tactic of huddling up is there.
Games like starcraft 2, which are rebalanced based on the competitive scene, don't have only a single strict build per faction that wins 50% of the time.
Because the goal of balancing wargaming factions for competitive play isn't to boil them all down to one list.
Like I said in my last post, he doesn't care about competitive play or competitive players balancing the game. He's salty about marines, and to a lesser extent orkz and trying to smokescreen it as a systematic issue rather than just whining, which until points come out for both factions it pretty much is. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of whining, but blaming every competitive player ever because Greentide Orkz don't faceroll win as often as you would like is silly. Especially considering we don't actually know that Greentide Orkz aren't a 95% winrate strat until we actually get into the edition. For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.
The new coherency rule or anti-multicharge rule, that grants a player who knows how to precisely micromanage his screens or model placement a huge advantage over an opponent who doesn't, has nothing to do with marines. It is an example of a rule that provides a great lever for skill expression in a game designed for tournament play, that is also massively fething miserable for casual play because all it does is give TFG Mcdouchenozzle an opportunity to point and go "Ha ha, your ork here is 2.05" from the second model instead of 2.00" so in the middle of this shooting sequence he's AUTOMATICALLY DEAD hahahaahah!"
It's no different from any of the other rules throughout the 8th-9th era that have been good for competitive play and terrible for casual play. When the game is designed solely with tournament players in mind, everything else doesn't get better, it suffers because weird unintuitive gameplay micromanagement tricks is great for competitive skill expression and gak for playing a game and having fun.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that they've seemingly removed SOME of those tricks that were annoying in 8th - but they didn't actually remove them. They COULD have just made Consolidate and Pile in moves "Directly toward" instead of "must end your move closer" - that would have been a simple, easy way to remove wrapping and trapping. But instead, they went with a combination of 3 different mechanics that keeps it in there...but only if you're a highly skillful, elite competitive gamer who knows how to cunningly micromanage your models, and now instead of it being an all or nothing huge advantage, it's just a little bonus you get in there that forces your opponent to lose 1/6 of his unit and spend 2CP to get out of it.
To the OP, you are actually doing a bit of confusion on the terms.
You talk about balance, but you present cases only on a subset of the concept of balance, which is the external balance.
If the design cares only for external balance, then you indeed have spotted the most egregious problems.
A design though doesn't focus only on external balance, it also takes into account the internal balance, which is what you are asking for. I don't care if nidzilla is competitive if all forms of nid infantry are trash, I want both playstyles to be supported.
Fortunately, GW has shown quite a lot of interest in internal balance during 8th. Almost all the changes that you saw in CA 20XX were done to improve internal balance, while the FAQs were exclusively for external balance.
This led all factions to have quite a good number of possible design choices. Now, if you played ITC you may not have noticed that, because ITC was designed to improve external balance while murderizing internal balance, but standard 8th did show a lot of freedom in list creation.
Spoletta wrote: To the OP, you are actually doing a bit of confusion on the terms.
You talk about balance, but you present cases only on a subset of the concept of balance, which is the external balance.
If the design cares only for external balance, then you indeed have spotted the most egregious problems.
A design though doesn't focus only on external balance, it also takes into account the internal balance, which is what you are asking for. I don't care if nidzilla is competitive if all forms of nid infantry are trash, I want both playstyles to be supported.
Fortunately, GW has shown quite a lot of interest in internal balance during 8th. Almost all the changes that you saw in CA 20XX were done to improve internal balance, while the FAQs were exclusively for external balance.
This led all factions to have quite a good number of possible design choices. Now, if you played ITC you may not have noticed that, because ITC was designed to improve external balance while murderizing internal balance, but standard 8th did show a lot of freedom in list creation.
Even internal balance is fundamentally flawed, though, if army design is off.
For example, Slaanesh Daemons are a melee army. How do you balance them? Well, apparently, you allow them greater board control than their opponents. That's what melee armies 'do', how they 'function'. A codex that is appropriately internally balanced around the ability for the units to execute board control, and externally balanced with a 50% winrate, is conceivably possible and, indeed, is well-balanced and can take several different lists. The problem is that these lists are built around board control as their primary objective...
...i.e. the problem is the resulting internally and externally balanced army is about as far away from the lore for Slaanesh Daemons as it could be.
Arschbombe wrote: The argument is that competitive balancing efforts cease when each faction has one competitive build without regard to theme, fluff et al. because that's all extraneous noise to the competitive guys who are, apparently,in charge of this process now.
Yeah - I'm getting that now.
Unfortunately I just don't think its true - or rather its making the perfect the enemy of the good.
What for instance is the evidence that GW think "Orks are fine if they win X tournament games"?
I think GW gets data basically through tournaments - and people sending their complaints.
I'm pretty confident *blast* is an evolution of *we all hate that the Exorcist has D6 shots*. So they changed the exorcist. But someone somewhere no doubt said "what's good for Sisters has to be good for everyone else".
But making everything loads of D3s would perhaps be a bit annoying. So lets try "this".
Unfortunately what its done has been to make hordes extinct - and because its such a huge swing, its very hard to see how it would ever be pointed correctly.
But as I see it GW either *tries* to balance for the competitive end - or they just don't balance. The same is largely true for every game system I can think of. For most of 40k's history, if you got a bad codex, you just had to lump it for 2-4-10 years.
I think the evidence is that they are now trying - mainly because they are listening to competitive players tell (and show) them that this or that is good or bad.
Which isn't to say they get it right - but if they stop listening to competitive players, we will go back to the trainwreck we had before.
ERJAK wrote: For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.
Here's another great example of why raw competitive balance isn't the be-all and end-all: For Orks it's expected that they'd be a cheap horde, but what about Eldar Aspect Warriors or Chaos Marines? Players who are invested in their fluff as veterans and specialists will be disappointed by their ostensibly elite units getting points cuts to make them competitively viable, turning them into a horde army.
If you solicit general feedback focusing on competitive balance, and use tournament players as your player sample, you will never hear that this is a problem. Those players have no investment in the fluff concept of Aspect Warriors and don't see it as an issue. Using more narrative-focused players may not yield optimal results for balance, but it will tell you when a faction doesn't feel right.
OP's point about Orks winning through holding objectives is much the same: Competitively, it may be balanced for Orks to win through camping objectives in defensive auras. Narratively, that doesn't feel right at all.
It's not like this is an insurmountable problem- even just asking competitive players 'we expect an army to look like such and such, and plays in such and such a way, does it work?' would tell you whether the result matches the intent. Pair that with a cadre of casual playtesters to try out the game and report back on whether the mechanics as implemented are fun, and you cover all bases. The key is recognizing that competitive balance is not the only goal, and structuring the playtesting accordingly.
Spoletta wrote: To the OP, you are actually doing a bit of confusion on the terms.
You talk about balance, but you present cases only on a subset of the concept of balance, which is the external balance.
If the design cares only for external balance, then you indeed have spotted the most egregious problems.
A design though doesn't focus only on external balance, it also takes into account the internal balance, which is what you are asking for. I don't care if nidzilla is competitive if all forms of nid infantry are trash, I want both playstyles to be supported.
Fortunately, GW has shown quite a lot of interest in internal balance during 8th. Almost all the changes that you saw in CA 20XX were done to improve internal balance, while the FAQs were exclusively for external balance.
This led all factions to have quite a good number of possible design choices. Now, if you played ITC you may not have noticed that, because ITC was designed to improve external balance while murderizing internal balance, but standard 8th did show a lot of freedom in list creation.
So ITC, a competitive tournament organization, was focused only on external balance between codexes rather than ensuring that a diversity of playstyles and options were available.
While core 8th edition appeared to be focused on a mixture of both, rather than handing balance over entirely to competitive, tournament playstyle.
And now we have 9th coming out, and every piece of commentary we have on it happens to be coincidentally from competitive tournament players, the designers are very carefully working tournament language into their previews, the rules are written legalistically, and all the new missions and rules changes are copying what ITC was doing.
Indeed. The fundamental disconnect seems to be summed up in the OP:
"[Army] is fine, because [army] can win a good number of games and has the tools to execute solid winning strategies." - reviewers/tournament gamers.
"[Army] is not fine because the way [army] plays on the table top is nothing whatsoever like how it plays in the lore, irrespective of how well it can win and what tools it has to win that way." - casual/narrative gamers
It is possible for the first to be true, and the second to also be true. Balancing around the first alone is, therefore, flawed - at least if you care at all what the second category of people think.
I don’t get what OP’s trying to propose here. The argument I’m seeing sounds like “Competive players shouldn’t balance 40k, because competitive armies have to use unusual tactics against other competitive armies in order to win, rather than play like how the army is supposed to in the fluff.” What does this have to do with casual play? The whole point of casual play is to bring lists and play missions that support the fluff in a way that creates cinematic moments. The players in these games are still trying to win, but it’s not the main reason people play casually. Therefore the ork player in you’re scenario can bulrush his opponent with the confidence in knowing his opponent probably didn’t bring a list which is designed to massively punish his orks for this decision. In other words, casual play is self balanced by the fact that both players are interested in having a narratively interesting game.
All the rest of your arguments are strawmanning opinions onto competitive players that they simply don’t have. No competitive player I’ve spoken to would say a near pure marine meta is just as good as a meta which includes chaos and xeno’s faction. Otherwise we wouldn’t have seen the near the same amount of marine hate on competitive forums as we did. No competitive player I’ve spoken to thinks it’s fine for faction to have 1 or 2 viable lists, playstyles, and/or units, Otherwise we wouldn’t have seen nearly as much complaining about during 8th. It’s true that competitive players are more ok when higher skill floor factions require tricks and skill to win with, but good game systems should have factions that do better at top levels vs more casual games, Finally the big assumption you’re making here is thinking that competitive players are ok with imbalance at a causal level. I can assure you nobody thinks it’s ok for a causal marine list to beat any other casual list simply because it’s a marine list. This is example of both external and internal imbalances and no one likes to see this.
My guess is you’re mistaking a mindset of “there’s no point to complain about game imbalances because doing so does nothing to help me win. Instead I’m going to look for ways to adapt my army and play-style in ways which allow me to win.” with “Imbalances in the game are fine so long as I can still win with my army.”
Finally, you didn’t really propose a way for this game to be balanced beyond “Don’t let competitive players be the only the ones to make balancing decisions.” We already have causal players (GW rules team) designing a great deal of the game, so it makes sense to have competitive players balance it. Are you suggesting we remove the competitive players fully from the game design process and revert to 3-7 edition style rules? Should we simply further limit the amount of control they have?
At this point I think people need realize that GW’s business interests is the biggest threat to in game balance. 8th was very balanced pre-marines, yet all that got ruined simply because GW felt the need to sell more primaris. None of that had to due with competitive playtesters (in almost all discussions about marines 2.0, playtesters heavily implied that GW forced too powerful rules through in order to sell models). Past codex writers have directly stated that GW management forced certain rules through in order to sell models during a new release. Just because this doesn’t allows happen (or always work) doesn’t mean it isn’t a huge problem.
Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.
Daedalus81 wrote: People need to stop conceptualizing melee as "I get to your deployment zone and smack you around". That's stupid and non-objective based gameplay. Controlling the board is the game now *as it should be*. Melee happens mid-table and not in the opponent's zone.
That's not how the fluff is written, though. Slaanesh Daemons don't wander onto objectives and dig in for the long haul. The army theme should be, indeed, "I get to your army and smack you around." Because that's their fluff, and it's what they do. "Controlling territory" isn't and should never be how Daemons work when fighting an army in reality; indeed, in the long run its quite impossible for them to hold ground because the warp will fade and reality will reassert itself.
In 30k, Daemons get their own objectives to choose from and can ignore the primary mission for precisely this reason - "Go and stand on a point for an arbitrary length of time" isn't very daemon-y. Nor is it orky, nor world-eaters-y, etc.
"Board control" is a competitive concern, not a narrative one. Which is precisely the problem.
That's what Crusade is for, is it not? The mission drives how the army operates. If the missions for competitive players don't make your army play as you like then don't play those missions.
If you instead want to play a balanced game there are sacrifices made on all sides.
I mean if you really want to follow the fluff then why would Orks ever capture objectives in any game since forever? Surely IG would prefer to set up a nice big defensive line and shoot a bunch while never moving and that's boring as gak.
I am not proposing anything: I'm pointing out that 9th proves the old argument of "casual players should just trust competitive players to design and balance a game, because a game designed by competitive players will always automatically be better for casual play" to be bs.
9th is much better designed for competitive play, and from batreps I've watched and games I've played (obligatory admission that all these are using the current point values, so maybe via some magic spell the point values are all that's needed to make everything perfect) 9th is worse for casual play.
Smaller board size makes maneuver matter less, coherency, character and charge phase changes create many more opportunities for "gotcha" moments, blasts and fight first rule changes create more arbitrary powerspikes for certain rules and models that casual players will stumble into and ruin games.
That's what Crusade is for, is it not? The mission drives how the army operates. If the missions for competitive players don't make your army play as you like then don't play those missions.
If you instead want to play a balanced game there are sacrifices made on all sides.
I mean if you really want to follow the fluff then why would Orks ever capture objectives in any game since forever? Surely IG would prefer to set up a nice big defensive line and shoot a bunch while never moving and that's boring as gak.
We'll see how crusade handles it, but I don't actually think it's going to handle it well. Plus, Matched Play / Tournament Play tends to be the play standard, irrespective of the narrativeness of the players. For example, the narrative campaign I talked about earlier in the thread used the Matched Play rules.
And the specific nature of those sacrifices is exactly the problem.
And right, your last sentence is literally the point - "how the armies do on the tabletop is unrelated how the armies do in the lore." The Imperial Guard's position in a battle shouldn't be boring - it should be tense. If you don't see how "sit in my DZ behind a defensive line and never move" can be a tense situation, then you should watch Zulu, which is literally a film full of suspense with some pretty damn good battle scenes. It consists of guys sitting largely stationary behind a defensive line.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.
Nope, this is exactly my position as well.
In all the info GW and other youtube folks have been putting out about playtesting and designing 9th edition, I haven't heard much at all about how such and such narrative player was involved in making sure the character of such and such a faction was preserved in 9th ed: Just a bunch of tournament players providing competitive tips n' tricks for how to micro your model placement for your boyz blob, or how to achieve a 7" charge out of deep strike using trigonometry, or how to toe-touch a ruin for true-LOS with your riptide.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.
The issue is that, unlike with a video game, GW has no way of gathering data from anything other than competitive play. Also unlike a video game they have no way to ensure that anybody not at a tournament is being matched against skill appropriate players and is actually playing the game correctly. All of the above makes their job next to impossible already but that's not even the worst hurdle.
Even if they could magically collect all of the above data; that data would also be noisy as hell. Unlike the homogenization that occurs at the top level of competition, there's no standard at all in the lower tiers. One player might have off-meta units that were good 4 editions ago, another player might have a fluffy list that happens to include a few all-star units he thinks are cool, while a third player bought Tau and only uses battle suits because they're anime, the final player of the group bought Orks because he likes shouting WAAAGH! once per game and can't be convinced to do anything but advance and fish for 12" charges because 'Dat's what da boss would do'. How do you even approach balancing that?
Even a game like League of Legends can see massive win-rate differences simply down to the order in which a champion skills up or which item they purchase first. Let alone any skill expression like map awareness, warding, last hitting, positing in fights, etc. Toss in the sheer variables of 40k and we're lucky it's as functional as it is.
Here's how I'd handle a game between Slaanesh Daemons and Imperial Guard:
Daemons objective: "Feast on Fear:" Every failed morale check caused by an action taken by a unit in your army gives you {X} victory points. If you exceed {y} victory points, you win!
Imperial Guard objective: "Hold the Line:" Place two objectives in your own deployment zone. Each one is worth {Z} VP to you. If you match or exceed {2Z} VP, you win!
In this case, it actually makes for a game where two winners (and two losers!) is possible - which is indeed narratively possible. It is entirely conceivable that both sides complete their objective and acquire a victory in a narrative sense, especially if their objectives are so mismatched.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.
Nope, this is exactly my position as well.
In all the info GW and other youtube folks have been putting out about playtesting and designing 9th edition, I haven't heard much at all about how such and such narrative player was involved in making sure the character of such and such a faction was preserved in 9th ed: Just a bunch of tournament players providing competitive tips n' tricks for how to micro your model placement for your boyz blob, or how to achieve a 7" charge out of deep strike using trigonometry, or how to toe-touch a ruin for true-LOS with your riptide.
Canadian 5th wrote: The issue is that, unlike with a video game, GW has no way of gathering data from anything other than competitive play.
Data/metrics are 99% worthless for rectifying the issues OP is talking about. Collecting data is great for determining competitive balance (eg is there a weapon/character/unit/etc that the data shows rarely gets used, or is used all the time?), but whether the game feels right is not something you can glean from data.
The answer there is the same as the answer here: Use casual playtesters to provide qualitative, not quantitative, feedback. Usability/UX testing observation procedures are especially helpful if you have the resources to do testing in-house, but even just soliciting feedback from a greater community is helpful.
This is not a unique problem to GW and it's not one that's gone forever unsolved.
Pft, the objectives and stuff or for the umie gitz. Orkzes got their own game every game; Get into da fight.
If at the end of the game the umie is worried about some fiddly victory points, just remember, you had a WAAAGH! there was lots of fightin' and it was orky.
Stop playing the umies competitive game, you can have all the fluffy fun you want and celebrate your own fluffy victory, even if it doesn't add up to more victory points.
The very idea that orkz would camp a thing unless they knew it would bring them a good fight is heresy.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Maybe I am more moderate than the OP, but I am not arguing that competitive players shouldn't be involved in helping the design team balance the game. Rather, I am arguing that they shouldn't solely be responsible for helping the design team balance the game.
The issue is that, unlike with a video game, GW has no way of gathering data from anything other than competitive play. Also unlike a video game they have no way to ensure that anybody not at a tournament is being matched against skill appropriate players and is actually playing the game correctly. All of the above makes their job next to impossible already but that's not even the worst hurdle.
Even if they could magically collect all of the above data; that data would also be noisy as hell. Unlike the homogenization that occurs at the top level of competition, there's no standard at all in the lower tiers. One player might have off-meta units that were good 4 editions ago, another player might have a fluffy list that happens to include a few all-star units he thinks are cool, while a third player bought Tau and only uses battle suits because they're anime, the final player of the group bought Orks because he likes shouting WAAAGH! once per game and can't be convinced to do anything but advance and fish for 12" charges because 'Dat's what da boss would do'. How do you even approach balancing that?
Even a game like League of Legends can see massive win-rate differences simply down to the order in which a champion skills up or which item they purchase first. Let alone any skill expression like map awareness, warding, last hitting, positing in fights, etc. Toss in the sheer variables of 40k and we're lucky it's as functional as it is.
That's only because you're looking at it quantitatively. If they handed their playtesters a paragraph of lore about how they expect the battle to go, then the players play the battle, and part of the output is "how close did the gameplay match that paragraph we wrote? What were the major divergences?"
For example, if the paragraph said "We expect the Orks to go forwards and fight a line of guardsmen, huge chunks being blown out of their units, but ultimately to overwhelm the front line of IG and require an appropriate Imperial counterattack to hold" then the playtesters would say "no, turtling under a KFF in the middle of the board and enduring losses until you run out of turns did not match that."
Essentially, you include casual/narrative qualitative concerns as part of your playtest - and you include the relevant players as well, perhaps.
oh look, it's from a tournament player who says that things are looking great for the "mainstay weapon" of the deathwatch: The storm bolter.
A gun that you'll notice does not appear in the Deathwatch Kill Team kit anywhere, and that pretty much only exists in tournament competitive deathwatch lists, where the flexible, versatile anti-xenos specialists bring 100% identical squads of dudes, all equipped with storm bolters and storm shields, marching like the faceless legion of identical soldiers the deathwatch has always been meant to be!
This is the point of the OP. This is the guy they asked to playtest the Deatwatch and make sure they work like they should in the new edition: The dude that took the rules for a unit intended to be like regular marines, but more flexible, and used it to make them be like marines, but more uniform and identical.
"Say, joe, how do the deathwatch play in the new edition?"
"Great, I really love the fact that my 10-man storm bolter/storm shield squads get 2+ 4++ now!"
"cool, did you try any of the Deathwatch weapons?"
"Deathwatch weapons? You mean the storm bolter?"
"No, the...like the weapons from the kit. The power swords, and the heavy thunder hammer, and the deathwatch shotgun, and the infernus heavy bolter?"
"The what? Sorry, I ebayed my squads with AOBR bodies and storm bolter/storm shield arms from a bitz reseller, then had them shipped directly to the commission painter to build them for an extra charge before he 3-color sprayed them. What comes in the kit?"
Unit1126PLL wrote: If you don't see how "sit in my DZ behind a defensive line and never move" can be a tense situation, then you should watch Zulu, which is literally a film full of suspense with some pretty damn good battle scenes. It consists of guys sitting largely stationary behind a defensive line.
Except that was tense, because it was a couple hundred rundown troops versus thousands.
Unit1126PLL wrote: If you don't see how "sit in my DZ behind a defensive line and never move" can be a tense situation, then you should watch Zulu, which is literally a film full of suspense with some pretty damn good battle scenes. It consists of guys sitting largely stationary behind a defensive line.
Except that was tense, because it was a couple hundred rundown troops versus thousands.
You can't imagine a situation when it is tense because it's a couple-hundred well-equipped troops against fifty or so much much better troops? The point is that it is possible to have an entertaining and engaging battle where one side sits behind a defensive line the whole time. "how to accomplish that specifically" is GW's problem, not mine. But if someone wants to pay me for my time at about the same rate as a GW designer I could perhaps give some proposals.
Unfortunately a lot of people simply do not get this. It was clearly demonstrated in a recent Eldar thread, where the Eldar players complained about the rules of their army not reflecting the fluff or supporting the thematic playstyle, only to be met with several people telling them that their complaints were stupid because the Eldar do well in tournaments.
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate. Granted, ideally you would do all three.
catbarf wrote: Data/metrics are 99% worthless for rectifying the issues OP is talking about. Collecting data is great for determining competitive balance (eg is there a weapon/character/unit/etc that the data shows rarely gets used, or is used all the time?), but whether the game feels right is not something you can glean from data.
The answer there is the same as the answer here: Use casual playtesters to provide qualitative, not quantitative, feedback. Usability/UX testing observation procedures are especially helpful if you have the resources to do testing in-house, but even just soliciting feedback from a greater community is helpful.
This is not a unique problem to GW and it's not one that's gone forever unsolved.
But its just a circle though.
"I think the best way to build an Ork list is to take all the Boyz and yolo forward all the time."
"O...kay. I guess we can try and build the game so that has the best chance of winning."
"Yeah but, I think the best way to build an Ork list is to not have loads of boys, and instead have lots of buggies, or dredds"
"Okay I guess we should also try and make that list have the best chance of winning...."
"Yeah okay but I play Blood Axes, and I think the best way to play Orks is to be ded Kunnin' and use taktiks and stuff."
".... just screw it. This is impossible."
In MTG terms what we seem to be asking for is that every list simultaneously satisfies Timmy, Johnny and Spike players. But this is impossible.
If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.
Cant be any balancing since datasheets and army rules are unbalanced (hint : toward marines).
Rules tweaking is a smoke screen to hide the fact that whatever core rules are implemented, marines get the best weapons, and the best bodies (for the points) to carry them.
It keeps players hoping, and buying, and new players are lured in with a starctaft-like balancing PR.
Tyel wrote: If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.
You're in a thread where Timmies and Johnnies are complaining about ninth, and asking for evidence that Timmies and Johnnies are upset with 9th? Really?
And no, balance isn't less of a concern. I don't want less balanced games. I think balanced games are great, because it leads to tense and engaging outcomes. I just think they have to be balanced and support lore-friendly army construction and employment at the same time.
Imagine if a World War 2 game played this way: "I bought into Soviets to play horde infantry, tank riders, and fairly good tanks." "Oh, sorry, the way the Soviets actually play is you just take a bunch of Special Forces guys using captured German equipment and infiltrate onto the objectives, stacking [x combo of rules] to make all your enemies fail detection rolls until you win." "Ah... I ... I see. Alright. Well at least the game is balanced because the Germans can just use Panzer II blobs in late-war against the American trash infantry horde." "BALANCE!"
catbarf wrote: Data/metrics are 99% worthless for rectifying the issues OP is talking about. Collecting data is great for determining competitive balance (eg is there a weapon/character/unit/etc that the data shows rarely gets used, or is used all the time?), but whether the game feels right is not something you can glean from data.
The answer there is the same as the answer here: Use casual playtesters to provide qualitative, not quantitative, feedback. Usability/UX testing observation procedures are especially helpful if you have the resources to do testing in-house, but even just soliciting feedback from a greater community is helpful.
This is not a unique problem to GW and it's not one that's gone forever unsolved.
But its just a circle though.
"I think the best way to build an Ork list is to take all the Boyz and yolo forward all the time."
"O...kay. I guess we can try and build the game so that has the best chance of winning."
"Yeah but, I think the best way to build an Ork list is to not have loads of boys, and instead have lots of buggies, or dredds"
"Okay I guess we should also try and make that list have the best chance of winning...."
"Yeah okay but I play Blood Axes, and I think the best way to play Orks is to be ded Kunnin' and use taktiks and stuff."
".... just screw it. This is impossible."
In MTG terms what we seem to be asking for is that every list simultaneously satisfies Timmy, Johnny and Spike players. But this is impossible.
If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.
I don't know, every group I've seen putting out preview content, writing articles or talking about their experiences playtesting the game is Spike.
Tyel wrote: If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.
You're in a thread where Timmies and Johnnies are complaining about ninth, and asking for evidence that Timmies and Johnnies are upset with 9th? Really?
And no, balance isn't less of a concern. I don't want less balanced games. I think balanced games are great, because it leads to tense and engaging outcomes. I just think they have to be balanced and support lore-friendly army construction and employment at the same time.
Imagine if a World War 2 game played this way:
"I bought into Soviets to play horde infantry, tank riders, and fairly good tanks."
"Oh, sorry, the way the Soviets actually play is you just take a bunch of Special Forces guys using captured German equipment and infiltrate onto the objectives, stacking [x combo of rules] to make all your enemies fail detection rolls until you win."
"Ah... I ... I see. Alright. Well at least the game is balanced because the Germans can just use Panzer II hordes in late-war against the American trash infantry horde."
"BALANCE!"
This reminds me of a Roman game I played at a Con last year that had infantry that moved 12", cavalry that moved 18", and bowmen with 2" range. and all combat was based on number of models, so elephants were the weakest units. Gave me a chuckle remembering it.
the_scotsman wrote: This reminds me of a Roman game I played at a Con last year that had infantry that moved 12", cavalry that moved 18", and bowmen with 2" range. and all combat was based on number of models, so elephants were the weakest units. Gave me a chuckle remembering it.
As long as it was finely balanced, who cares, amirite?
the_scotsman wrote: I don't know, every group I've seen putting out preview content, writing articles or talking about their experiences playtesting the game is Spike.
Well yeah, because if you balance a game competitively, you can always play it casually.
Which I realise is the fundamental conclusion you are trying to destroy - but I don't get it, because of the last sentence. Nothing stops you toning down.
But if you have factions that fundamentally don't work at all, that have no way of playing, then those players are screwed.
I just can't get "I want to play Slaanesh Daemons. I want to just run across the table and stab stuff and that's it. But it turns out I'm more likely to win by holding objectives. Which sucks, bad game, bad game."
bullyboy wrote: At OP, I think a lot of what you say breaks down at the table. A fluffy marine list (especially if not all the new hotness primaris) will probably lead to a good game vs Orks, playing in their themed style. That's where narrative/casual gamers need to have a conversation about the type of game they want and balance the power accordingly.
On the flipside, I am curious to see how 9th truly handles this new balance when players hit the tables again. We know there will be soem skew lists, and it does look like marines will be doing their thing again. And hey, here's a few more new models to add to your lineup...lol. Wait, you already have bikes and AT dudes? nah, nah...just wait til you see these rules.
9th ed now helpfully gives my fluffy marine opponent
-Automatic max hits on any random shot weapon vs any of my units above min size
-The ability to fight first on my charge phase even on my turn (oh look a helpful new primaris unit that just happens to have that ability right on his datasheet, what a coinkidink!)
-The ability to cause double or more the casualties from the new coherency rules unless I'm slavishly checking and rechecking my unit's adherence to new coherency
-Removal of my ability to fight with 3 rows of orks thanks to the new 1/2" engagement range rule
-dense terrain that cuts my shooting effectiveness by 45% while cutting my opponent's shooting effectiveness by 12%
-A new board size with deployment zones small enough that I can't fit my army physically inside them
But because in competitive play, someone can squat on objectives under a KFF bubble and survive 5 turns, orks are perfectly fine and need no changes. In fact, they may need nerfs if the KFF-huddling strategy is effective enough!
let's address what you said in regard to what I wrote.
1. OK, so whirlwinds and TFC (which getting massive points hikes). Missile launchers, frag grenades...scary stuff! Not really a big deal really.
2. Not happening, unless taking the executioner fellow....which old marines don't get (which was my point)
3. No, just keep your guys together instead of spreading them out to cover masses of the board. It's actually easy.
4. 2 ranks is more than enough to kill most old marine squads.
5. Your shooting will not be affected that much.
6. Strategic reserves are a thing, and maybe it's time to dust off those trukks, etc.
Your point is made vs Primaris top of the pile units and a few other skews, but again, with a narrative game with a marine player...you can have a good game.
Here's some stuff that's perfectly fine in a game balanced around competitive parameters alone:
Narrator: It was not, in fact, perfect fine in a game balanced around competitive parameters alone.
1) Two factions are narratively supposed to be the "good and evil" opposites of one another. however, the "good" faction has a number of significant gameplay advantages that lead to them absolutely slaughtering the "evil" faction's troops in a straight up fight, requiring the "evil" faction to rely on a few specific combos that revolve around fringe elements of their codex, while the "good" faction can field a well-balanced mix of units that looks like something right off the codex cover art. As long as both have a 50% competitive winrate, this is a healthy game state!
Not really.
It is a healthier game state than if one faction lacked even the specific combos. It is not as healthy a game state as it would be if both factions had the "Good" faction's benefits. Game mechanics requiring gimmick builds are not, as it happens, particularly healthy for Meta purposes, really.
2) A faction can field 4-5 essentially unkillable models at a given game size. Any opponent of them spends the entire game playing a punching bag, often losing all the weapons they could possibly affect their opponent's models turns 1-2. As long as missions rely on board control and the unkillable models do not have above a 50% winrate, this is a healthy game state!
Not really.
It could be, if neither army is FORCED into that position, but rather that it is one of many viable tactical choices presented. If it's the only viable tactical choice presented, it isn't particularly healthy, really.
3) A faction whose background is melee-based, belligerent aggression can win 50% of their competitive games, but only by huddling around defensive buffs and screens, sitting on objective markers and taking it on the chin. This is a healthy game state!
Not really.
It could be, if that faction isn't FORCED into that position, but rather that it is one of many viable tactical choices presented. If it's the only viable tactical choice presented, it isn't particularly healthy, really.
4) Meta A includes the following dominant factions: Chaos Space Marines, Eldar, Tau, Orks, Tyranids, Imperial Guard, Dark Eldar, Space Marines. Meta B includes the following dominant factions: Space Marines, Grey Knights, Dark Angels, Space Wolves, Blood Angels, Deathwatch, Eldar, Tau. Meta A and Meta B are exactly as healthy as one another - same number of different factions!
Not really.
A Meta is healthiest when dominant forces are sufficiently different (with sufficiently different weaknesses and vulnerabilities) that it allows broad varieties of strategies to be used, allowing a continual churning and adaptation. The second list doesn't qualify nearly as well as the first in that regard, so it isn't exactly as healthy - it's less healthy.
5) For the same number of points, a player can take a super-heavy walker, or 50 light infantry units. At a given game size, most models cannot meaningfully interact with the super-heavy walker, while most weapons can harm the light infantry models. However, it takes significantly more time to move the light infantry models than the superheavy walker, meaning that it is more important to incentivize players taking the former over the latter in a game designed around ensuring that players can complete a tournament game within the desired timeframe!
Oh, goodness, you might actually have a point here, if points weren't supposed to be a measure of EFFECTIVENESS IN GAME. If 50 light infantry are not worth their points when a superheavy walker is, then they haven't followed the most basic, primal, DO NOT VIOLATE EVERY YOU FOOLS rule of "balancing around competitive play" - that the points are actually BALANCED.
Now, some of these are certainly issues with poorly done competitive play balancing... but they also don't fall prey to the parade of horrors that poorly done balancing around narrative play can inflict upon us (and it has). Hyperbole doesn't help your point.
I'm not unsympathetic to the whole issue, because Orks should be designed to be effective at what they're known for in fluff (aggressive area control through sheer bodies), and there aren't as many viable builds for that as there should be. That's not a hallmark of Competitive Design, that's an unfortunate slip through the cracks.
But your whole argument is essentially a straw man - Competitive Play is at its best when there's INTERNAL balance (between the tools for each faction) and EXTERNAL balance (between the factions), and you're cherry-picking things that Competitive Play would desribe as "kinda gakky balance" at best to use as examples of what Competitive Play designs for.
Unfortunately a lot of people simply do not get this. It was clearly demonstrated in a recent Eldar thread, where the Eldar players complained about the rules of their army not reflecting the fluff or supporting the thematic playstyle, only to be met with several people telling them that their complaints were stupid because the Eldar do well in tournaments.
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate. Granted, ideally you would do all three.
he is not 100% correct though, and I was one of the people on that Eldar thread defending the fluff.
I also have a lot of deathwatch that aren't SB/SS. They are great in narrative games, and will continue to be, even with a design shift for 9th.
The only thing that bothered me was the "table is smaller, so SB is better statement". That's cool, but it's a minimum, right....that's what I keep being told. So why is that such a boon for deathwatch in a regular game on a 6x4?
Unfortunately a lot of people simply do not get this. It was clearly demonstrated in a recent Eldar thread, where the Eldar players complained about the rules of their army not reflecting the fluff or supporting the thematic playstyle, only to be met with several people telling them that their complaints were stupid because the Eldar do well in tournaments.
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate. Granted, ideally you would do all three.
he is not 100% correct though, and I was one of the people on that Eldar thread defending the fluff.
I also have a lot of deathwatch that aren't SB/SS. They are great in narrative games, and will continue to be, even with a design shift for 9th.
The only thing that bothered me was the "table is smaller, so SB is better statement". That's cool, but it's a minimum, right....that's what I keep being told. So why is that such a boon for deathwatch in a regular game on a 6x4?
Oh I'm sorry, are you saying that you're hoping that GW isn't going to be forcing some marketing-based change on the entire playerbase by shoving it through competitive play?
Because thaaaaaaaaaaaats what they're dooooooooooooooooing..... Enjoy your smaller board, it's the new tournament standard.
Tyel wrote: I just can't get "I want to play Slaanesh Daemons. I want to just run across the table and stab stuff and that's it. But it turns out I'm more likely to win by holding objectives. Which sucks, bad game, bad game."
But why not? As a Slaanesh Daemons player, I picked the faction for its models and lore (though way back when I was planning to use 3rd party models). The Lore for Slaanesh Daemons includes the following: 1) Not holding objectives. Daemons fade back into the warp after a short time in reality, so narratively, "holding" anything is fairly dumb for them. 2) Chasing emotion and excess. They exist partly to excite certain emotions in themselves and the foe, and this process usually involves running up to them and stabbing them - or seducing them. In brief. 3) Doing Slaanesh's will. The other part of their existence is as extensions of their Deity, who is a fickle and oft-dreaming god ill-concerned with military logic such as seizing specific terrain or accomplishing tactical or strategic objectives.
They're an army driven literally by emotion, and not logic. Victory for them should be some sort of emotional high, not having seized some certain amount of the battlefield or killed some certain specific targets or whatever.
Again, to draw another analogy: This is like picking up a World War II game to play American Paratroopers because you liked watching "Band of Brothers" and finding out that the real way to play paratroopers is to give them zero upgrades, regiment them, don't use their unique deployment rules, and horde them up so you can do human wave attacks like Pickett's Charge.
Crimson wrote: Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.
That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?
And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'
Crimson wrote: Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.
That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?
And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'
Look back at my example from the narrative campaign. I could either lose every game and play narratively, but lose the campaign (because my specific army's narrative is incompatible with the mission victory conditions) and therefore narratively lose the whole campaign, which is painful for my army's fluff and is guaranteed. Or I can win enough of my games and then win the campaign, but have played my army in the most penny-pinching, un-narrative way possible within the tactical engagements.
A game should both be balanced and supporting the narrative.
Unfortunately a lot of people simply do not get this. It was clearly demonstrated in a recent Eldar thread, where the Eldar players complained about the rules of their army not reflecting the fluff or supporting the thematic playstyle, only to be met with several people telling them that their complaints were stupid because the Eldar do well in tournaments.
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate. Granted, ideally you would do all three.
he is not 100% correct though, and I was one of the people on that Eldar thread defending the fluff.
I also have a lot of deathwatch that aren't SB/SS. They are great in narrative games, and will continue to be, even with a design shift for 9th.
The only thing that bothered me was the "table is smaller, so SB is better statement". That's cool, but it's a minimum, right....that's what I keep being told. So why is that such a boon for deathwatch in a regular game on a 6x4?
Oh I'm sorry, are you saying that you're hoping that GW isn't going to be forcing some marketing-based change on the entire playerbase by shoving it through competitive play?
Because thaaaaaaaaaaaats what they're dooooooooooooooooing..... Enjoy your smaller board, it's the new tournament standard.
lol, no. I thought we were talking narrative games here......where I will enjoy my 6x4 board. Please decide what you are arguing for here?
Crimson wrote: Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.
That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?
And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'
Maybe you care more about your win-rate playing the models you own/a fluffy list than the absolute overall winrate of people playing top-level tournaments with bizarre amalgamations of the top three units in three different Codexes and claiming they're playing your army.
Tyel wrote: But its just a circle though.
"I think the best way to build an Ork list is to take all the Boyz and yolo forward all the time."
"O...kay. I guess we can try and build the game so that has the best chance of winning."
"Yeah but, I think the best way to build an Ork list is to not have loads of boys, and instead have lots of buggies, or dredds"
"Okay I guess we should also try and make that list have the best chance of winning...."
"Yeah okay but I play Blood Axes, and I think the best way to play Orks is to be ded Kunnin' and use taktiks and stuff."
".... just screw it. This is impossible."
In MTG terms what we seem to be asking for is that every list simultaneously satisfies Timmy, Johnny and Spike players. But this is impossible.
If all the Timmy and Johnny players were upset with 9th I could understand - but where is the evidence of that? If you fundamentally don't care about winning for the sake of winning - and are happy to trade that in to win "the right way" - balance is much less of a concern.
You misunderstand- the idea is not to take a poll of every casual player and ensure that all of their strategies are equally viable. The idea is to have a coherent vision for how the game should play, and test the design against that vision.
Let's use a historical analogy: We're going to make a game about D-Day. What should happen is that the Allied player will hit the beach ASAP, take heavy losses, but push through and achieve a breakout. That's their win condition.
So we go and spend a bunch of time writing up our ruleset, and then give it to some hardcore competitive players to try out. And they come back to us and tell us that the game has a 50/50 winrate- it's perfectly balanced. Great! We release it and it's immediately a dismal failure.
Because it turns out that the optimal strategy that these competitive players developed, and the one that results in the 50/50 winrate, is for the Allies to avoid landing as long as possible. They sit in their boats out at the edge of the board and let naval gunfire do the work, and once that's done, land and proceed through- if the artillery is enough then the Allies win, if it doesn't wipe out the defenders then the Allies lose. Attempting to take the beach under fire, as actually happened, is suicide and doesn't work. So we've developed a game with a competitively balanced 50/50 winrate, but when played by a historically-minded player always results in a loss for the Allies and isn't particularly fun either.
Do you see the problem? We tested whether the game was objectively balanced, but we didn't test whether the optimal play strategy matched history. We now have an incongruence where the winning strategy of the game is different from the winning strategy in history, and in historical wargaming that is straight-up bad design.
In a modern wargame, we have the same expectations. The strategies that work in a modern, fictional-setting wargame should be the ones that work in real life. If the best way to employ infantry is in a Napoleonic line marching abreast into machine gun fire, it may be balanced in a competitive sense, but our game design is fundamentally flawed.
In a fantasy or sci-fi wargame, we don't have an objective reference, but presumably we do have a coherent vision for what our fictional battlefield looks like and how it works. The game should be designed to facilitate that vision.
So, back to 40K: It may be competitively balanced for the primary value of an Ork Boy to be in sitting on objectives, hiding from a fight, and absorbing bullets. But that doesn't match the game's fluff at all; and if that's the optimal way to employ Boyz, then a casual player who uses them aggressively will be employing them suboptimally, and it will not be balanced for that casual context.
The solution is not to pick a side and balance around either competitive play or casual play. The solution is to perform qualitative playtesting analysis, determine that the optimal strategy doesn't match the fluff or what's fun to play, and then redesign the game to rectify the imbalance. An Ork player who hides his Boyz should be punished. An Ork player who uses his Boyz aggressively should be rewarded. Once the game mechanics are set up to incentivize the 'correct' behavior, then there is no longer an incongruence between competitive and casual players: They will both be using Boyz the same way. Competitive players will do it because the game rewards them for it, casual players will do it because that's what the fluff says and what feels right, and thus Boyz can be balanced for both players.
Should Blood Axes behave differently? Okay, now let's assess how they should play versus how the new redesign encourages them to play, and adjust accordingly. Maybe we want them to still be aggressive, but be a bit smarter about it, so let's give them more benefit from cover while still having incentives to get into combat and disincentives to avoiding a fight. Now let's get that in front of casual playtesters to see if it feels right to them, and competitive playtesters to see if there are unintended side effects, or if the mechanic doesn't actually encourage the play we want to see. Notice how the playtesting goals are not just 'is this balanced at a tournament level', but we still need competitive playtesters in the mix.
And so this comes back to OP's point: The problem is not using competitive players for playtesting. The problem is assessing the game's design quality solely through the lens of competitive balance, while neglecting soft factors that matter to casual or narrative-driven players. You need a healthy cross-section of playtester demographics and a rigorous approach to testing (there is standard methodology for this- again, this is a solved problem!) to properly playtest and adjust the game as needed. You can't have just Spike players playtesting and driving redesign; you need Timmy and Johnny players offering their feedback as well, and it is certainly possible to please all three groups if you do your job properly.
catbarf wrote: You misunderstand- the idea is not to take a poll of every casual player and ensure that all of their strategies are equally viable. The idea is to have a coherent vision for how the game should play, and test the design against that vision.
Let's use a historical analogy: We're going to make a game about D-Day. What should happen is that the Allied player will hit the beach ASAP, take heavy losses, but push through and achieve a breakout. That's their win condition.
So we go and spend a bunch of time writing up our ruleset, and then give it to some hardcore competitive players to try out. And they come back to us and tell us that the game has a 50/50 winrate- it's perfectly balanced. Great! We release it and it's immediately a dismal failure.
Because it turns out that the optimal strategy that these competitive players developed, and the one that results in the 50/50 winrate, is for the Allies to avoid landing as long as possible. They sit in their boats out at the edge of the board and let naval gunfire do the work, and once that's done, land and proceed through- if the artillery is enough then the Allies win, if it doesn't wipe out the defenders then the Allies lose. Attempting to take the beach under fire, as actually happened, is suicide and doesn't work. So we've developed a game with a competitively balanced 50/50 winrate, but when played by a historically-minded player always results in a loss for the Allies and isn't particularly fun either.
Shouldn't the historically minded player realize that the allies didn't simply zerg rush the beaches and did in fact spend time on a pre-assault bombardment and bombing campaign earlier that morning?
So, back to 40K: It may be competitively balanced for the primary value of an Ork Boy to be in sitting on objectives, hiding from a fight, and absorbing bullets. But that doesn't match the game's fluff at all; and if that's the optimal way to employ Boyz, then a casual player who uses them aggressively will be employing them suboptimally, and it will not be balanced for that casual context.
The solution is not to pick a side and balance around either competitive play or casual play. The solution is to perform qualitative playtesting analysis, determine that the optimal strategy doesn't match the fluff or what's fun to play, and then redesign the game to rectify the imbalance. An Ork player who hides his Boyz should be punished. An Ork player who uses his Boyz aggressively should be rewarded. Once the game mechanics are set up to incentivize the 'correct' behavior, then there is no longer an incongruence between competitive and casual players: They will both be using Boyz the same way. Competitive players will do it because the game rewards them for it, casual players will do it because that's what the fluff says and what feels right, and thus Boyz can be balanced for both players.
If Orks and Daemons are built to use the complex strategy of, checks notes, move forward at full speed until they reach melee then they're going to cream armies based on board control and holding objectives unless those armies have tools to remove entire units of Orks each turn to push back the tide. This is to say nothing of a new player attempting the Eldar hit and run tactics that, in fluff, take thousands of years of dedication to fully master. How do you balance the different skills required to play each style and what do you assume the average skill level is? How do you account for the balance of a high skill player using a high skill cap, but fluffy, army against a low skill cap army and beating them 75% of the time while the same army run by a less skilled player losses 75% of the time against that same list?
There's a reason why League of Legends balances around 4-tiers of play. Average (Casual Players), Medium (Diamond plus), Skilled (Challenger), and Very Skilled (Profesional). That average tier contains 80% of your players, but only 25% of your champions really fit in at that tier and skilled players using champions designed for another tier will feel unfair at lower levels of play until the player is rated fairly and matched against equally skilled players where their win rate settles in at 50/50.
In 40k you don't have the option to match against 10s of thousands of players of equal skill with their champion picks and playstyle carefully measured by a computer designed to give players even and engaging matches. You have a dozen or less players at a local store who each have different budgets and levels of time to dedicate to the game. How do you maintain fluff while also accounting for skill, budget, and local meta?
Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.
I'm not sure the designers have a "coherent vision" for what they are expecting battles to look like. They don't quite understand the nuanced conflict between, say, a Keeper of Secrets and a squad of Guardsmen, or even between an entire army of Slaanesh Daemons and an entire army of loyalists. In 30k and AOS, they seem to have a better grasp. Keeper of Secrets as an example:
In AOS, Keepers do a lot more than simply "10 attacks at 2+, 2+, -3, 3D." They interact with their opponent in more warpy, slaaneshi ways. Indeed, a keeper in AOS is much less more likely to land huge amounts of damage (though it can spike to much greater amounts!). Instead, the strength of a KOS comes from its ability to seduce and toy with the enemy, doing things such as forcing them to attack last by breaking their will with allure, sensuality and temptation, or offering them a bonus (re-rolls) with the potential of a curse (instant death at the end of the phase on a certain roll). Toying, playing, bating, seducing. They have solid damage output, but you don't take it just for the damage.
In 30k, Keepers don't exist. Instead, the daemons begin roughly the same, and what upgrades and army choices you make affects how your models play. A Greater Daemon of the Lurid Onslaught, the closest thing to a Keeper (and clearly intended to be a keeper, given the name) comes out of a Warp Rift, neither deep striking nor deploying normally, and is a potent and terrifying psyker - though it lacks the sheer power of the Gibbering Madness (Tzeench). It has graceful speed (Fleet and Move Through Cover) but lacks the overwhelming brutality of the Khorne analogue, and has an ability to deceive and seduce enemy squads (reducing their initiative in a fight). Additionally, Armies of the Lurid Onslaught can ignore the mission rolled for and instead select a victory condition that is much more slaaneshi, gaining VP from failed morale checks (feeding on despair and the breaking of wills) and losing VP on heroically passed ones (being rebuffed by heroic will and steadfastness in the face of temptation), for example. Combined with mechanics to increase the number of morale checks taken, this works out to make an army that plays uniquely and isn't shackled by holding hum-drum mortal objectives.
So there are two examples of games with visions to employ Slaanesh. I think the same vision is lacking in 40k, or seems to be.
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Canadian 5th wrote: In 40k you don't have the option to match against 10s of thousands of players of equal skill with their champion picks and playstyle carefully measured by a computer designed to give players even and engaging matches. You have a dozen or less players at a local store who each have different budgets and levels of time to dedicate to the game. How do you maintain fluff while also accounting for skill, budget, and local meta?
You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.
As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.
So what happens if you balance Orks around the idea of them moving as close to the enemy as possible each turn and hitting an enemy gun line, such as guard, with 30% of their forces and that being enough to win 50% of the time and a skilled player uses the terrain to keep 50% of their forces alive and thus steamrolls gunlines? What if another player realizes that Orks can actually win even bigger if they only try for a few Ork objectives with a fraction of their force and use the rest of their army to counter punch the Space Marine force which wins by attempting to hold the center of the table?
You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.
As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.
How does that help anything once skill expression is factored in? How does that work with an 'intended list' being used in an unintended but powerful way?
Also, provide proof that this is a solved problem within the computer gaming industry. Then show me that it's also solved for the tabletop wargaming industry. You can't just assert that something is solved and not show that this proof is common, works for games of 40k's level of complexity, and can accommodate all skill and budget levels as well as metas based around these disparate levels of resources.
For example, just for guard, you need to balance around Armored Companies, Mechanized Infantry, Massed Infantry, Elite Drop Troops, Fliers and Tanks, and any and all mixes of the above and they need to be balanced so that any of these can play against any of them without the issue of armor skew being a problem against a foot list that has limited heavy weapons teams. Then factor that over every army in the game.
Then factor in that other players may think fluff involves not taking counters to certain units because, "My regiment is anti-horde, they fought in the battle of xxx against the Tyranids and relied on regiment C to provide anti-tank and air cover." and he has to play against, "My regiment is built to support this relic baneblade handed down for centuries."
I've often wondered what the draw was for the super competitive players
* the massive player base. Gittin gud and being seen on the international level as gittin gud is a huge ego draw.
* the massive player base. Money money money. Cottage industries pop up like livestreams.
* the massive player base.
I have pointed this EXACT SAME ARGUMENT many times, in the AOS forum mostly where its seen as "the game is great balance because tournaments are not won by the same faction" and then I remember my last AOS game where I brought a "for fun" slaanesh army with one keeper and got demolished by the triple keeper of secrets army that summoned +1800 points on top of his 2000 points. No one is going to have a fun game playing 3800 pts vs 2000 pts. No one. And the rules allow that.
40k is similar. My last 40k game I brought a for fun rubric marine army. And faced a "for fun" ITC 5 knight army that tabled me in two turns. The game lets them do that. The game is not balanced, I don't care what it looks like at the ITC top tables... the game is not balanced.
I am a game designer. I have been for many years. I have played dozens upon dozens of games. And it is true NO GAME is perfectly balanced, but most games get a lot closer than this mess. These imbalances are done intentionally to move models and to appease to the hyper spike crowd that must win games. They are following the magic the gathering design protocols almost to a "T". And they are rewarded with forklifts of money so why change?
Not all consists will be equal, because the strategy behind list building matters. A hodgepodge laundry basket of units selected for theme or because it was one the shelf should be an uphill battle against a strategically composed list where each unit was selected for purpose.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.
So what happens if you balance Orks around the idea of them moving as close to the enemy as possible each turn and hitting an enemy gun line, such as guard, with 30% of their forces and that being enough to win 50% of the time and a skilled player uses the terrain to keep 50% of their forces alive and thus steamrolls gunlines? What if another player realizes that Orks can actually win even bigger if they only try for a few Ork objectives with a fraction of their force and use the rest of their army to counter punch the Space Marine force which wins by attempting to hold the center of the table?
Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).
You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.
As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.
How does that help anything once skill expression is factored in? How does that work with an 'intended list' being used in an unintended but powerful way?
Skill expression is why you include players of multiple levels in your playtest, and in theory your game design should encourage intended things to work they way they work, and unintended things to not work. That's... why game design is hard. You have to make sure the game functions as intended, and fix it when it doesn't. Obviously.
Canadian 5th wrote: Also, provide proof that this is a solved problem within the computer gaming industry. Then show me that it's also solved for the tabletop wargaming industry.
I didn't make the claim and don't have any proof, but feel free to PM Catbarf for his proof. I was just pointing out that the post you quoted claimed it was solved.
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Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote: Not all consists will be equal, because the strategy behind list building matters. A hodgepodge laundry basket of units selected for theme or because it was one the shelf should be an uphill battle against a strategically composed list where each unit was selected for purpose.
I agree with you, but the point we are making is that:
"A strategically composed list where each unit was selected for purpose" should coincide very well with "a hodgepodge laundry list basket of units selected for theme" provided that theme is the narrative of the army in question and not something utterly bizarre (like a Fortification-themed list that spams fortifications and Inquisitors or something).
Otherwise, you end up with players who choose an army for the narrative having to play something entirely unrelated. You end up with Band of Brothers fans doing human wave attacks with american paratroopers armed as cheaply as possible. That's obviously bad.
Competitive balance: Is there a combination of units and tactics that will get me a favorable win-rate against the field of armies?
Narrative balance: can I play the units I like, the units that would logically appear in my head-cannon, and a wide variety of units that can stand on their own and function as they should in lore.
These things are not the same. Both camps come from differing mindsets and I doubt the differences could ever be reconcilable. Simply having a build that can win 50%+ of the time against anyone, but relies on a specific combination of factors and is not reproducible outside of those conditions will certainly not make for a good, healthy narrative environment.
No, balancing for competition does not improve the game at the narrative level. They are not at all concerned with the same objectives and outcomes. They're not even concerned with playing the tabletop the same.
Like in an MMO, I always preferred the structured PvP system to have a different set of rules/abilities that applied only in PvP. That way PvP could be balanced separately from everything else. When WoW went on the big PvP normalization a lot of specs/classes lost their way and we ended up with a muddled mess of 31 flavors that all tasted like chicken.
It is why I never complained about ITC or other big gaming competitions having their own set of rules. They could make their own rules for their intended audience and it had 0 impact on what my friends and I were doing. Both groups could have their cakes and eat 'em, too.
Edit: this is why I am super stoked for Crusade. Finally, "narrative" isn't just "matched play only... power level and no structure!". There is a structured play system for narrative that is possibly even more expansive than even Matched Play, right now. I think this is a healthy decision as you can make the cut-throat environment competitors want in Matched Play without stomping over the people that may not necessarily want to play 6 flyrants to have a chance at competing in a game.
Unfortunately a lot of people simply do not get this. It was clearly demonstrated in a recent Eldar thread, where the Eldar players complained about the rules of their army not reflecting the fluff or supporting the thematic playstyle, only to be met with several people telling them that their complaints were stupid because the Eldar do well in tournaments.
Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate. Granted, ideally you would do all three.
I don't think that was the argument.
I believe it was that Eldar players were expressing feeling abused and others were pointing out several advantages that leads to them taking top tables. Not that the units they want to be better don't deserve to be better.
But that can vary person to person and I can't speak for everyone.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Here's how I'd handle a game between Slaanesh Daemons and Imperial Guard:
Daemons objective: "Feast on Fear:" Every failed morale check caused by an action taken by a unit in your army gives you {X} victory points. If you exceed {y} victory points, you win!
Imperial Guard objective: "Hold the Line:" Place two objectives in your own deployment zone. Each one is worth {Z} VP to you. If you match or exceed {2Z} VP, you win!
In this case, it actually makes for a game where two winners (and two losers!) is possible - which is indeed narratively possible. It is entirely conceivable that both sides complete their objective and acquire a victory in a narrative sense, especially if their objectives are so mismatched.
These sure sound like the kind of secondaries that GW has said will be in the updated codexes. Granted I disagree with the idea of putting them in individual books and think the army-specific secondaries should have been put in the launch Chapter Approved, but it is what it is.
Well, more fluff-related objectives. The specific examples given are actually terrible.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).
You can't drastically shift 40k's lore at this point. Look at the outrage around Primaris and the fact that there are still players who dislike Tau and the Necron rework.
So your only left with the lever of making gameplay work. How do you make a low skill cap army equal win-rate against a high skill cap army when both of them are being played by casual players who barely remember the rules? How do you make that same battle balanced if both players are season veterans and enjoy the tournament scene?
You can't just say that these things should be balanced, you need to show how they can be done in the face of the issues I've raised.
Canadian 5th wrote: Skill expression is why you include players of multiple levels in your playtest, and in theory your game design should encourage intended things to work they way they work, and unintended things to not work. That's... why game design is hard. You have to make sure the game functions as intended, and fix it when it doesn't. Obviously.
Let's again look at League of Legends, they have champions that are enjoyable at low skill levels that are tuned so that they fall off quickly in utility at higher levels of skill. This has to be the case because if those champions were tuned for high skill play they would be oppressive at low level play. Are these champions unbalanced? How about the inverse a champion that requires you to hit a 3 button combo with a tight timing window for maximum effect, they do poorly in the hands of an unskilled player but work at higher skill levels, and fall off again in pro where players can avoid the combo either via skill or team play. Are those champions unbalanced?
Canadian 5th wrote: I didn't make the claim and don't have any proof, but feel free to PM Catbarf for his proof. I was just pointing out that the post you quoted claimed it was solved.
Claims without proof are meaningless and you shouldn't lend such claims credence until they are proven.
OP, you seem to be making the argument that narrative and flavor cannot be balanced at all. Why not? Other games do.
I play competitively, whether it's a tournament or not, and it's pretty boring when there are "competitive builds," and then everything else, and when armies and individual units don't represent their fluff, or provide multiple options for building a viable force.
Crimson wrote: Supporting fluff appropriate playstyle and general fun is more important than balancing the win rate.
That's a slightly odd comment. If you don't care about your win rate then what stops you from playing a fluff appropriate playstyle and having fun?
And it also circles back to the idea that asking competitive players to balance the game doesn't include some concept of 'target playstyle'. I mean it's GW, so it might not, but if I was looking to get a game to market my approach with testers would start with 'this is how it is supposed to work...'
Maybe you care more about your win-rate playing the models you own/a fluffy list than the absolute overall winrate of people playing top-level tournaments with bizarre amalgamations of the top three units in three different Codexes and claiming they're playing your army.
Well that's fine - but then you have to support fluff appropriate playstyle and balance the game, it's not an either-or ... well, unless you deliberately make it so that fluff-appropriate lists are disproportionately powerful, but GW tried that in 7th and it was not a good idea.
Tyel wrote:Well yeah, because if you balance a game competitively, you can always play it casually.
But, as many people have said, sometimes the "competitive" balance on paper doesn't match what "casual" players want to do.
A game probably *should* be balanced competitively, but in addition to being casually balanced. Otherwise, we get cases of, as later posts indicate, things like competitively minded players doing things that don't fit the narrative trying to be told, in favour of optimisation.
I just can't get "I want to play Slaanesh Daemons. I want to just run across the table and stab stuff and that's it. But it turns out I'm more likely to win by holding objectives. Which sucks, bad game, bad game."
Because Slaanesh Daemons aren't well known for their objective holding, and so they shouldn't be penalised for not holding them/incentivised to do things other than camp objectives.
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Unit1126PLL wrote:But why not? As a Slaanesh Daemons player, I picked the faction for its models and lore (though way back when I was planning to use 3rd party models). The Lore for Slaanesh Daemons includes the following:
1) Not holding objectives. Daemons fade back into the warp after a short time in reality, so narratively, "holding" anything is fairly dumb for them.
2) Chasing emotion and excess. They exist partly to excite certain emotions in themselves and the foe, and this process usually involves running up to them and stabbing them - or seducing them. In brief.
3) Doing Slaanesh's will. The other part of their existence is as extensions of their Deity, who is a fickle and oft-dreaming god ill-concerned with military logic such as seizing specific terrain or accomplishing tactical or strategic objectives.
They're an army driven literally by emotion, and not logic. Victory for them should be some sort of emotional high, not having seized some certain amount of the battlefield or killed some certain specific targets or whatever.
Again, to draw another analogy:
This is like picking up a World War II game to play American Paratroopers because you liked watching "Band of Brothers" and finding out that the real way to play paratroopers is to give them zero upgrades, regiment them, don't use their unique deployment rules, and horde them up so you can do human wave attacks like Pickett's Charge.
catbarf wrote:You misunderstand- the idea is not to take a poll of every casual player and ensure that all of their strategies are equally viable. The idea is to have a coherent vision for how the game should play, and test the design against that vision.
Let's use a historical analogy: We're going to make a game about D-Day. What should happen is that the Allied player will hit the beach ASAP, take heavy losses, but push through and achieve a breakout. That's their win condition.
So we go and spend a bunch of time writing up our ruleset, and then give it to some hardcore competitive players to try out. And they come back to us and tell us that the game has a 50/50 winrate- it's perfectly balanced. Great! We release it and it's immediately a dismal failure.
Because it turns out that the optimal strategy that these competitive players developed, and the one that results in the 50/50 winrate, is for the Allies to avoid landing as long as possible. They sit in their boats out at the edge of the board and let naval gunfire do the work, and once that's done, land and proceed through- if the artillery is enough then the Allies win, if it doesn't wipe out the defenders then the Allies lose. Attempting to take the beach under fire, as actually happened, is suicide and doesn't work. So we've developed a game with a competitively balanced 50/50 winrate, but when played by a historically-minded player always results in a loss for the Allies and isn't particularly fun either.
Do you see the problem? We tested whether the game was objectively balanced, but we didn't test whether the optimal play strategy matched history. We now have an incongruence where the winning strategy of the game is different from the winning strategy in history, and in historical wargaming that is straight-up bad design.
In a modern wargame, we have the same expectations. The strategies that work in a modern, fictional-setting wargame should be the ones that work in real life. If the best way to employ infantry is in a Napoleonic line marching abreast into machine gun fire, it may be balanced in a competitive sense, but our game design is fundamentally flawed.
In a fantasy or sci-fi wargame, we don't have an objective reference, but presumably we do have a coherent vision for what our fictional battlefield looks like and how it works. The game should be designed to facilitate that vision.
So, back to 40K: It may be competitively balanced for the primary value of an Ork Boy to be in sitting on objectives, hiding from a fight, and absorbing bullets. But that doesn't match the game's fluff at all; and if that's the optimal way to employ Boyz, then a casual player who uses them aggressively will be employing them suboptimally, and it will not be balanced for that casual context.
The solution is not to pick a side and balance around either competitive play or casual play. The solution is to perform qualitative playtesting analysis, determine that the optimal strategy doesn't match the fluff or what's fun to play, and then redesign the game to rectify the imbalance. An Ork player who hides his Boyz should be punished. An Ork player who uses his Boyz aggressively should be rewarded. Once the game mechanics are set up to incentivize the 'correct' behavior, then there is no longer an incongruence between competitive and casual players: They will both be using Boyz the same way. Competitive players will do it because the game rewards them for it, casual players will do it because that's what the fluff says and what feels right, and thus Boyz can be balanced for both players.
Should Blood Axes behave differently? Okay, now let's assess how they should play versus how the new redesign encourages them to play, and adjust accordingly. Maybe we want them to still be aggressive, but be a bit smarter about it, so let's give them more benefit from cover while still having incentives to get into combat and disincentives to avoiding a fight. Now let's get that in front of casual playtesters to see if it feels right to them, and competitive playtesters to see if there are unintended side effects, or if the mechanic doesn't actually encourage the play we want to see. Notice how the playtesting goals are not just 'is this balanced at a tournament level', but we still need competitive playtesters in the mix.
And so this comes back to OP's point: The problem is not using competitive players for playtesting. The problem is assessing the game's design quality solely through the lens of competitive balance, while neglecting soft factors that matter to casual or narrative-driven players. You need a healthy cross-section of playtester demographics and a rigorous approach to testing (there is standard methodology for this- again, this is a solved problem!) to properly playtest and adjust the game as needed. You can't have just Spike players playtesting and driving redesign; you need Timmy and Johnny players offering their feedback as well, and it is certainly possible to please all three groups if you do your job properly.
Agreed with both. What is encouraged in the rules of the game is not always the same as what should be encouraged from a narrative perspective, and that's a problem.
It's an issue I've had in 40k for a long time regarding Space Marine Scouts - Scouts should be a supplementary force, not the backbone of the army, and yet I've seen countless Space Marine armies made up almost entirely of Scouts acting as the default infantry unit, as that's what was competitively encouraged. It just feels so *off*.
Arachnofiend wrote: Oh yeah, counter point: in 8th the Tzeentch/Nurgle buddies bonanza was a strong but well-balanced competitive list.
GW completely changed the detachment system to kill it because it's such a bizarre and unfluffy way to play the game.
To be fair, the allies system makes things more difficult to balance and leads to people cherry-picking units that cover their primary force's weaknesses.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).
You can't drastically shift 40k's lore at this point. Look at the outrage around Primaris and the fact that there are still players who dislike Tau and the Necron rework.
So your only left with the lever of making gameplay work. How do you make a low skill cap army equal win-rate against a high skill cap army when both of them are being played by casual players who barely remember the rules? How do you make that same battle balanced if both players are season veterans and enjoy the tournament scene?
You can't just say that these things should be balanced, you need to show how they can be done in the face of the issues I've raised.
You don't set an expectation of perfectly even winrates as your main end goal, for starters. You begin by aligning optimal play to theoretical play, with playtesting to confirm. Then you can balance appropriately to the intended matchup; whether you want the game to be fun and approachable for casual play and don't mind it being easily broken at high levels of play (do note that this is how 40Kused to be written), or whether you'd prefer the game to be balanced around competitive play and accept that some factions/units/etc will underperform when not handled with high skill.
Additionally, you can cater to multiple skill levels through counteracting mechanics that express at different levels. For instance, in 8th Ed while tri-pointing makes horde infantry more useful at higher levels of play, you can counter it with placement to mitigate tri-pointing. At lower levels of skill players may be unaware of both tri-pointing and the means of mitigating it, so balance is maintained.
I don't think anyone has suggested that a realistic goal is perfect balance for all players with all army compositions at all times, so either you're setting up a strawman or generically dismissing the idea of better playtesting so long as absolute perfection is unattainable; either way it's bunk.
Canadian 5th wrote: Let's again look at League of Legends, they have champions that are enjoyable at low skill levels that are tuned so that they fall off quickly in utility at higher levels of skill. This has to be the case because if those champions were tuned for high skill play they would be oppressive at low level play. Are these champions unbalanced? How about the inverse a champion that requires you to hit a 3 button combo with a tight timing window for maximum effect, they do poorly in the hands of an unskilled player but work at higher skill levels, and fall off again in pro where players can avoid the combo either via skill or team play. Are those champions unbalanced?
Unbalanced, no.
Suboptimal, yes.
Acceptable within the constraints of a development team that has other priorities, sure.
Canadian 5th wrote: Claims without proof are meaningless and you shouldn't lend such claims credence until they are proven.
Feel free to actually believe that the tabletop gaming and videogaming industries have just no idea how to playtest their products, and that 40K is a weird outlier among a sea of games that have (apparently magically) achieved convergence between optimal and narrative play, if that's what you so desire.
I have a degree in game design and worked in the industry. Nielsen-Norman UX testing procedures (one of the most basic principles of which is use a cross-section of representative users) as applied to gaming are standard practice. Do a Google search for how Valve uses focus groups if you want some insight into a good example of user-focused game design, if you want. I really don't care, because I'm not using claims of authority in lieu of argument.
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Purifying Tempest wrote: Competitive balance: Is there a combination of units and tactics that will get me a favorable win-rate against the field of armies?
Narrative balance: can I play the units I like, the units that would logically appear in my head-cannon, and a wide variety of units that can stand on their own and function as they should in lore.
These things are not the same. Both camps come from differing mindsets and I doubt the differences could ever be reconcilable.
If you do a good job at game design, then the army composition and tactics used by competitive players because they're most optimal will be indistinguishable from the army composition and tactics used by casual players because they fit the lore.
If they don't look anything alike, and the differences aren't reconcilable, then you've screwed up.
Like, nobody just accepts this as a given in historical wargaming- if the optimal play strategy in a WW2 game is to use forces and tactics that bear no resemblance to anything that actually happened in WW2, you don't chalk it up as an inevitable consequence of the rift between competitive and narrative players; you blame the designers for writing a game where real-world forces and tactics don't work.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Then you balance the game to achieve better winrates? I said that you should balance the game and have a narrative vision for how the battle should play out - they are not mutually exclusive. And if they are? Then you have the luxury of changing your narrative vision (though I think this would upset many players if orks became... squatters or something who preferred to just sit on objectives and die slowly).
You can't drastically shift 40k's lore at this point. Look at the outrage around Primaris and the fact that there are still players who dislike Tau and the Necron rework.
So your only left with the lever of making gameplay work. How do you make a low skill cap army equal win-rate against a high skill cap army when both of them are being played by casual players who barely remember the rules? How do you make that same battle balanced if both players are season veterans and enjoy the tournament scene?
You can't just say that these things should be balanced, you need to show how they can be done in the face of the issues I've raised.
Why? That's the game designer's job, not mine. If they can't be balanced, then something has to give - and since 40k's lore is its strongest suit, maybe balance should be what gives. Or maybe it's do-able with a redesign of the rule-set. IMHO the rules are infinitely flexible -there's tons of game designs out there; heck, even with regards to turn structure there's like four separate ways I can think of alone, and that's just the turn structure. (If you're wondering, those turn structures are IGOUGO, Alternating Activations, Alternating Phases, Impulse Model, WEGO. Oops, guess there's five, even better and even more flexible).
Unit1126PLL wrote: Skill expression is why you include players of multiple levels in your playtest, and in theory your game design should encourage intended things to work they way they work, and unintended things to not work. That's... why game design is hard. You have to make sure the game functions as intended, and fix it when it doesn't. Obviously.
Let's again look at League of Legends, they have champions that are enjoyable at low skill levels that are tuned so that they fall off quickly in utility at higher levels of skill. This has to be the case because if those champions were tuned for high skill play they would be oppressive at low level play. Are these champions unbalanced? How about the inverse a champion that requires you to hit a 3 button combo with a tight timing window for maximum effect, they do poorly in the hands of an unskilled player but work at higher skill levels, and fall off again in pro where players can avoid the combo either via skill or team play. Are those champions unbalanced?
I don't play League of Legends, but one of the crucial things to understand is that you're only talking about tweaking champions. I'm talking about tweaking the whole game. If a champion is oppressive in League of Legends but the same mechanic isn't as oppressive in Overwatch, then maybe you should make your League operate a little bit more like Overwatch (e.g. making it first-person or whatever). Sometimes you have to rethink the underlying structure and core rules of the game to resolve these mechanics, rather than just adjusting codexes or points here and there. Remember, EVERYTHING about the game is human-created, and thus subject to change.
Unit1126PLL wrote: I didn't make the claim and don't have any proof, but feel free to PM Catbarf for his proof. I was just pointing out that the post you quoted claimed it was solved.
Claims without proof are meaningless and you shouldn't lend such claims credence until they are proven.
I think it's reasonable to want your orcs to feel like they have an inherent sense of momentum rushing up the battlefield, that's great game design and I hope that any codex rules that are laid out encourage that style of game play. That said the criticism of counter intuitive playstyles being rewarding in 9th is perhaps a reflection not of army balance but the game system itself. I'm not sure any edition has incentivised killing less than 9th. It looks to be an objective focused game that rewards playing the mission as opposed to a traditionally green skinned slug fest.
That said I'd hope this does lead to a more conventionally balanced game. Your orcs might not be able to charge headlong into Admech/Marine gunlines turn one but they can make use of large numbers of units swarming objectives and choking out the map, coming in from board edges and playing to your strengths. I admit that that's a display of more "cunnin" than some orc players might prefer, but this means you don't have to fight your opponent on his terms and should hopefully make things more competitive. It's not like the orcs to pick a fair fight anyway, so I'd imagine dropping 6 x 10 boys in turn three will still be pretty fun for a lot of players.
Barbachop wrote: I think it's reasonable to want your orcs to feel like they have an inherent sense of momentum rushing up the battlefield, that's great game design and I hope that any codex rules that are laid out encourage that style of game play. That said the criticism of counter intuitive playstyles being rewarding in 9th is perhaps a reflection not of army balance but the game system itself. I'm not sure any edition has incentivised killing less than 9th. It looks to be an objective focused game that rewards playing the mission as opposed to a traditionally green skinned slug fest.
That said I'd hope this does lead to a more conventionally balanced game. Your orcs might not be able to charge headlong into Admech/Marine gunlines turn one but they can make use of large numbers of units swarming objectives and choking out the map, coming in from board edges and playing to your strengths. I admit that that's a display of more "cunnin" than some orc players might prefer, but this means you don't have to fight your opponent on his terms and should hopefully make things more competitive. It's not like the orcs to pick a fair fight anyway, so I'd imagine dropping 6 x 10 boys in turn three will still be pretty fun for a lot of players.
The post is intended entirely to be a criticism of counter intuitive playstyles being rewarding in 9th.
Weird, arbitrary breakpoints have ALWAYS created stupid, stupid situations in the rules of 40k.
An autocannon dealing 1/6 wounds to a character and allowed their full 3+ armor save while a krak missile with 1 more strength and AP just OBLITERATED them outright was stupid in 5th.
A 300 point unit getting the "superheavy" designation and gaining stomp, Strength D, immunity to the damage table, and a half-dozen other rules enabling a single wraithknight to be able to easily defeat 3 280-ish point Gorkanauts was stupid in 7th.
A 9-wound gigantic winged daemon being totally safe behind a line of cultists while a 10-wound character could be instantly picked out was stupid in 8th.
And now, for some bizzare, unexplained reason, the second your squad hits that magical number of 6, you take a MASSIVE hit to your effectiveness where you suddenly can't screen, can't wrap, can't string out, and tank min 3 hits from blast weapons.
Why? Why when there are so many damn kits out there that sell 3 models, basically any elite unit in existence, why would you suddenly make it a gigantic trap to take two boxes of space marine bikes or 2 boxes of killa kanz or two boxes of the new admech cavalry and run them as a single unit?
And now, for some bizzare, unexplained reason, the second your squad hits that magical number of 6, you take a MASSIVE hit to your effectiveness where you suddenly can't screen, can't wrap, can't string out, and tank min 3 hits from blast weapons.
Why? Why when there are so many damn kits out there that sell 3 models, basically any elite unit in existence, why would you suddenly make it a gigantic trap to take two boxes of space marine bikes or 2 boxes of killa kanz or two boxes of the new admech cavalry and run them as a single unit?
It might be because it isn't that huge of an issue. Dunno.
It certainly isn't as huge as "can't".
Well, the flipside is that MSU is worse against both definitions of "attrition" in 9th. Easier to get down to half strength and lose extra models in the morale phase, easier to lose more total units and get scored on for what is arguably the best "kill stuff" objective to take.
I don't think these factors quite even things out but it's clear that GW recognized there was a problem and took steps to mitigate it.
Sidebar, I'm missing the part where any of the issues the OP brought up have anything to do with competitive players balancing the game for competitive blah, blah blah.
Take Orkz. Orkz have never really played thematically how they are in a competitive environment.
In 8th their best strategy was to camp out half the board and win on objectives.
In 7th their best strategy was to play Eldar instead.
In 6th their best strategy was to play Eldar also.
In 5th their best strategy was to use Nob Bikers to abuse wound allocation.
So in at least the past 4 editions Orkz have been NEITHER thematic OR balanced competitively and yet only 8th edition has even attempted to bring competitive play into the conversation.
Sure, it would be great if you could have both, but up until now we haven't really had either for the majority of armies. At least competitively.
ERJAK wrote: Sidebar, I'm missing the part where any of the issues the OP brought up have anything to do with competitive players balancing the game for competitive blah, blah blah.
Take Orkz. Orkz have never really played thematically how they are in a competitive environment.
In 8th their best strategy was to camp out half the board and win on objectives.
In 7th their best strategy was to play Eldar instead.
In 6th their best strategy was to play Eldar also.
In 5th their best strategy was to use Nob Bikers to abuse wound allocation.
So in at least the past 4 editions Orkz have been NEITHER thematic OR balanced competitively and yet only 8th edition has even attempted to bring competitive play into the conversation.
Sure, it would be great if you could have both, but up until now we haven't really had either for the majority of armies. At least competitively.
What the OP is saying is that listening to competitive play and competitive play only is but half the solution to this problem you've so neatly outlined. The other half remains to be addressed - but since GW is only getting feedback from the first half, the modern playtested 40k is skewed away from thematic armies and towards competitive ones (since theme is disregarded when balancing armies).
Arachnofiend wrote: Well, the flipside is that MSU is worse against both definitions of "attrition" in 9th. Easier to get down to half strength and lose extra models in the morale phase, easier to lose more total units and get scored on for what is arguably the best "kill stuff" objective to take.
I don't think these factors quite even things out but it's clear that GW recognized there was a problem and took steps to mitigate it.
Five-man units suffer almost the same under the new morale system as they do under the old. If penalizing MSU through morale was their intent, they either wanted it to be an extremely subtle change (at Ld8 on a five-model unit, the only difference occurs if you take exactly three casualties, roll a 6 on the morale check, and then roll a 1 or 2 on the last model's attrition check), or they didn't actually math out what the impact would be.
ERJAK wrote: Sidebar, I'm missing the part where any of the issues the OP brought up have anything to do with competitive players balancing the game for competitive blah, blah blah.
Take Orkz. Orkz have never really played thematically how they are in a competitive environment.
In 8th their best strategy was to camp out half the board and win on objectives.
In 7th their best strategy was to play Eldar instead.
In 6th their best strategy was to play Eldar also.
In 5th their best strategy was to use Nob Bikers to abuse wound allocation.
So in at least the past 4 editions Orkz have been NEITHER thematic OR balanced competitively and yet only 8th edition has even attempted to bring competitive play into the conversation.
Sure, it would be great if you could have both, but up until now we haven't really had either for the majority of armies. At least competitively.
What the OP is saying is that listening to competitive play and competitive play only is but half the solution to this problem you've so neatly outlined. The other half remains to be addressed - but since GW is only getting feedback from the first half, the modern playtested 40k is skewed away from thematic armies and towards competitive ones (since theme is disregarded when balancing armies).
Or, at least, this appears to be the case based on who they're getting to contribute to these Faction Focus articles - and bringing the NOVA guy on board in a community role. I vaguely recall an article in WD during 8th where they did interview playtesters, and there were some narrative groups in there - but if they're still around, their contributions aren't getting acknowledged by featuring on WHC at the moment.
ERJAK wrote: Sidebar, I'm missing the part where any of the issues the OP brought up have anything to do with competitive players balancing the game for competitive blah, blah blah.
Take Orkz. Orkz have never really played thematically how they are in a competitive environment.
In 8th their best strategy was to camp out half the board and win on objectives.
In 7th their best strategy was to play Eldar instead.
In 6th their best strategy was to play Eldar also.
In 5th their best strategy was to use Nob Bikers to abuse wound allocation.
So in at least the past 4 editions Orkz have been NEITHER thematic OR balanced competitively and yet only 8th edition has even attempted to bring competitive play into the conversation.
Sure, it would be great if you could have both, but up until now we haven't really had either for the majority of armies. At least competitively.
What the OP is saying is that listening to competitive play and competitive play only is but half the solution to this problem you've so neatly outlined. The other half remains to be addressed - but since GW is only getting feedback from the first half, the modern playtested 40k is skewed away from thematic armies and towards competitive ones (since theme is disregarded when balancing armies).
Or, at least, this appears to be the case based on who they're getting to contribute to these Faction Focus articles - and bringing the NOVA guy on board in a community role. I vaguely recall an article in WD during 8th where they did interview playtesters, and there were some narrative groups in there - but if they're still around, their contributions aren't getting acknowledged by featuring on WHC at the moment.
It also appears to be the case based on rules design. For example, many of the current players have touted (as in the OP example) the ability for melee armies to move up and have "board control" as the reason melee will be fine in 9th. As illustrated throughout this thread, while that may result in games that are 'balanced' between melee and shooting in terms of winrate, it does not result in thematic games. It results in the melee army moving to midboard and then hunkering down and getting shot until the game ends - exactly the opinion provided by the competitive player that the_scotsman was commenting on at the beginning of the thread.
"Orks aren't dead, they can just sit on objectives and soak bullets to victory!" rings hollow for players who picked orks to, say, "git stuck-in wif da boyz".
I think this is coming down to the crux of what is "competitive playtesting".
I feel the morale system is pure GW - not competitive playtesters. Its "People don't like the current system - lets change it and see - look at player base a bit like a hopeful dog"
Because... the change is fairly incidental - and I feel competitive players will have said its marginally better, but morale is a non-issue so don't care much.
Hypothetically it punishes failing by say 1 more severely - but in MSU, there simply won't be the bodies to be attritioned away. So many 5 man units are functionally immune unless you almost killed them - and that was the case before. Modifiers might mess with this a bit, but... eh. Need more testing to see, given how bad morale has been. The change theoretically helps big squads but... blast still just deletes them, and they are probably running with near hard-coded faction-wide rules to help reduce the impact of morale anyway.
To a degree I think the only change for what people want will be in the 9th edition codexes. It might change the design space for these various factions taking account of the new rules. Big points changes might also shake up the meta - but in practice, most things play much the same as they do now, +/- the little things.
But I guess my view is "blast sucks - its a dumb rule" - but I don't think that's GW giving in to the competitive players, that's GW doing Narrative. And saying you want more narrative players deciding how the game will work will result in more such rules.
Actually, blast is a fine rule. I think it's implemented badly, but it's actually a perfect example to hinge the discussion around.
In the "game logic" or "battle vision" or "lore" or "reality" (whatever you want to call it), explosive weapons affect a greater area than non-explosive weapons (given similar quantities). "Back in the day", as it were, GW had a good way to handle this, but these days, they do not. The disappearance of said area mechanism left the awkward situation where area targets took equal damage as point targets from an explosion.
The current rules are a clumsy but well-meaning attempt to fit the logic of the "reality" of the game into the rules. It is clumsy but present.
Arachnofiend wrote: Well, the flipside is that MSU is worse against both definitions of "attrition" in 9th. Easier to get down to half strength and lose extra models in the morale phase, easier to lose more total units and get scored on for what is arguably the best "kill stuff" objective to take.
I don't think these factors quite even things out but it's clear that GW recognized there was a problem and took steps to mitigate it.
Five-man units suffer almost the same under the new morale system as they do under the old. If penalizing MSU through morale was their intent, they either wanted it to be an extremely subtle change (at Ld8 on a five-model unit, the only difference occurs if you take exactly three casualties, roll a 6 on the morale check, and then roll a 1 or 2 on the last model's attrition check), or they didn't actually math out what the impact would be.
Yeah, I agree it's a minor change for five man squads. It's more significant in the argument of 10 vs. 20, which is meaningful to me because Necrons.
I think the attrition objective is the more impactful check; take two Thousand Sons players who are just obsessed with Rubrics for some reason. One of them splits them up into 5-man MSU squads, the other takes big 20 man rubricks. The second player is getting Attrition for free, and since only one person can score that objective that's a huge difference in scoring potential.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Actually, blast is a fine rule. I think it's implemented badly, but it's actually a perfect example to hinge the discussion around.
In the "game logic" or "battle vision" or "lore" or "reality" (whatever you want to call it), explosive weapons affect a greater area than non-explosive weapons (given similar quantities). "Back in the day", as it were, GW had a good way to handle this, but these days, they do not. The disappearance of said area mechanism left the awkward situation where area targets took equal damage as point targets from an explosion.
The current rules are a clumsy but well-meaning attempt to fit the logic of the "reality" of the game into the rules. It is clumsy but present.
But you had that already. Its reflected in getting D6 shots.
I think it would be far - far - preferably to say D6 weapons always get 3 hits. Or 4 hits. It doesn't really matter - and you can balance them accordingly.
But saying you get on average (with downside) 3.5 shots versus this unit, 4 on that unit, and 6 on that unit, is dumb. Its a huge buff, that is going to be incredibly difficult to quantify.in points.
Either things like a Wyvern are going to be generally *bad* - because they are only justified against 11+ units and suck otherwise - or they are okay normally, and offer obscene returns versus hordes.
I don't think there can be a middle ground when you get 50% more shots. (Or, RAW min 3, 71% more shots.)
The sensible thing I think would just be to make all such weapons treat the dice roll as a minimum of 3. That's what I think a competitive player would have gone for - because it gives consistency and that can be valued in points.
This by contrast is a mess - and the likely function is to make squads of 11+ extinct. Or one turn wonders.
Now as said in other threads - meta is meta. In a world where no one takes anything but MSU, it may be that blast weapons are bad, so no one takes them, which in turn means people can start taking hordes again. But this remains to be seen. Points will tell - but right now, I think its been a net buff to lots of guns that didn'tn obviously need it, and as a result bringing hordes is a liability. There are loads of downsides and no upsides.
But I don't think this is because of competitive playtesters. This is because GW think battlecannon go boom.
Making statements about how GW has supposedly catered to tournament play in terms of design is pointless if you can't actually point to instances where this is objectively the case, especially in the examples OP and others have been using. Plus, you don't even know how GW actually playtests or what they ask their playtesters to find.
I used to work in the games industry and also do QA before that and I can tell you that testers are routinely ignored or only asked to do very specific things. It is LAUGHABLE that you would criticise the competitive players who were chosen to playtest 9th on the basis of Orks or Eldar not playing thematically, because you don't know WHAT they were asked to playtest. Essentially, it isn't Tabletop Titans fault that Eldar are almost encouraged to play a cheap chaff type of playstyle because they probably have little input into the actual design of datasheets or units. They might absolutely give feedback along the lines of "Aspect Warriors don't represent what they're like in-lore" but GW are free to ignore that, especially if Tabletop Titans has only been hired to test if the current unit and its stats essentially "works" within the new system and is pointed appropriately.
I remember doing bugtesting and compliance for games and usually if you ever gave actual feedback on game design or balancing, you were usually ignored or told to feth off. That wasn't what you were hired to do and I'm sure in many cases it's the same for playtesters in 40k.
What a lot of you are griping about is a failure of the games designers. I'm sure Lawrence Baker from TTT would love if Howling Banshees were more evocative of their background, but from what it sounds like they're just given their materials, asked to see if anything is too exploitable or broken and if its points match its current datasheet appropriately.
EDIT: Also we know for a fact that GW can absolutely just ignore playtesting completely. Take a look at Marines 2.0 and the Iron Hands supplement specifically. Their entire playtesting team, including the competitive aspects of it, routinely and repeatedly told them it was a massive issue. Their concerns were not taken on board.
Bosskelot wrote: What a lot of you are griping about is a failure of the games designers.
OP and others have explicitly said that, so... yes?
I mean, where are you getting the idea that people are blaming competitive players themselves and absolving GW? Everything I see in this thread is criticizing the idea of only balancing towards tournament play, or criticizing GW directly.0
Bosskelot wrote: EDIT: Also we know for a fact that GW can absolutely just ignore playtesting completely. Take a look at Marines 2.0 and the Iron Hands supplement specifically. Their entire playtesting team, including the competitive aspects of it, routinely and repeatedly told them it was a massive issue. Their concerns were not taken on board.
Looking at you list of grievances, it looks like 40% of your complaints are against skew lists, which is hardly a competitive only "problem". Wacky skewed lists are basically the only way to play a titan, for example, and I have never see someone frown in the presence of one. The dirty secret of these kinds of units is that they aren't actually that powerful for their points. While essentially everything can kill a single cultist, very few things are even vaguely efficient at it (heavy bolters are better at killing knights than cultists), and killing one cultist a turn won't even destroy the unit by the end of the game. Heavy skew lists are always especially hard on tac lists, but that's the trade-off you make for being tac.
I think the problems, become real for regular folk, when you are given only two options either play a tournament army or play something realy bad, so bad that it isn't even worth trying out in casual settings.
One build books, or armies who have to be build around one model type, but unlike knights don't consist of that one model, are the real bad thing in w40k.
Most people don't care about playing in tournaments, they do care about quality of game play. I doubt there are many people who are willing to spend 800$ or more, and then find out the army they bought for looks is not up to task when playing vs other armies bought for looks too.
This thread is flawed on a core level, because it makes the assumption that this change is to the benefit of competitive balance. By all means this seems unlikely. Orks and similar armies seem to be going into 9th heavily nerfed. The suggestions on how to play seem to be scraping together the last options Orks have left. The fact that they WERENT balanced for competitive play feels like it’s more responsible for unfit design than anything else. GW’s balance philosophy seems to be “make the game as fun as possible for people who enjoy interacting as little as possible and sitting their rolling dice behind their castle” as it seems like that is their breadwinner. No competitive players were suggesting ANY of the nerfs that you described there.
Slayer6 wrote: Sometimes watching casuals play is like this:
Spoiler:
Competitive matches are like watching a MMA fight by comparison.
I'd take a competitive balanced game any day. If you want casual based, then you have Crusade, or 8E, hell even 7E...
Looks like they're having fun in that first example.
And MMA comparison to Competitive? I don't know man, that seems pretty different to what I've seen on competitive tables. I will agree that there is a lot of hype for a really short burst of action that ultimately lets everyone down who was waiting for a really intense, long grinding fight!
Those minions had a blast... if we're talking about a game... I think they're winning.
MMA fighting?
This is why I say both camps have wildly different goals and objectives and the differences will not likely be reconciled under one big umbrella.
At least with Crusade and Matched Play, we got two smaller, more specific umbrellas to play under. Let fluffy people be fluffy and slap box and laugh at their stupid antics... and let the competitive guys be super cereal. Everyone enjoys the game in their own ways.
Silly question: why can't gw write rules for factions that are both competitive and portray them as they should be in their fluff? I don't see why they can't, in fact they often do. The reason csm players loved the 3.5 codex wasn't just because it was strong competitively, it was also because it is considered by most to be the best portrayal of them. Hh does an excellent job of making all the legions play like they should, while still being good.
Personally, I think the rules for Night Lords in Faith and Fury are an excellent recent example of this. As a long time Night Lords player I love them. They are strong without being meta breaking while reflecting the legion almost perfectly.
If gw would spend more time trying to write rules like these instead of just trying to make things better by making them cheaper, or writing rules that just boost raw power, then they could have factions that are both fun for casual and narrative players and competitive. It would just take a little more effort.
Gadzilla666 wrote: Silly question: why can't gw write rules for factions that are both competitive and portray them as they should be in their fluff? I don't see why they can't, in fact they often do. The reason csm players loved the 3.5 codex wasn't just because it was strong competitively, it was also because it is considered by most to be the best portrayal of them. Hh does an excellent job of making all the legions play like they should, while still being good.
Personally, I think the rules for Night Lords in Faith and Fury are an excellent recent example of this. As a long time Night Lords player I love them. They are strong without being meta breaking while reflecting the legion almost perfectly.
If gw would spend more time trying to write rules like these instead of just trying to make things better by making them cheaper, or writing rules that just boost raw power, then they could have factions that are both fun for casual and narrative players and competitive. It would just take a little more effort.
Ironhand's rules were fluffy as all hell and they dominated so hard just saying 'IH' is enough to pucker half the buttholes on dakka.
Gadzilla666 wrote: Silly question: why can't gw write rules for factions that are both competitive and portray them as they should be in their fluff? I don't see why they can't, in fact they often do. The reason csm players loved the 3.5 codex wasn't just because it was strong competitively, it was also because it is considered by most to be the best portrayal of them. Hh does an excellent job of making all the legions play like they should, while still being good.
Personally, I think the rules for Night Lords in Faith and Fury are an excellent recent example of this. As a long time Night Lords player I love them. They are strong without being meta breaking while reflecting the legion almost perfectly.
If gw would spend more time trying to write rules like these instead of just trying to make things better by making them cheaper, or writing rules that just boost raw power, then they could have factions that are both fun for casual and narrative players and competitive. It would just take a little more effort.
Ironhand's rules were fluffy as all hell and they dominated so hard just saying 'IH' is enough to pucker half the buttholes on dakka.
That's where the concept of "restraint" comes in. The Iron Hands supplement seemed to be written with the same amount of restraint as a bad movie character that fits the "Mary Sue" description: they had to be better than everyone else at everything. The rules writers just didn't know when to stop.
Though it does seem gw have a thing for chapters/legions with "Iron" in their name (see Iron Warriors in the 3.5 codex).
Feel I'm on the verge of whiteknighting here, but GW *does* try to write rules that represent the fluff.
Want to play Goffs? Okay, here's a rule that only benefits you if you are krumping things - and hey, you should do more damage than any other Ork.
Its just that the game doesn't always make that optimal versus the other choices. See: Doing damage isn't the problem, its getting across the table faster and not dying. But there is nothing especially "Goffy" about this.
Afraid there is always two sides to this. At some level yes Chaos 3.5 rules were cool just because they were *different*. But they were also powerful - and people inevitably gravitated to the ones that were better. (Oh, you play Iron Warriors too? What a coincidence...)
Now to a degree this is a balance calculation that could say be resolved. You should be able to balance - to a degree - doing say 7/6 more damage in assault, or moving/advancing/charging an extra inch and ignoring the assault penalty or the other options.
But the complaint here seems more visceral. "If I play Orks I should have a Green Tide and run at the enemy and if I am at any point encouraged to deviate from this preprogrammed path the game is wrong". Well.. I just can't agree. I don't think doing so should be an auto-lose. But neither should it be automatically the way to play. Or at least I don't think so.
If Orks might be forced into hanging back that is a problem with the Codex, not the fact GW is only talking to competitive players. Few of them are going to want Orks to deliberately suck, and play in this *I'll hang back and die slowly* way. They are just going to point out that they can.
I guess the argument you could make is that the competitive scene was madly convinced Orks were going to be the hottest thing ever and then they were a bit meh. Which isn't to say they didn't win games and tournaments - but their dominance never really happened. Probably because of a failure to realise the meta would quickly adapt to be very anti-ork if the number of Ork players ever increased to the point it was justified. In a 6 game tournament, the odds of coming up against an army skewed to murder boyz are very high.
The problem with 40k is that the meta tends to evolve to lists which can't be "meta'ed". See, laughing in Ironhands, or Eldar Flyers, or 3++ Castellans.
No, you hit the nail on the head Tyel. There's potentially issues with Orks (probably a bit early to be making threads about it), but to label ANY of these as "competitive" is just absurd. These are not competitive changes at all, no competitive player wanted that. This is GW again, designing a base system to try and ensure that their poster boys have no real speedbumps towards chewing through NPC (Xenos) factions.
Yeah, I'm sure the rules are just coincidentally structured like ITC, and ITC is just coincidentally deciding to stop houseruling and fold in to the default missions and rules.
auticus wrote: I think GW has some talented guys working for them.
Which is why I also think that the imbalance that is always rife in their rulesets is intentional.
Sometimes i think its the end results of Rule of Cool, Everything has to be cool, even when it doesn't really make sense, or just ends in other things not being cool. Its hard to write good rules if you dont get all the peaces to make those rules really play nice.
auticus wrote: I think GW has some talented guys working for them.
Which is why I also think that the imbalance that is always rife in their rulesets is intentional.
Yep.
It's just that in this instance, GW has happened to decide that all the things major event organizers don't like (players using large hordes to slow play, requiring a ton of terrain on every board, unpainted armies, vaguely worded rules, complicated list building, etc) get cut out of 8th and the mission structure is coincidentally identical to ITC.
This is Warhammer 40,000: We Realized Large Events Are Good Press Edition. Of course they shuffle around which unit categories are good every edition, this edition is the walking monster/vehicle/Elite Infantry edition, 8th was the light infantry/make everyone buy an ally detachment edition, 7th was the make everybody buy a transport for every squad/monster edition, 6th was the flyer/fortification edition, etc.
auticus wrote: I think GW has some talented guys working for them.
Which is why I also think that the imbalance that is always rife in their rulesets is intentional.
Sometimes i think its the end results of Rule of Cool, Everything has to be cool, even when it doesn't really make sense, or just ends in other things not being cool. Its hard to write good rules if you dont get all the peaces to make those rules really play nice.
Many of their rules are blatantly busted after a couple minutes reading the army book. I don't believe its because of rule of cool. I believe its because imbalance drives model sales. Firmly believe this. There are things in 40k and AOS where even the dullest among us figured out in 5 minutes that taking a lot of that thing is really good, or that an entire faction is as good as steamed crap in a tupperware bowl.
There is no rule of cool to describe how entire factions are horrible for years / entire edition durations. But we (the community) celebrate it and shovel money their way anyway.
auticus wrote: I think GW has some talented guys working for them.
Which is why I also think that the imbalance that is always rife in their rulesets is intentional.
Yep.
It's just that in this instance, GW has happened to decide that all the things major event organizers don't like (players using large hordes to slow play, requiring a ton of terrain on every board, unpainted armies, vaguely worded rules, complicated list building, etc) get cut out of 8th and the mission structure is coincidentally identical to ITC.
This is Warhammer 40,000: We Realized Large Events Are Good Press Edition. Of course they shuffle around which unit categories are good every edition, this edition is the walking monster/vehicle/Elite Infantry edition, 8th was the light infantry/make everyone buy an ally detachment edition, 7th was the make everybody buy a transport for every squad/monster edition, 6th was the flyer/fortification edition, etc.
This is the cycle of gw unfortunately. WHFB went through the tournament editions. 40k has had tournament editions (4th and 5th were largely tournament editions, 6th and 7th largely narrative editions). I agree, this is firmly going into tournament player edition. The only thing I can really say about that is their community surveys have shown them that the tournament player is the majority audience and where they are going to get their money from and based on my observations I'd agree with them. They are the ones that buy new armies every time a new power list is brought out. They are the cash cow.
auticus wrote: I think GW has some talented guys working for them.
Which is why I also think that the imbalance that is always rife in their rulesets is intentional.
Sometimes i think its the end results of Rule of Cool, Everything has to be cool, even when it doesn't really make sense, or just ends in other things not being cool. Its hard to write good rules if you dont get all the peaces to make those rules really play nice.
Many of their rules are blatantly busted after a couple minutes reading the army book. I don't believe its because of rule of cool. I believe its because imbalance drives model sales. Firmly believe this. There are things in 40k and AOS where even the dullest among us figured out in 5 minutes that taking a lot of that thing is really good, or that an entire faction is as good as steamed crap in a tupperware bowl.
There is no rule of cool to describe how entire factions are horrible for years / entire edition durations. But we (the community) celebrate it and shovel money their way anyway.
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
auticus wrote: I don't think new units have to be OP. There just has to be some units OP, and some units that are not so good.
That way you can rotate new units in and out.
The only other answer is their rules writers are truly incompetent.
^and that's the one I'm going with.
There is no rational reason for units like Shining Spears, Guardsmen, Vauls Wrath Batteries, Catachans, Dark Reapers, Necron Destroyers, and all these low-profit sculpts from 3rd-5th edition to be busted good if you buy into the grand GW-spiracy. Every time one of them becomes OP they INSTANTLY go out of stock and stay that way for MONTHS. If you know some way that that is somehow a corporation pulling a "just as planned" and profiting off some janky-ass ancient-ass sculpt made of fossilized shaving cream that they call Finecast I would love to know.
The real answer is just...stuff ain't balanced. 25% of the game makes the other 75% look like a joke, and when GW releases new stuff, about a quarter of it lands in that category (go figure).
People just remember the Kelermorph, and forget about the biophagus magus sanctus jackal alphus locus and nexos that all come out at the same time, cost GW the same exact amount of investment capital, and often have bottom of the barrel rules.
Occam's razor. Gw's just incompetent, and people just remember the hits and forget the misses. Remember that being a psychic medium is like a billion dollar industry. People aren't that smart.
auticus wrote: I don't think new units have to be OP. There just has to be some units OP, and some units that are not so good.
That way you can rotate new units in and out.
The only other answer is their rules writers are truly incompetent.
I think after reading that recent interview, I would suspect there rules writers are often at the bottom on what really makes the game work. They just the ones putting it all together.
This is entirely made worse when factions are in real need of specific units to facilitate there ability to play the game, Why other army get units that they have allmost no place for.
All this why they are having to design and write rules for an ever expanding scale of game, why a big part of the games factions still miss even basic parts of the games intended play.
Agree on Kelermorph versus other similar kits. Tbh I was also wrong when his rules leaked. I think he was and remains good, but also so hard to keep alive after appearing that he never gets a chance to be that problematic.
You can call it incompetence, but I think GW just doesn't think about balance the way "competitive" players do. Or even players who just spend a long time thinking about the game. This is why I think getting narrative players more involved would be a mixed blessing - GW already provide that themselves. You are likely to just see people push the narrative they want.
For example the longest time the GW "idea" of building a list was essentially Highlander with maybe some duplicate troops. Spam and skew was an unknown concept - because who would want to turn up with 5 Hive Tyrants? Don't you want to show off your collection of lots of different kits? Unsurprisingly with such a mentality, you don't write lists thinking people will just max out the good squads and ignore all the bad. Indeed you might even think its cool that certain squads are "good" for their points, so they stand out and do cool things on the tabletop.
So generally every new codex (although not always) some of the explicitly too good stuff gets toned down and the bad stuff gets toned up. Cynics say this is about getting people to buy new models - but really, isn't it how you'd try to balance the game? The fact its done semi-randomly is more evidence of not really understanding the game in a cohesive way than some sort of grand master plan.
I think competitive players enjoy imbalance. Without imbalance there are no skew lists. Without skew lists, they are "bored". If there was actual balance in the game, more things would be viable and listbuilding wouldnt' be as impactful.
Its the narrative and casual players that suffer most from imbalance. They are the ones that walk into the gw store and get suckered by the store manager into buying the necrons or whatever other tepid crap army exists because they look awesome, but whose rules are flaming garbage.
And then they get face planted game in game out and told to get good, while being out nearly a grand.
Tyel wrote: Agree on Kelermorph versus other similar kits. Tbh I was also wrong when his rules leaked. I think he was and remains good, but also so hard to keep alive after appearing that he never gets a chance to be that problematic.
You can call it incompetence, but I think GW just doesn't think about balance the way "competitive" players do. Or even players who just spend a long time thinking about the game. This is why I think getting narrative players more involved would be a mixed blessing - GW already provide that themselves. You are likely to just see people push the narrative they want.
For example the longest time the GW "idea" of building a list was essentially Highlander with maybe some duplicate troops. Spam and skew was an unknown concept - because who would want to turn up with 5 Hive Tyrants? Don't you want to show off your collection of lots of different kits? Unsurprisingly with such a mentality, you don't write lists thinking people will just max out the good squads and ignore all the bad. Indeed you might even think its cool that certain squads are "good" for their points, so they stand out and do cool things on the tabletop.
So generally every new codex (although not always) some of the explicitly too good stuff gets toned down and the bad stuff gets toned up. Cynics say this is about getting people to buy new models - but really, isn't it how you'd try to balance the game? The fact its done semi-randomly is more evidence of not really understanding the game in a cohesive way than some sort of grand master plan.
There's also almost certainly a whole lot of telephone game time-lag going on. We know that rules are written a very long way in advance. If you view 9th edition's rules changes through the lens of the current, post marines 2.0 world, it's comical how much they favor the currently dominant faction paradigm and penalize the current weakest factions.
But orks, GSC, Daemons, and Nids making up the bottom of the barrel is a recent enough development that, were the formative work on 9th to have begun even just 1 year ago, the idea of having to clamp down hard on large blobs of light infantry makes a ton more sense.
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auticus wrote: I think competitive players enjoy imbalance. Without imbalance there are no skew lists. Without skew lists, they are "bored". If there was actual balance in the game, more things would be viable and listbuilding wouldnt' be as impactful.
Its the narrative and casual players that suffer most from imbalance. They are the ones that walk into the gw store and get suckered by the store manager into buying the necrons or whatever other tepid crap army exists because they look awesome, but whose rules are flaming garbage.
And then they get face planted game in game out and told to get good, while being out nearly a grand.
If someone invests a grand into 40k before playing their first game, I have zero sympathy for them to be honest.
No list you build before playing your first game is going to be good.
I've been through six edition changes now with 40k. I have over a grand sunk into my necron army. I've had them since 5th edition.
There is no excuse for them or any faction to be a laughing stock throughout an entire edition.
Lets back the truck up and see a more common scenario. The suckers that walk into the store and end up sinking... $200 or so into a faction they think is cool. And then they put their stuff together, come to the table with a partial force and find out they chose the wrong faction because half or more of the store are chasing the ITC meta and they are getting piledriven.
Not as bad as a grand, not carried over from previous editions where they were good or at least worth having a game with and made into garbage by the GW rules team, but still... $200 is $200 and GW got their money.
They then put that stuff up on the local buy/sell and sell it off for peanuts and either leave or buy the latest ITC power build now that they know better (setting them up of course for the inevitable nerfing they will take forcing them to buy a new army)
auticus wrote: I've been through six edition changes now with 40k. I have over a grand sunk into my necron army. I've had them since 5th edition.
There is no excuse for them or any faction to be a laughing stock throughout an entire edition.
Lets back the truck up and see a more common scenario. The suckers that walk into the store and end up sinking... $200 or so into a faction they think is cool. And then they put their stuff together, come to the table with a partial force and find out they chose the wrong faction because half or more of the store are chasing the ITC meta and they are getting piledriven.
Not as bad as a grand, not carried over from previous editions where they were good or at least worth having a game with and made into garbage by the GW rules team, but still... $200 is $200 and GW got their money.
They then put that stuff up on the local buy/sell and sell it off for peanuts and either leave or buy the latest ITC power build now that they know better (setting them up of course for the inevitable nerfing they will take forcing them to buy a new army)
Oh, sure. I agree with you there. I was mostly envisioning the common "guy gets into 40k, gets real excited, ebays a whole army from a previous edition for a grand, realizes he has absolutely zero clue how to play the game even at all and get dumpstered on and, for that matter, usually ripped off, because ebay is a website designed to make idiots think they're really smart while getting ripped off" that unfortunately I see a lot of.
At least I have the blessing of the place I play being such a casual meta that only the most bonkers rule changes actually ruin games. Pretty much the only meta shift throughout all of 8th that had an impact was "everybody who has a space marine army/bought the starter box for the game now has a nigh-unbeatable meta list and games against them are so miserable that every non-marine player either steps away from the game or decides to stop playing against marines".
Knight meta? Nobody bought one of the big knights. Eldar flyer meta? Two guys play eldar, neither have flyers. Guard meta? Our local catachan player is so ridiculously fluffed out that I don't think there's a rule you could give his army short of "you win automatically" that could make him feel OP to play against. Regular guard squads mounted in valkyries, every officer gets a powerfist, regular ogryns, hellhounds, and lascannon scout sentinels for antitank.
They are lucky if they can sell a bad army localy in the first place, at least in places where people can't afford to buy bad armies.
GW games should come with a warrning of some sorts. Don't start it unless you earn at least 500$ per month and still live with your parents, or something like that.
I guess with other games one can get burned on a bad faction or bad units too. Though I only imagine it, as the only non w40k game I saw being played is AoS on tables next to me. But still spending a 100$ and losing it to a bad investment is not the same as 600-800$.
Karol wrote: They are lucky if they can sell a bad army localy in the first place, at least in places where people can't afford to buy bad armies.
GW games should come with a warrning of some sorts. Don't start it unless you earn at least 500$ per month and still live with your parents, or something like that.
I guess with other games one can get burned on a bad faction or bad units too. Though I only imagine it, as the only non w40k game I saw being played is AoS on tables next to me. But still spending a 100$ and losing it to a bad investment is not the same as 600-800$.
I can't think of many hobbies you can afford if you're making $3.12 an hour, to be fair tho.
That's like...1/4 of the minimum wage where I live.
You can call it incompetence, but I think GW just doesn't think about balance the way "competitive" players do. Or even players who just spend a long time thinking about the game. This is why I think getting narrative players more involved would be a mixed blessing - GW already provide that themselves. You are likely to just see people push the narrative they want.
There-in lies the problem. I've been as critical as anyone of GW's "Play testing" efforts, but I'm always very careful to point out that we don't know where the fault lies. Entirely possible the testers did things perfectly and GW ignored them, or that GW asked them to work in a way that prevented them from actively seeing the problems they would otherwise have called out. The big issue is that I'm not sure HOW the rules writers actually work. When you listen to any of the authors who worked on the HH series speak, they often go to great length to describe the meetings and discussions, and calls, etc etc they had with the other authors to make sure they were all on the same page and no one was about to do something to screw up the story.
You NEVER hear the rules writers say this, and often times it feels like they don't spend as much time thinking about the game as some of the players do. Their definition of competitive is certainly different (these are the folks who thought the 6th ed CSM codex was good after all), and there doesn't seem to be any cohesion once we've gotten to the point of writing codexes. So within their own team, they don't seem to have much of a "unifying view", and then add in to that, the multitude of different definitions of "narrative play" and you just add even more confusion.
Getting narrative players to weigh in a bit is good, and should be done, but if you ask any three narrative players what their definition of that play style is, you are likely to get 4 different answers. I'm largely a narrative player myself these days, and I can tell you that sometimes, narrative is long and complex like an ongoing campaign, other times it's a one-off re-enactment of a famous 40k battle, and at still other times, it's deliberately playing a wildly imbalanced game just for the fun of having that "heroic last stand". So how on earth do you balance that? You don't. Narrative players have a wider field to modify the game in their individual scenarios, so it almost doesn't matter.
On the other hand, matched play and "competitive 40k" at least gives a common point from which to start and doesn't generally have the variables described above. I mean take Winters SEO review of Crusade for example. A lot of narrative players are gushing over it. He's a self described narrative player and his exact review was essentialy "some will like this, but this isn't MY kind of narrative play".
450-500$ is the avarge pay where I live. For adults.
I can make that working durning summer, next year when I am older, but that is it. Before that people are limited to getting confirmation money, and then birthday-christmas-new year gifts. Good when you have big family, bad when your mom marries a second time and doesn't invite anyone from your dads family, and she herself has no siblings.
Knight meta? Nobody bought one of the big knights.
Im jealous. My last 40k game was two summers ago at our for fun narrative campaign we run every year.
Let me bold for fun. FOR FUN and CASUAL NARRATIVE which was made very apparent to everyone.
I brought my casual narrative FOR FUN rubric marine army.
I was paired with dude that brought... his ITC all knight army. This was his for fun army. (this is a lot of the people in my area not just bad luck to pick this one guy)
I was tabled in 2 turns. Thats the type of rules disparities I'm talking about. (I know you know, I'm just highlighting what I mean lol)
His exact words that day: "its not my fault you don't know how to build lists."
Karol wrote: 450-500$ is the avarge pay where I live. For adults.
I can make that working durning summer, next year when I am older, but that is it. Before that people are limited to getting confirmation money, and then birthday-christmas-new year gifts. Good when you have big family, bad when your mom marries a second time and doesn't invite anyone from your dads family, and she herself has no siblings.
Looks like it's more like double that, according to google. And this is a very strange thread to be concluding that you can't enjoy 40k because your mom has no siblings.
Knight meta? Nobody bought one of the big knights.
Im jealous. My last 40k game was two summers ago at our for fun narrative campaign we run every year.
Let me bold for fun. FOR FUN and CASUAL NARRATIVE which was made very apparent to everyone.
I brought my casual narrative FOR FUN rubric marine army.
I was paired with dude that brought... his ITC all knight army. This was his for fun army. (this is a lot of the people in my area not just bad luck to pick this one guy)
I was tabled in 2 turns. Thats the type of rules disparities I'm talking about. (I know you know, I'm just highlighting what I mean lol)
His exact words that day: "its not my fault you don't know how to build lists."
This attitude right there.
Yeah. I've been playing a pretty much entirely rubric-based Thousand Sons army (well, 20 rubrics and 10 terminator rubrics, but that, their Rhinos, and the HQs are over 1500 points right there lol) and have never not been able to compete. they're not primaris level stupid, but they are fairly nasty at this point with double-shoot for 1CP.
I've found the 8th meta generally softer - although Knights and flyers are certainly not unusual. Whether this is because there has been greater churn in faction power is unclear - but I don't think people do just go and drop £500 or whatever on a new army unless they are really into the tournament scene - and so will drop far more than that on transport and accommodation over the year.
Admittedly my low point in 7th was being creamed by Eldar at my FLGS, looking across the 8 or so other tables being played on, and seeing 5 wraithknights.
Karol wrote: 450-500$ is the avarge pay where I live. For adults.
I can make that working durning summer, next year when I am older, but that is it. Before that people are limited to getting confirmation money, and then birthday-christmas-new year gifts. Good when you have big family, bad when your mom marries a second time and doesn't invite anyone from your dads family, and she herself has no siblings.
Looks like it's more like double that, according to google. And this is a very strange thread to be concluding that you can't enjoy 40k because your mom has no siblings.
.
yes for the entire country as an avarge, it is something crazy like 3000zl 750. Only no one gets such salary, not even the people that live in big cities like warsaw. Or to be more precise, those people that do work in western companies or goverment funded companies, earn gigantic salaries. Everything the party can set up comes with huge salaries. The chief of polish banks has two secretaries that earn more money then some people on the polish central bank council.
Outside of big cities, party or union jobs you get salaries that are much lower. My mom is a teacher, with 5 years bonus , earns less then 2000zl after taxs monthly. and 2000zl is around 500$. No idea how much my stepdad makes, but my dad works as a clerk at his local town and makes 2500zl/625$. I know that because I heard him argue with my mom many times, about money.
Looks like it's more like double that, according to google. And this is a very strange thread to be concluding that you can't enjoy 40k because your mom has no siblings.
nah it has more to do with the fact what when my birthday rolls up, I don't get any money, because no one from my dads family has enough, and me being born in june means money is needed for holidays. When my sister has birthday, her dads 2 brothers and aunt come, both her godparents, and she was born after 6th of january, so she gets money from catholic and ortodox christmas, and then those from her birthday. She gets a ton more stuff, even now when both her grandparents are dead now.
Tyel wrote: I've found the 8th meta generally softer - although Knights and flyers are certainly not unusual. Whether this is because there has been greater churn in faction power is unclear - but I don't think people do just go and drop £500 or whatever on a new army unless they are really into the tournament scene - and so will drop far more than that on transport and accommodation over the year.
Admittedly my low point in 7th was being creamed by Eldar at my FLGS, looking across the 8 or so other tables being played on, and seeing 5 wraithknights.
Yeah, it definitely felt like in 6th and 7th people were less tired of the meta churn. We've maintained our usual playerbase size of 30-40 active folks at any given time, with about 1/2 to 2/3 of that turning up any given week (Before the lockdown, at least, right now we've kind of octopus'd out to take over the store's 4 socially distanced game tables 3 days a week) but you've got a lot fewer folks who are keeping up with the joneses when it comes to the new meta stuff.
We have a looooooot of people still going pure oldmarines, a lot of people playing the exact same 2000 point list they built in 7th, and a lot of the major new stuff-buyers, myself included, have massively slowed down particularly on the book front.
The last big surge where people got actually excited was the SOB launch. The space marine players are absolutely tapped out with 250$ of new kits they could buy seemingly every month, and when quarantine set in at least half a dozen of the previously primarily marine players started building up a different army. Most of them because they wanted to go back to a place where their rules would stay stable for at least a couple months.
Lots of drukhari, actually! I'm really excited about that, i was the only person playing harlequins or drukhari for ages.
I do think the rules team is incompetent. Arrogant as well, judging by the tone of recent FAQs, snippets from Twitch and even the way the LOTR rulebook drips with pretension.
It's obvious they don't think deeply about the game- every edition and codex since I started in late 5th has been "the same, but different." Armor value is now gone, but somehow IGOUGO, the phases, and their tunnel-vision on gameplay being roll to-hit, wound and save ad nauseam, are above examination. Now, this would be fine if the game were in a good place and only needed tweaking, but, yeah........
They lack imagination and an openness to self-critique. Many choices made with 9th so far are very weird. A Psyker may be able to make a "psychic action," so this gets stapled onto the rules for the psychic phase, powers, and individual units, yet it never occurred to them that abandoning IGOUGO and the phases for AA might be a simpler method for the players, and provide more opportunities for minis to do cool stuff? Unit coherency gets changed in a way that will surely cause more harm than good, instead of, say, re-analyzing the value of aura buffs and the mobility of factions, which may make conga lines a poor tactic most of the time.
Characters are another great example. How does GW show a commander's ability to lead? Aura buffs. Auras aren't inherently bad, of course, but GW's implementation is. And sooooo boring!
Here's the Kaddar Nova from MEDGe for comparison. They even have an aura buff, too!
Epirians are even better, but require more understanding of the core rules. Short version: when a ROBOT unit in the force is issued an order, its bot protocols activate. Stuff like Dig-In, Dodge, extra movement, the ability to move and suppressive fire, etc.
I will say the LOTR is pretty good. I have a few issues here and there-like your opponent choosing your mini's LOS in certain situations, or two-handed weapons imposing a -1 penalty to it's wielder's Fight rolls-but it's miles above 40k and AOS. LOTR is a separate team, I think?
I do think the rules team is incompetent. Arrogant as well, judging by the tone of recent FAQs, snippets from Twitch and even the way the LOTR rulebook drips with pretension.
I like to cut them some slack whenever a "tone" eeks its way into an FAQ. I truly believe the TT world has "grown up around them" and they were too busy to notice. I also think they could do with an entire revamp of their processes, some better editorial oversight, and some polish around the rough edges. But that being said, for all their perceived "faults", they also have to deal with people asking things like "What does it mean when a model is dead" and "If I concede, do I lose the game", so between that and the legitimate flack they get, I can over-look/forgive the occasional snark ...
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
Biiiiiinnnnngggoooo.
No seriously, but also the FAQ thing , i remember the Salamander one patching out the stratagem shenanigans for mortals galore Lacked some serious courtesy...
Also we know of atleast one case of new Made op with the wraithknight..
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
So basically, anything that's overpowered at release is part of the big evil conspiracy to sell the new models, but anything that isn't overpowered was just sacrificed into obscurity in order to obfuscate the previously mentioned conspiracy.
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
So basically, anything that's overpowered at release is part of the big evil conspiracy to sell the new models, but anything that isn't overpowered was just sacrificed into obscurity in order to obfuscate the previously mentioned conspiracy.
A'ight.
The whole point of a business is to sell things. There are many levers available to a business to pull in order to increase or decrease sales in certain areas. If you don't think strong rules is one of those levers, I don't know what to tell you.
slave.entity wrote: The whole point of a business is to sell things. There are many levers available to a business to pull in order to increase or decrease sales in certain areas. If you don't think strong rules is one of those levers, I don't know what to tell you.
So who do you think at GW decided they really didn't want to push the Ork Buggies then?
slave.entity wrote: The whole point of a business is to sell things. There are many levers available to a business to pull in order to increase or decrease sales in certain areas. If you don't think strong rules is one of those levers, I don't know what to tell you.
So who do you think at GW decided they really didn't want to push the Ork Buggies then?
Frankly I'm more interested to know why GW decided they didn't want to push Intercessors until a full year after they were released.
There is no point in arguing about this. Either you understand business or you don't. It is not 'an evil conspiracy' for a business to tune its products for its customers.
Arachnofiend wrote: Frankly I'm more interested to know why GW decided they didn't want to push Intercessors until a full year after they were released.
Its all part of the master plan.
Because GW clearly wanted people hunting down Forgeworld Dreads, Centurions, Whirlwinds and Thunderfire Cannons and not... idk, Hellblasters and Inceptors.
Its very important to the business that people buy the right plastic and not the wrong plastic.
Arachnofiend wrote: ...Frankly I'm more interested to know why GW decided they didn't want to push Intercessors until a full year after they were released.
Overcorrecting. They pushed Sigmarines too hard when they did AoS and a lot of people got annoyed and left, so they decided to try and back off and not make Primaris Marines render the rest of the game utterly irrelevant to the same degree, and ended up making them underwhelming at launch.
Then they came back with the second book and the supplements and made them render the rest of the game utterly irrelevant.
Its very important to the business that people buy the right plastic and not the wrong plastic.
Moreso its important to the business that people continue to buy plastic. And by cycling power game ratings on units, they can get the meta chasers to continue to fork over cash for new armies and new units to stay relevant.
Its very important to the business that people buy the right plastic and not the wrong plastic.
Moreso its important to the business that people continue to buy plastic. And by cycling power game ratings on units, they can get the meta chasers to continue to fork over cash for new armies and new units to stay relevant.
And honestly GW does it very well. It never feels super overtly pay-to-win because the random units you've had in your collection for years will suddenly become OP. I certainly prefer this model over something like say, MtG, where cards get phased out on a regular schedule.
The other thing I love about 40k? Narrative play. There are a lot of factors that allow GW to be less heavy-handed about adjusting rules to control sales.
Well I'd disagree. I had 9 40k armies at one time and about the same number of fantasy armies when I was a tournament player.
It feels very pay-to-win. I have had few random units in my very deep collection suddenly become OP and useful. I have shelves of plastic that are pretty to look at that were once pretty competitive that are now all fairly useless.
You come to a decision sooner or later to either abandon ship or keep forking money over.
Fair enough. I suppose for any hardcore tournament player over the long term there's no avoiding that feeling of pay-to-win. I don't know if there will ever be such a thing as having an entire wargaming collection remain competitive for decades. That's just not how the business model works.
If a company can't keep making money off their game, there is no reason to continue supporting it.
The game design purists here need to remember that the business always comes first, then the game. If the business model doesn't work, it doesn't matter how perfectly balanced the game is. There will be no game. And if at any point in the company's life cycle they have to choose between the better business decision, or the better game design decision, it would be foolish to choose anything but the former.
In a perfect world this wouldn't be the case. I'm certain if GW could find a way to create a sustainable business while also delivering a perfectly balanced, competitive game experience, while also releasing dozens of new products year, without invalidating all of your old models, while also designing new rules that are balanced and interesting, etc... I'm sure they would do so. That is what every company wants.
Unfortunately, no one has managed to figure it out. And those that have tried... well, they are mostly dead now aren't they? Are there wargaming companies that have succeeded and survived as long as GW? I'm not aware of any. Certainly none that don't incorporate at least some aspects of pay-to-win, indirectly or not.
And obviously I am discounting traditional board games like Settlers of Catan or something. Those operate under a completely different business model, one that allows for (comparatively) perfect balance for the entire product life cycle.
Ok, my two cents here. I think balance doesn't sell. Excitement for things being strong, exciting, player power fantasy is real. If they make things balanced, there isn't easy to find or abuse outliers, people don't get excited and that doesn't move product.
Now before I'm drown in.." No way, they care for our happy ! " No they don't. They care we are moved to buy, or happy to indulge in heavy spending. They only care about imbalance if it threatens the bottom line. They aren't altruistic in their design choices or decisions.
You can't look at the first born v primaris situation and not see clear trends towards pressing first born to be pointless and primaris just flat out better, not different, better. That isn't a balance choice, that is a sales choice.
Taking that to be true and if they would do that to their previous favored fan base how can you honestly believe any balancing is more than marketing given game rule form ? I know I can't and that situation has divorced me from any idea they actually are a legit game company, they aren't.
Now do they always get it right ? No, sometimes they release bad models, rules and in part I think that comes from they think it will be good but don't honestly know how the game runes at the higher levels. Maybe those units are great for casual play but fall flat for competitive scenes.
Eventually though, usually they get it right. Like the first primaris models weren't hands down better than first born kin. Eventually, that changed and the gap just grows now and new units just come out as better, more well costed versions of old choices. Now either these rules makers are dumb as a sack of old socks or they are making purposeful choices to nerf one and raise up another.
Whole factions seemingly can mire away for long times waiting for something to help them, other ones get multiple new books making them stronger and stronger. Some get no new excitement for years, others see a release every couple months pretty much.
From the foundation this game isn't really made to be balanced. All we can hope for is the favor can swing your way for awhile before it swings away. Like beginning of last edition Guard was great, many nerfs later most you saw of them was the loyal 32, this edition who knows ? Probably back to middle of the road. Such is the way balance bounces in a fundamentally unbalanced game. That is literally made to burn it itself out every few years and reboot but no reboot ever leads to balance just a fresh new hell of broken gak.
I think it's more accurate to say that, especially for the factions that are already popular, balance is basically irrelevant to how well a faction sells. The launch primaris sucked and they still sold like hotcakes. On the other hand, no matter how many times they break elves the models clearly aren't selling enough to justify a big release. Now that Necrons have joined the party those finecast aspect warriors are looking pretty lonely in the needs-an-update section.
I'm sure they sold a fair amount of Eldar stuff, just select models of course. However I wouldn't hold breath for any big release as we still have a lot of Marines++ units to come out yet. Who knows it we'll ever get through a year without marines releases being about 60% of the kits released if not more.
I'd also like to add, the premise of the thread is correct. Competitive play and casual (or narrative) play are two different things that are only somewhat related.
It comes down to these two groups of players having very different sets of values. Optimizing too far for what competitive players value, say, something like mathematically perfect 50% win rate across all factions, will likely eventually detract from things that narrative players might value, such as the ability to take a bunch of fun units without relying on a handful of niche combos.
I think balance doesn't sell. Excitement for things being strong, exciting, player power fantasy is real. If they make things balanced, there isn't easy to find or abuse outliers, people don't get excited and that doesn't move product.
You are spot on. Balanced games are seen as "boring". Few people really want balance. The proof is in the pudding. The community forklifts crates of cash to the company for producing bad balance. They don't care.
When I was doing one of the big fan comps for AOS in 2015, we got hammered a LOT by people angry that we had "ruined list building" by making things balanced because since everything was viable, listbuilding min/max didn't mean as much. So erego list building was "worthless". I even had a guy on facebook message me to wish that I got cancer because I ruined his gaming group because they were using my AOS comp.
2015 was a big eye opener for me in terms of what the community was really after.
The game has never been anything close to balanced, there's just too much stuff. And even if you somehow got the points to balance, the dumbed-down mechanics would still be a bad vehicle for competitive play.
As for competitive players, they've never balanced anything. They just patch issues with the rules that they discover and exploit in first place. See the giant laser tag walls that they crowd behind because all the lists are so destructive that you have to make terrain specifically to keep the game going for more than 2 turns.
At the end of the day people just want to be entertained. Balance or perceived balance can be a big part of it, sure. But the reality is a lot more complex.
This thread is useless. Just a rant by the op to complain that a faction—at this specific instant in time before the edition is even released—doesn’t play how he likes. Allegedly, I might add.
the_scotsman wrote: Yeah, I'm sure the rules are just coincidentally structured like ITC, and ITC is just coincidentally deciding to stop houseruling and fold in to the default missions and rules.
Cons: Multicharge, changes to "always fight first" rules and coherency changes make screens even more difficult to deal with as a melee army - their advice was, huddle around KFFs and Painboyz and let the enemy come to you! Also, as one of the three factions in the game that will be bringing 11+ model squads, a lot of enemy lists will gain arbitrary power spikes against you with blast weapons they would be including in their armies.
I'm sorry, what is the connection or structure to ITC here? Taaaaaaalk about reach. You don't like the rules. So because of that, you've singled this stuff out as "competitively driven" when it seems like the opposite.
"Balance doesn't sell." Unfortunately, I think this is true.
People want the power fantasy, yes.
The tastes of gamers have also changed, however. Especially among people my age and younger, the desire to put effort into succeeding at a game simply isn't there. Players prefer to minimize the effort they put into their own fun time, and rely on OP stuff or rules/game system abuses. It's easier, and it's "the way" to play. This is certainly what LOL does. They pay lip-service to balance while releasing new champions every month who are nearly always OP for several weeks before the inevitable nerf. Their business is selling RP to players, and using flashy gameplay in Esports games as advertising.
I hate it. I've moved away from many games for this exact reason. Using OP units, characters, weapons, whatever- does not appeal to me. I want to make the effort, and to be mentally engaged. I'd rather lose badly because I screwed up than win by being cheap. Close, tense, hard fought battles are what excite me. Or exploration, adventure, puzzle-solving..... Yet most mainstream video games are button-mashy stim-fests infested with microtransactions.
40k, well......... I still watch the occasional bat-rep, and all I see are two forces standing in their deployment zones shooting each other off the table, or maybe a blob somewhere of melee with hit, wound and save rolls being made for several turns in a row. How is that fun? Yet I think that is part of the success of the game, 8th edition even more so. People just want to see stuff die and pat themselves on the back for being so "smart" to use that busted unit, stacking buffs, or whatever.
ERJAK wrote: For all we know Ork Boyz went down 3 points a model.
Here's another great example of why raw competitive balance isn't the be-all and end-all: For Orks it's expected that they'd be a cheap horde, but what about Eldar Aspect Warriors or Chaos Marines? Players who are invested in their fluff as veterans and specialists will be disappointed by their ostensibly elite units getting points cuts to make them competitively viable, turning them into a horde army.
If you solicit general feedback focusing on competitive balance, and use tournament players as your player sample, you will never hear that this is a problem. Those players have no investment in the fluff concept of Aspect Warriors and don't see it as an issue. Using more narrative-focused players may not yield optimal results for balance, but it will tell you when a faction doesn't feel right.
OP's point about Orks winning through holding objectives is much the same: Competitively, it may be balanced for Orks to win through camping objectives in defensive auras. Narratively, that doesn't feel right at all.
It's not like this is an insurmountable problem- even just asking competitive players 'we expect an army to look like such and such, and plays in such and such a way, does it work?' would tell you whether the result matches the intent. Pair that with a cadre of casual playtesters to try out the game and report back on whether the mechanics as implemented are fun, and you cover all bases. The key is recognizing that competitive balance is not the only goal, and structuring the playtesting accordingly.
Minimum Guardians unit plus support platform = horde. Total bs.
Quasistellar wrote: This thread is useless. Just a rant by the op to complain that a faction—at this specific instant in time before the edition is even released—doesn’t play how he likes. Allegedly, I might add.
Not a baseless rant, though, given he's working from a video provided by people who I believe were involved in the playtesting process (though a link to the specific video would probably have helped this discussion).
It is interesting that their advice doesn't mesh with what was covered in the Faction Focus by a "Longtime Grand Tournaments player and Orks expert" - again, note yet another tournament player being used for one of these articles, rather than someone with a narrative focus - though there is the possibility that the FF article features marketing spin rather than substance. At least it wasn't Reese writing it, so it might be trustworthy...
Blastaar wrote: "Balance doesn't sell." Unfortunately, I think this is true.
People want the power fantasy, yes.
The tastes of gamers have also changed, however. Especially among people my age and younger, the desire to put effort into succeeding at a game simply isn't there. Players prefer to minimize the effort they put into their own fun time, and rely on OP stuff or rules/game system abuses. It's easier, and it's "the way" to play. This is certainly what LOL does. They pay lip-service to balance while releasing new champions every month who are nearly always OP for several weeks before the inevitable nerf. Their business is selling RP to players, and using flashy gameplay in Esports games as advertising.
.
There is also the fact that if GW puts out your codex as a balanced one, 6 months later it is no longer balanced, because in the mean time they put out 3-4 new books out of which two are maybe more powerful, and one is a lot less powerful. Having an unbalanced, externaly, codex gives it more life.
Eldar for example, required a full blown faction kill switch nerf and they still were okey as a core faction codex. They just wasn't the best.
Something like DG on the other hand went in to obscurity very fast. So it is not just a power fantasy, where you plow through opponent after opponent. Some of it is thinking of the future of what you are going to play in 6 or 12 months time.
There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
8th was the most balanced edition of 40k. In fact its probably *the only edition* where GW actively tried to bring balance to the game. Obviously its not perfect - but its infinitely better than the older method of "here's a codex, oh it sucks? Well, see you in some years time".
All the evidence is that 8th is also the most commercially successful edition. Admittedly this could be due to various other factors unrelated to how the game plays, but its a strange coincidence just to shrug off.
Are GW actively making the game worse by having CA points changes each year?
I guess for people who buy the current hotness and want that to remain the current hotness until the heat death of the universe - but I'm not convinced they make up a huge percentage of the playerbase.
Tyel wrote: There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
8th was the most balanced edition of 40k. In fact its probably *the only edition* where GW actively tried to bring balance to the game. Obviously its not perfect - but its infinitely better than the older method of "here's a codex, oh it sucks? Well, see you in some years time".
All the evidence is that 8th is also the most commercially successful edition. Admittedly this could be due to various other factors unrelated to how the game plays, but its a strange coincidence just to shrug off.
Are GW actively making the game worse by having CA points changes each year?
I guess for people who buy the current hotness and want that to remain the current hotness until the heat death of the universe - but I'm not convinced they make up a huge percentage of the playerbase.
I wouldn't call 8th the most balanced edition of Warhammer. STRETCHES of 8th? sure. The current state of 8th? No way. And this currently shift in focus seems to be lining GW's pockets with that PMarine money very effectively, and seems to be slated to keep up extra hard in 9th.
I hadn't considered the idea that balance may not be what the playerbase actually wants.... but it's been some pretty good arguments put forth as to why that may be, so I remain undecided. Is balance less profitable though? Well, almost certainly. You can't write extremely OP rules to shift units, without causing an imbalance.
Knight meta? Nobody bought one of the big knights.
Im jealous. My last 40k game was two summers ago at our for fun narrative campaign we run every year.
Let me bold for fun. FOR FUN and CASUAL NARRATIVE which was made very apparent to everyone.
I brought my casual narrative FOR FUN rubric marine army.
I was paired with dude that brought... his ITC all knight army. This was his for fun army. (this is a lot of the people in my area not just bad luck to pick this one guy)
I was tabled in 2 turns. Thats the type of rules disparities I'm talking about. (I know you know, I'm just highlighting what I mean lol)
His exact words that day: "its not my fault you don't know how to build lists."
This attitude right there.
I think in general "competitive" play is toxic, personally. I don't really see the fun in it, at least not anymore. I used play it that way back in 4th and 5th, and I found it made me hate myself, and the hobby as a whole. I've largely moved onto other games, but I still collect GW minis because I like painting them. Overall, I'm not a fan of most of their 'balance' design still. I keep up to date, just because it is the biggest game.
The last time I ran anything was an excitedly narrative campaign I ran. What did I find? The first four people who entered? Awesome. Then others found out and wanted to join, no one wanted to be the people to say 'no', so slowly more people joined. As more people joined, they had different ideas of what they wanted, and many of them were 'competitive'. Or through narrative campaigns just meant... test games? I'm not sure. But people started bringing increasingly hardened lists, avoiding things that were the basis of the campaign, IE, trying to have relatively soft, fluffy lists. A few bad apples basically came into the group, stomped people, accelerated an arms race, and turned the friendly narrative campaign into an unfun nightmare. Before people say anything, I mostly ran the campaign, I only played if someone's opponent couldn't show up. I wanted to build something for me and a few friends that was about following a narrative campaign.
I've kind of just given up on 40k being that experience. So, I'll just paint my minis. But I complete agree with the first post in this thread, and posts like the one quoted above.
And I'll point out, saying that you want to run your campaign narratively is great, but people who don't want that will show up, and will ruin it to basically just shot on other people's armies because they just care about winning.
Nitro Zeus wrote: I wouldn't call 8th the most balanced edition of Warhammer. STRETCHES of 8th? sure. The current state of 8th? No way. And this currently shift in focus seems to be lining GW's pockets with that PMarine money very effectively, and seems to be slated to keep up extra hard in 9th.
I hadn't considered the idea that balance may not be what the playerbase actually wants.... but it's been some pretty good arguments put forth as to why that may be, so I remain undecided. Is balance less profitable though? Well, almost certainly. You can't write extremely OP rules to shift units, without causing an imbalance.
I'll admit a seeming year of Marine buffs has sort of undermined my point - but I still think Ironhands today is less obnoxious than "can only bet hit on 6s, have a rerollable 2++ save" from 7th.
GW did at least do a week 2(?) nerf to Iron Hands - and the subsequent Marine FAQ in February. The former obviously wasn't enough, and measuring the second has been made difficult by the collapse of game playing across the world, but in older editions you would have just seen them shrug, leave it for two years and then bring out something even more powerful.
Marines *were* bad for about 18 months. I think this is a massive overreaction, caused by no one thinking about what happens when you add all the marine buffs on top of each other.
I don't think it will last forever, even if the first 6 months of 9th exacerbate these trends.
But maybe that's just me. I like balance, and I remain a lot more optimistic about the game today than I was 10 years ago.
I've kind of just given up on 40k being that experience. So, I'll just paint my minis. But I complete agree with the first post in this thread, and posts like the one quoted above.
And I'll point out, saying that you want to run your campaign narratively is great, but people who don't want that will show up, and will ruin it to basically just shot on other people's armies because they just care about winning.
There is also the question of tiers, as much as people dislike them to exist, of armies. An IH player could bring an army with little to no tanks, no FW dreads, no special characters, leave the super relic at home. Not max out of eliminators or multiple heavy options, and have a casual army . Only that casual army of his, is going to be beating tournament armies of other players, and it those players bring their factions versions of a casual list, the IH player becomes the WAAC god.
The gaps between some armies are huge in w40k. Doesn't matter as much for tournaments, specialy the top tables, where everyone is expected to play against the best armies and best builds. At the store among 3-4 new players that start at the same time it is huge problem. If 6 months ago three people started to play and build armies, and two went orc , gsc, etc and one went marines, there is a good chance that some of them were no longer playering in january, and a few will not come back when the corona ends.
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
So, you're saying that in an incredibly cunning maneuver, James Workshop has taken a look at their game where, overall, about 1 in 4 units are competitive level strong, and has decided that the best way to create a "pay to win" scenario is to release models and ensure that about 1 in 4 is competitive level strong.
Well in that case, I hope they keep doing it that way? This is one of those conspiracies like "Obama creates the weather". Like, if it's true, I hope he keeps doing it then??
There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
Spend a year doing game design. You won't get another chance to fill in for GW like I did with the AOS initial release, but general game design in competitive style game like wargames will show you what people really want.
I've been doing game design, mainly video games but I have a shelf full of my own wargame supplements and alternate rulesets as well, for many years and I will say that there are designer conferences where this topic comes up and is talked about.
From a commercial standpoint, balance does not sell. I have seen the backlash of balance with my own eyes, and even if you aren't in game design you can look out at the other wargames on the market today that are mostly touted as being a lot tighter (no i'm not saying perfect balance) that have a very small fan base, yet the most imbalanced game also dominates the market. Imbalance sells because imbalance is exciting. Its exciting to chase after the imbalance. Its exciting to get the imbalance and win with it. It gives the rush of winning. (is this universal? am I saying EVERYONE is like this? Obviously no, it repels me to my core, and I know there are people like me but we are not in any way very well represented)
Because balance is not a primary concern for most people playing games, even if they say it is something they care about. So long as their faction can do well, they really don't care about the necron players getting their nose ground into the table. Thats the necron players' fault for liking necrons and they need to get good and buy a better faction.
To put it back on topic... competitive players (of which I used to belong to that group so I am speaking from my own desires and experience as one) want the opposite of balance. They actively seek imbalance, they build lists to skew balance so hard in their favor that they win by virtue of their list. Thats the goal of listbuilding and a game that reinforces listbuilding. To skew the game as hard as you can in your favor. To actively IMBALANCE the game as hard as you can.
Want to try an experiment? Make a tournament, supply the armies, and have the armies be the same. Thats as balanced as you can get. Everyone has the same tools, like a chessboard. And you will see it raged on and dismissed. You'd think tournaments should be about showing skill and who can play better, but we have infused listbuilding skews as equally tactical as playing the game. And that will NEVER change.
Knight meta? Nobody bought one of the big knights.
Im jealous. My last 40k game was two summers ago at our for fun narrative campaign we run every year.
Let me bold for fun. FOR FUN and CASUAL NARRATIVE which was made very apparent to everyone.
I brought my casual narrative FOR FUN rubric marine army.
I was paired with dude that brought... his ITC all knight army. This was his for fun army. (this is a lot of the people in my area not just bad luck to pick this one guy)
I was tabled in 2 turns. Thats the type of rules disparities I'm talking about. (I know you know, I'm just highlighting what I mean lol)
His exact words that day: "its not my fault you don't know how to build lists."
This attitude right there.
I think in general "competitive" play is toxic, personally. I don't really see the fun in it, at least not anymore. I used play it that way back in 4th and 5th, and I found it made me hate myself, and the hobby as a whole. I've largely moved onto other games, but I still collect GW minis because I like painting them. Overall, I'm not a fan of most of their 'balance' design still. I keep up to date, just because it is the biggest game.
The last time I ran anything was an excitedly narrative campaign I ran. What did I find? The first four people who entered? Awesome. Then others found out and wanted to join, no one wanted to be the people to say 'no', so slowly more people joined. As more people joined, they had different ideas of what they wanted, and many of them were 'competitive'. Or through narrative campaigns just meant... test games? I'm not sure. But people started bringing increasingly hardened lists, avoiding things that were the basis of the campaign, IE, trying to have relatively soft, fluffy lists. A few bad apples basically came into the group, stomped people, accelerated an arms race, and turned the friendly narrative campaign into an unfun nightmare. Before people say anything, I mostly ran the campaign, I only played if someone's opponent couldn't show up. I wanted to build something for me and a few friends that was about following a narrative campaign.
I've kind of just given up on 40k being that experience. So, I'll just paint my minis. But I complete agree with the first post in this thread, and posts like the one quoted above.
And I'll point out, saying that you want to run your campaign narratively is great, but people who don't want that will show up, and will ruin it to basically just shot on other people's armies because they just care about winning.
Yup.
One of the rules of managing a thing is sometimes you gotta be the donkey-cave. I have found that a better expectation to set up up front than "You should bring a light, fluffy list" is "the intended experience is that you will win some games and lose some games."
When someone competitively minded wants to bring a more competitive list than the average, make it clear to them that the campaign, for them, will be about going up against overwhelming odds, and that you are going to set up increasingly unfair scenarios to challenge them, if their goal is a challenging, competitive experience.
More often than not, I've found that that either does one of two things: one, they think that kicks ass, and you have a fun time playing out the whole "battle school" segment from ender's game where the competitive player encounters some fresh challenge every game, or two, they tell you they'd be happier just being a regular player and they tone their lists down.
People create these one-sided stomp scenarios like you said: By nobody being willing to say no. It's much more comfortable for everyone when we all pretend we're just going to adhere to this neutral third-party of the Games Workshop Official Rules TM, and if imbalance happens, we can either get mad at GW or we can grumble anonymously online behind the offending player's back.
If you manage a group, you already know who is going to be rocking a crazy winrate and who tends to lose every game. You know who you're going to have to talk to right at the outset. And for gods sake, stop writing campaign systems that include
1) Huge bonuses to winning that make it way more likely you'll win the next game
2) Stupid maps that do nothing but limit your opponent pool so the same players end up playing against each other game after game. It's 40k! Everyone has teleporters and space ships and airplanes and tunneling drills and roks and spores and webways! Why do campaigns play out like risk?
WHen I did campaign events I had to write houserules to curb the powergaming. Of course that leads to the age old chestnut of "who are you to rewrite the rules and make my army less effective? HOW DARE YOU!" arguments and screaming matches that can take place down at the good ole game store.
I mean I have had a guy almost flip a table and storm out because I was using a warhammer world scenario which wasn't "real 40k" (wasn't an ITC tournament scenario) and another guy flip his **** at a campaign event because we were using Forgeworld campaign and those weren't "real 40k". Then there was the guy that wanted to go out into the parking lot to fight because houserules were toxic and ruined the community and he felt VERY strongly about that.
So if you're going to do campaigns I'd definitely say keep it restricted, keep it small, and yes you have to put your foot down and say "this isn't the time and place for your ITC tournament list, please change things out or go play down at the store where everyone else is doing ITC practice games".
I think at this point I've garnered enough of a reputation as someone who will reach in to the core rules and do a quick hand-jive in there that when people show up to something I'm running they know it's going to be fairly homebrewed. At one point we did a "everybody bring a single Knight sized model or bigger we're gonna do a giant stuff fight" game that involved me adding in a whole 2nd ed style critical damage table to the game. And also alternating activations. And also entirely new terrain rules that included destructible terrain.
If you be crazy for long enough people learn to start expecting crazy.
40k with alternate activations is actually a game I kind of enjoy. Spent a few years doing it even though people warned it would "imbalance the game severely (lol)".
Tyel wrote:There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
He's not wrong though. People say they want balance, but despite the words, what they often mean is they want the illusion of balance. What's more important than fair rules or balanced rules are official rules. Especially a lowest common denominator, minimum effort plug in and play that cannot be deviated from and which can be exploited. Competitive listbuilding is ultimately about squeezing five thousand points of power into a two thousand point list, but still claiming you are within the rules.
Drakthul wrote:
I think in general "competitive" play is toxic, personally. I don't really see the fun in it, at least not anymore. I used play it that way back in 4th and 5th, and I found it made me hate myself, and the hobby as a whole. I've largely moved onto other games, but I still collect GW minis because I like painting them. Overall, I'm not a fan of most of their 'balance' design still. I keep up to date, just because it is the biggest game.
Competitive play is not necessarily toxic. Competitive-at-all-costs play is toxic. Competitive play, with zero empathy or willingness to account for other approaches is toxic. 40k is a bad competitive game, full stop. It's never been good for it. I played WMH for years, competitively. Even claimed some scalps from folks who went on to win national masters. I was decent, have some medals, and could have been 'good'. And there was a time when I enjoyed the white knuckle excitement of the tournament scene immensely. I lived and breathed it. I get it. I do. There's nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of thing. But insisting only that kind of thing has value is where I draw the line. Dismissing other approaches as 'casual' grates - the opposite of competitive is not casual, it's non-competitive. The opposite of casual is serious. And you can be a serious player and seriously invested in the hobby and game who is simply uninterested in the top tier lists.
Drakthul wrote:
The last time I ran anything was an excitedly narrative campaign I ran. What did I find? The first four people who entered? Awesome. Then others found out and wanted to join, no one wanted to be the people to say 'no', so slowly more people joined. As more people joined, they had different ideas of what they wanted, and many of them were 'competitive'. Or through narrative campaigns just meant... test games? I'm not sure. But people started bringing increasingly hardened lists, avoiding things that were the basis of the campaign, IE, trying to have relatively soft, fluffy lists. A few bad apples basically came into the group, stomped people, accelerated an arms race, and turned the friendly narrative campaign into an unfun nightmare. Before people say anything, I mostly ran the campaign, I only played if someone's opponent couldn't show up. I wanted to build something for me and a few friends that was about following a narrative campaign.
And I'll point out, saying that you want to run your campaign narratively is great, but people who don't want that will show up, and will ruin it to basically just shot on other people's armies because they just care about winning.
Learn to say no. Our girls learn it early in life. Us nerds need to do the same.
In some ways, this was on them. In others, This was on you. You did the wrong thing for all the right reasons. With respect, the number one rule for wargsming need some to be 'play with likeminded individuals'. You need honest, open and up front communication. You need to be clear what' it entails. Too manyou people, it gets unwieldy. Different people want different things, often at different times. This is ok. Nothing wrong with it. But when tournament players come in, bring tournament lists to your grass leagues soft fluffy lists, whilst neither side is strictly wrong in the type ps of games they want to play, nonetheless there is a problem. For both camps. Not everyone needs to play together, you're not doing people favours saying yes just because. It's like an RPG, you need to be on the same page with the type of game you want. That may mean gate keeping. Its ok to say 'no'. It's Not necessarily a bad thing, but it is necessary for its long term health.
auticus wrote: WHen I did campaign events I had to write houserules to curb the powergaming. Of course that leads to the age old chestnut of "who are you to rewrite the rules and make my army less effective? HOW DARE YOU!" arguments and screaming matches that can take place down at the good ole game store.
I believe the correct responses to this question are either "Me? I'm Batman." or "I'm the event organiser, hence I can change the rules as needed".
auticus wrote: I mean I have had a guy almost flip a table and storm out because I was using a warhammer world scenario which wasn't "real 40k" (wasn't an ITC tournament scenario) and another guy flip his **** at a campaign event because we were using Forgeworld campaign and those weren't "real 40k". Then there was the guy that wanted to go out into the parking lot to fight because houserules were toxic and ruined the community and he felt VERY strongly about that.
Guy 1 - ITC isn't real 40k either, and at least the scenario you were using was published by GW Guy 2 - FW materials are released with the GW & 40k logos on them, ergo they're part of "real 40k". Suck it up, buttercup.
Guy 3 - "Hi, police? I've got a gentleman here threatening to assault me over a miniature wargame..."
Tyel wrote:There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
He's not wrong though. People say they want balance, but despite the words, what they often mean is they want the illusion of balance. What's more important than fair rules or balanced rules are official rules. Especially a lowest common denominator, minimum effort plug in and play that cannot be deviated from and which can be exploited. Competitive listbuilding is ultimately about squeezing five thousand points of power into a two thousand point list, but still claiming you are within the rules.
Drakthul wrote:
I think in general "competitive" play is toxic, personally. I don't really see the fun in it, at least not anymore. I used play it that way back in 4th and 5th, and I found it made me hate myself, and the hobby as a whole. I've largely moved onto other games, but I still collect GW minis because I like painting them. Overall, I'm not a fan of most of their 'balance' design still. I keep up to date, just because it is the biggest game.
Competitive play is not necessarily toxic. Competitive-at-all-costs play is toxic. Competitive play, with zero empathy or willingness to account for other approaches is toxic. 40k is a bad competitive game, full stop. It's never been good for it. I played WMH for years, competitively. Even claimed some scalps from folks who went on to win national masters. I was decent, have some medals, and could have been 'good'. And there was a time when I enjoyed the white knuckle excitement of the tournament scene immensely. I lived and breathed it. I get it. I do. There's nothing wrong with enjoying that kind of thing. But insisting only that kind of thing has value is where I draw the line. Dismissing other approaches as 'casual' grates - the opposite of competitive is not casual, it's non-competitive. The opposite of casual is serious. And you can be a serious player and seriously invested in the hobby and game who is simply uninterested in the top tier lists.
Drakthul wrote:
The last time I ran anything was an excitedly narrative campaign I ran. What did I find? The first four people who entered? Awesome. Then others found out and wanted to join, no one wanted to be the people to say 'no', so slowly more people joined. As more people joined, they had different ideas of what they wanted, and many of them were 'competitive'. Or through narrative campaigns just meant... test games? I'm not sure. But people started bringing increasingly hardened lists, avoiding things that were the basis of the campaign, IE, trying to have relatively soft, fluffy lists. A few bad apples basically came into the group, stomped people, accelerated an arms race, and turned the friendly narrative campaign into an unfun nightmare. Before people say anything, I mostly ran the campaign, I only played if someone's opponent couldn't show up. I wanted to build something for me and a few friends that was about following a narrative campaign.
And I'll point out, saying that you want to run your campaign narratively is great, but people who don't want that will show up, and will ruin it to basically just shot on other people's armies because they just care about winning.
Learn to say no. Our girls learn it early in life. Us nerds need to do the same.
In some ways, this was on them. In others, This was on you. You did the wrong thing for all the right reasons. With respect, the number one rule for wargsming need some to be 'play with likeminded individuals'. You need honest, open and up front communication. You need to be clear what' it entails. Too manyou people, it gets unwieldy. Different people want different things, often at different times. This is ok. Nothing wrong with it. But when tournament players come in, bring tournament lists to your grass leagues soft fluffy lists, whilst neither side is strictly wrong in the type ps of games they want to play, nonetheless there is a problem. For both camps. Not everyone needs to play together, you're not doing people favours saying yes just because. It's like an RPG, you need to be on the same page with the type of game you want. That may mean gate keeping. Its ok to say 'no'. It's Not necessarily a bad thing, but it is necessary for its long term health.
I should point something out, when the system broke down, I basically ended it and made it quite clear why it was ended. I got grumbles mostly from the players I didn't want to join, rather than the people who wanted to play just simple games with authentic-esque lists. The problem is, I didn't want these people to join, other people did because of peer pressure. When they were allowed in (often after weeks of me saying "I'd rather not") it had the exact effect I warned about.
Giving the players what they want is something you do have to relent to. Sometimes though, they just don't know what they want.
auticus wrote: WHen I did campaign events I had to write houserules to curb the powergaming. Of course that leads to the age old chestnut of "who are you to rewrite the rules and make my army less effective? HOW DARE YOU!" arguments and screaming matches that can take place down at the good ole game store.
I believe the correct responses to this question are either "Me? I'm Batman." or "I'm the event organiser, hence I can change the rules as needed".
auticus wrote: I mean I have had a guy almost flip a table and storm out because I was using a warhammer world scenario which wasn't "real 40k" (wasn't an ITC tournament scenario) and another guy flip his **** at a campaign event because we were using Forgeworld campaign and those weren't "real 40k". Then there was the guy that wanted to go out into the parking lot to fight because houserules were toxic and ruined the community and he felt VERY strongly about that.
Guy 1 - ITC isn't real 40k either, and at least the scenario you were using was published by GW Guy 2 - FW materials are released with the GW & 40k logos on them, ergo they're part of "real 40k". Suck it up, buttercup.
Guy 3 - "Hi, police? I've got a gentleman here threatening to assault me over a miniature wargame..."
heh oh the number of arguments I've had with locals about ITC and it not being official 40k either. To many its official 40k because its tournament standard. They are just using the wrong word. "official" doesn't mean GW official by the book, it means "tournament standard" to a lot of people. Thats what they are arguing for, because thats what they spent a grand on for in the first place, an army that does REALLY REALLY well in tournament standard, but does not do so well outside of that (or does moderately well but moderately well is not REALLY REALLY well so they are being "punished") - there's that "punished" word again some of us were discussing in the painting thread that got locked down.
Guy 1 and 2 were basically saying the same thing. Its not tournament standard 40k so it shouldn't be allowed (I'll never understand why people feel that they are entitled to say all events should run liike their ITC events)
Guy 3 - yeah he's special. And mostly a pariah now.
auticus wrote: Spend a year doing game design. You won't get another chance to fill in for GW like I did with the AOS initial release, but general game design in competitive style game like wargames will show you what people really want.
I've been doing game design, mainly video games but I have a shelf full of my own wargame supplements and alternate rulesets as well, for many years and I will say that there are designer conferences where this topic comes up and is talked about.
From a commercial standpoint, balance does not sell. I have seen the backlash of balance with my own eyes, and even if you aren't in game design you can look out at the other wargames on the market today that are mostly touted as being a lot tighter (no i'm not saying perfect balance) that have a very small fan base, yet the most imbalanced game also dominates the market. Imbalance sells because imbalance is exciting. Its exciting to chase after the imbalance. Its exciting to get the imbalance and win with it. It gives the rush of winning. (is this universal? am I saying EVERYONE is like this? Obviously no, it repels me to my core, and I know there are people like me but we are not in any way very well represented)
Because balance is not a primary concern for most people playing games, even if they say it is something they care about. So long as their faction can do well, they really don't care about the necron players getting their nose ground into the table. Thats the necron players' fault for liking necrons and they need to get good and buy a better faction.
To put it back on topic... competitive players (of which I used to belong to that group so I am speaking from my own desires and experience as one) want the opposite of balance. They actively seek imbalance, they build lists to skew balance so hard in their favor that they win by virtue of their list. Thats the goal of listbuilding and a game that reinforces listbuilding. To skew the game as hard as you can in your favor. To actively IMBALANCE the game as hard as you can.
Want to try an experiment? Make a tournament, supply the armies, and have the armies be the same. Thats as balanced as you can get. Everyone has the same tools, like a chessboard. And you will see it raged on and dismissed. You'd think tournaments should be about showing skill and who can play better, but we have infused listbuilding skews as equally tactical as playing the game. And that will NEVER change.
I think you are describing two things.
Obviously most people prefer to win than to lose, and there are some people out there who just want to win. All the time. Every game. If they are not winning the game sucks.
And so those people, to an extent, want to be supplied with an all conquering list from the internet, and then smash some scrubs. And they hate balance, because it means they have to buy another netlist. And another and another etc.
But I'm not convinced that is the bulk of playerbase, because this sort of behavior tends to be toxic.
And because few people like being farmed by such lists.
So over time, what you describe in the end, happens. All the armies in a club or whatever start to become the same, because only armies that are getting into the last 8 of the LVO are being played. And then people get bored.
For games design, I think the issue is a divide between "power" - i.e. I get more for my points than you do - and "interesting" - i.e. I get some sort of special rule that makes me play in a different way to other factions.
Which is sort of what the OP talked about. They don't like the idea that Orks are playing like Guardsmen, cowering in ruins to score objectives.
But I think the point is that people like variety. And the only way you get that is with a relatively balanced system.
Unfortunately though you can build a game system which is balanced but also very *boring*. Old 40k (and especially fantasy) used to be a bit like this. This is a space marine, this is a guardian, this is an ork boy - they all essentially walk and talk the same, barring a slight variation in stats and weapon profiles. I remember thinking Eldar getting fleet (or whatever the rule was back then) was the height of rules complexity. Take that slow imperial goons.
A lot of "balanced" custom editions - for AOS, 9th edition WHFB etc - I think make the mistake in thinking the game is balanced if you just remove everything interesting from the game. And sure, it probably is, but its also... dull. If playing your high elves is just like playing your friends chaos warriors is just like playing your other friends goblins, then it can be boring. You don't have that variety - unless you start going into dedicated narrative stories where there is no pretense both sides should have a roughly equal chance to win.
But I think the point is that people like variety. And the only way you get that is with a relatively balanced system.
I have never seen that actually played out in any communities, video game or tabletop. I'd LOVE to be proven wrong but even in design meetings for titles or games this is one of the things that gets discussed and chosen because imbalance is vastly the more profitable model.
If the people REALLY wanted balance, they wouldn't shovel money to game companies that provide the opposite. Or barring that, if they REALLY wanted balance they would prioritize that first. (this is MY personal priority, if the game is not balanced and I get "punished" for liking the wrong faction, I'm not going to play that game or give money to the company because the game and the game's results matter to me, thats why I play games to begin with and I don't want to have to fork over $1000 every year to get to keep doing that in a viable environment)
After all, game designers and companies are going to go after the money. If they are being rewarded for creating imbalance, they will keep down that path.
I have been made to by the publisher or producer alter rules to bring skew in because the publisher or producer knew that my balance would turn players off because then its "boring and not fun".
I have seen for example Age of Sigmar with the fan comp systems be just as different with each faction and also balanced. At least a ton more balanced than GW.
I also know that people hated that. Because listbuilding wasn't as impactful and thats why a lot of people are here. I had a guy take the time to write me on facebook to wish cancer on me because I made his listbuilding hobby not as good since we made 2000 points represent 2000 points. So I know it can be done. I've done it, I've had peers do it with their own systems. Not perfectly, nothing will ever be perfect, but leagues better than 40k or aos. And I've watched those efforts be largely wasted because thats not what people want enmasse.
I also know that the points model that GW chose had purposeful imbalances put in. The designer of that point system had said on their chat board that they intentionally made monsters cheaper to entice people to take more monsters by making them undercost. That point system is what GW adopted as "official points" in 2016.
Thats just one example out of hundreds, but one pertinent to GW games where I actually know an actual truth of the matter.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Also notice, there are no competitive players in these threads trying to say otherwise that they want balance. Because they know they don't really want balance. They want to seek to skew the game with listbuilding and make the game as imbalanced as they are allowed. We had a painting thread get to 39 pages of back and forth so I know its not that they aren't reading this, its that there is little to argue against.
As pointed out in a post above, the ability to play a 5000 point army by squeezing it into 2000 points and then being legal by the rules. Thats what they are after. You see it every.single.day.
People love to have balance as long as they get balance+.
To be honest I would rather have GW create one tight mono build per codex with a something having an idea how it should work within the core rules of an editions. And not go full core rules philosophy change every 6-9 months. Some armies would still be better, some would be worse. Some probably be too good, if optimized, but at least there would be no of those armies that need tournament lists to play casual games.
But I don't know, maybe it would work only around here. Maybe stuff like that isn't really needed in other places.
auticus wrote: WHen I did campaign events I had to write houserules to curb the powergaming. Of course that leads to the age old chestnut of "who are you to rewrite the rules and make my army less effective? HOW DARE YOU!" arguments and screaming matches that can take place down at the good ole game store.
I believe the correct responses to this question are either "Me? I'm Batman." or "I'm the event organiser, hence I can change the rules as needed".
auticus wrote: I mean I have had a guy almost flip a table and storm out because I was using a warhammer world scenario which wasn't "real 40k" (wasn't an ITC tournament scenario) and another guy flip his **** at a campaign event because we were using Forgeworld campaign and those weren't "real 40k". Then there was the guy that wanted to go out into the parking lot to fight because houserules were toxic and ruined the community and he felt VERY strongly about that.
Guy 1 - ITC isn't real 40k either, and at least the scenario you were using was published by GW Guy 2 - FW materials are released with the GW & 40k logos on them, ergo they're part of "real 40k". Suck it up, buttercup.
Guy 3 - "Hi, police? I've got a gentleman here threatening to assault me over a miniature wargame..."
heh oh the number of arguments I've had with locals about ITC and it not being official 40k either. To many its official 40k because its tournament standard. They are just using the wrong word. "official" doesn't mean GW official by the book, it means "tournament standard" to a lot of people. Thats what they are arguing for, because thats what they spent a grand on for in the first place, an army that does REALLY REALLY well in tournament standard, but does not do so well outside of that (or does moderately well but moderately well is not REALLY REALLY well so they are being "punished") - there's that "punished" word again some of us were discussing in the painting thread that got locked down.
Guy 1 and 2 were basically saying the same thing. Its not tournament standard 40k so it shouldn't be allowed (I'll never understand why people feel that they are entitled to say all events should run liike their ITC events)
And here I was thinking the tournament crowd weren't keen on RAI instead of RAW - you'd think they'd pick their words better, wouldn't you?
And yes, not everything needs to run like a hardcore tournament.
auticus wrote: Guy 3 - yeah he's special. And mostly a pariah now.
Shiny metal body, white ceramic facemask, some form of gauss polearm? Sounds about right...
I'm not trying to speak for anyone other than myself, and deliver the experiences I have had on both sides of the fence.
I'd probably fall in the filthy casual category, but I've competed frequently throughout my life. Not usually in 40K, but in just about every hobby I've taken it to competitive extremes because the opportunity was there. I've not done that specifically in 40K because I learned very early on that competitive 40K isn't really... well... competitive. I think that comes from the game's roots in being a casual, narrative game that is more akin to large-scale D&D than it is like M:tG.
So, when I sit down to draft up an army, I look at a lot of the same things that competitive players do: what value does this unit bring to my overall army, what cost, what are the expected results on the table, how does this unit assist me in filling my objectives on the tabletop? Probably a lot how the designers look at units when they're building them. Each unit was designed to do something, and trying to unlock that understanding makes me feel like I can better make use of it and understand how GW envisions this army operating. Then, my "fluffy" list fields units with roles on the table. Roles are normally: fire support, area control, area denial, harassment, assassin, support, etc. Then comes picking the purpose of the army, and I normally start with a bit of area control (units that can move onto space and occupy it for like scoring objectives). This ranges anywhere from light units that can keep a low profile, like middling blobs of troops, to big units built to be durable and hard to remove. Then you support that with things like fire support (units designed to suppress your opponent and support those troops) or area denial to restrict the opponent's movement into spaces I don't want them in. Ultimately, the army hits the table and it becomes clear what the role of each unit is. The army more-or-less takes on the feel GW was trying to achieve, and for a narrative game... we get a pretty solid match between two well-built armies.
Competitive may have its roots in those areas, because the concepts don't really change, but the refinement phase is taken to a Nth degree. Things like optimal size, optimal loadouts, points efficiency, mathhammer... all of these fraction of a % decisions are applied to every aspect of the army. From that initial run of mathhammer, some units get dropped (oh, farewell Howling Banshees) in favor of maximizing others (oh, HELLO Nightspinners!). Normally, by this point, the armies look nothing alike. Then comes things like stratagem-hammer to get unintended power creeps, and application of weird rules like 1+ saves with nue-Stormshields (you know, clearly unintended things that have wild power swings in a game that I won't exploit and go with RAI over RAW).
Then comes the constant loop of the refinement phase of competitive play, where interactions are ironed out, timing of the tactics is tuned to the point of even the CP use is tactically optimal. And I mean, these are like fractions of a % of optimization, but that's where they spend a lot of time... and normally, this is where the filthy casual games come into play. It isn't about "stomping the life" out of the opposing player... it is about refinement and testing those changes or timings. It is unfortunate that they're not including the "filthy casual" in that process and they become a blind-sided victim in many cases. I mean, the most unfortunate part is that the opposing player's interest in the game is fundamentally irrelevant at this point. Their experience, interaction, feedback... means nothing. They are just a cardboard cutout that cuts out half the work of playing the game alone and allows the tuner to focus on the important data.
So now you have someone with a "TAC" army built to emulate a fighting force that could realistically be found in lore squaring off with a guy trying to field a fighting force optimized to do "something" to 100% and beyond. The TAC guy may be looking for a social experience and the tuner is looking for data gathering. From the onset of the game they're both after distinctly different outcomes (winning is not the outcome in either case... it is socialization vs data gathering/testing).
The problem is only aggravated because balance is impossible to achieve in this setting. Even if things are closer to balanced than they are, simple decisions like sub-faction choice shifts that balance because units just plain perform differently once these things hit. An Alaitoc CHE is way better than a Biel-tan one... does Alaitoc cost more or does Biel-tan cost less? They're clearly no balanced against each other. And these are the differences in the thought process. A more competitive player is never going to drop a CHE into a Biel-tan detachment, it strategically provides no benefit where there is an obvious "better choice" - but does that mean CHE should never be played in a Biel-tan army? Well, I'll play it, because it is an Aspect Warrior.
How do you achieve balance around that? Because this is 100% going to be a disconnect between fluff players and crunch players. And as long as a difference in valuation exists, crunch players are going to find the optimal combination of these differences to play at a level beyond what is expected. Once the power shifts, they shift their tactics to find the new undercosted or overperforming units and the cycle begins anew. GW can nip the worst of the worst, but as long as decisions like Alaitoc vs Biel-tan exist, there will always be a difference in power that cannot be overcome with balance. Which leads to decisions like that being removed, and now we start down the road to "normalization" where "bad" choices cannot be made to ensure "all armies are equal"ly bland.
I think as long as the overperforming units are brought back in line (oh hi, Tau Commanders and Flying Hive Tyrants) and GW spends a bit more time working on those poor units that are so god awful and lost (Howling Banshees) to get them at least CLOSE to the rest of the pack... then both groups will still naturally segregate based on ideal outcome of the match, but they won't be playing ENTIRELY different games (oh, hello there Iron Hands indestructible castle). Sure they'll cross over now and then, but the results shouldn't be AS tragic, though I doubt they'll still be pretty.
I mean, really, how many people at a tournament are there for the experience... and how many people are there to REALLY compete? So really, this normally plays out in tournaments, too, until a point that the groups start to separate due to the competitive guys rising over the normies and then they have to start squaring off due to standings. But like a solid 50% of the people there are just normies that you play against all the time, which makes that experience against normies almost as valuable as against the pros. You ever see a normie list demolish a pro list because it just happened to be the perfect storm of counter units and bizarre tactics that just totally blindsided the pro and he made critical play errors that compounded the issues? I have. It is kinda funny.
Anyways, rant over. Sorry. Again, not gospel, just my experiences vomited out all over the place. Maybe shed some light on why I think the two spaces can overlap, but ultimately the differences can never be reconciled.
You can't achieve perfect balance ever. What you can do is squash the obvious OP always-takes, and look at the units (or... entire factions) that are never taken and address why that is.
If the argument is a 50/50 knife's edge of balance, thats unreasonable. I don't mind playing an uphill game, if I have a chance.
But look at necrons in 8th edition as an example of steaming garbage. As an entire faction basically. There should never be an entire faction that sits in that category for that long.
Slaves to darkness in AOS is another example. They were hot flaming garbage for FIVE years.
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
So, you're saying that in an incredibly cunning maneuver, James Workshop has taken a look at their game where, overall, about 1 in 4 units are competitive level strong, and has decided that the best way to create a "pay to win" scenario is to release models and ensure that about 1 in 4 is competitive level strong.
Well in that case, I hope they keep doing it that way? This is one of those conspiracies like "Obama creates the weather". Like, if it's true, I hope he keeps doing it then??
The sarcasm is unnecessary. If you want to discuss, let's discuss. If not, then why bother?
And yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Not every unit is designed for the competitive player. Not every unit needs competitive-level rules to sell kits. Competitive players are a tiny fraction of the player base so it would follow that, across the entire 2 or 3 thousand SKUs (can't remember exactly), only a handful of them fulfill the needs of that segment of the customer base.
Pay-to-win is a term mostly used from the fan perspective so it's probably too strong here. There is no conspiracy of evil businessmen scheming to take your money. I know it can feel that way, especially if you've spent years on the competitive treadmill chasing the meta (see auticus's reply to my last post). But rest assured, at no point have the words "pay-to-win" ever been written on a design goals whiteboard at GWHQ.
The pay-to-win aspect of the business model, insofar as it addresses the needs of the competitive player base, is implicit. It is an obvious lever for the design team to pull in order to influence sales and meet business goals whenever the situation calls for it. Keep in mind though, all of the entry-level designers at GW doing the heavy lifting design work (writing datasheets, checking rules, etc) most likely hate pulling that lever. Younger designers tend to be bright-eyed, design rockstars, armed with a deep understanding of fundamental game design principles and strong opinions on what good game design looks like, all from a purely technical perspective. They don't think about business, marketing, PR, or sales. Their sole task is to design games. They also tend to be much closer to the fan base in terms of demographic, tastes, and general attitudes toward the product they're selling. So naturally they will be violently opposed to anything that smells even vaguely of the dreaded "pay-to-win" moniker.
Where does it ultimately come from then? You already know where. The business department. Not to say the business department knows a damn thing about game design. They may have never even heard the words 'pay-to-win' and they generally don't know anything about what makes a good game. That's not their job. But there is a single person they talk to who does, and that is the head of design.
As a head of design, your main responsibility is to ensure the design team produces results that keep the rest of your business afloat. Your job is to talk to everyone in charge of their respective departments and use that knowledge to create a basic design framework for the rest of the design team to act on. The idea is this framework, with minimal external guidance, enables your designers to come up with a ruleset that satisfies all of the requirements outlined by the other departments, and most importantly, the business department. Sometimes those requirements entail things like "grow the competitive scene" or "give competitive players something new to work with" or "attract new customers that fit our profile of a competitive player". Generally speaking, the guys in business will have identified who they need to sell to in order to keep their numbers more green and less red. They pass this information to the design department, and from that point on it's up to the head of design to decide how to go about executing.
You have to remember pay-to-win is never the explicit goal driving these design decisions. They don't call it pay to win. All they're doing is identifying a portion of their customers who generate revenue, and creating products for those customers. Competitive players generate buzz. They stay on top of all the new releases. They host big, flashy events. They like to play the game a certain way, they like to optimize, and they tend to get bored if the meta stagnates for too long. Picking and choosing a few competitively viable units every season, and rotating them in and out as time passes, appears to be the strategy GW has settled on. It appears to be working.
If you're only analyzing this situation from the perspective of a fan or if you only evaluate rules decisions from the perspective of game design, then you will be missing crucial factors in the bigger picture. A successful game business is a complex engine with many different moving parts. Design does not happen in a vacuum. And certainly not when talking about huge organizations like GW.
So what factor does GW use to determine which ancient 3rd ed era/finecast sculpts they're going to seemingly arbitrarily ascend to competitive godhood?
Certainly doesn't seem like it's "Do we have this thing in stock, ready to sell to our competitive playerbase" to me. considering that whether it's shining spears, or talos pain engines, or vauls wrath batteries, or whatever, it basically instantly goes out of stock and stays that way for months.
You would think that would...not make GW any money, particularly if they do something like, I dunno, release a brand new plastic banshees unit and then the supporting rulebook that comes out with them makes Vauls Wrath guns ridiculously OP while leaving the brand new banshees garbage.
So the new unit GW just invested money into doesn't sell to competitive players, but they instantly run out of stock of the ancient old sculpt and everyone competitively minded goes to ebay to get those.
It also seems to me like, were I a corporation interested in instituting some kind of pay to win situation, I would do something to kind of use those competitive sales to drive my business. I might, for example, if I were considering releasing a big wave of CSMs and I was planning on having one of the new models be super duper tournament competitive, I might go ahead and put that bad boy right there in the big box and make it so you have to buy the big box with all the non-competitive units in it to get the super competitive thing.
I wouldn't, for example, release the big box with all the non-competitive junk units in it, and then release the thing lets name for the sake of argument a Lord of Discord in its own SEPARATE kit that then all my competitive players would just buy that and not buy the box set.
It's not that simple. Not every release is designed to milk competitive players for all their worth. Furthermore, businesses make a lot of mistakes. You are correct in that it's not an evil conspiracy where every single tiny design decision is a calculated move designed to maximize sales. Lots of things simply fly under the radar, and end up being overpowered for no good reason. You've seen how sloppy their rules writing can be. Now imagine these same mistakes, but scaled up across the 10-20 different departments, not just the handful of guys in the rules department.
the_scotsman wrote: So what factor does GW use to determine which ancient 3rd ed era/finecast sculpts they're going to seemingly arbitrarily ascend to competitive godhood?
Certainly doesn't seem like it's "Do we have this thing in stock, ready to sell to our competitive playerbase" to me. considering that whether it's shining spears, or talos pain engines, or vauls wrath batteries, or whatever, it basically instantly goes out of stock and stays that way for months.
You would think that would...not make GW any money, particularly if they do something like, I dunno, release a brand new plastic banshees unit and then the supporting rulebook that comes out with them makes Vauls Wrath guns ridiculously OP while leaving the brand new banshees garbage.
So the new unit GW just invested money into doesn't sell to competitive players, but they instantly run out of stock of the ancient old sculpt and everyone competitively minded goes to ebay to get those.
It also seems to me like, were I a corporation interested in instituting some kind of pay to win situation, I would do something to kind of use those competitive sales to drive my business. I might, for example, if I were considering releasing a big wave of CSMs and I was planning on having one of the new models be super duper tournament competitive, I might go ahead and put that bad boy right there in the big box and make it so you have to buy the big box with all the non-competitive units in it to get the super competitive thing.
I wouldn't, for example, release the big box with all the non-competitive junk units in it, and then release the thing lets name for the sake of argument a Lord of Discord in its own SEPARATE kit that then all my competitive players would just buy that and not buy the box set.
They bumble their way into making old models powerful.
the_scotsman wrote: So what factor does GW use to determine which ancient 3rd ed era/finecast sculpts they're going to seemingly arbitrarily ascend to competitive godhood?
Certainly doesn't seem like it's "Do we have this thing in stock, ready to sell to our competitive playerbase" to me. considering that whether it's shining spears, or talos pain engines, or vauls wrath batteries, or whatever, it basically instantly goes out of stock and stays that way for months.
You would think that would...not make GW any money, particularly if they do something like, I dunno, release a brand new plastic banshees unit and then the supporting rulebook that comes out with them makes Vauls Wrath guns ridiculously OP while leaving the brand new banshees garbage.
So the new unit GW just invested money into doesn't sell to competitive players, but they instantly run out of stock of the ancient old sculpt and everyone competitively minded goes to ebay to get those.
It also seems to me like, were I a corporation interested in instituting some kind of pay to win situation, I would do something to kind of use those competitive sales to drive my business. I might, for example, if I were considering releasing a big wave of CSMs and I was planning on having one of the new models be super duper tournament competitive, I might go ahead and put that bad boy right there in the big box and make it so you have to buy the big box with all the non-competitive units in it to get the super competitive thing.
I wouldn't, for example, release the big box with all the non-competitive junk units in it, and then release the thing lets name for the sake of argument a Lord of Discord in its own SEPARATE kit that then all my competitive players would just buy that and not buy the box set.
They bumble their way into making old models powerful.
Exactly. From my experience working in the games industry as an entry level designer and later as the head of a department (art), all I can say is, well... game design is chaos. You would be shocked to find out how things really get made. Lol.
Hey, I think we just discovered Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'm not going to be as brash as to call the designers "stupid" - I mean there are tons of data points and interactions these people have to account for, surely something unintended is going to slip through. But I also think attributing these mistakes to malice is just... really... childish.
There is no doomsday clock of when your units are going to absolutely suck and then suddenly swing into power houses. Everything cycles around. New units probably get a white glove pass because they're new and the company genuinely wants them to succeed... they literally spent a ton of money in design on them, you don't want it to flop. Do they make them intentionally OP? No, but I think they try to find that line and get REALLY close, because they want you to want it. The model is never going to sell as well as when it is premiered, so you definitely do not want to sell a turd.
And that means other models kind of languish under the radar. Their rules are infrequently updated, how the game plays after an edition update diminishes their value even more... the unit starts to age, and not sell. Someone is then tasks with "give this unit a face lift so we can get it back on the table" or "new codex time, let's give this unit an extra pass because it's been notoriously underrepresented the past few editions"... kind of a way to give them another day in the sun, and even to get those kits into the hand of newer players who never gave them a try.
But really, I think a lot of this ascribing malice to everything we disagree with and do not like... bad way of living life. You see the worst in everything, believe everything is done as part of some monstrous design. And we forget that people make mistakes all the time, and it doesn't make them bad. People misinterpret things all the time, it doesn't make them evil. And most importantly: smart people can do some REALLY dumb things. Doesn't make them stupid or bad, just shows that they're still fallible regardless of how smart they are.
the_scotsman wrote: So what factor does GW use to determine which ancient 3rd ed era/finecast sculpts they're going to seemingly arbitrarily ascend to competitive godhood?
Certainly doesn't seem like it's "Do we have this thing in stock, ready to sell to our competitive playerbase" to me. considering that whether it's shining spears, or talos pain engines, or vauls wrath batteries, or whatever, it basically instantly goes out of stock and stays that way for months.
You would think that would...not make GW any money, particularly if they do something like, I dunno, release a brand new plastic banshees unit and then the supporting rulebook that comes out with them makes Vauls Wrath guns ridiculously OP while leaving the brand new banshees garbage.
So the new unit GW just invested money into doesn't sell to competitive players, but they instantly run out of stock of the ancient old sculpt and everyone competitively minded goes to ebay to get those.
It also seems to me like, were I a corporation interested in instituting some kind of pay to win situation, I would do something to kind of use those competitive sales to drive my business. I might, for example, if I were considering releasing a big wave of CSMs and I was planning on having one of the new models be super duper tournament competitive, I might go ahead and put that bad boy right there in the big box and make it so you have to buy the big box with all the non-competitive units in it to get the super competitive thing.
I wouldn't, for example, release the big box with all the non-competitive junk units in it, and then release the thing lets name for the sake of argument a Lord of Discord in its own SEPARATE kit that then all my competitive players would just buy that and not buy the box set.
They bumble their way into making old models powerful.
Which means they're not spending time concocting strategies on how to sell those models. The result is a product of a poor play-testing process.
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Purifying Tempest wrote: Hey, I think we just discovered Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'm not going to be as brash as to call the designers "stupid" - I mean there are tons of data points and interactions these people have to account for, surely something unintended is going to slip through. But I also think attributing these mistakes to malice is just... really... childish.
There is no doomsday clock of when your units are going to absolutely suck and then suddenly swing into power houses. Everything cycles around. New units probably get a white glove pass because they're new and the company genuinely wants them to succeed... they literally spent a ton of money in design on them, you don't want it to flop. Do they make them intentionally OP? No, but I think they try to find that line and get REALLY close, because they want you to want it. The model is never going to sell as well as when it is premiered, so you definitely do not want to sell a turd.
And that means other models kind of languish under the radar. Their rules are infrequently updated, how the game plays after an edition update diminishes their value even more... the unit starts to age, and not sell. Someone is then tasks with "give this unit a face lift so we can get it back on the table" or "new codex time, let's give this unit an extra pass because it's been notoriously underrepresented the past few editions"... kind of a way to give them another day in the sun, and even to get those kits into the hand of newer players who never gave them a try.
But really, I think a lot of this ascribing malice to everything we disagree with and do not like... bad way of living life. You see the worst in everything, believe everything is done as part of some monstrous design. And we forget that people make mistakes all the time, and it doesn't make them bad. People misinterpret things all the time, it doesn't make them evil. And most importantly: smart people can do some REALLY dumb things. Doesn't make them stupid or bad, just shows that they're still fallible regardless of how smart they are.
That's part of the problem. Some people directly attribute improving a poorly performing unit or nerfing a strong one as no different than deliberately pushing rules. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.
I think GW's biggest problem is there is no way to play test all these releases competently. Especially not in reference to each other. Indomitus started in earnest a year or more ago. The were designing units and a new edition about the same time the marines codexes hit. And according to Brian playtesting began in Dec/Jan, so, how did any of the new PAs get folded into those considerations?
the_scotsman wrote: So what factor does GW use to determine which ancient 3rd ed era/finecast sculpts they're going to seemingly arbitrarily ascend to competitive godhood?
Certainly doesn't seem like it's "Do we have this thing in stock, ready to sell to our competitive playerbase" to me. considering that whether it's shining spears, or talos pain engines, or vauls wrath batteries, or whatever, it basically instantly goes out of stock and stays that way for months.
You would think that would...not make GW any money, particularly if they do something like, I dunno, release a brand new plastic banshees unit and then the supporting rulebook that comes out with them makes Vauls Wrath guns ridiculously OP while leaving the brand new banshees garbage.
So the new unit GW just invested money into doesn't sell to competitive players, but they instantly run out of stock of the ancient old sculpt and everyone competitively minded goes to ebay to get those.
It also seems to me like, were I a corporation interested in instituting some kind of pay to win situation, I would do something to kind of use those competitive sales to drive my business. I might, for example, if I were considering releasing a big wave of CSMs and I was planning on having one of the new models be super duper tournament competitive, I might go ahead and put that bad boy right there in the big box and make it so you have to buy the big box with all the non-competitive units in it to get the super competitive thing.
I wouldn't, for example, release the big box with all the non-competitive junk units in it, and then release the thing lets name for the sake of argument a Lord of Discord in its own SEPARATE kit that then all my competitive players would just buy that and not buy the box set.
They bumble their way into making old models powerful.
So it seems to me we have scenario "A" - Games Workshop wishes to construct a scenario of "Pay to win" so they make a certain fraction of their units competitive on purpose, to drive sales. Another larger fraction of their units, they do not give competitive rules, because they only need to drive the sales of certain models via competitive rules to the tournament gaming crowd.
Other units, they unintentionally make powerful, bumbling into accidentally making old sculpts extremely strong. This results in an end scenario where newer units, and older units, seem to have approximately the same fraction of strong vs weak contenders.
Scenario "B" - Games Workshop wishes to create a relatively balanced game. They create rules for new units, and refresh rules for older units, and each time they make a new unit or make new rules for an existing unit, they try to make sure it has some feature within its rules to make people excited about what it can do on the tabletop. However, they're not great at their job, and this results in an end scenario where newer units and older units seem to have approximately the same fraction of strong vs weak contenders.
What kind of metric could we use to determine whether we're seeing scenario "A" or scenario "B?"
If we see a release of a new unit, and somebody says "aha, clearly this new unit is just yet another example of a scenario "a" unit, intentionally made overly powerful in order to drive sales!" what metric could we use to determine whether they're correct or not?
What would be the difference in terms of a game state between scenario "A" and scenario "B"? Would it make a difference? Would it make an existing collection versus a new collection strong, or weak?
I ask, because I own several armies, and two of them include tons of the extremely recent 8th edition Ork Speed Freeks and Genestealer Cult Wave 2 models. Meanwhile, I have another two that are made up of old, and in many cases EXTREMELY old sculpts. The most recent are the early 7th ed era deathwatch veterans, the 5th ed era Vanvets/Sternguard, dreadnoughts and terminators from space hulk, and then the oldest are my Eldar army, which is plastic from 3rd ed and metal from 2nd ed and rogue trader.
Hands down, not even close, by an entire country mile, my eldar and marine armies blow my ork and GSC armies out of the fething park. All my brand new models with brand new rules get SLAUGHTERED by my 2nd ed era swooping hawks, rogue trader dark reapers, 2nd ed rangers, 2nd ed shining spears, and 3rd ed vauls wrath guns and wave serpents.
I mean, nothing described in the OP sounds worse then the re-rollable 2++ deathstars from 6th, or the summoning factories from 7th that allowed you to get hundreds of points of advantage over your opponent.
The thread is 7 pages in, so I'm sure everything that needs to be said has been said, but I'll just reiterate that you're using the same fallacies that people make when trying to criticize automated cars. A change does not need to be perfect in order to be superior to what came before it, it just needs to be a little bit better.
That Tesla autopiloted cars occasionally crash does not mean that Teslas are as safe or less safe than non-automated cars (they are vastly more safe than non-automated cars), and that games balanced around high end play may have its own balancing quirks does not mean that it is as poorly balanced as a game that has no balance, such as all of 40K pre-8th edition (depending on how you feel about 5th).
So it seems to me we have scenario "A" - Games Workshop wishes to construct a scenario of "Pay to win" so they make a certain fraction of their units competitive on purpose, to drive sales. Another larger fraction of their units, they do not give competitive rules, because they only need to drive the sales of certain models via competitive rules to the tournament gaming crowd.
Scenario "B" - Games Workshop wishes to create a relatively balanced game. They create rules for new units, and refresh rules for older units, and each time they make a new unit or make new rules for an existing unit, they try to make sure it has some feature within its rules to make people excited about what it can do on the tabletop. However, they're not great at their job, and this results in an end scenario where newer units and older units seem to have approximately the same fraction of strong vs weak contenders.
What kind of metric could we use to determine whether we're seeing scenario "A" or scenario "B?"
This is a fun question and of course we can only speculate on why decisions get made. There are so, so many factors in determining whether or not a kit sells that it's impossible to say for sure. I assume competitive rules strength, or even "casual" rules strength are usually only minor factors in sales. Bigger factors are probably things like, well, how exciting the kit looks. How big the target audience is for that particular kit. How much marketing and retail support is available to allocate for that release. How much legacy hype has been built up for that unit over the years. Etc...
I don't think they will usually need to crank the power gamer lever on a datasheet unless there are very good, specific reasons to do so. Pure speculation but I think it'd make sense to buff up a datasheet for an old kit when you're trying to clear out old stock. And I'm not talking about the "In Stock" label on the GW store page, I'm talking about more behind-the-scenes stuff, like the remaining lifespan of ancient molds or the remaining length of a manufacturing contract between GW and an outsourced manufacturer. There are endless possible reasons behind the scenes that could eventually manifest on the tabletop as 3++ Shining Spears, reasons that you, as the end consumer, will never be aware of. I've never worked in miniature games but I do have enough experience in video games to know that fan theories on how a game company operates based solely on publicly available data are almost always 100% wrong.
On the flip side, I think the recent space marine supplements present a more obvious, readable scenario. Still speculation of course, but to me SM 2.0 was a reaction (or overcorrection) against most of the entire first half of 8th edition where space marines were getting smashed left and right. From a branding perspective, having marines be the laughingstock of every local store is a not a good look for the game. You really want to avoid the situation where your brand new customers bring in their shiny space marines for the first time, only to get mercilessly stomped by veteran players of expensive xenos factions. That is a serious issue which could have deep financial consequences if left unaddressed over the long term.
Daedalus81 wrote: I think GW's biggest problem is there is no way to play test all these releases competently. Especially not in reference to each other. Indomitus started in earnest a year or more ago. The were designing units and a new edition about the same time the marines codexes hit. And according to Brian playtesting began in Dec/Jan, so, how did any of the new PAs get folded into those considerations?
I would go a step further and say that the problem is that GW is beholden to an outdated design/sales model.
In a videogame, or a wargame written by a different company, generally you'd have a couple of stages of testing for new additions to the game:
-Initial system is playtested by the developers until the basic functionality seems right.
-That system goes out to a small cadre of alpha testers, who do more rigorous testing and provide immediate player-focused feedback.
-Revisions are made, and then you send out for an open beta, where anyone who owns the game can test the new content, and provide feedback from there. This is also a great time for the developers to collect metrics in a videogame, but even a traditional wargame can leverage electronic polls, surveys, and forums to gather feedback.
-Once the problems are ironed out, the final version is actually released. In a videogame it gets rolled into the main release, in a wargame it becomes official, tournament legal rules.
GW's problem here is that if they want to charge money for rules, they basically can't give out free rules for beta testing. Also, the lead time on printing books (typically 6-12 months) means that it would also dramatically slow down an already-slow process, and they'd run into problems with content that seemed fine when it was okayed being broken by subsequent releases after it went to print.
So basically, they do their in-house testing, they do their alpha testing (and it's unclear how much they actually listen to their alpha testers), and then they go straight to production, with no telling how things will change by the time the printed final product hits stores. This was standard practice in the 90s, but it's pretty outdated today.
The announcement of a listbuilding app, the introduction of beta rules (bolter discipline), and the free core rules all make me wonder if GW is heading in a more modern direction. Quarterly balance adjustments and beta rule/datasheet introductions in an all-digital format would be significantly easier for GW to manage than once-per-year Chapter Approved, but not as directly profitable.
I suspect the litmus test is/was how Psychic Awakening panned out. If enough people bought those books (on top of new codexes, Chapter Approved, and supplements), then that would be a strong profit motive to keep cranking out new books to be invalidated within a year. For my part, I've sworn off buying balance updates entirely.
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BlaxicanX wrote: I mean, nothing described in the OP sounds worse then the re-rollable 2++ deathstars from 6th, or the summoning factories from 7th that allowed you to get hundreds of points of advantage over your opponent.
Did re-rollable 2++ deathstars regularly come up in casual play, or is that an example of imbalance at a high-end competitive level? OP's argument is that balancing around competitive play does not necessarily result in better balance for casual players, so a system that had exploits like that break competitive play might have still offered a better play experience for casual players.
I never played 6th so am not making an argument either way; I just don't think you've actually addressed OP's argument.
Tyel wrote: There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
8th was the most balanced edition of 40k. In fact its probably *the only edition* where GW actively tried to bring balance to the game. Obviously its not perfect - but its infinitely better than the older method of "here's a codex, oh it sucks? Well, see you in some years time".
All the evidence is that 8th is also the most commercially successful edition. Admittedly this could be due to various other factors unrelated to how the game plays, but its a strange coincidence just to shrug off.
Are GW actively making the game worse by having CA points changes each year?
I guess for people who buy the current hotness and want that to remain the current hotness until the heat death of the universe - but I'm not convinced they make up a huge percentage of the playerbase.
I wouldn't call 8th the most balanced edition of Warhammer. STRETCHES of 8th? sure. The current state of 8th? No way. And this currently shift in focus seems to be lining GW's pockets with that PMarine money very effectively, and seems to be slated to keep up extra hard in 9th.
I hadn't considered the idea that balance may not be what the playerbase actually wants.... but it's been some pretty good arguments put forth as to why that may be, so I remain undecided. Is balance less profitable though? Well, almost certainly. You can't write extremely OP rules to shift units, without causing an imbalance.
Well think about it for a moment. Other than those with collector issues ( like me perhaps ) No one will need to expand on armies or start new ones unless they want to if there is a real balance to things. Like for instance if you really felt and saw that first born marines were at power parity with primaris, what reason would people have to get these " Exciting new powerful units ! ". There wouldn't be one aside from variety and desire to have new stuff but not perhaps better stuff.
Was there a reason to Legend Chaplain on a bike when they had in the works waiting primaris chaplain on bike ? Not a one. They cited balance and unintended rule interactions but all they would have to do is give them the rules with changes for wargear and less wounds for the first born bike chaplain, they'd operate almost exactly the same but for those differences. Was it balance he was booted out for ? I don't think most would say yes now. It was simply that model was old, getting it gives GW no money as the models are second hand, kit bashed or third party. This new one will cost a crap ton, but it'll be new so all the money will flow GWs way for it.
More and more decisions are made seemingly with this in mind. Slowly nerf, release units just flat out better and more cost effective and even when they change points the disparity just grows. Now either they don't understand how to balance things at all or these are decisions made to push agendas that have nothing to do with game play and more with sales. That leads to frustration from the players as they keep touting this balance and care for the game state when most of the decisions may be out of the game designers hands. So in that we may give them a bad look to blame them all the time.
BlaxicanX wrote: I mean, nothing described in the OP sounds worse then the re-rollable 2++ deathstars from 6th, or the summoning factories from 7th that allowed you to get hundreds of points of advantage over your opponent.
Did re-rollable 2++ deathstars regularly come up in casual play, or is that an example of imbalance at a high-end competitive level? OP's argument is that balancing around competitive play does not necessarily result in better balance for casual players, so a system that had exploits like that break competitive play might have still offered a better play experience for casual players.
I never played 6th so am not making an argument either way; I just don't think you've actually addressed OP's argument.
It wasn't every game at every table, but it was pretty darn common to see re-rollable 2++ or "Hit only on 6s" units crawling around. It wouldn't be difficult to find at least one somewhere within the store. Freebies from formations ratcheted that up to 12... it became a totally different game at that point and "power combos" were pretty much the norm.
Forcing someone to play 7th edition (which was like 6.5, really) was indeed a hate crime. Hate to get ERJAK props with how overboard they normally react, but that statement was spot on
I would go a step further and say that the problem is that GW is beholden to an outdated design/sales model.
In a videogame, or a wargame written by a different company, generally you'd have a couple of stages of testing for new additions to the game:
-Initial system is playtested by the developers until the basic functionality seems right.
-That system goes out to a small cadre of alpha testers, who do more rigorous testing and provide immediate player-focused feedback.
-Revisions are made, and then you send out for an open beta, where anyone who owns the game can test the new content, and provide feedback from there. This is also a great time for the developers to collect metrics in a videogame, but even a traditional wargame can leverage electronic polls, surveys, and forums to gather feedback.
-Once the problems are ironed out, the final version is actually released. In a videogame it gets rolled into the main release, in a wargame it becomes official, tournament legal rules.
GW's problem here is that if they want to charge money for rules, they basically can't give out free rules for beta testing. Also, the lead time on printing books (typically 6-12 months) means that it would also dramatically slow down an already-slow process, and they'd run into problems with content that seemed fine when it was okayed being broken by subsequent releases after it went to print.
So basically, they do their in-house testing, they do their alpha testing (and it's unclear how much they actually listen to their alpha testers), and then they go straight to production, with no telling how things will change by the time the printed final product hits stores. This was standard practice in the 90s, but it's pretty outdated today.
The announcement of a listbuilding app, the introduction of beta rules (bolter discipline), and the free core rules all make me wonder if GW is heading in a more modern direction. Quarterly balance adjustments and beta rule/datasheet introductions in an all-digital format would be significantly easier for GW to manage than once-per-year Chapter Approved, but not as directly profitable.
I suspect the litmus test is/was how Psychic Awakening panned out. If enough people bought those books (on top of new codexes, Chapter Approved, and supplements), then that would be a strong profit motive to keep cranking out new books to be invalidated within a year. For my part, I've sworn off buying balance updates entirely.
IMO the very first sentence is accurate, but the reasons below it might not be. You absolutely CAN give out free rules for Beta testing and still charge later for the actual release. That's what NDAs are for and they already use them heavily.
The real issue is more than likely that they don't seem to ever have a true roadmap for development. Planning in production time for physical books is trivial to planning in code freeze for bug fixes on something like a AAA video game, and yet game studios do this successfully every day (well some do ... lol...not that I'm speaking from experience or anything ... ), but GW doesn't seem to. We already know they don't follow basic publishing best practices for the codexes (as evidenced in the numerous copy/paste errors across editions), and my guess is, they may not even know about modern development best practices. The feeling in the RT/2nd ed days was that it was a slightly grown up version of a bunch of guys making this up as they went along while sitting in their garage. That's fine for back then , but the problem is it still feels that way.
With a proper development road map, they would be able to do sufficient beta-testing, print books, and do releases without rushing and without some of the fairly egregious errors their materials routinely have (whether that be typos, omissions, or flat out broken units).
Tycho wrote: You absolutely CAN give out free rules for Beta testing and still charge later for the actual release. That's what NDAs are for and they already use them heavily.
I meant more that from the perspective of profitability, if you give out free rules online for open beta among the general 40K community, people are less likely to pay for the tweaked (or unchanged) final version when it goes to print. NDAs are regularly used for their closed beta testing.
If GW gave up on the idea of selling rules, it would open a lot of doors. For a company that is very famously models-first, it's odd that they've seemed so opposed to the concept in 8th.
People are so quick to blame everything on incompetence, greed, or stupidity. But any corporation is a big, complicated organization, made up of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people just like you and me, and the complex interactions that arise from that are chaos theory made manifest.
So the answer is that it's incompetence, greed, AND stupidity.
I kid, I kid. I'm just coming off a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project that ended in blood and tears and legal ultimatums despite really good people being involved in every stage of the process. A lot of the problems arose because of the separate knowledge and goals each tier had - the trenches knew the product was trash and wanted to spend more time in development and QA, the team leads had a directive to include X number of features and so kept adding features to an already-buggy product, and management was weighing things like "long-term financial viability" and "contractual obligations" and "holy crap am I about to get 50+ people fired because I picked a bad product?"
I've used the example before, but even a game like Overwatch - where Blizzard can track every interaction, every combination, every bullet and every blow, run simulations until their eyes bleed - took YEARS to balance some heroes correctly. Mercy was continuously nerfed and was still an auto-take for forever. And that's in (to start with) a relatively small game, with fewer heroes than 40k has factions, let alone units.
By comparison, GW has a tiny window into their own world. They see tournament lists and results, new unit sales, playtest feedback, and maybe, occasionally, forum complaints. And the people working on these rules and releases - as Daedalus points out above - are often working years ahead, and trying to consider every possible interaction at every moment in time just makes it that much harder. And then you add in release schedules to keep player retention going, management mandates that you keep new player onboarding, as measured by certain unit sales, at specific levels, maintain a steady cadence of DLC... it gets difficult. It gets impossible.
Also, I think competitive players make for fine playtesters. They tend to have excellent knowledge about the ins and outs of their own armies - and they get as frustrated as everyone else when they're reduced to taking these five units to the exclusion of all else, because that's the only way to win in the current meta. A healthy meta balance is good for everyone in the long term, and the better competitive players out there recognize it. The more you can play around with, the more you can optimize and tinker and build, the happier a lot of these guys are.
Tyel wrote: There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
8th was the most balanced edition of 40k. In fact its probably *the only edition* where GW actively tried to bring balance to the game. Obviously its not perfect - but its infinitely better than the older method of "here's a codex, oh it sucks? Well, see you in some years time".
All the evidence is that 8th is also the most commercially successful edition. Admittedly this could be due to various other factors unrelated to how the game plays, but its a strange coincidence just to shrug off.
Are GW actively making the game worse by having CA points changes each year?
I guess for people who buy the current hotness and want that to remain the current hotness until the heat death of the universe - but I'm not convinced they make up a huge percentage of the playerbase.
I wouldn't call 8th the most balanced edition of Warhammer. STRETCHES of 8th? sure. The current state of 8th? No way. And this currently shift in focus seems to be lining GW's pockets with that PMarine money very effectively, and seems to be slated to keep up extra hard in 9th.
I hadn't considered the idea that balance may not be what the playerbase actually wants.... but it's been some pretty good arguments put forth as to why that may be, so I remain undecided. Is balance less profitable though? Well, almost certainly. You can't write extremely OP rules to shift units, without causing an imbalance.
Well think about it for a moment. Other than those with collector issues ( like me perhaps ) No one will need to expand on armies or start new ones unless they want to if there is a real balance to things. Like for instance if you really felt and saw that first born marines were at power parity with primaris, what reason would people have to get these " Exciting new powerful units ! ". There wouldn't be one aside from variety and desire to have new stuff but not perhaps better stuff.
Was there a reason to Legend Chaplain on a bike when they had in the works waiting primaris chaplain on bike ? Not a one. They cited balance and unintended rule interactions but all they would have to do is give them the rules with changes for wargear and less wounds for the first born bike chaplain, they'd operate almost exactly the same but for those differences. Was it balance he was booted out for ? I don't think most would say yes now. It was simply that model was old, getting it gives GW no money as the models are second hand, kit bashed or third party. This new one will cost a crap ton, but it'll be new so all the money will flow GWs way for it.
More and more decisions are made seemingly with this in mind. Slowly nerf, release units just flat out better and more cost effective and even when they change points the disparity just grows. Now either they don't understand how to balance things at all or these are decisions made to push agendas that have nothing to do with game play and more with sales. That leads to frustration from the players as they keep touting this balance and care for the game state when most of the decisions may be out of the game designers hands. So in that we may give them a bad look to blame them all the time.
I have a cool life hack for anyone who owns an old legended chaplain on bike or old space marine bikers and is jealous of those fancy new primaris bikes.
It's a special thing I cooked up in my brain-meat as someone who owns and still plays regularly with 2nd edition eldar miniatures. And, you know, every other faction that isn't loyalist space marines who gets a new kit for anything they already own.
You just...
you just say it's the new thing. And you use the new rules.
catbarf wrote: OP's argument is that balancing around competitive play does not necessarily result in better balance for casual players
And I've directly addressed that argument.
No, you have not.
If you want to use the autonomous car analogy: Let's say Tesla's development strategy for autopilot is designed and tested around high-speed collisions, because those are obviously a huge and obvious problem. The assumption is that designing autopilot to be better than a human at avoiding high-speed collisions will trickle down to making it better than a human driver at preventing low-speed fender-benders.
OP does a bunch of testing and finds that their self-driving car is actually worse at avoiding low-speed collisions than they were. And since they only use their car to get around town at low speed, and aren't the kind of driver where improved high-speed collision avoidance would be relevant, this has actually gotten them into more accidents than before.
You've come in and pointed to a 70MPH twenty-car pileup that doesn't happen now thanks to autopilot, so clearly OP is wrong and autopilot has made things better.
Put more bluntly: OP's complaint is that balance has gotten worse in specifically the context of casual/narrative play. Pointing out that the most egregious examples of imbalance have been corrected isn't a counter-argument, unless those situations were endemic to casual/narrative play to begin with.
So the answer is that it's incompetence, greed, AND stupidity.
Hahaha this is so true though. Coordinating dozens, hundreds or even thousand of people to make a single project is an insanely complex task.
The truth is no single person at the organization has a complete picture of what the feth is actually happening. If you've ever worked on any large scale entertainment production like a video game or movie, you'd know that it is absolute chaos. The fact that companies somehow manage to produce semi-functioning products at all is a minor miracle to me every time it happens.
I don't know how else to express to the armchair designers on the internet how complicated it is to build things.
Isn't most new stuff nowadays build out of pre constructs? Frenchises get reused and rebooted, adaptations are made. With GW there doesn't seem to be much work put in to updating some stuff. Stratagems in 8th were clones or litteraly the same ones, every army gets a banner, gun, sword and armour that work more or less the same way etc.
There are very few armies, where everything seems to be new, at least in w40k. AoS seems to be full of new armies, but then again as Atticus said, GW sometimes drops the ball on some armies had. I felt bad with 2+ years of GK, can't imagine how it would be to be a slaves player and have a bad army for 5+ years.
Archebius wrote: People are so quick to blame everything on incompetence, greed, or stupidity. But any corporation is a big, complicated organization, made up of dozens or hundreds or thousands of people just like you and me, and the complex interactions that arise from that are chaos theory made manifest.
So the answer is that it's incompetence, greed, AND stupidity.
I kid, I kid. I'm just coming off a multi-year, multi-million-dollar project that ended in blood and tears and legal ultimatums despite really good people being involved in every stage of the process. A lot of the problems arose because of the separate knowledge and goals each tier had - the trenches knew the product was trash and wanted to spend more time in development and QA, the team leads had a directive to include X number of features and so kept adding features to an already-buggy product, and management was weighing things like "long-term financial viability" and "contractual obligations" and "holy crap am I about to get 50+ people fired because I picked a bad product?"
I've used the example before, but even a game like Overwatch - where Blizzard can track every interaction, every combination, every bullet and every blow, run simulations until their eyes bleed - took YEARS to balance some heroes correctly. Mercy was continuously nerfed and was still an auto-take for forever. And that's in (to start with) a relatively small game, with fewer heroes than 40k has factions, let alone units.
By comparison, GW has a tiny window into their own world. They see tournament lists and results, new unit sales, playtest feedback, and maybe, occasionally, forum complaints. And the people working on these rules and releases - as Daedalus points out above - are often working years ahead, and trying to consider every possible interaction at every moment in time just makes it that much harder. And then you add in release schedules to keep player retention going, management mandates that you keep new player onboarding, as measured by certain unit sales, at specific levels, maintain a steady cadence of DLC... it gets difficult. It gets impossible.
Also, I think competitive players make for fine playtesters. They tend to have excellent knowledge about the ins and outs of their own armies - and they get as frustrated as everyone else when they're reduced to taking these five units to the exclusion of all else, because that's the only way to win in the current meta. A healthy meta balance is good for everyone in the long term, and the better competitive players out there recognize it. The more you can play around with, the more you can optimize and tinker and build, the happier a lot of these guys are.
I would also add that some of the problems of imbalance come from the unit sheets themselves and how they are often overlapping or underperforming similar units, making it nigh impossible to point correctly without making it a must take or something to avoid. To be fair I think the tourney playtesters have little to no say in the datasheets themselves and can only suggest potential point costs and try their best to do so.
You see this inherent problem in Overwatch where Blizzard has had to redesign a hero from the ground up to make it viable, but they also have the benefit of having a live service they can change rather quickly which is a benefit in the digital entertainment industry. For GW they are throwing existing codexes/datasheets into the hands of the tourney crowd and at no point will you see the actual datasheet addressed by GW. Except for a Warscroll or two in AoS strangely enough(fx. Plague Monks).
The final problem is also one very few players want to accept, but that is unit bloat. The reason there is a lot of overlap and redundancy is because the rent... I mean the number of units is too high. At some point GW needs to either remove units from factions or just make them interchangeable from one unit to another. Like if they were at one point claim that all marines have undergone the rubicon and the old marines are now "counts as appropriate Primaris unit". Just the Space Marine line alone is about 110-ish units. There is no way to balance it unless you make some of them very similar too each other.
Tyel wrote: There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
8th was the most balanced edition of 40k. In fact its probably *the only edition* where GW actively tried to bring balance to the game. Obviously its not perfect - but its infinitely better than the older method of "here's a codex, oh it sucks? Well, see you in some years time".
All the evidence is that 8th is also the most commercially successful edition. Admittedly this could be due to various other factors unrelated to how the game plays, but its a strange coincidence just to shrug off.
Are GW actively making the game worse by having CA points changes each year?
I guess for people who buy the current hotness and want that to remain the current hotness until the heat death of the universe - but I'm not convinced they make up a huge percentage of the playerbase.
I wouldn't call 8th the most balanced edition of Warhammer. STRETCHES of 8th? sure. The current state of 8th? No way. And this currently shift in focus seems to be lining GW's pockets with that PMarine money very effectively, and seems to be slated to keep up extra hard in 9th.
I hadn't considered the idea that balance may not be what the playerbase actually wants.... but it's been some pretty good arguments put forth as to why that may be, so I remain undecided. Is balance less profitable though? Well, almost certainly. You can't write extremely OP rules to shift units, without causing an imbalance.
Well think about it for a moment. Other than those with collector issues ( like me perhaps ) No one will need to expand on armies or start new ones unless they want to if there is a real balance to things. Like for instance if you really felt and saw that first born marines were at power parity with primaris, what reason would people have to get these " Exciting new powerful units ! ". There wouldn't be one aside from variety and desire to have new stuff but not perhaps better stuff.
Was there a reason to Legend Chaplain on a bike when they had in the works waiting primaris chaplain on bike ? Not a one. They cited balance and unintended rule interactions but all they would have to do is give them the rules with changes for wargear and less wounds for the first born bike chaplain, they'd operate almost exactly the same but for those differences. Was it balance he was booted out for ? I don't think most would say yes now. It was simply that model was old, getting it gives GW no money as the models are second hand, kit bashed or third party. This new one will cost a crap ton, but it'll be new so all the money will flow GWs way for it.
More and more decisions are made seemingly with this in mind. Slowly nerf, release units just flat out better and more cost effective and even when they change points the disparity just grows. Now either they don't understand how to balance things at all or these are decisions made to push agendas that have nothing to do with game play and more with sales. That leads to frustration from the players as they keep touting this balance and care for the game state when most of the decisions may be out of the game designers hands. So in that we may give them a bad look to blame them all the time.
I have a cool life hack for anyone who owns an old legended chaplain on bike or old space marine bikers and is jealous of those fancy new primaris bikes.
It's a special thing I cooked up in my brain-meat as someone who owns and still plays regularly with 2nd edition eldar miniatures. And, you know, every other faction that isn't loyalist space marines who gets a new kit for anything they already own.
You just...
you just say it's the new thing. And you use the new rules.
I would agree and at some point I think many will do this. However, as GW treats these units as different things you will get blow back. My point of bringing it up wasn't to say " I'm a victim ! " it was to say their design process isn't based on balance and more set to sell things. As if they weren't set to sell the new things and moth ball the old they'd keep the old with the new or merge the two, in most books aside from space marines it's simply new models but the same unit. With Space marines they won't do this as then people would already have full armies still and they want to force you to buy whole new primaris forces to keep up. If they Legend all first born it goes from a nudge to a " do it or probably don't play as most will say its unbalanced " We had a whole thread where people said they'd just deny those Legends because of balance as pointless of an excuse as that is.
The advent of legends as opposed to being a savior for all models was just a graveyard for balance. As now they can mothball all they want, literally force you to keep up or get out because they can claim they never " squat " anything again they simply became legend which effectively for most intents and purposes ends up as the same thing for a good deal of the community.
I meant more that from the perspective of profitability, if you give out free rules online for open beta among the general 40K community, people are less likely to pay for the tweaked (or unchanged) final version when it goes to print. NDAs are regularly used for their closed beta testing.
If GW gave up on the idea of selling rules, it would open a lot of doors. For a company that is very famously models-first, it's odd that they've seemed so opposed to the concept in 8th.
The real reason you wouldn't give the rules for free in a truly open beta is because it wouldn't net them anything at all. It's too much data for them to collect and too much room for skew in the numbers. The concept of an "open beta" from the video game world really doesn't translate well to this one, so there would literally be no point.
In terms of "selling rules" - the battle primer is a free PDF isn't it? And most of the other top war games companies also sell their rules but avoid the problems GW runs into at every turn. Wanting to sell the rules really doesn't factor in. Honestly, since it's the rules that drive the models, and since they wouldn't be making money directly from the rules in that case, I could make the argument that should they start giving all the rules away for free, the problems would actually get worse, and since you still have to sell that model (and since it's often rules that sell the models), you are still very likely to end up with problem units. Giving the rules away doesn't fix this.
I really think the problem is simply not sitting down and committing to a road map. Again, if you listen to the Horus Heresy authors talk about making the series, the one thing that really stands out is how often they met, how much they talked, and how far in advance they planned TOGETHER so that they wouldn't start writing on day 1, and end up with massive problems on day 10,000.
That's also how you make a development road map. You sit the devs (or in this case, the "rules writers",) down, and hammer out a 12 month plan. Ideally you also have a strong technical writer on hand and some strong editors. Once you have the broad strokes, you set up work groups to tackle the different parts and go. In this way, you have milestones, an agreed to design approach that is checked in on regularly, and an understood timeline so that everything comes out in a logical, clean, and thought out manner. GW doesn't do this currently. For example, look at the 6th ed CSM codex. RIDDLED with NEW units that would have been AMAZING. In 4th or 5th ed. But not 6th. What the hell happened? It's my favorite "dead horse", but it's far from the only example, and these kinds of things don't happen with this kind of regularity if you're using solid, modern best practices.
Under a properly road mapped system, you have time to make the core rules first, test them, release them, work on codexes in concert, make adjustments as needed, test them, and release them. You don't have "guy A" writing the core book in basement "B", while contractor "C" is simultaneously writing a codex for the system that doesn't have full core rules yet, and never between the two shall meet.
They just need to fix the process. THEN they can look at the people. Like any group, there's going to be some winners and losers, but right now they all seem to be hamstrung by a totally broken workflow, so you really can't tell if they're good or not.
Tycho wrote: I really think the problem is simply not sitting down and committing to a road map. Again, if you listen to the Horus Heresy authors talk about making the series, the one thing that really stands out is how often they met, how much they talked, and how far in advance they planned TOGETHER so that they wouldn't start writing on day 1, and end up with massive problems on day 10,000.
That's also how you make a development road map. You sit the devs (or in this case, the "rules writers",) down, and hammer out a 12 month plan. Ideally you also have a strong technical writer on hand and some strong editors. Once you have the broad strokes, you set up work groups to tackle the different parts and go. In this way, you have milestones, an agreed to design approach that is checked in on regularly, and an understood timeline so that everything comes out in a logical, clean, and thought out manner. GW doesn't do this currently. For example, look at the 6th ed CSM codex. RIDDLED with NEW units that would have been AMAZING. In 4th or 5th ed. But not 6th. What the hell happened? It's my favorite "dead horse", but it's far from the only example, and these kinds of things don't happen with this kind of regularity if you're using solid, modern best practices.
Under a properly road mapped system, you have time to make the core rules first, test them, release them, work on codexes in concert, make adjustments as needed, test them, and release them. You don't have "guy A" writing the core book in basement "B", while contractor "C" is simultaneously writing a codex for the system that doesn't have full core rules yet, and never between the two shall meet.
They just need to fix the process. THEN they can look at the people. Like any group, there's going to be some winners and losers, but right now they all seem to be hamstrung by a totally broken workflow, so you really can't tell if they're good or not.
See, again, I think the drive to sell rules is a significant part of this. Yes, competent rules-writing can clearly be made to work within the confines of a set release schedule, but as it stands the rules teams are beholden to a tempo imposed by yearly Chapter Approved, biannual Marine codices, and the need to string out codex releases into a new one every other month, not to mention now Psychic Awakening as a campaign.
I know software design isn't a 1:1 comparison (I think you are partly correct about open betas- although the feedback that can be gleaned from open betas is little different from what they get from the community that leads to CA changes), but I've seen the design problems that come up when you have a release schedule dictated by business concerns. Maybe you're working on three new systems that are intended to work in concert with one another, but the publisher says you've got to release them as DLCs every two months, so you can't develop and test them concurrently like you really should be, and ultimately you have to fix the mess after the fact.
The writers just can't work on core rules first, then work on codexes in concert, when they have a set, sequential release schedule- especially when the effects from one change to the game won't be felt for another three months and then oops, the next book was sent off to the press two months ago and now the game's going to break. The people are coming and going, the design ideologies are changing, the power level is creeping, and the meta is ever-evolving. If there was a roadmap at the start of the edition, friction has eroded it into a patchwork mess of loose guidelines and invalidated clauses. That's an awful environment to try to develop a game in.
If they threw out the constant need to sell books, then sat down all the devs in a room, worked out a coherent plan and vision for the next 12 months, and then as you said developed the core rules followed by all the codexes in concert, I think we'd have a much tighter, more coherent, balanced, and downright better ruleset. They could even still sell them at the end- but it wouldn't be as profitable as the drip-feed approach, and it seems that's the priority.
See, again, I think the drive to sell rules is a significant part of this. Yes, competent rules-writing can clearly be made to work within the confines of a set release schedule, but as it stands the rules teams are beholden to a tempo imposed by yearly Chapter Approved, biannual Marine codices, and the need to string out codex releases into a new one every other month, not to mention now Psychic Awakening as a campaign.
This is all the tail wagging the dog though, and would be eliminated by proper roadmapping.
I know software design isn't a 1:1 comparison (I think you are partly correct about open betas- although the feedback that can be gleaned from open betas is little different from what they get from the community that leads to CA changes), but I've seen the design problems that come up when you have a release schedule dictated by business concerns. Maybe you're working on three new systems that are intended to work in concert with one another, but the publisher says you've got to release them as DLCs every two months, so you can't develop and test them concurrently like you really should be, and ultimately you have to fix the mess after the fact.
What they get currently for CA is largely via major tournaments and select play testers. This is a specific, strategically limited, quantified data set. An open beta in the video games sense would be a total free for all. No way to gather proper context, no way to target requests, no level setting, etc. It's just very different.
The writers just can't work on core rules first, then work on codexes in concert, when they have a set, sequential release schedule- especially when the effects from one change to the game won't be felt for another three months and then oops, the next book was sent off to the press two months ago and now the game's going to break. The people are coming and going, the design ideologies are changing, the power level is creeping, and the meta is ever-evolving. If there was a roadmap at the start of the edition, friction has eroded it into a patchwork mess of loose guidelines and invalidated clauses. That's an awful environment to try to develop a game in.
If they threw out the constant need to sell books, then sat down all the devs in a room, worked out a coherent plan and vision for the next 12 months, and then as you said developed the core rules followed by all the codexes in concert, I think we'd have a much tighter, more coherent, balanced, and downright better ruleset. They could even still sell them at the end- but it wouldn't be as profitable as the drip-feed approach, and it seems that's the priority.
They actually had the chance to write core rules THEN the codexes when we were in index 40k but they (generally) whiffed on it. The thing is, when you look at the codex releases across 8th, it becomes very clear there was no defined direction from the start. You can see two books seeming to go down one path, then a third book is released and BAM! Completely different direction. The fourth bool forks in a third direction off of that, but the 5th book kind of circles back to the original direction ... this is partly why things become such a mess balance wise.
With a roadmap you would:
1. Define the core rules
2. Play test core rules with something akin to index 40k 3. Select a general design structure for the actual codexes
4. STICK to said structure and begin releasing them while collecting data
5. Re-evaluate at years end - making adjustments in CA, and evaluating the current army design direction for place to improve
In this way you start to get true balance because you're evaluating a series of books that were all based on the same design philosophy rather than having one or two books that are cranked up to 11, and another 5 that ... aren't and trying to figure out which books are TRULY causing the problem . The current way is "HEY! Check out this ork codex I designed. Totes for fun! Complete beer 'n' pretzels good time!", while across the studio, Iron Hands is being developed as the final word in competitive play. They couldn't be anymore different from one another in terms of even basic design philosophy, but they're both expected to live in the same space as though they WERE made under some central guiding light. Proper creative direction and actual planning would prevent this, while STILL allowing them to maintain the break-kneck pace of releases. In fact, after a small release delay (similar to the times of index 40k), it would actually allow them to go FASTER.
If anything, in addition to what appears to be lack of process, what likely is getting in the way is the sheer number of factions. Ideally, you would put out every codex under the initial "design directive" and then re-evaluate for a 2.0 series in 18 months to 2 years. Problem is, if your book came at the end of the first cycle and it isn't good, you're sitting on that book for a while as everyone else gets a new one. The positive would be that you at least would be playing the same game as everyone else, rather than what we have now where some armies have to play Warhammer 40,000 and others are playing whatever the feth they want because reasons. lol
I know software design isn't a 1:1 comparison (I think you are partly correct about open betas- although the feedback that can be gleaned from open betas is little different from what they get from the community that leads to CA changes), but I've seen the design problems that come up when you have a release schedule dictated by business concerns. Maybe you're working on three new systems that are intended to work in concert with one another, but the publisher says you've got to release them as DLCs every two months, so you can't develop and test them concurrently like you really should be, and ultimately you have to fix the mess after the fact.
What they get currently for CA is largely via major tournaments and select play testers. This is a specific, strategically limited, quantified data set. An open beta in the video games sense would be a total free for all. No way to gather proper context, no way to target requests, no level setting, etc. It's just very different.
Do you think it is a problem if the tournament scene is the only channel being used to collect feedback, given the number of events during 8th that weren't playing 40k as written by GW?
I know software design isn't a 1:1 comparison (I think you are partly correct about open betas- although the feedback that can be gleaned from open betas is little different from what they get from the community that leads to CA changes), but I've seen the design problems that come up when you have a release schedule dictated by business concerns. Maybe you're working on three new systems that are intended to work in concert with one another, but the publisher says you've got to release them as DLCs every two months, so you can't develop and test them concurrently like you really should be, and ultimately you have to fix the mess after the fact.
What they get currently for CA is largely via major tournaments and select play testers. This is a specific, strategically limited, quantified data set. An open beta in the video games sense would be a total free for all. No way to gather proper context, no way to target requests, no level setting, etc. It's just very different.
Do you think it is a problem if the tournament scene is the only channel being used to collect feedback, given the number of events during 8th that weren't playing 40k as written by GW?
Luckily absolutely nothing even suggests that the game is being built purely around the tournament scene. Look at the state of this game.
1. Define the core rules
2. Play test core rules with something akin to index 40k 3. Select a general design structure for the actual codexes
4. STICK to said structure and begin releasing them while collecting data
5. Re-evaluate at years end - making adjustments in CA, and evaluating the current army design direction for place to improve
I think you're spot-on, and just to pick up on this section in particular I think points 1, 3 and 4 are GW's biggest problems, but specifically 4. You just need to look back over the last couple of edition to see big mid-edition changes in direction that should have been left for a new edition. I'm thinking mainly of Formations in 7th and the raft of little changes that snuck into Codices about halfway (maybe 2/3 of the way) through 8th like changing re-roll misses to re-roll all. It's especially infuriating because when you match it up with GW's approach to releasing rules you end up with some armies missing out on the new hotness by a month and being stuck like that for years.
If there was one thing I could change about GW's approach to the rules it would be this. They really need to have a design bible or roadmap, a set of predefined guidelines for designing new units and weapons and they really, really need someone at the studio to force designers to stick to it instead of abruptly changing direction 18 months from now. The big problem with that is it doesn't appear GW thinks deeply enough about their own rules to understand them well enough to design an effective roadmap in the first place.
In principle complete agreement, in practice I can see why GW don't just stick to "this is the design principle and that will be that" - because by definition it makes stuff samey - and you have a multi-year release cycle. I'm not sure if its under "people like imbalance" - but no one likes a middle of the road boring codex with no unique features.
Now okay they could have sat down over the last 6 months and gone "this is what 9th edition Space Marines, Daemons, Necrons, Orks, Eldar, Tau etc will play like, even if the Tau 9th edition codex isn't set to be released until October 2021." But I can't see it somehow. There is always a temptation to "fix" perceived flaws in balance with later codexes, and see what this does to the meta.
So for example you can see a sort of evolution of:
"Vehicles are cool. pew pew."
"Okay, but now armoured walls are a bit silly, better give people anti-tank weapons and let them buff them."
"Okay but now they are killing big stuff too quickly. Hand out 5++ saves and other defences to new units."
"Okay but now things are too tough. Hand out mortal wounds that bypass these defences."
"Okay but now we need to hand out FNP/Mortal wound protection..."
I don't want to derail the thread into "what killed Fantasy" - but you can explicitly track this development through the 8th edition Army Books as GW provided "answers" the meta every year, with power creep being the inevitable result. In 40k its a bit more variable - perhaps due to the "1/4 units are good" approach being more telling.
Basically GW are going to come up with new features/ideas to go in the game, and it makes more sense to push them out and see what happens in the wild, rather than sit on them and then release a load of changes when a new edition arrives. For better balance, they have to get away from this idea that the datasheet is near sacrosanct, and recognise that it can and should change on roughly the same schedule as CA. I think the continued steps to digitalising the rules may eventually lead to this - but so long as paper books remain seemingly a goldmine, I'm not sure they will ever go this far.
Tyel wrote: In principle complete agreement, in practice I can see why GW don't just stick to "this is the design principle and that will be that" - because by definition it makes stuff samey - and you have a multi-year release cycle. I'm not sure if its under "people like imbalance" - but no one likes a middle of the road boring codex with no unique features.
Now okay they could have sat down over the last 6 months and gone "this is what 9th edition Space Marines, Daemons, Necrons, Orks, Eldar, Tau etc will play like, even if the Tau 9th edition codex isn't set to be released until October 2021." But I can't see it somehow. There is always a temptation to "fix" perceived flaws in balance with later codexes, and see what this does to the meta.
So for example you can see a sort of evolution of:
"Vehicles are cool. pew pew."
"Okay, but now armoured walls are a bit silly, better give people anti-tank weapons and let them buff them."
"Okay but now they are killing big stuff too quickly. Hand out 5++ saves and other defences to new units."
"Okay but now things are too tough. Hand out mortal wounds that bypass these defences."
"Okay but now we need to hand out FNP/Mortal wound protection..."
I don't want to derail the thread into "what killed Fantasy" - but you can explicitly track this development through the 8th edition Army Books as GW provided "answers" the meta every year, with power creep being the inevitable result. In 40k its a bit more variable - perhaps due to the "1/4 units are good" approach being more telling.
Basically GW are going to come up with new features/ideas to go in the game, and it makes more sense to push them out and see what happens in the wild, rather than sit on them and then release a load of changes when a new edition arrives. For better balance, they have to get away from this idea that the datasheet is near sacrosanct, and recognise that it can and should change on roughly the same schedule as CA. I think the continued steps to digitalising the rules may eventually lead to this - but so long as paper books remain seemingly a goldmine, I'm not sure they will ever go this far.
Honestly i think this has lead to the game feeling samey, the design space has been pushed a lot. And the two big changes with Flying and Knights has lead to that design space being shrunk rather than expanded to fit them. When it seems like half the armys where lucky to get thrown bones into that design in the first place.
Half doing it, does not really lead to the game really changing much.
Its just leads to a lot of great ideas being tracked though the mud and the need to change up things again.
Tyel wrote: In principle complete agreement, in practice I can see why GW don't just stick to "this is the design principle and that will be that" - because by definition it makes stuff samey.
I think that's caused by another pair of problems with the GW approach. Firstly, there are too many units in this game, possible by an order of magnitude once you consider all the FW units. Compounding that is the very narrow range of stats GW uses. Despite opening up Strength and Toughness values above 10 GW stuck too rigidly to the old values, which leaves no design space open for variety.
Just simple design principles in their initial design document would go a long way to curbing a lot of the problems they end up with. Things like deciding what the maximum number of shots a weapon or unit should get with a given AP/S/Damage profile would be a good start to stop things getting out of hand, or a limit on the number of dice a unit can be expected to roll for their attacks for the sake of players' sanity. Instead we tend to see a fairly consistent and conservative approach initially, then things just start getting out of hand because they have nothing to guide them with basic principles of design for each edition.
auticus wrote: You'll definitely get blowback for using the older chaplain as the new one as the size is different which affects line of sight rules.
Bet you a shiny nickel the size difference is a whole lot less than my 2nd edition wraithguard on 25mm bases to the current WG.
Literally nobody in dozens upon dozens of games has had a problem with those.
Well, a gameplay problem. I have painted them up to look like creepy creepy puppets, and many people have had a problem with a sad clown and pinnocchio coming to murder their tanks.
auticus wrote: You'll definitely get blowback for using the older chaplain as the new one as the size is different which affects line of sight rules.
Bet you a shiny nickel the size difference is a whole lot less than my 2nd edition wraithguard on 25mm bases to the current WG.
Literally nobody in dozens upon dozens of games has had a problem with those.
Well, a gameplay problem. I have painted them up to look like creepy creepy puppets, and many people have had a problem with a sad clown and pinnocchio coming to murder their tanks.
I envy you. I've had people get very irate when using older models because they are smaller. I had someone accuse me of rigging my campaign because I was using the old diaz daemonettes from the 2000s instead of the new ones because the older ones were smaller and easier to hide.
First, as auticus continually mentions, people may claim they want balance but they really don't, because listbuilding is an integral part of the game (and perhaps the most important) and listbuilding is all about finding the loopholes in balance to exploit. Look at how within days of a book or even before it's even out due to leaks people are formulating how to break the game by reading XYZ rule as RAW or RAI depending. Hell look at a thread in YMDC talking about terminators with 1+ saves that essentially give them a 2++ save. It's unlikely (but not impossible, this is GW) that isn't intended but people IMMEDIATELY are trying to game an advantage. In a world where people cared about balance, normal people would look at it and not even think it works that way.
Second there's the approach of GW's designers. We know for a fact with 8th edition from what playtesters have stated the playtesting was something along the lines of here take this premade 1500 point army and play it against this other premade 1500 point army. Tell us if everything feels right without a chance to do listbuilding or try and find the wombo-combos that people may try to exploit. We don't know what the testing was for 9th edition but GW has continually shown that their way of testing isn't testing the parts that are most abusable, it's testing the gameplay itself.
Third, or maybe 2.5 since it's related is the fact their design approach from the beginning is too opaque. They almost never state how they actually go about determining what works, how they decide if an ability is too good or needs to be fixed, or anything like that to my knowledge. For AOS Jervis has stated in White Dwarf articles that they have a spreadsheet they use with formulae but no other details and he has gone and said that the model's look influences the rules rather than it being a collaborative effort between the miniatures designers and the rules writers. So for years now it looks like the model guys will design cool models and throw them to the design team a few weeks before they're set to release and tell them to fit them into the game.
Next there's the fact that GW talks out of both sides of their mouth. They claim the game is based around casual narrative play but leave glaring holes that are exploitable by the competitive players, not the casual ones, while at the same time making rules that are wonky enough that a casual player can be considered WAAC just because their army became FOTM and they started to curbstomp everyone else out of the blue through no fault of their own. They used to restrict things that were "rare" (the old 0-1 stuff) and got rid of that because that means you only buy one instead of three, which was already a hit to balance because now that restriction is gone. They adjust things seemingly without reason and since they rarely give any sort of "patch notes" you're left wondering how they came up with the idea that X needed to be fixed.
It's a lot of issues but I don't think the blame is on the competitive players beyond the fact that they have the mindset to look to break everything, when normal people don't take that approach with the rules.
Wayniac wrote: It's a lot of issues but I don't think the blame is on the competitive players beyond the fact that they have the mindset to look to break everything, when normal people don't take that approach with the rules.
If, as the WHC Faction Focus articles seem to suggest, the only external people doing any playtesting are the competitive crowd, then they need to shoulder some of the "blame" if things don't end up feeling right, even if the balance is better.
Look at the OPs original post - concern that one group is recommending an approach to using Orks that seems counter to the usual Ork look & feel - it might be effective, but it rubs someone who cares about the faction identity upthe wrong way.
Tyel wrote: There are many complaints on Dakka, but the idea people don't want an balanced game makes very little sense.
8th was the most balanced edition of 40k. In fact its probably *the only edition* where GW actively tried to bring balance to the game. Obviously its not perfect - but its infinitely better than the older method of "here's a codex, oh it sucks? Well, see you in some years time".
All the evidence is that 8th is also the most commercially successful edition. Admittedly this could be due to various other factors unrelated to how the game plays, but its a strange coincidence just to shrug off.
Are GW actively making the game worse by having CA points changes each year?
I guess for people who buy the current hotness and want that to remain the current hotness until the heat death of the universe - but I'm not convinced they make up a huge percentage of the playerbase.
I wouldn't call 8th the most balanced edition of Warhammer. STRETCHES of 8th? sure. The current state of 8th? No way. And this currently shift in focus seems to be lining GW's pockets with that PMarine money very effectively, and seems to be slated to keep up extra hard in 9th.
I hadn't considered the idea that balance may not be what the playerbase actually wants.... but it's been some pretty good arguments put forth as to why that may be, so I remain undecided. Is balance less profitable though? Well, almost certainly. You can't write extremely OP rules to shift units, without causing an imbalance.
Well think about it for a moment. Other than those with collector issues ( like me perhaps ) No one will need to expand on armies or start new ones unless they want to if there is a real balance to things. Like for instance if you really felt and saw that first born marines were at power parity with primaris, what reason would people have to get these " Exciting new powerful units ! ". There wouldn't be one aside from variety and desire to have new stuff but not perhaps better stuff.
Was there a reason to Legend Chaplain on a bike when they had in the works waiting primaris chaplain on bike ? Not a one. They cited balance and unintended rule interactions but all they would have to do is give them the rules with changes for wargear and less wounds for the first born bike chaplain, they'd operate almost exactly the same but for those differences. Was it balance he was booted out for ? I don't think most would say yes now. It was simply that model was old, getting it gives GW no money as the models are second hand, kit bashed or third party. This new one will cost a crap ton, but it'll be new so all the money will flow GWs way for it.
More and more decisions are made seemingly with this in mind. Slowly nerf, release units just flat out better and more cost effective and even when they change points the disparity just grows. Now either they don't understand how to balance things at all or these are decisions made to push agendas that have nothing to do with game play and more with sales. That leads to frustration from the players as they keep touting this balance and care for the game state when most of the decisions may be out of the game designers hands. So in that we may give them a bad look to blame them all the time.
I have a cool life hack for anyone who owns an old legended chaplain on bike or old space marine bikers and is jealous of those fancy new primaris bikes.
It's a special thing I cooked up in my brain-meat as someone who owns and still plays regularly with 2nd edition eldar miniatures. And, you know, every other faction that isn't loyalist space marines who gets a new kit for anything they already own.
You just...
you just say it's the new thing. And you use the new rules.
Oh nice, so now i can proxy my Chaos lord on steed of slaanesh as ... nothing?
Oh nice, so now i can proxy my Sorcerer on steed of slaanesh as ... nothing?
Oh nice, so now i can proxy my Fusion pistol + Fusion gun autarch as ... a boring autarch with no gun that has a completely different playstyle than my tank hunter one?
Oh nice, so now i can proxy my Kabalites trueborn as boring old kabalites. good thing drukhari doesn't deserve to keep its fluff.
Having taken a bit to think on why balance in 40k is so difficult I have a few ideas that may shed some light on things.
1. Lack of a clear cut role for each category of unit.
2. Lack of systems to allow for unit differentiation.
3. Multiple units filling the same few roles that we do have.
The first problem is rather easy to highlight when I ask the simple question, what is the role of a Troop choice in 40k? I can further expand this to HQ, Elites, Fast Attack, Heavy Support, Fliers, etc.
In the real world, your basic soldier is the backbone of your armed forces. Cheap enough that you have solid numbers, well equipped enough to have a place on the modern battlefield. Useful for everything from digging ditches and fighting fires to sweeping and clearing buildings or standing guard at a checkpoint. They have enough training to do these tasks but not so much as to be wasting their skills when asked to do low skill grunt work.
In combat, they often serve as the eyes and ears of the force. They don't have enough firepower to act alone against anything though, but the modern soldier knows that their radio is every bit as useful as their rifle when things get tough. They're best suited as a reactive force rather than being the first unit into an area where the enemy is manning prepared positions.
The second problem flows from the first. Every battle in 40k is a pitched battle where both sides have had time to pile into an organized deployment zone and where both sides are fighting for the same core objectives which neither of them appears to have a firm hold over. Realistically each battle should be an escalation of force.
As an example, a pair of patrols find each other while sweeping a sector. They have standing orders to call in additional forces if they encounter the enemy because that sector is important. Each side now has to hunker down and wait for their sides forces to arrive. Fliers, fast attack, and mechanized units tend to arrive the fastest, but your forces might have prioritized (by spending pregame CP) having a heavy support division close-by in anticipation of just such a clash. Your opponent might instead have focused on having their forces arrive all at once even if it means holding back faster units for a turn.
Suddenly a tabletop movement speed and a strategic speed which determines when it would normally arrive and how much CP it costs to have it arrive sooner or later than that. You can also introduce systems that hamper your opponent's reinforcements and purchase off table assets like flak batteries to hurt or delay specific categories of unit as they scramble to reach the battlefield.
These levers and changes to gameplay also mean that the only fixed units you have to field were in your patrol. You can call in the rest of your allotment from a larger pool until you run out of command and are no longer authorized to request additional forces to that sector. This opens up room for specialist units to see play as getting the right counter to what an enemy has just brought out is only a few hunkered and desperate turns away.
I know this isn't 40k. It's far more of a Axis and Allies type campaign, but it illustrates a depth that would allow for a unit to be special beyond killing stuff, buffing stuff, or screening stuff which is where 40k is at right now.
TLDR; the issue with 40k is a lack of depth which means all units are judged only on how well they let you kill stuff rather than emulating things that real militaries use their soldiers for.
Modern warfare and 40k warfare are very different.
In part because 40k seeks that space fantasy feel in which melee can happen and in part because plenty of factions can do things no modern military can do like throwing around billions of troops like candy or teleport.
Canadian 5th wrote: Having taken a bit to think on why balance in 40k is so difficult I have a few ideas that may shed some light on things.
1. Lack of a clear cut role for each category of unit.
2. Lack of systems to allow for unit differentiation.
3. Multiple units filling the same few roles that we do have.
The first problem is rather easy to highlight when I ask the simple question, what is the role of a Troop choice in 40k? I can further expand this to HQ, Elites, Fast Attack, Heavy Support, Fliers, etc.
In the real world, your basic soldier is the backbone of your armed forces. Cheap enough that you have solid numbers, well equipped enough to have a place on the modern battlefield. Useful for everything from digging ditches and fighting fires to sweeping and clearing buildings or standing guard at a checkpoint. They have enough training to do these tasks but not so much as to be wasting their skills when asked to do low skill grunt work.
In combat, they often serve as the eyes and ears of the force. They don't have enough firepower to act alone against anything though, but the modern soldier knows that their radio is every bit as useful as their rifle when things get tough. They're best suited as a reactive force rather than being the first unit into an area where the enemy is manning prepared positions.
The second problem flows from the first. Every battle in 40k is a pitched battle where both sides have had time to pile into an organized deployment zone and where both sides are fighting for the same core objectives which neither of them appears to have a firm hold over. Realistically each battle should be an escalation of force.
As an example, a pair of patrols find each other while sweeping a sector. They have standing orders to call in additional forces if they encounter the enemy because that sector is important. Each side now has to hunker down and wait for their sides forces to arrive. Fliers, fast attack, and mechanized units tend to arrive the fastest, but your forces might have prioritized (by spending pregame CP) having a heavy support division close-by in anticipation of just such a clash. Your opponent might instead have focused on having their forces arrive all at once even if it means holding back faster units for a turn.
Suddenly a tabletop movement speed and a strategic speed which determines when it would normally arrive and how much CP it costs to have it arrive sooner or later than that. You can also introduce systems that hamper your opponent's reinforcements and purchase off table assets like flak batteries to hurt or delay specific categories of unit as they scramble to reach the battlefield.
These levers and changes to gameplay also mean that the only fixed units you have to field were in your patrol. You can call in the rest of your allotment from a larger pool until you run out of command and are no longer authorized to request additional forces to that sector. This opens up room for specialist units to see play as getting the right counter to what an enemy has just brought out is only a few hunkered and desperate turns away.
I know this isn't 40k. It's far more of a Axis and Allies type campaign, but it illustrates a depth that would allow for a unit to be special beyond killing stuff, buffing stuff, or screening stuff which is where 40k is at right now.
TLDR; the issue with 40k is a lack of depth which means all units are judged only on how well they let you kill stuff rather than emulating things that real militaries use their soldiers for.
I wonder whether you could create a cool custom mission that would differentiate between unit types in this sort of way, and make 'gathering intel' and 'calling for reinforcements' something of a game objective rather than the usual abstracted style of objective-taking.
Just as a brainstorm...
You're playing a 2k game. Each army gets to start with an Entrenched Force on the board of 2-3 troops, 1-2 HQs, 0-2 fast, 0-1 elites and 0-1 heavy.
At the end of each battle round, if a unit with the Troops, HQ, or Fast Attack battlefield role has both targeted an enemy unit with an attack, and been targeted with an enemy attack but has not been destroyed, they may call for reinforcements, garnering 1 point of Battlefield Requisition. Each battlefield role costs different amounts of Requisition and has a special ability.
Troops - 1 point. Troop Formation: You may instead 1 point and bring on 2 Troops and 1 HQ battlefield role units.
Elites - 2 points. The Cavalry Has Arrived: Any Elites choice unit gains a 6" +1LD Aura the turn it comes on to the board.
Flyer - 2 points. Flyers enter the board as if they were placed into Strategic Reserves (i.e., they deep strike on)
Fast Attack - 1 point. Fast Attack units enter the board as if they were placed into Strategic Reserves (and also cost less Requisition than other specialized roles)
Heavy Support - 2 points. Instead of entering the board, a unit with the Heavy Support role may choose to make 1 shooting attack from off the board when you spend Requisition to call for them. Measure range from any point on your board edge for the attack, the unit counts as having remained stationary this turn.
HQ - 2 points. HQ units cost 1 point of requisition if you bring them in alongside any other non-HQ role unit and they end their movement phase within 3" of that unit.
Dedicated Transport - 1 point. A Dedicated Transport causes it and all units embarked on it to count as Fast Attack slot units the turn they arrive (I.e., they arrive from Strategic Reserves and on the first turn it's on the board the Dedicated Transport model may generate a point of Requisition)
Tyran wrote: Modern warfare and 40k warfare are very different.
In part because 40k seeks that space fantasy feel in which melee can happen and in part because plenty of factions can do things no modern military can do like throwing around billions of troops like candy or teleport.
That's fine. That doesn't mean that every battle needs to be a pitched battle with both sides having the same primary objectives.
Why can't you have a patrol of Dark Eldar out looking to catch some slaves run into a detachment of guard who are digging in and waiting for a convoy to arrive and drop off the equipment to set up a new forward observation post? Why do we fight all battles in evacuated ruins without a civilian presence and not a working factory, communications tower, spaceport, etc.to be found?
Being sci-fi doesn't limit our scenarios it should increase them beyond the bog-standard line up like it's the 19th-century missions we get now.
Also, why do these forces exist as they do in-universe? What role is a massed force of cultists supposed to serve? How about a unit of bloodletters, or a unit of lootas? We need to know what these forces are supposed to do and then ask if the rules actually give those roles a meaning.
Tyran wrote: Modern warfare and 40k warfare are very different.
In part because 40k seeks that space fantasy feel in which melee can happen and in part because plenty of factions can do things no modern military can do like throwing around billions of troops like candy or teleport.
That's fine. That doesn't mean that every battle needs to be a pitched battle with both sides having the same primary objectives.
Why can't you have a patrol of Dark Eldar out looking to catch some slaves run into a detachment of guard who are digging in and waiting for a convoy to arrive and drop off the equipment to set up a new forward observation post? Why do we fight all battles in evacuated ruins without a civilian presence and not a working factory, communications tower, spaceport, etc.to be found?
Being sci-fi doesn't limit our scenarios it should increase them beyond the bog-standard line up like it's the 19th-century missions we get now.
Also, why do these forces exist as they do in-universe? What role is a massed force of cultists supposed to serve? How about a unit of bloodletters, or a unit of lootas? We need to know what these forces are supposed to do and then ask if the rules actually give those roles a meaning.
Don't narrative missions already represent those scenarios? With pretty much every supplement introducing narrative missions some of them must represent this.
So I guess the answer is the same as why we don't usually play narrative missions.
Tyran wrote: Don't narrative missions already represent those scenarios? With pretty much every supplement introducing narrative missions some of them must represent this.
So I guess the answer is the same as why we don't usually play narrative missions.
Then we're back to the issue that you can't balance for both types of play at once because matched play is always pitched battles over some small subset of points on the board. In that tiny design space, the only role a unit can fulfill is buffing, killing, or holding ground with the rare outlier able top do something unique like teleport a unit. When the only things that matter about a unit is how well it can kill and how much firepower it can take before it doesn't get to kill any ore it's going to create large and obvious cases where some units are plainly better than others. Toss in D6 rolls and limited stat ranges and there often is no middle ground between OP and Trash.
EDIT: The core issue I'm aiming to shine a light on is that matched play doesn't have enough depth to allow units to have defined battlefield roles so everything always boils down to a simple formula for which units are worth using.
Tyran wrote: Don't narrative missions already represent those scenarios? With pretty much every supplement introducing narrative missions some of them must represent this.
So I guess the answer is the same as why we don't usually play narrative missions.
Then we're back to the issue that you can't balance for both types of play at once because matched play is always pitched battles over some small subset of points on the board. In that tiny design space, the only role a unit can fulfill is buffing, killing, or holding ground with the rare outlier able top do something unique like teleport a unit. When the only things that matter about a unit is how well it can kill and how much firepower it can take before it doesn't get to kill any ore it's going to create large and obvious cases where some units are plainly better than others. Toss in D6 rolls and limited stat ranges and there often is no middle ground between OP and Trash.
EDIT: The core issue I'm aiming to shine a light on is that matched play doesn't have enough depth to allow units to have defined battlefield roles so everything always boils down to a simple formula for which units are worth using.
matched play = math equation / more "fair"
everything else = not math equation / un"fair"
Racerguy180 wrote: matched play = math equation / more "fair"
everything else = not math equation / un"fair"
You could easily make matched play more interesting and probably more balanced by giving each faction their own set of primary mission goals for each GW mission. So Orks versus DE would play the same scenario far differently that Ultramarines versus Necrons and Orks versus Necrons would also be vastly different.
Picture a game where a guard player has to hold their deployment zone for 3 turns and spend at least 12 non-combat actions to score their primary victor while the Eldar player needs to retrieve an artifact from the center of the board using their warlord, it takes an action to garb that artifact and you can't move more than 6" per turn or embark in transport while carrying it. You still want to stop your opponent from doing their thing but you probably won't win if you don't finish your goal.
The guard might have the same goal while as above while the DE player has to capture a certain number of points of opposing models. They can capture in melee and any models that flee due to morale also count as captured.
This would take a lot of work to get running smoothly and Knights and Custodes are likely to be outliers due to the very specific roles those factions are supposed to fill, but it gives each faction reasons to use different strategies.
Canadian 5th wrote: TLDR; the issue with 40k is a lack of depth which means all units are judged only on how well they let you kill stuff rather than emulating things that real militaries use their soldiers for.
Other areas that contribute to this problem:
-IRL, infantry in the open are a tanker's dream, infantry in dense urban terrain are a tanker's nightmare. The denser the terrain, the more of an advantage infantry have, since they can hear vehicles coming from a mile away but the tankers have no idea which buildings conceal guys with anti-tank weapons. This isn't well-represented in-game, as detection is not modeled at all- you know exactly which bushes are safe and which ones are full of RPGs.
-Even in infantry-on-infantry combat, cover is critical IRL, and most casualties are inflicted via flanking and close assault. 40K has no mechanics for crossfire, so having more mobile infantry that can maneuver to flank and deny cover is less useful.
-Morale is largely irrelevant. Suppression does not exist as a concept. High Ld has very little value.
-No command and control modeling whatsoever. If you play something like Panzerblitz, you very quickly get a feel for just how different radio-equipped Panzer IVs play from hand-signals-and-flags T-34s. Even Epic's very simple system (die roll to activate a unit) added a lot of this flavor. Ork Nobz and Space Marines really shouldn't be functionally interchangeable.
-De-emphasis on maneuver. Boards are small enough and ranges long enough that transports aren't about moving troops more rapidly so much as they are about protecting alpha-strike units from enemy fire. Compare to something like Epic where an infantry-heavy force without transports is slow, unwieldy, and plays very differently from one that can strike, remount, and redeploy.
-Lastly, unit roles IRL tend to be very specialized. You do not shoot down aircraft with MBTs, engage infantry with MANPADS, or knock out tanks with massed rifle fire. 40K generalizes most units to avoid the issue of a skew list dominating any TAC list, but your concept of reactive reinforcements would be a way to address that.
In general, 40K just isn't much of a wargame in the traditional sense. It's a highly abstract fantasy system that creates distinct roles through its own internal logic rather than as any reflection of real life.
Tyel wrote:
In principle complete agreement, in practice I can see why GW don't just stick to "this is the design principle and that will be that" - because by definition it makes stuff samey.
I understand where you're coming from, but this only happens if things are done poorly. So for example, if you talk to games designers, one of the things that comes up a lot is the phrase "the rules are made to be broken". This is where your variation comes through. So for example, (and this is VERY general and high level so not trying to imply it's perfect) if you said:
1. Every army will get some form of "doctrines". They may be different versions, and they may get access to, or use them in different ways, but they will all have them.
2. Each army will be varied in it's weapon choices (similar to how the game is now)
3. Each army will be able to specialize in breaking A CERTAIN SPECIFIC RULE. I capitalize that because this is where GW runs into so many problems. Currently, they write the rules and then hand out exceptions like crazy. Some armies have to obey ALL the rules and get no work arounds. Others, can pretty much ignore any rules they want at will. So the variation here would be something like "Tau can manipulate the normal over watch rules", Tsons get special consideration for Psychic phase (and maybe morale if your army is all Rubrics etc). Loyalist marines, since they are supposed to be decent at everything but not amazing at any one thing, could get really simple bonuses in each phase, but don't get to wholly ignore/change/manipulate the rules of any phases in the way other armies do.
I think if you look at something like 7th, the armies all felt pretty unique to me, but if you look at 5th, by the end, you did laregly have that "samey" semi-boring feel you mention. But the good thing is, if you do pick an over-all philosophy, and it DOES turn out samey or boring, you will have a level playing field between the books and a consistent pattern for how to adjust everything going forward. Otherwise, in the words of another poster, you're left with the "Spaghetti Canon fired at a dart board" semi-random approach we have now that continues to cause issues in each edition.
Canadian 5th wrote: TLDR; the issue with 40k is a lack of depth which means all units are judged only on how well they let you kill stuff rather than emulating things that real militaries use their soldiers for.
Other areas that contribute to this problem:
-IRL, infantry in the open are a tanker's dream, infantry in dense urban terrain are a tanker's nightmare. The denser the terrain, the more of an advantage infantry have, since they can hear vehicles coming from a mile away but the tankers have no idea which buildings conceal guys with anti-tank weapons. This isn't well-represented in-game, as detection is not modeled at all- you know exactly which bushes are safe and which ones are full of RPGs.
-Even in infantry-on-infantry combat, cover is critical IRL, and most casualties are inflicted via flanking and close assault. 40K has no mechanics for crossfire, so having more mobile infantry that can maneuver to flank and deny cover is less useful.
-Morale is largely irrelevant. Suppression does not exist as a concept. High Ld has very little value.
-No command and control modeling whatsoever. If you play something like Panzerblitz, you very quickly get a feel for just how different radio-equipped Panzer IVs play from hand-signals-and-flags T-34s. Even Epic's very simple system (die roll to activate a unit) added a lot of this flavor. Ork Nobz and Space Marines really shouldn't be functionally interchangeable.
-De-emphasis on maneuver. Boards are small enough and ranges long enough that transports aren't about moving troops more rapidly so much as they are about protecting alpha-strike units from enemy fire. Compare to something like Epic where an infantry-heavy force without transports is slow, unwieldy, and plays very differently from one that can strike, remount, and redeploy.
-Lastly, unit roles IRL tend to be very specialized. You do not shoot down aircraft with MBTs, engage infantry with MANPADS, or knock out tanks with massed rifle fire. 40K generalizes most units to avoid the issue of a skew list dominating any TAC list, but your concept of reactive reinforcements would be a way to address that.
In general, 40K just isn't much of a wargame in the traditional sense. It's a highly abstract fantasy system that creates distinct roles through its own internal logic rather than as any reflection of real life.
You also need to factor in that 40k should have converged on a few weapons types being the best and everybody using some variant of those rather than each faction having their own unique main arm. Real-life armies are very distinct from one another and even a US division will be distinct from another based on what their intended role is yet they share the same main rifles, support vehicles, command structure, etc. 40k could do with trying to figure out why their many different line-infantry weapons exist and giving them highly defined strengths, weaknesses, and reasons why only their faction uses them.
EDIT: In most metas there are a few best weapons and factions that don't have access to them feel bad while other factions that have them pick up easy wins.
Wayniac wrote: It's a lot of issues but I don't think the blame is on the competitive players beyond the fact that they have the mindset to look to break everything, when normal people don't take that approach with the rules.
If, as the WHC Faction Focus articles seem to suggest, the only external people doing any playtesting are the competitive crowd, then they need to shoulder some of the "blame" if things don't end up feeling right, even if the balance is better.
Look at the OPs original post - concern that one group is recommending an approach to using Orks that seems counter to the usual Ork look & feel - it might be effective, but it rubs someone who cares about the faction identity upthe wrong way.
This is a good point. How many competitive players don't care about faction identity, or play style? I'm competitive, but if an army isn't working as it should according to the lore, that's wrong. Is the attraction to this particular subset of players not the gameplay, or the lore, but the ease with which the rules can be abused for easy wins?
If this is the case, those players can shove off. GW shouldn't be asking them to participate in their meager "play testing" process, or considering them when designing the game. This must also be a factor in GW's shoddy writing- they lack perspective and have no understanding just how easy to break their work is, or why many people play their game at all.
Just how many play 40k for reasons other than "40k?"
If, as the WHC Faction Focus articles seem to suggest, the only external people doing any playtesting are the competitive crowd, then they need to shoulder some of the "blame" if things don't end up feeling right, even if the balance is better.
This isn't really fair since we don't have insight into what they are actually saying/doing, whether or not GW is listening to them, or if they're even allowed to work in a manner that would be conducive to finding the problems. It certainly COULD be the testers fault, but they could also be giving out amazing advice that GW is flat out ignoring because it's not what they want to hear. We just don't know. So while it's fair to say (and I have said this myself many times) "The play testing process isn't necessarily working as intended", you can't, with any confidence lay blame on the testers.
Look at the OPs original post - concern that one group is recommending an approach to using Orks that seems counter to the usual Ork look & feel - it might be effective, but it rubs someone who cares about the faction identity upthe wrong way.
In my local meta, when you watch the Ork players in the "non-competitive" pick-up games, they're not only working like actual Orks, they're actually half way decent provided they brought enough CP. So is the army really broken, or did the competitive crowd simply find an unexpected use? IMO there's too much "XYZ competitive player did a thing with an army that I don't agree with fluff wise, so it must be bad" lately ...
Don't get me wrong, Orks are pretty far from "ok" as an army (imo), but I'm not sure some of the examples given are actually evidence of what the OP believes them to be.
If, as the WHC Faction Focus articles seem to suggest, the only external people doing any playtesting are the competitive crowd, then they need to shoulder some of the "blame" if things don't end up feeling right, even if the balance is better.
This is claiming something that none of the playtesters are doing. They are not the game designers. They can only say what unit is underpowered/underperforming and overpowered/overperforming which the GW Game Designers take into account when pointing the units.
I think a lot of people in this thread are mixing up what a playtester does and what a game designer does. A playtester is not much different from a QA person and QA rarely - if ever - get any say in how a game is designed.
Dysartes wrote: If, as the WHC Faction Focus articles seem to suggest, the only external people doing any playtesting are the competitive crowd, then they need to shoulder some of the "blame" if things don't end up feeling right, even if the balance is better.
Short of deliberately misrepresenting their findings for personal benefit / to screw with GW the external testers are not in any way responsible for what GW does, and arguably not even then.
External playtesting is gathering opinions and extra eyes looking for mistakes and oversights. It it literally someone elses job to design the game.
Dysartes wrote: If, as the WHC Faction Focus articles seem to suggest, the only external people doing any playtesting are the competitive crowd, then they need to shoulder some of the "blame" if things don't end up feeling right, even if the balance is better.
Short of deliberately misrepresenting their findings for personal benefit / to screw with GW the external testers are not in any way responsible for what GW does, and arguably not even then.
External playtesting is gathering opinions and extra eyes looking for mistakes and oversights. It it literally someone elses job to design the game.
Is there any responsibility then of someone who playtests a faction, gives feedback to GW that they are underpowered, and then gets hired by GW to sell the faction to its playerbase as "Great in the new edition!!! This gun has BLAST now! This vehicle can fire in close combat! WOW! They're going to be so Great!"
Because if anything, that appears to be the real job of these competitive playtesters: Just to be a name they can put at the top of their WHC articles and say the people "wrote" the articles that all read suspiciously identically.
the_scotsman wrote: Is there any responsibility then of someone who playtests a faction, gives feedback to GW that they are underpowered, and then gets hired by GW to sell the faction to its playerbase as "Great in the new edition!!! This gun has BLAST now! This vehicle can fire in close combat! WOW! They're going to be so Great!"
If it's an employee that is giving bad feedback then they are responsible for doing a bad job.
Trying to hype the game as the best thing ever is unrelated to game balancing, they'd say the same regardless.
the_scotsman wrote: Is there any responsibility then of someone who playtests a faction, gives feedback to GW that they are underpowered, and then gets hired by GW to sell the faction to its playerbase as "Great in the new edition!!! This gun has BLAST now! This vehicle can fire in close combat! WOW! They're going to be so Great!"
If it's an employee that is giving bad feedback then they are responsible for doing a bad job.
Trying to hype the game as the best thing ever is unrelated to game balancing, they'd say the same regardless.
If you are hyping up a bad faction, on an official company site or forum, then you are very much responsible for what you say. If a tester called with first and last name on a Coca Cola site said that corn syrup is great, and in no way a health risk and in fact it is so great people should want more of it in their Cola products, then they are very much responsible what happens later on.
Tyran wrote: Not really comparable, as one involves a health risk and the other involves plastic soldiers.
It involves money, and money is always the same kind of thing.
If the GK write up for ed 8 said, you are going to have a bad army for 2 years, and then maybe we will fix it just before 9th, I wouldn't have bought the army. I lost more then some health thinking I wasted money.
But if you want to have an example from no health related stuff, here you go. Our president told everyone to take electricity from polish companies, that it is going to be better, as there won't be any price hikes etc. Of course the prices went up, and durning election his defence was that he didn't say it as the city president, no matter that he said that with the president building in the back with offcials around him, but he said it as a private citizent. People voted him out, but he just got a well paid job at the electricity company. Although considering that 2 people died durning winter from cold, because they couldn't heat their homes, this probably is health related too.
Karol wrote: If you are hyping up a bad faction, on an official company site or forum, then you are very much responsible for what you say. If a tester called with first and last name on a Coca Cola site said that corn syrup is great, and in no way a health risk and in fact it is so great people should want more of it in their Cola products, then they are very much responsible what happens later on.
Two entirely different things, as you well know.
Coca Cola will advertise every new flavour as fantastic no matter what they taste like, similarly GW and basically everyone will market their product as amazing regardless.
Now if GW started advertising primaris marines as a heath supplment, cure to cancer, whatever then it's a different story. The term is 'puffery' - it's all opinion, hyperbole, and hot air not claims of fact.
I think a lot of people in this thread are mixing up what a playtester does and what a game designer does. A playtester is not much different from a QA person and QA rarely - if ever - get any say in how a game is designed.
Couldn't agree more with this.
To the point of the Warhammer Community articles - of COURSE something published via "official Games Workshop" channels is going to be largely positive. But if you look up a lot of those same folks on their own channels, I think they've done good jobs of pointing out the pluses AND the minuses. Also, honestly, I don't find the Warhammer Community articles to be that bad. I mean yeah, they ONLY cover the perceived positives, and admittedly, I haven't read all of them, but I haven't really seen one that was "drenched in hyperbole" and truly "hyping" a "bad faction" yet.
Most of what they're saying seems pretty reasonable.
I think a lot of people in this thread are mixing up what a playtester does and what a game designer does. A playtester is not much different from a QA person and QA rarely - if ever - get any say in how a game is designed.
This is true and it is only natural for people to misunderstand. For most fans their only insight into how games are made comes from things like developer diaries, behind-the-scenes interviews, and release previews. This paints a distorted picture of the work and methodologies that actually go into the development process.
The thing to remember is that every single one of these behind-the-scenes tidbits function purely as marketing collateral and that's it. The interview or article written by a famous playtester, YouTuber, or other prominent community figure is conducted and released purely for the sake of hyping up their next product. It has nothing (or at least very little) to do with some altruistic desire by GW to educate you on their design pipeline. That interview with that recognizable name on top is chosen for release solely because it has marketing value. That's it.
At the end of the day, you will only ever see behind-the-scenes material that paints their newest products in the best possible light. Which means as a fan, you're probably going to think that the development processes revealed in the marketing fluff piece represent the primary focus of the design team throughout production. This is rarely the case. The reality is development is extremely chaotic and messy, and most of the time it is too complicated, boring, or otherwise unappealing for the marketing department to portray it accurately in their material. Hence, the distorted picture.
I'm not saying these articles are fake or that these playtesters and designers are lying about their opinions or methodologies . They aren't. The vast majority of the time they do reflect real things they did and real opinions they had in creating the product. It's just that these pieces are chosen selectively for their ability to sell you more things, and not really to provide anything beyond superficial insight into how they made it.
Unit1126PLL wrote: Well said, Catbarf. I think one thing you mentioned but has been somewhat in doubt of late is the coherent vision of how a battle should play out.
I'm not sure the designers have a "coherent vision" for what they are expecting battles to look like. They don't quite understand the nuanced conflict between, say, a Keeper of Secrets and a squad of Guardsmen, or even between an entire army of Slaanesh Daemons and an entire army of loyalists. In 30k and AOS, they seem to have a better grasp. Keeper of Secrets as an example:
In AOS, Keepers do a lot more than simply "10 attacks at 2+, 2+, -3, 3D." They interact with their opponent in more warpy, slaaneshi ways. Indeed, a keeper in AOS is much less more likely to land huge amounts of damage (though it can spike to much greater amounts!). Instead, the strength of a KOS comes from its ability to seduce and toy with the enemy, doing things such as forcing them to attack last by breaking their will with allure, sensuality and temptation, or offering them a bonus (re-rolls) with the potential of a curse (instant death at the end of the phase on a certain roll). Toying, playing, bating, seducing. They have solid damage output, but you don't take it just for the damage.
In 30k, Keepers don't exist. Instead, the daemons begin roughly the same, and what upgrades and army choices you make affects how your models play. A Greater Daemon of the Lurid Onslaught, the closest thing to a Keeper (and clearly intended to be a keeper, given the name) comes out of a Warp Rift, neither deep striking nor deploying normally, and is a potent and terrifying psyker - though it lacks the sheer power of the Gibbering Madness (Tzeench). It has graceful speed (Fleet and Move Through Cover) but lacks the overwhelming brutality of the Khorne analogue, and has an ability to deceive and seduce enemy squads (reducing their initiative in a fight). Additionally, Armies of the Lurid Onslaught can ignore the mission rolled for and instead select a victory condition that is much more slaaneshi, gaining VP from failed morale checks (feeding on despair and the breaking of wills) and losing VP on heroically passed ones (being rebuffed by heroic will and steadfastness in the face of temptation), for example. Combined with mechanics to increase the number of morale checks taken, this works out to make an army that plays uniquely and isn't shackled by holding hum-drum mortal objectives.
So there are two examples of games with visions to employ Slaanesh. I think the same vision is lacking in 40k, or seems to be.
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Canadian 5th wrote: In 40k you don't have the option to match against 10s of thousands of players of equal skill with their champion picks and playstyle carefully measured by a computer designed to give players even and engaging matches. You have a dozen or less players at a local store who each have different budgets and levels of time to dedicate to the game. How do you maintain fluff while also accounting for skill, budget, and local meta?
You do qualitative analysis during playtesting and include casual and narrative players in the playtest.
As has been mentioned several times before, including in the post you quoted - which even says it's a solved problem in the industry.
Yo, we already have iron hands, we don't need AoS style slaanesh. It's not fun to play against. Particularly if you're gonna be combat skewed (which my aos army actually isn't, but my 40k army is) and the slaanesh player goes "Right, so you don't get to fight until my entire army has fought, most of it twice". I don't care how thematic you feel that is for YOUR army, it don't feel particularly thematic for mine.
Bosskelot wrote: EDIT: Also we know for a fact that GW can absolutely just ignore playtesting completely. Take a look at Marines 2.0 and the Iron Hands supplement specifically. Their entire playtesting team, including the competitive aspects of it, routinely and repeatedly told them it was a massive issue. Their concerns were not taken on board.
Who's on the record saying this happened, btw?
I "know" (As in I have spoken to a couple times) a few playtesters (And they are people you probably know of), and they all said it in more informal conversations, but for the benefit of not trying to screw their prospects, I won't name them.
the_scotsman wrote: Yeah, I'm sure the rules are just coincidentally structured like ITC, and ITC is just coincidentally deciding to stop houseruling and fold in to the default missions and rules.
They had nothing to do with 9th I'm sure.
Play testing isn't that simple. I do think playtesters have had more say in 40k than ever before. But you can also watch tabletop titans going "And we told GW that these rules are kinda busted" when referring to admech. They don't have all the say.
But, also, it's not like previous missions benefited orks or slaaneshi demons in any way, and the only way to make them viable in a way that feels in theme is to give them the ability to whop across the board ASAP and murder the enemy in a turn or two, like AoS slaanesh does. And that fething sucks for the people on the other side.
Or, let's take a 40k example. Tau play super on many of their themes. And they are the most miserable game experience most people ever have. Especially if you are playing a melee army. "I cha...." "Greater good, I shoot your army dead in your charge phase"
Blastaar wrote: I do think the rules team is incompetent. Arrogant as well, judging by the tone of recent FAQs, snippets from Twitch and even the way the LOTR rulebook drips with pretension.
It's obvious they don't think deeply about the game- every edition and codex since I started in late 5th has been "the same, but different." Armor value is now gone, but somehow IGOUGO, the phases, and their tunnel-vision on gameplay being roll to-hit, wound and save ad nauseam, are above examination. Now, this would be fine if the game were in a good place and only needed tweaking, but, yeah........
They lack imagination and an openness to self-critique. Many choices made with 9th so far are very weird. A Psyker may be able to make a "psychic action," so this gets stapled onto the rules for the psychic phase, powers, and individual units, yet it never occurred to them that abandoning IGOUGO and the phases for AA might be a simpler method for the players, and provide more opportunities for minis to do cool stuff? Unit coherency gets changed in a way that will surely cause more harm than good, instead of, say, re-analyzing the value of aura buffs and the mobility of factions, which may make conga lines a poor tactic most of the time.
Characters are another great example. How does GW show a commander's ability to lead? Aura buffs. Auras aren't inherently bad, of course, but GW's implementation is. And sooooo boring!
Here's the Kaddar Nova from MEDGe for comparison. They even have an aura buff, too!
Epirians are even better, but require more understanding of the core rules. Short version: when a ROBOT unit in the force is issued an order, its bot protocols activate. Stuff like Dig-In, Dodge, extra movement, the ability to move and suppressive fire, etc.
I will say the LOTR is pretty good. I have a few issues here and there-like your opponent choosing your mini's LOS in certain situations, or two-handed weapons imposing a -1 penalty to it's wielder's Fight rolls-but it's miles above 40k and AOS. LOTR is a separate team, I think?
It is. Indeed most of the games are seperate rules writers moment to moment, though the bigs ones cross over. The current LotR dudes are mostly insular, though that's in part because their main dude's like super young right now. I can't remember if Troke had any hand in writing other games, and I know calvatore did, but GW's culture was just way different then
I would buy this a little bit more if GW were actually consistent about making new units OP. The thing is though, they tend not to be. Everyone remembers instances when they are (Like, say, now, with the new primaris stuff) and forgets the instances when they invested huge money releasing stuff that was hot garbage (like say, all the other primaris stuff when it came out. Remember that time GW released more kits in 2 years for the faction that had the most kits already than any other faction got combined, and all of it was hot trash on release?)
It would be too obviously pay-to-win if every new unit was OP. The trick is to release new units all the time, make SOME of them OP every once in a while, and save the rest for later, giving them the OP treatment in the future depending on a variety of (likely external) factors such as overall sales history of a particular kit, remaining stock, plans for future products, etc.
Obfuscating a pay to win scheme over the long term really doesn't seem that hard when you have years or even decades to do it.
So basically, anything that's overpowered at release is part of the big evil conspiracy to sell the new models, but anything that isn't overpowered was just sacrificed into obscurity in order to obfuscate the previously mentioned conspiracy.
A'ight.
When you make an overpowered unit, you don't want it to be overpowered forever, because then people will buy it and be done buying. You want it to, later, be bad, so that people have to buy the new OP unit.
And GW does certainly do this. Literally every major CCG and miniature wargame does this honestly. Hell, MOBAs all do this. Because it drives profits. It's one of the most bog standard business tactics in the industry.
Arachnofiend wrote: Frankly I'm more interested to know why GW decided they didn't want to push Intercessors until a full year after they were released.
Its all part of the master plan.
Because GW clearly wanted people hunting down Forgeworld Dreads, Centurions, Whirlwinds and Thunderfire Cannons and not... idk, Hellblasters and Inceptors.
Its very important to the business that people buy the right plastic and not the wrong plastic.
You want some supposition?
GW wanted marines to be bad for a bit so that marine players switched to other armies slowly.
Only to reel them back in with good (and blatently overpowered) rules later.
Or they made a mistake here, because companies WANTING to do something, and companies successfully doing something aren't the same.
But you'd have to be pretty dim to think GW doesn't use the most basic of marketing strategies with their games. Or extra dim to think such strategies exist nowhere.
Blastaar wrote: "Balance doesn't sell." Unfortunately, I think this is true.
People want the power fantasy, yes.
The tastes of gamers have also changed, however. Especially among people my age and younger, the desire to put effort into succeeding at a game simply isn't there. Players prefer to minimize the effort they put into their own fun time, and rely on OP stuff or rules/game system abuses. It's easier, and it's "the way" to play. This is certainly what LOL does. They pay lip-service to balance while releasing new champions every month who are nearly always OP for several weeks before the inevitable nerf. Their business is selling RP to players, and using flashy gameplay in Esports games as advertising.
.
There is also the fact that if GW puts out your codex as a balanced one, 6 months later it is no longer balanced, because in the mean time they put out 3-4 new books out of which two are maybe more powerful, and one is a lot less powerful. Having an unbalanced, externaly, codex gives it more life.
Eldar for example, required a full blown faction kill switch nerf and they still were okey as a core faction codex. They just wasn't the best.
Something like DG on the other hand went in to obscurity very fast. So it is not just a power fantasy, where you plow through opponent after opponent. Some of it is thinking of the future of what you are going to play in 6 or 12 months time.
This is why the new KO battletome did not bring me back to AoS. A nice balanced army. Fighting against the nonsense of slaanesh and OBR. No thank you.
auticus wrote: WHen I did campaign events I had to write houserules to curb the powergaming. Of course that leads to the age old chestnut of "who are you to rewrite the rules and make my army less effective? HOW DARE YOU!" arguments and screaming matches that can take place down at the good ole game store.
I believe the correct responses to this question are either "Me? I'm Batman." or "I'm the event organiser, hence I can change the rules as needed".
auticus wrote: I mean I have had a guy almost flip a table and storm out because I was using a warhammer world scenario which wasn't "real 40k" (wasn't an ITC tournament scenario) and another guy flip his **** at a campaign event because we were using Forgeworld campaign and those weren't "real 40k". Then there was the guy that wanted to go out into the parking lot to fight because houserules were toxic and ruined the community and he felt VERY strongly about that.
Guy 1 - ITC isn't real 40k either, and at least the scenario you were using was published by GW Guy 2 - FW materials are released with the GW & 40k logos on them, ergo they're part of "real 40k". Suck it up, buttercup.
Guy 3 - "Hi, police? I've got a gentleman here threatening to assault me over a miniature wargame..."
Unless you want someone dead, don't call the police on them
Purifying Tempest wrote: Hey, I think we just discovered Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'm not going to be as brash as to call the designers "stupid" - I mean there are tons of data points and interactions these people have to account for, surely something unintended is going to slip through. But I also think attributing these mistakes to malice is just... really... childish.
There is no doomsday clock of when your units are going to absolutely suck and then suddenly swing into power houses. Everything cycles around. New units probably get a white glove pass because they're new and the company genuinely wants them to succeed... they literally spent a ton of money in design on them, you don't want it to flop. Do they make them intentionally OP? No, but I think they try to find that line and get REALLY close, because they want you to want it. The model is never going to sell as well as when it is premiered, so you definitely do not want to sell a turd.
And that means other models kind of languish under the radar. Their rules are infrequently updated, how the game plays after an edition update diminishes their value even more... the unit starts to age, and not sell. Someone is then tasks with "give this unit a face lift so we can get it back on the table" or "new codex time, let's give this unit an extra pass because it's been notoriously underrepresented the past few editions"... kind of a way to give them another day in the sun, and even to get those kits into the hand of newer players who never gave them a try.
But really, I think a lot of this ascribing malice to everything we disagree with and do not like... bad way of living life. You see the worst in everything, believe everything is done as part of some monstrous design. And we forget that people make mistakes all the time, and it doesn't make them bad. People misinterpret things all the time, it doesn't make them evil. And most importantly: smart people can do some REALLY dumb things. Doesn't make them stupid or bad, just shows that they're still fallible regardless of how smart they are.
If the result is the same, the reasons are moot. Really.
the_scotsman wrote: So what factor does GW use to determine which ancient 3rd ed era/finecast sculpts they're going to seemingly arbitrarily ascend to competitive godhood?
Certainly doesn't seem like it's "Do we have this thing in stock, ready to sell to our competitive playerbase" to me. considering that whether it's shining spears, or talos pain engines, or vauls wrath batteries, or whatever, it basically instantly goes out of stock and stays that way for months.
You would think that would...not make GW any money, particularly if they do something like, I dunno, release a brand new plastic banshees unit and then the supporting rulebook that comes out with them makes Vauls Wrath guns ridiculously OP while leaving the brand new banshees garbage.
So the new unit GW just invested money into doesn't sell to competitive players, but they instantly run out of stock of the ancient old sculpt and everyone competitively minded goes to ebay to get those.
It also seems to me like, were I a corporation interested in instituting some kind of pay to win situation, I would do something to kind of use those competitive sales to drive my business. I might, for example, if I were considering releasing a big wave of CSMs and I was planning on having one of the new models be super duper tournament competitive, I might go ahead and put that bad boy right there in the big box and make it so you have to buy the big box with all the non-competitive units in it to get the super competitive thing.
I wouldn't, for example, release the big box with all the non-competitive junk units in it, and then release the thing lets name for the sake of argument a Lord of Discord in its own SEPARATE kit that then all my competitive players would just buy that and not buy the box set.
They bumble their way into making old models powerful.
Which means they're not spending time concocting strategies on how to sell those models. The result is a product of a poor play-testing process.
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Purifying Tempest wrote: Hey, I think we just discovered Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'm not going to be as brash as to call the designers "stupid" - I mean there are tons of data points and interactions these people have to account for, surely something unintended is going to slip through. But I also think attributing these mistakes to malice is just... really... childish.
There is no doomsday clock of when your units are going to absolutely suck and then suddenly swing into power houses. Everything cycles around. New units probably get a white glove pass because they're new and the company genuinely wants them to succeed... they literally spent a ton of money in design on them, you don't want it to flop. Do they make them intentionally OP? No, but I think they try to find that line and get REALLY close, because they want you to want it. The model is never going to sell as well as when it is premiered, so you definitely do not want to sell a turd.
And that means other models kind of languish under the radar. Their rules are infrequently updated, how the game plays after an edition update diminishes their value even more... the unit starts to age, and not sell. Someone is then tasks with "give this unit a face lift so we can get it back on the table" or "new codex time, let's give this unit an extra pass because it's been notoriously underrepresented the past few editions"... kind of a way to give them another day in the sun, and even to get those kits into the hand of newer players who never gave them a try.
But really, I think a lot of this ascribing malice to everything we disagree with and do not like... bad way of living life. You see the worst in everything, believe everything is done as part of some monstrous design. And we forget that people make mistakes all the time, and it doesn't make them bad. People misinterpret things all the time, it doesn't make them evil. And most importantly: smart people can do some REALLY dumb things. Doesn't make them stupid or bad, just shows that they're still fallible regardless of how smart they are.
That's part of the problem. Some people directly attribute improving a poorly performing unit or nerfing a strong one as no different than deliberately pushing rules. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.
I think GW's biggest problem is there is no way to play test all these releases competently. Especially not in reference to each other. Indomitus started in earnest a year or more ago. The were designing units and a new edition about the same time the marines codexes hit. And according to Brian playtesting began in Dec/Jan, so, how did any of the new PAs get folded into those considerations?
I mean... like the obvious answer is... both.
GW is alternatively clueless and devious, and you can't be sure what rules are the result of which because GW's hardly going to tell you (I mean sometimes you can get a designer with a few beers in a convention and he'll go "Yeah we just didn't test malefic lords", but that's not gonna be on warcom).
But the result is, ultimately, the same.
Does GW make dumb mistakes? Obviously.
Does GW design their game with an eye to creating a constantly shifting meta so people are pushed to buy the next best thing? Also, obviously.
Tyran wrote: Again no comparable because a president is a government official. Also electricity is a basic need unlike plastic soldier so not comparable x2.
And if GK had been a good army you would still have "lost" the same amount of money.
that doesn't mean companies should be allowed to get away with shady practices because they are less relevant to life.
I mean, GW products also have powerful memetic potential, which can actually be dangerous.
This is why the new KO battletome did not bring me back to AoS. A nice balanced army. Fighting against the nonsense of slaanesh and OBR. No thank you.
^^^^ and yet it is wildly celebrated and cheered as having great balance.
I will never understand.
You're forgetting half of that sentence "...compared to 40k" Which is absolutely true. Even the worst of Slaanesh dominance was nowhere near as bad as marine dominance and lasted less than half as long. OBR wasn't ever that out of line, it just was an extremely lopsided army matchcup wise. Could you deal with petrifex? Yes, you win. No? You get stomped into dirt without killing a single model.
AoS isn't balanced, it's still a GW game. It's just a dam sight better balanced than 40k is.
Tyran wrote: Not really comparable, as one involves a health risk and the other involves plastic soldiers.
It involves money, and money is always the same kind of thing.
If the GK write up for ed 8 said, you are going to have a bad army for 2 years, and then maybe we will fix it just before 9th, I wouldn't have bought the army. I lost more then some health thinking I wasted money.
But if you want to have an example from no health related stuff, here you go. Our president told everyone to take electricity from polish companies, that it is going to be better, as there won't be any price hikes etc. Of course the prices went up, and durning election his defence was that he didn't say it as the city president, no matter that he said that with the president building in the back with offcials around him, but he said it as a private citizent. People voted him out, but he just got a well paid job at the electricity company. Although considering that 2 people died durning winter from cold, because they couldn't heat their homes, this probably is health related too.
A lot of this seems like you're really focused on blaming Reece for saying GK were a good army. What you're forgetting is that from Reece's perspective, it probably was. At least in the testing phase and Early release phase. If Reece found a relatively effective tactic early on and played the army very well, it's possible he racked up quite a lot of wins against people who were still trying to figure out their army. He has proven himself to be a good player, so it's definitely possible.
Continuing to say GK are good is obstinance, not false advertising.
This is why the new KO battletome did not bring me back to AoS. A nice balanced army. Fighting against the nonsense of slaanesh and OBR. No thank you.
^^^^ and yet it is wildly celebrated and cheered as having great balance.
I will never understand.
You're forgetting half of that sentence "...compared to 40k" Which is absolutely true. Even the worst of Slaanesh dominance was nowhere near as bad as marine dominance and lasted less than half as long. OBR wasn't ever that out of line, it just was an extremely lopsided army matchcup wise. Could you deal with petrifex? Yes, you win. No? You get stomped into dirt without killing a single model.
AoS isn't balanced, it's still a GW game. It's just a dam sight better balanced than 40k is.
Tyran wrote: Not really comparable, as one involves a health risk and the other involves plastic soldiers.
It involves money, and money is always the same kind of thing.
If the GK write up for ed 8 said, you are going to have a bad army for 2 years, and then maybe we will fix it just before 9th, I wouldn't have bought the army. I lost more then some health thinking I wasted money.
But if you want to have an example from no health related stuff, here you go. Our president told everyone to take electricity from polish companies, that it is going to be better, as there won't be any price hikes etc. Of course the prices went up, and durning election his defence was that he didn't say it as the city president, no matter that he said that with the president building in the back with offcials around him, but he said it as a private citizent. People voted him out, but he just got a well paid job at the electricity company. Although considering that 2 people died durning winter from cold, because they couldn't heat their homes, this probably is health related too.
A lot of this seems like you're really focused on blaming Reece for saying GK were a good army. What you're forgetting is that from Reece's perspective, it probably was. At least in the testing phase and Early release phase. If Reece found a relatively effective tactic early on and played the army very well, it's possible he racked up quite a lot of wins against people who were still trying to figure out their army. He has proven himself to be a good player, so it's definitely possible.
Continuing to say GK are good is obstinance, not false advertising.
Slaanesh had like a 68 percent major winrate. That's not that far off the worst of the iron hands
This is why the new KO battletome did not bring me back to AoS. A nice balanced army. Fighting against the nonsense of slaanesh and OBR. No thank you.
^^^^ and yet it is wildly celebrated and cheered as having great balance.
I will never understand.
You're forgetting half of that sentence "...compared to 40k" Which is absolutely true. Even the worst of Slaanesh dominance was nowhere near as bad as marine dominance and lasted less than half as long. OBR wasn't ever that out of line, it just was an extremely lopsided army matchcup wise. Could you deal with petrifex? Yes, you win. No? You get stomped into dirt without killing a single model.
AoS isn't balanced, it's still a GW game. It's just a dam sight better balanced than 40k is.
Tyran wrote: Not really comparable, as one involves a health risk and the other involves plastic soldiers.
It involves money, and money is always the same kind of thing.
If the GK write up for ed 8 said, you are going to have a bad army for 2 years, and then maybe we will fix it just before 9th, I wouldn't have bought the army. I lost more then some health thinking I wasted money.
But if you want to have an example from no health related stuff, here you go. Our president told everyone to take electricity from polish companies, that it is going to be better, as there won't be any price hikes etc. Of course the prices went up, and durning election his defence was that he didn't say it as the city president, no matter that he said that with the president building in the back with offcials around him, but he said it as a private citizent. People voted him out, but he just got a well paid job at the electricity company. Although considering that 2 people died durning winter from cold, because they couldn't heat their homes, this probably is health related too.
A lot of this seems like you're really focused on blaming Reece for saying GK were a good army. What you're forgetting is that from Reece's perspective, it probably was. At least in the testing phase and Early release phase. If Reece found a relatively effective tactic early on and played the army very well, it's possible he racked up quite a lot of wins against people who were still trying to figure out their army. He has proven himself to be a good player, so it's definitely possible.
Continuing to say GK are good is obstinance, not false advertising.
Slaanesh had like a 68 percent major winrate. That's not that far off the worst of the iron hands
That was the first place rate, if you look a little deeper you'll see that maybe 3 out of the top 16 were Slaanesh in any given event, whereas between 10-12 were IH when IH was tops and it only split between IH and Ravenguard when the first round of Nerfs came in.
So yeah, 68% 1st place rate was a clear mark of being unbalanced, not nearly as bad as being 80% of every top 16, with an 80% win rate.
This is why the new KO battletome did not bring me back to AoS. A nice balanced army. Fighting against the nonsense of slaanesh and OBR. No thank you.
^^^^ and yet it is wildly celebrated and cheered as having great balance.
I will never understand.
You're forgetting half of that sentence "...compared to 40k" Which is absolutely true. Even the worst of Slaanesh dominance was nowhere near as bad as marine dominance and lasted less than half as long. OBR wasn't ever that out of line, it just was an extremely lopsided army matchcup wise. Could you deal with petrifex? Yes, you win. No? You get stomped into dirt without killing a single model.
AoS isn't balanced, it's still a GW game. It's just a dam sight better balanced than 40k is.
Tyran wrote: Not really comparable, as one involves a health risk and the other involves plastic soldiers.
It involves money, and money is always the same kind of thing.
If the GK write up for ed 8 said, you are going to have a bad army for 2 years, and then maybe we will fix it just before 9th, I wouldn't have bought the army. I lost more then some health thinking I wasted money.
But if you want to have an example from no health related stuff, here you go. Our president told everyone to take electricity from polish companies, that it is going to be better, as there won't be any price hikes etc. Of course the prices went up, and durning election his defence was that he didn't say it as the city president, no matter that he said that with the president building in the back with offcials around him, but he said it as a private citizent. People voted him out, but he just got a well paid job at the electricity company. Although considering that 2 people died durning winter from cold, because they couldn't heat their homes, this probably is health related too.
A lot of this seems like you're really focused on blaming Reece for saying GK were a good army. What you're forgetting is that from Reece's perspective, it probably was. At least in the testing phase and Early release phase. If Reece found a relatively effective tactic early on and played the army very well, it's possible he racked up quite a lot of wins against people who were still trying to figure out their army. He has proven himself to be a good player, so it's definitely possible.
Continuing to say GK are good is obstinance, not false advertising.
Slaanesh had like a 68 percent major winrate. That's not that far off the worst of the iron hands
That was the first place rate, if you look a little deeper you'll see that maybe 3 out of the top 16 were Slaanesh in any given event, whereas between 10-12 were IH when IH was tops and it only split between IH and Ravenguard when the first round of Nerfs came in.
So yeah, 68% 1st place rate was a clear mark of being unbalanced, not nearly as bad as being 80% of every top 16, with an 80% win rate.
I'm fairly sure that IH reached low 70s.
And.... less people play slaanesh. Their winrate is their winrate, not thier top finish rate. Their winrate. It's how often they win. And since everyone had a space marine army, well, everyone could break out the new op faction pretty rapidly.
Karol wrote: If you are hyping up a bad faction, on an official company site or forum, then you are very much responsible for what you say. If a tester called with first and last name on a Coca Cola site said that corn syrup is great, and in no way a health risk and in fact it is so great people should want more of it in their Cola products, then they are very much responsible what happens later on.
Two entirely different things, as you well know.
Coca Cola will advertise every new flavour as fantastic no matter what they taste like, similarly GW and basically everyone will market their product as amazing regardless.
Now if GW started advertising primaris marines as a heath supplment, cure to cancer, whatever then it's a different story. The term is 'puffery' - it's all opinion, hyperbole, and hot air not claims of fact.
Oh I know that, but you are not going to tell me that when a playtester that knows an army is bad, writes that it is good, it is somehow a good thing, because all companies hype stuff up. I don't care what promo GW does, but I do care when a playtester, says something works or doesn't. When a suplment seller hypes some product, promissing us 20 year old size at the age of 15, I know he is bullshiting me. When my trainer does the same, or someone from my class, it is way different.
A lot of this seems like you're really focused on blaming Reece for saying GK were a good army. What you're forgetting is that from Reece's perspective, it probably was. At least in the testing phase and Early release phase. If Reece found a relatively effective tactic early on and played the army very well, it's possible he racked up quite a lot of wins against people who were still trying to figure out their army. He has proven himself to be a good player, so it's definitely possible.
Continuing to say GK are good is obstinance, not false advertising.
But that is what he said, and later he said that GK players just don't play GK the right way. And his right way was the same way everyone else was playing them.
Also there is a big difference between someone up the importance ladders says something, and a no body like me saying stuff. What I say does not matter at all. What a well known person in the community and playtester says something is a ton of weight. And yes I know that playtesters technicly aren't employed by GW.
Yes, but this is a forum that focuses largely on GW and not, say, Mosanto. Or whatever blackwater is calling itself today.
Still small potatoes BTW.
And GW is not revolutionizing the way marketing works, if anything GW is still very new and inexperienced when it comes to it.
I mean, if the new Primaris are GW's attempt to shift the meta to create revenue, it is a very poor attempt. You don't tie meta shifting products to limited release ones as you limit your own potential profit. You also don't release OP units for already OP armies, as that also limits profit potential compared to e.g. Necrons being the new OP army and every competitive player needing to buy a Necron army likely from scratch.
Yes, but this is a forum that focuses largely on GW and not, say, Mosanto. Or whatever blackwater is calling itself today.
Still small potatoes BTW.
And GW is not revolutionizing the way marketing works, if anything GW is still very new and inexperienced when it comes to it.
I mean, if the new Primaris are GW's attempt to shift the meta to create revenue, it is a very poor attempt. You don't tie meta shifting products to limited release ones as you limit your own potential profit. You also don't release OP units for already OP armies, as that also limits profit potential compared to e.g. Necrons being the new OP army and every competitive player needing to buy a Necron army likely from scratch.
I mean, the judicator stands out as a pretty hard counter for a number of armies.
But most of the boc stuff will come out individually, and the space marine stuff will come out individually rapidly (necrons probly have to wait a bit longer). I do suspect captain skeleton shield, or vulkite man might be a box exlusive and never come out later. But for building an OP army, you'll probly grab yourself a judicator.
And the eradicators.
Remember that one of the things GW banks on is everyone having a space marine army. I'm not sure if they'll ever flub/decide to make them bad again, but space marine meta is almost an entire gameline on its own. They're nerfing the points of the thunderfire cannon into the dirt for example, and I can tell you, every competitive marine player had a couple of those. There's so many space marines you can churn the meta of literally just space marines by choosing winner and looser units inside the codex itself.
R; A good developer will try to achieve a easy to understand game with intuitive interactions and enough depth so that both casual players can have a fun time and let room for skill to show. But when a casual player loses in a intuitive game to a more skilled one, it is not a unfun experience, because they can understand, even if they aren't capable of doing it, why they have lose. The skill is right there. But in an unintuitive enviroment they'll lose to some abstract rule interaction they just can't wrap their heads around.
), but 
is the fact their design approach from the beginning is too opaque. They almost never state how they actually go about determining what works, how they decide if an ability is too good or needs to be fixed, or anything like that to my knowledge. For 
Yo, we already have iron hands, we don't need