So first off, I specified “external” in the title because I actually believe internal balance is better now. A large chunk of units and list build styles within most books can be viable for that army. Except vehicles, those by in large always suck.
That said while things looked promising at first, it’s becoming quite clear that 9th is very bad at keeping the best armies in check. It’s not pure powercreep, since some of the newer codex’s haven’t been broken (orks, tsons), but it’s clear that too many OP rules are being made. First it was DE and Ad-mech, now it’s custodes, Tyranids, and Tau. Based on leaks Craftworld and Chaos may be the next armies to push the envelope. All these armies have had > 60% winrates at tournaments, with them also often being the most played armies.
Some of you may tell me “oh that’s only in a competitive environment, so who cares?” Or “I only play against/hate SM, so since they’re bad I’m happy.” To this I would tell you those of who play the game feel it at all levels. People refuse to play my custodes outside of competitive games. I’m therefore, forced either to bring another army or bargain some house-rule nerfs if I want to play them in a non-sweaty game. Many newer players are asking how it’s possible to beat their newbie friends Tau list. Neither of these books need to use the best things in their books to win either, it’s just general lists that automatically win.
This is not good balance. I’m used to some level of power creep, but if I can win with no effort just by playing an overturned faction, that’s a huge issue. I’m 8-1 with my custodes, and that one lose was my first test game where I didn’t fully understand the new rules. These are mostly against people who normally prove a challenge against me and certainly outplayed me in some of those wins. All 8 where still crushing victories (especially post CA updates).
People need to start complaining to GW more about this problem. Realistically, only sales numbers will really make a change, but I want them to know that price increases aren’t the only reason why sales are declining.
I think the power of some books is a little more difficult to control. DE took quite a few nerfs ( and some dumb buffs ), but kept on ticking, because what makes them run isn't entirely locked behind points.
Custodes, in theory, should be kept in check by -1D stuff, but they're so god damn efficient it doesn't matter.
T'au is running a ton of units that should promote D2, but people probably still dodge it, because of D1. I haven't had the pleasure of playing them yet, but most of the lists look like they just aim to mostly wipe you out as fast as possible.
Nids are running an AoR with book mechanics that they shouldn't have.
With the Custodes points ping pong and the book schedule so clearly awry is seems GW can't stay ahead of the curve. It's very reminiscent of patching video games after release. I do think they have some overarching design decisions, but nothing is ready to test with everything before it.
Fortunately, we do have an outlet with 6 month CA and 3 month slates, but few want to deal with the seesaw if the spikes are going to be this steep.
I think with enough ( calm ) pressure we could perhaps force GW to put point adjustments in the slate until the book releases calm down or they get their internal issues under control.
That discussion is general catch all thread where people complain about whatever problem they have with the game at large. Where little on real balancing outside of CA complaints. Speaking of…
Gadzilla666 wrote: If the points changes in the dataslate are as minimal as the ones in the latest CA I don't know if they'd make much difference.
Yea, I just think CA is also a victim of the pace of releases on top of schedule delays.
Regardless of the reason, GW released a balance update which hurt the game’s balance. If GW isn’t willing to update the rules digitally in order to solve this, than I’m not willing to buy any of their rules.
We spoke for many many pages on the balancing problems of the edition and various ways to dream of changing how to fix that. Pages of discussion on why they don't care about balancing the game (the community overall doesn't care about balance, and bad balance makes them a shed load of money).
Thats also why I sold off my 40k collection, because I grew exhausted with having to buy new models every year to keep up with my powergamer friends that played to break the game.
Salt donkey wrote: ...People need to start complaining to GW more about this problem. Realistically, only sales numbers will really make a change, but I want them to know that price increases aren’t the only reason why sales are declining...
People have been complaining about balance at GW near constantly for twenty years. It hasn't made a lick of difference yet.
auticus wrote: We spoke for many many pages on the balancing problems of the edition and various ways to dream of changing how to fix that. Pages of discussion on why they don't care about balancing the game (the community overall doesn't care about balance, and bad balance makes them a shed load of money).
Thats also why I sold off my 40k collection, because I grew exhausted with having to buy new models every year to keep up with my powergamer friends that played to break the game.
Sorry. What I mean is that this edition’s balance is specifically worse than 8th’s. This true both for competitive and non-competitive players. For competitive players, as long as you owned some units used in your factions soup build, you didn’t have to work hard to make a tournament ready army. If you where casual, simpy don’t play soup or knights and you had a fine time. Putting it another way, in 8th you had to optimize your list in order to crush someone.
In 9th, however, you just have to play an OP army to crush everyone else (that will inevitably be nerfed when a newer/more OP army comes out 3-6 months later).
Salt donkey wrote: ...People need to start complaining to GW more about this problem. Realistically, only sales numbers will really make a change, but I want them to know that price increases aren’t the only reason why sales are declining...
People have been complaining about balance at GW near constantly for twenty years. It hasn't made a lick of difference yet.
You’re right, but the community will complain regardless of how good or bad balance actually is. 5th edition is widely considered the most Balanced edition ever. You’d never know this by forums like this, warseer, BoLS lounge, etc. it was not stop complaining about transports being OP, monsters sucking, SM being the worst, etc, etc.
My point is balanced in 9th has taken a step back from 8th, similar to how 6th was a step back from 7th.
Salt donkey wrote: 5th edition is widely considered the most Balanced edition ever.
By whom? I thought 5th edition is widely considered the edition ruled/ broken by Space Wolves and Grey Knights.
5th is simply the last edition before the gak hit the fan formally.
Conversely I'd argue that no, 9th has better external balance overall. Some books have been consistently better than others admittedly at this stage, but the fact it's a singular book or two causing problems is significantly better than having impossible to track combinations of units from multiple books in a temporary super faction all throwing gak out the window. I'd argue the individual stand alone factions were maybe better in 8th prior to marines v2, but the rules as a whole imbalanced external combinations due to the impossibility of covering them all.
Actually the damage done by marines v2 actually probably makes 8th so much worse.
Yeah. IMHO 5th is where things *started* to jump the shark, but only barely.
Definitely wasn't that balanced though. GW has never successfully balanced an edition. *That said*, which form the imbalance takes is significant too. High Lethality vs. High Durability in the top list for example.
I think you'd need some evidence of this.
I mean to my mind.
Early 8th - kind of busted rules in general, Imperial (Guilliman) Soup preferred. Then the Eldar book came out.
Mid 8th. Still kind of busted. Imperial soup (with a knight) and Eldar soup preferred.
Late 8th. Marines marines and more marines. Eldar still competitive. Tau considered dreadful, Seigler wins a major with them, Internet briefly considers them mad OP before normalcy is restored.
9th has had power factions but the variety of factions that have placed has been considerable. I think this is because of 9ths nature as a game and so there is less in "my army is odds on to do more damage than yours" even though lethality is incredibly high. DE should have been nerfed earlier. Ad Mech synergies were obviously stupid.
Its probably not great we are going to have a reign of Custodes and Tau with 60%+ win rates. I think its clear GW is giving in to its ever-present desire for Codex creep. But I'm not sure its obviously worse than in 8th where much the same happened.
I also think you need to see if there can be a meta adaption. Part of the odd thing about the LVO was that Custodes, Tyranids and DE were below 25% of lists. A concern therefore if you want to go the distance but if you'd hard skewed to counter Custodes you might just not have run into one before losing against other factions. I suspect Custodes player % will be on the up, but if it tips out at 10-15% is it really apocalyptic for the game?
The issue right now for external balance is that GW has spun the rules reset again and so certain codexes which kind of worked with multi-chapter builds are now wanting. GW should release points updates to recognise this reality. But they need data.
The more "balance" they add the the game the less "fun stuff" they can include.
Balance advocates despise high variance and randomness even though these types of rules tend to be very fun or comical to your average 40k player. I do not see how GW can create a fun fluffy rule that is also balanced. It will always be either too poor or too overpowered.
Even though 7th had its fair share of problems, the codex's felt like they had more flavor (excluding Orks, SW, and Dark Eldar). I look back at my 7th edition guard and necron codex, or my 5th edition ork and dark eldar books and wonder where the magic was lost.
Salt donkey wrote: [Sorry. What I mean is that this edition’s balance is specifically worse than 8th’s. This true both for competitive and non-competitive players. For competitive players, as long as you owned some units used in your factions soup build, you didn’t have to work hard to make a tournament ready army. If you where casual, simpy don’t play soup or knights and you had a fine time. Putting it another way, in 8th you had to optimize your list in order to crush someone.
In 9th, however, you just have to play an OP army to crush everyone else (that will inevitably be nerfed when a newer/more OP army comes out 3-6 months later).
That's not true though. You still have to make an effort with 9th to win games. I play Drukhari and haven't won a game. I play Deathwatch and even using Narrative scenarios, haven't won a game. Conversely in 8th I just took whatever Guard stuff I wanted and won all but one game I played with them.
There is not a single army where you are guaranteed a win every single game you play but the Internet being the Internet would like you to believe that is the case. A good player will beat a bad player 9 times out of 10, the 10th being the one where the bad player gets lucky. Looking at tournaments as a way of determining game balance as a whole is an utterly flawed concept because the players at tournaments are playing on a different level to everyone else.
You’re right, but the community will complain regardless of how good or bad balance actually is. 5th edition is widely considered the most Balanced edition ever. You’d never know this by forums like this, warseer, BoLS lounge, etc. it was not stop complaining about transports being OP, monsters sucking, SM being the worst, etc, etc.
My point is balanced in 9th has taken a step back from 8th, similar to how 6th was a step back from 7th.
Considered by whom? My memories of 5th are getting curb stomped by T'au, Blood Angels, and Grey Knights. My friends likely remember having a great Edition where they won loads of games. You may consider 5th to be the best balanced but I would disagree.
Salt donkey wrote: ...5th edition is widely considered the most Balanced edition ever...
5e's widely considered to have the best core rulebook. It's also where the power creep started growing out of control, and has some of GW's first cases of colossal overcorrections ("nobody's taking Rhinos? Better a) revise the transport rules to let you charge out of them if they stand still, b) revise the damage tables so you need pens to kill them, and c) drop them from 50pts to 35pts, that's obviously going to make people take them in sane quantities and not turn the entire game into parking lots of mechanized SM spam!"). To my recollection 3rd and 4th were way better on the balance front.
I know exactly what you mean OP, but the Orks and TSons books were not externally balanced either.
Orks required the general rules of the game to be altered to nerf their power (rule of 2 for aircraft and rule of 1 squad for buggies). This alphork list that people keep posting about also sounds terrible for the game.
TSons are currently near and dear to me. Yes, they never went on a tournament winning streak like DE, AM, GK, Nids and that now Cust/Tau are starting. But, they are miserable to play against for 8th edition codexes and some 9th edition codexes like Necrons and especially Death Guard. Space Marines sometimes have game into them, but I can tell at list reading stage if the Space Marine I'm about to face is going to stand a chance.
On the attack - They just shred some armies. Either they have no MW defence or massed 24" S4 AP2 is super efficient into them. They also can turn 1 teleport to get off the game ruining alpha strike most people hate.
On the defence - They have an effective army wide 2+ save against D1 attacks, with their terminators being a 1+ and then both targets being able to grab cover to negate AP1 (or AP1 and 2 for the terminators). While massed 5++ makes low volume high AP inefficient.
EightFoldPath wrote: Orks required the general rules of the game to be altered to nerf their power (rule of 2 for aircraft and rule of 1 squad for buggies). This alphork list that people keep posting about also sounds terrible for the game.
Also an internal balance issue, since aircraft + buggies + mek gunz was winning tournaments, while green tide decidedly isn't.
I'm amazed they still can't do it after dumbing down the gameplay so much it really is just a simple formula of damage output vs damage soak with no tactics to speak of in between.
EightFoldPath wrote: Orks required the general rules of the game to be altered to nerf their power (rule of 2 for aircraft and rule of 1 squad for buggies). This alphork list that people keep posting about also sounds terrible for the game.
Also an internal balance issue, since aircraft + buggies + mek gunz was winning tournaments, while green tide decidedly isn't.
What a bunch of uninformed nonsense. Green tide by itself is a symptom of terrible internal balance, unless you want to argue that bringing 1000+ points of single datasheet is healthy for any army.
Green tide only ever is a top tournament build when everything but boyz sucks - which has been the case for so many years, some people seem to mistake this for intention.
What is winning tournaments are two distinct armies with buggies which is freeboota buggies on one side and speed freeks army on the other. Both armies build and play completely differently, sharing only some fast unit elements between them. The third is the goff tempo archetype which is essentially a ton of kill ork stuff running across the board to carve your face in, with no two builds looking like the other.
Almost two thirds of the codex can be considered playable and has been in a top placing list, and almost everything that isn't is either a LoW, a fortification or a support character.
The alphork list is a gimmick list that is famous here at dakka (and no where else, really) because Semper is the one championing it and it is a blast to play. While he has some decent success with it locally, it hasn't really shown up in any grand tournaments.
No proof, just yet another person stating their subjective opinion as absolute truth and telling everyone to complain to GW while they complain to dakka.
I will argue that bringing 1000 points of a single data sheet is unhealthy, but only cause 120 boyz should be under 1k points .
Green tide is great, the only people who I’ve heard complain about it always do it for git reasons. Have other options, but let me take da ladz.
Jidmah wrote: Almost two thirds of the codex can be considered playable and has been in a top placing list
You're getting on my case about saying the internal balance has issues, then saying a third of the codex is unplayable?
Forgive me for not providing a comprehensive unit-by-unit breakdown of the entire codex with my short remark intended to point out that not everything within the Ork codex is doing great, even while certain units are so successful they had to be heavily limited by rules patch. Didn't realize 'green tide' meant 'an army of literally nothing but Boyz' around here as I've always heard it refer to infantry-based Ork armies, which I haven't seen do nearly as well as the archetypical tournament-winning lists lately.
When are people going to wake the feth up and realize that the issue is the mission design.
A particular faction and/or specific army build will keep winning because the game has only one mission, only one way to play. There is nothing that changes from one game to the next. It's rinse and repeat each and every time.
There is nothing to push a player to use their army in a different way from game to game.
For anything to change... The meta must change... This places the onus on each new book to enact change throughout the whole environment. Warhammer Tourney-K requires a significant power escalation from book to book to force this change on the play environment lest the whole thing become stale. Historically, this was something the missions / mission design handled. Not any more. No thanks to Mike Brandt.
oni wrote: When are people going to wake the feth up and realize that the issue is the mission design.
A particular faction and/or specific army build will keep winning because the game has only one mission, only one way to play. There is nothing that changes from one game to the next. It's rinse and repeat each and every time.
There is nothing to push a player to use their army in a different way from game to game.
For anything to change... The meta must change... This places the onus on each new book to enact change throughout the whole environment. Warhammer Tourney-K requires a significant power escalation from book to book to force this change on the play environment lest the whole thing become stale. Historically, this was something the missions / mission design handled. Not any more. No thanks to Mike Brandt.
Ash (Guerilla Miniature Games) had a bit of tirade on this point, the game being just "standing in circles and pushing buttons" on stream, first segment
Salt donkey wrote: ...5th edition is widely considered the most Balanced edition ever...
5e's widely considered to have the best core rulebook. It's also where the power creep started growing out of control, and has some of GW's first cases of colossal overcorrections ("nobody's taking Rhinos? Better a) revise the transport rules to let you charge out of them if they stand still, b) revise the damage tables so you need pens to kill them, and c) drop them from 50pts to 35pts, that's obviously going to make people take them in sane quantities and not turn the entire game into parking lots of mechanized SM spam!"). To my recollection 3rd and 4th were way better on the balance front.
3rd edition Blood Angels, 3rd edition Eldar, 3rd edition Iron Warriors. 4th edition Fish of Fury, 4th edition Eldar Wave Serpant Spam.. Just off the top off my head as to what people hated back in 3rd and 4th.
5th edition probably had the best core rules IMO but the balance was just as jacked. It was the edition of grey.
Grey Knights, Space Wolves, and Necrons. And then things like Nob Biker armies.
That was the first editon I tried to do campaign gaming and narrative gaming coming out of 3rd and 4th edition as a mostly powergaming tournament player and 5th was the first edition I started feeling frustration with the balance disparity because it was impossible to get good narrative games with narrative armies when your opponent wanted to run their tournament nob bikers or paladin armies or space wolf army with 18 rocket launchers.
Jidmah wrote: Almost two thirds of the codex can be considered playable and has been in a top placing list
You're getting on my case about saying the internal balance has issues, then saying a third of the codex is unplayable?
Orks currently have 74 datasheets available for play. Two thirds of that is ~49. Show me a single codex in the game that has ever had that many datasheets show up top tournament lists in any edition.
But it gets better, 33 of those datasheets are said characters, lords of war or fortifications. Those are already severely limited by their battlefield role and they will rarely form an archetype or an army's backbone on their own.
Pretty much every "regular" multi-model unit and almost every vehicle in the codex are playable. Any other codex would die for an internal balance comparable to that, even if it means getting your troops gutted.
Heck, I'm not even sure how GW managed to do that well considering how terrible the overall coherency of the rules in the codex is. But you won't see me complaining about having a good book for the first time since 5th.
Forgive me for not providing a comprehensive unit-by-unit breakdown of the entire codex with my short remark intended to point out that not everything within the Ork codex is doing great, even while certain units are so successful they had to be heavily limited by rules patch.
Well, too bad that there isn't a comprehensive unit-by-unit breakdown done by someone here on dakka.
Didn't realize 'green tide' meant 'an army of literally nothing but Boyz' around here as I've always heard it refer to infantry-based Ork armies, which I haven't seen do nearly as well as the archetypical tournament-winning lists lately.
Green tide almost always refers to spamming as many boyz as you can plus support for said boyz.
Many of the goff pressure lists bring large blocks of infantry, kommadoz, snagga boyz, burnas, storm boyz and MANz regularly pop up in top spots. There even have been some people placing in top tens running nobz and lootas.
The only infantry units that are not showing up anywhere are flash gits and tank bustas, but due to their per model costs neither unit would fit in well with an infantry theme anyways.
Jidmah wrote: Orks currently have 74 datasheets available for play. Two thirds of that is ~49. Show me a single codex in the game that has ever had that many datasheets show up top tournament lists in any edition.
Do you feel that every datasheet in the codex is on the same level as the ones that had to be hard-limited, or are you missing the actual point, which was that aircraft and buggies doing great does not mean everything in the codex is doing equally great, and internal balance is still a concern?
Jidmah wrote: No proof, just yet another person stating their subjective opinion as absolute truth and telling everyone to complain to GW while they complain to dakka.
Statistically we're probably not likely worse off, but I think with the pace of things it gets very difficult to deal with new armies.
Take T'au -- W4/W8 suits with W2 drones that have a 4++. Previously D2 was becoming verboten, but now it might need some sunlight to deal with suits and drones. Trying to puzzle that out while still striking a balance against other armies like Custodes with W5 bikes can be difficult - especially if you're not a Dark Lance army.
We're going to be dealing with GSC, Custodes, T'au, Eldar, and Tyranids all within 3 months worth of time or so. And then we'll have CSM not long thereafter.
Jidmah wrote: Orks currently have 74 datasheets available for play. Two thirds of that is ~49. Show me a single codex in the game that has ever had that many datasheets show up top tournament lists in any edition.
Do you feel that every datasheet in the codex is on the same level as the ones that had to be hard-limited, or are you missing the actual point, which was that aircraft and buggies doing great does not mean everything in the codex is doing equally great, and internal balance is still a concern?
Honestly I think the buggy limit is a crap rule that isn’t needed anymore with the last point adjustment. I don’t see people taking more then 3 squigbuggies anymore and/or 3 scrapjets On the current meta. Without dual subfaction lists the need for 2 detachments has waned. Plus orks have fallen out of competitive placings.
Best edition was 7th Ed index after the first faq to nerf greyknights and guard.. the rules bloat was minimal and lots of armies placed… it was a lot of Allies though which people didn’t like.. 9th feels like an extension of 8th with lots of rules bloat…to sell books.
auticus wrote: 5th edition probably had the best core rules IMO but the balance was just as jacked. It was the edition of grey.
I think people need to recall that the community had a large desire to self regulate during that period. Special characters almost never saw tables. There were lots of missions and other changes - especially within ITC.
5th was not unfettered like 9th has been.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
gungo wrote: Honestly I think the buggy limit is a crap rule that isn’t needed anymore with the last point adjustment. I don’t see people taking more then 3 squigbuggies anymore and/or 3 scrapjets On the current meta. Without dual subfaction lists the need for 2 detachments has waned. Plus orks have fallen out of competitive placings.
DE fell out pretty hard, too. Figuring out how the new armies operate is going to take a couple weeks. Though I am not sure what level of headwind is involved with Custodes and T'au yet.
DE is still very strong the only real change from lvo was the loss of dual subfaction lists which wasn’t a huge deal.
The biggest hit to DE was the chapter approved point adjustments to custodes was horrendously bad. Nerf custodes/tau and DE and Tyranids are back on top.
I think people need to recall that the community had a large desire to self regulate during that period. Special characters almost never saw tables. There were lots of missions and other changes - especially within ITC.
5th was not unfettered like 9th has been.
To a degree yeah. I definitely agree from 6th on that it started to be more and more masters of the universe style games with huge special characters slamming against each other and more and more take whatever you want because thats whats FUNNNNN.
And I guess to be fair for a lot of people that is whats fun.
But that comes at the cost of the gameplay itself.
Orks currently have 74 datasheets available for play. Two thirds of that is ~49. Show me a single codex in the game that has ever had that many datasheets show up top tournament lists in any edition.
In fairness, a lot of those 49 were ones and twos that showed up in some random list and never again. Its like the lunatic Aussie Ork player who keeps winning with random builds including killakanz. Yeah it happens but its more of an exception rather than the rule
Some of those units likewise are pre-reqs as well. Boyz/Grotz for example are usually only taken as a tax. The beast snaggas I still don't see a use for beyond tax and since you are taking the Kilrig you might as well take the extra 20pt beast snaggas over Boyz so you can use the transport capacity. Hell, i've seen units that you and I both agree are trash tier being played in tournaments and winning somehow.
I'll gladly admit mind you that competitively this is the best codex we have had since 4th edition.
Best edition was 7th Ed index after the first faq to nerf greyknights and guard.. the rules bloat was minimal and lots of armies placed… it was a lot of Allies though which people didn’t like.. 9th feels like an extension of 8th with lots of rules bloat…to sell books.
7th didn't have index points, 8th edition had the index points costs, 7th edition was the worst edition in my opinion EVER.
DE fell out pretty hard, too. Figuring out how the new armies operate is going to take a couple weeks. Though I am not sure what level of headwind is involved with Custodes and T'au yet.
No...no they didn't. DE had 2 of the top 8 placings at LVO. They owned 30% of the top 10 and 20% of the top 20. Overall they owned 19% of the top 100. A faction which "fell out pretty hard" does not finish with a 62% win rate and own that many top spots at the biggest event in the community.
gungo wrote: DE is still very strong the only real change from lvo was the loss of dual subfaction lists which wasn’t a huge deal.
The biggest hit to DE was the chapter approved point adjustments to custodes was horrendously bad. Nerf custodes/tau and DE and Tyranids are back on top.
Preliminary and limited data, but -- 1/1 to 2/11 there were 263 unique DE players. 40 of those played this past weekend. Of those 20 stuck with DE ( for that weekend anyway ).
Four switched to T'au and all did worse than their prior records with DE. Five when to Custodes and 4 out of 5 did better.
This chart below shows how they ( the ones who stayed loyal to DE ) did with DE from 1/1 to 2/11 as compared to how they did this past weekend. Most notably the ones who did worse attended Beachhead where competition was stiffer.
Spoiler:
Automatically Appended Next Post:
SemperMortis wrote: No...no they didn't. DE had 2 of the top 8 placings at LVO. They owned 30% of the top 10 and 20% of the top 20. Overall they owned 19% of the top 100. A faction which "fell out pretty hard" does not finish with a 62% win rate and own that many top spots at the biggest event in the community.
I'm referencing this past weekend. LVO is last season and T'au codex wasn't active yet as well as the dataslate.
SemperMortis wrote: No...no they didn't. DE had 2 of the top 8 placings at LVO. They owned 30% of the top 10 and 20% of the top 20. Overall they owned 19% of the top 100. A faction which "fell out pretty hard" does not finish with a 62% win rate and own that many top spots at the biggest event in the community.
Edit - Ninjaed by Daed.
Post still has info though.
He means in the last week. DE Win percent over the weekend tournaments fell back to 53%.
By contrast Custodes 63%, Tyranids 62%, Tau 60%. (FWIW, Orks down to just 48%)
The loss of 2 detachments (vital for getting DT on Cronos - without it they are kind of just fat low damage bully sponges), plus the loss of some buffs to Talos and Cronos due to the removal of core sort of put a line under Thicc City.
Nothing stops you running say 170 Wracks - or indeed a more balanced DE list. But the LVO was then and this is now.
I'll gladly give it a few weeks to balance out. But I don't see a faction like DE doing that much worse. The supreme irony being that they dropped to a 53% win rate which is still great.
oni wrote: When are people going to wake the feth up and realize that the issue is the mission design.
A particular faction and/or specific army build will keep winning because the game has only one mission, only one way to play. There is nothing that changes from one game to the next. It's rinse and repeat each and every time.
There is nothing to push a player to use their army in a different way from game to game.
For anything to change... The meta must change... This places the onus on each new book to enact change throughout the whole environment. Warhammer Tourney-K requires a significant power escalation from book to book to force this change on the play environment lest the whole thing become stale. Historically, this was something the missions / mission design handled. Not any more. No thanks to Mike Brandt.
yeah, the mission design of 9th is terrible, everything is bland with no variety. We need missions that push truly different army composition.
SemperMortis wrote: I'll gladly give it a few weeks to balance out. But I don't see a faction like DE doing that much worse. The supreme irony being that they dropped to a 53% win rate which is still great.
Yea they still have teeth and it will be interesting to see how others fare or if they just straight switch out armies instead.
oni wrote: When are people going to wake the feth up and realize that the issue is the mission design.
Amen. I can't say this enough myself.
The mission design, intentionally or not, also engenders a competitive outlook to matched play, which reinforces people's competitive tendencies rather than tempering them.
What do I mean? The missions are setup -- with their symmetrical win conditions, symmetrical and fixed layout of objective markers, and a min-maxing choose your own secondary objectives -- to give the pretense of a fair and level playfield field where players are told they will win or lose through no contribution of the mission parameters. Why do tournament maps have symmetrical terrain layouts? Same thinking at work.
And this thinking spills over into the entre swath of "matched play" and shapes the communities attitude.
-------------------------------------------------
The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.
Because of the above, it's entirely possible than a modest portion of perceived external imbalances result from the above issues magnifying whatever inherent imbalances there might be in the list. DE probably wouldn't have an amazing win rate at the current matched play scenarios if they were forced to occasionally play mission types they weren't well-suited for.
Mezmorki wrote: DE probably wouldn't have an amazing win rate at the current matched play scenarios if they were forced to occasionally play mission types they weren't well-suited for.
The prevalent issue here is they're able to be well suited for anything.
Regards mission formats, I'd hasten to add that what we have now is the natural next step of the ITC which is was largely praised as more balanced and competitive than GW maelstrom missions which are nearer what you're intending. To the point that most of the US didn't know how to or want to play maelstrom.
I don't think you'd get any real buy in from competitive players for any game mode that isn't a mathematical exercise, they don't like to have uncertainty.
Not gonna lie, this isn't THAT bad. We don't have any IH Dread Lists, or completely game breaking Knight lists to worry about. Granted, I play custodes, but I haven't been completely shot off the table turn 1 in this edition YET.
8th was a pretty terrible edition, so yeah, I think this is kinda silly. 9th has it's obvious flaws, however nothing as bad as a turn 1 pick up my models off the board and shake a hand, then go home.
oni wrote: When are people going to wake the feth up and realize that the issue is the mission design.
Amen. I can't say this enough myself.
The mission design, intentionally or not, also engenders a competitive outlook to matched play, which reinforces people's competitive tendencies rather than tempering them.
What do I mean? The missions are setup -- with their symmetrical win conditions, symmetrical and fixed layout of objective markers, and a min-maxing choose your own secondary objectives -- to give the pretense of a fair and level playfield field where players are told they will win or lose through no contribution of the mission parameters. Why do tournament maps have symmetrical terrain layouts? Same thinking at work.
And this thinking spills over into the entre swath of "matched play" and shapes the communities attitude.
-------------------------------------------------
The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.
Because of the above, it's entirely possible than a modest portion of perceived external imbalances result from the above issues magnifying whatever inherent imbalances there might be in the list. DE probably wouldn't have an amazing win rate at the current matched play scenarios if they were forced to occasionally play mission types they weren't well-suited for.
These are some of the most interactive missions 40K has ever had. People like interaction, which is more akin to Maelstrom than other mission types. Not who is on the hill on the last turn or the kill points.
DE wouldn't have had an amazing win rate if it weren't for the very complex books where the power of an army isn't necessarily derived from over/undertuned points.
The mission design and competitive mindset is self-reinforcing. That's the issue.
ITC-like competitive missions have become the defacto missions for matched play, which now has subsumed casual pick up games with its competitive approach.
Ironically, people are praising ITC missions for being more balance and competitive and simultaneously complaining that the game itself and armies are notable out of balance - seemingly without noticing the possible correlation (and causation) between the two.
People look at ITC-style missions and say "oohhh, it's more balanced" .... but balanced for what? It may be balanced within the context of mutually equal opportunity (in theory) over a single game. But when played over many games, the mission set absolutely favors certain types of armies (which is what we see in the data, no?).
What do people want? Do you want balance within a single match? Or do you want balance and things to equal out over the entire run of playing an army? That's the question people aren't asking. I think we're collectively chasing the former - and it's an impossible goal. We should be focused on the latter.
EDIT: FWIW - I never like Maelstrom missions either. They solved a perceived problem with a solution most people didn't like.
Mezmorki wrote: The mission design and competitive mindset is self-reinforcing. That's the issue.
ITC-like competitive missions have become the defacto missions for matched play, which now has subsumed casual pick up games with its competitive approach.
Ironically, people are praising ITC missions for being more balance and competitive and simultaneously complaining that the game itself and armies are notable out of balance - seemingly without noticing the possible correlation (and causation) between the two.
People look at ITC-style missions and say "oohhh, it's more balanced" .... but balanced for what? It may be balanced within the context of mutually equal opportunity (in theory) over a single game. But when played over many games, the mission set absolutely favors certain types of armies (which is what we see in the data, no?).
What do people want? Do you want balance within a single match? Or do you want balance and things to equal out over the entire run of playing an army? That's the question people aren't asking. I think we're collectively chasing the former - and it's an impossible goal. We should be focused on the latter.
What's the alternative, exactly, though? Asymmetrical win conditions?
I'd argue that to be a good game, you're going to want to chase the former.
If I am hearing you right your rub is that we don't have the 6th / 7th style missions where people would lose invulnerable saves or units with FLY would get impacted in some fashion, which means certain units wouldn't be quite so viable all of the time.
We have some of that in the mission that prevents scouting, but leaning to heavily into mission design like that would only make armies avoid those units and DE would still come out on top, I think.
If 40K were to have a sideboard then I think such a dynamic might be more viable.
What's the alternative, exactly, though? Asymmetrical win conditions?
I'd argue that to be a good game, you're going to want to chase the former.
missions that arent just "stand on objectives as long as possible with obsec units"
Use the actions framework to force list variety.
Have a mission where you need to unearth relics by clearing rubble (an action) with vehicles or monsters for example
Have a mission where a character has to retrieve data from an objective by doing an action on it.
Have missions with multiple steps. Step 1 : identify what objective contains an STC, Step 2 : retrieve the STC.
I don't know, right now , the missions could very well just be completely bypassed for :
4pts for hold 1
4pts for hold 2
4pts for hold more
50pts for the secondaries you built your list to take
its boring, bland and makes games super repetitive and predictable.
What's the alternative, exactly, though? Asymmetrical win conditions?
Yes - at least some of the time. But there are other missions parameters to consider as well.
Let me lay down a few a different levers that could be used:
Victory Timing. People used to complain about all the missions being based on who crawled out from behind cover to sit on the objective on last turn of the game. The rest of the game was taking pot-shots at each from across the map, hugging cover, etc. Totally fair criticisms, and it incentive certain types of lists. Now, most of the missions primary objectives are all about sitting in circles around the objective points for as many turns as you can. This likewise incentivizes certain types of lists.
Ideally - a mission set would include some missions with end game scoring, and some missions with progressive scoring. Or how about threshold scoring where you instantly win after X-feat is completed Y-times? The timing of victory and scoring affects the pacing and tempo of the mission and different armies are going be better or worse at certain ones.
Objective Type Primary objectives right now are all just about controlling points. Players pick min-maxed secondary objectives. The 'mission' secondary objectives are generally ignored. It's all the same feat you're asked to do in every mission. But it wasn't always this way. What about having to breach and secure bunkers? What about having to infiltrate off your opponent's table edge? What about centralized objectives (i.e. artifact hunting) where you need to secure an object and hold it till the end? What about just attaching the enemy in a straight up shoot-out?
Ideally - a mission set would have a range of actual objective tasks players are trying to accomplish. Some armies will be better suited than others at any specific tasks, but the intent is to provide a variety, which evens out in the end.
Asymmetry Yes - there should be missions setup with distinct attacking and defending sides, including asymmetric deployment zones. There should be ambush missions, and bunker assault missions, and breakthrough missions, and sabotage missions. And yes - there should also be missions are that are symmetrical still. Again, this is going to help and hurt different factions at an individual mission level - but the aim is for it to even out over playing many different types of missions.
What can also be done is to provide some better structure around how the missions are setup and selected.
For example, what if prior to a match players randomly determined 3 possible missions, and each vetoed one. You could have players bid CP's for the right to pick sides/deployment zones (so, for example an army that struggled to attack in certain missions could bid CP's for the right to remain on defense). Give players the tools to customize mission parameters to better balance the scenario before you even start pushing models around.
A lot of 40k's historic missions have been kind of terrible. Generally devolving into "just shoot each other for 3-4 turns and whoever's come off better just wanders over and grabs the objectives."
I mean I think there could be more variety maybe - but I do think scoring should be progressive, and have a board presence dimension to discourage castling up in the corner nuking anyone trying to jog across the table.
Scenarios which went say "Necron Radiation, all vehicles have -6M" would mess with certain lists, but I'm not sure they'd make the game much more fun. Depends on what you want I guess.
I agree with OP, AdMech horde was stronger relative to the field at the time than Broviathan was relative to its field.
Mezmorki wrote: The mission design and competitive mindset is self-reinforcing. That's the issue.
ITC-like competitive missions have become the defacto missions for matched play, which now has subsumed casual pick up games with its competitive approach.
Ironically, people are praising ITC missions for being more balance and competitive and simultaneously complaining that the game itself and armies are notable out of balance - seemingly without noticing the possible correlation (and causation) between the two.
People look at ITC-style missions and say "oohhh, it's more balanced" .... but balanced for what? It may be balanced within the context of mutually equal opportunity (in theory) over a single game. But when played over many games, the mission set absolutely favors certain types of armies (which is what we see in the data, no?).
Don't pretend that certain types of armies don't do better in the Maelstrom mission set or any of the 4th edition asymmetric mission sets.
ITC did help balance 40k by nerfing some OP things in 7th and making the missions harder to win in 8th for certain OP lists. Space Marines did ITC missions really well and the ITC missions never had time to adapt and become balanced for Space Marines, but again, let's not forget Iron Hands were still stupidly OP in any other game mode. Yes, you should play the mission, but it never hurts to deal tonnes of damage, be ultra-resilient and/or fast.
What do people want? Do you want balance within a single match? Or do you want balance and things to equal out over the entire run of playing an army? That's the question people aren't asking. I think we're collectively chasing the former - and it's an impossible goal. We should be focused on the latter.
I want the former, I don't see how yesterday's game against Mike changes today's game against Jim and it's something we are constantly discussing here on Dakka and have been since 8th edition at least with the ITC haters vs the ITC fanboys.
The missions are setup -- with their symmetrical win conditions, symmetrical and fixed layout of objective markers, and a min-maxing choose your own secondary objectives -- to give the pretense of a fair and level playfield field where players are told they will win or lose through no contribution of the mission parameters. Why do tournament maps have symmetrical terrain layouts? Same thinking at work.
That's ridiculous, the win conditions are not symmetrical since players choose their own secondaries, players don't even have access to the same secondaries. It is explicitly an unlevel playing field because it is meant to skew the field in favour of lists that don't skew with secondaries that punish spamming vehicles, titanic units, characters or hordes of infantry.
Symmetrical terrain means you don't have to switch sides, it's just easier to do things that way. It is unfair because it leaves the defender at a disadvantage, but if you didn't have symmetrical terrain and objectives then the disadvantage of the attacker could be huge. It's a lot harder to make a fair asymmetrical table than an almost fair symmetrical table.
Daedalus81 wrote: If I am hearing you right your rub is that we don't have the 6th / 7th style missions where people would lose invulnerable saves or units with FLY would get impacted in some fashion, which means certain units wouldn't be quite so viable all of the time.
We have some of that in the mission that prevents scouting, but leaning to heavily into mission design like that would only make armies avoid those units and DE would still come out on top, I think.
If 40K were to have a sideboard then I think such a dynamic might be more viable.
I'll be done with my sideboard mission set tomorrow, it's very inspired by 4th edition missions, I hate it.
Mezmorki wrote: Victory Timing. People used to complain about all the missions being based on who crawled out from behind cover to sit on the objective on last turn of the game. The rest of the game was taking pot-shots at each from across the map, hugging cover, etc. Totally fair criticisms, and it incentive certain types of lists. Now, most of the missions primary objectives are all about sitting in circles around the objective points for as many turns as you can. This likewise incentivizes certain types of lists.
Lists that are built for fighting over objectives over the course of the game are just a lot more fun to play with and against than lists that are meant to kill the enemy bestest and then hop on objectives by the end of the game.
Symmetrical games may be boring, but asymmetrical ones are infuriating if there wasn't a significant degree of planning and compromise from both parties, meaning they are crap for pick up games.
A lot of 40k's historic missions have been kind of terrible. Generally devolving into "just shoot each other for 3-4 turns and whoever's come off better just wanders over and grabs the objectives.
5th editions missions, despite the 5th ed core rules generally being quite good, were a total low point IMHO. Control objective markers at the end game, capture marker in opponent's territory, or annihilation.
6th + 7th basic missions weren't much better.
3rd + 4th edition missions were good - particularly if you used the full range of missions types as part of your pool of missions. There was a set of 5-6 standard missions, but also battle missions, breakthrough missions, and raid missions. Many had some fun special rules attached to how they worked.
4th in particular did a good job of balancing VP's derived from killing units against VPs derived from achieving the mission objectives.
What's the alternative, exactly, though? Asymmetrical win conditions?
I'd argue that to be a good game, you're going to want to chase the former.
missions that arent just "stand on objectives as long as possible with obsec units"
Use the actions framework to force list variety.
Have a mission where you need to unearth relics by clearing rubble (an action) with vehicles or monsters for example
Have a mission where a character has to retrieve data from an objective by doing an action on it.
Have missions with multiple steps. Step 1 : identify what objective contains an STC, Step 2 : retrieve the STC.
I don't know, right now , the missions could very well just be completely bypassed for :
4pts for hold 1
4pts for hold 2
4pts for hold more
50pts for the secondaries you built your list to take
its boring, bland and makes games super repetitive and predictable.
Those are good ideas. Positive reinforcement is probably better than negative reinforcement to get players to bring a wider variety of units, but...
I am not sure they really work.
In a mission where monsters have to action the opponent that goes first or has the most flexible removal will prevent you from achieving the mission, some armies come across disposable characters more easily, etc. The third example pretty much exists.
If the goal is to get variety into lists - it already exists. You rarely see the same list even when Thicc City was at it's peak.
The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.
Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.
Mezmorki wrote: Ideally - a mission set would include some missions with end game scoring, and some missions with progressive scoring.
Exists:
Or how about threshold scoring where you instantly win after X-feat is completed Y-times?
Favors run-away wins.
Objective Type Primary objectives right now are all just about controlling points.
Not sure I understand the skepticism about objectives involving points. Anything you do is going to be somewhere on the battlefield whether it is an arbitrary objective or not.
Players pick min-maxed secondary objectives. The 'mission' secondary objectives are generally ignored. It's all the same feat you're asked to do in every mission. But it wasn't always this way. What about having to breach and secure bunkers? What about having to infiltrate off your opponent's table edge? What about centralized objectives (i.e. artifact hunting) where you need to secure an object and hold it till the end? What about just attaching the enemy in a straight up shoot-out?
It sounds like you might not be familiar with the recent CA missions. There's no more mission secondaries as it were. We used to have Relic Hunter as a mission and it was awful, because whomever got there first basically won.
Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?
Ideally - a mission set would have a range of actual objective tasks players are trying to accomplish. Some armies will be better suited than others at any specific tasks, but the intent is to provide a variety, which evens out in the end.
Secondary missions do this fairly well and they're being tweaked often.
For example, what if prior to a match players randomly determined 3 possible missions, and each vetoed one. You could have players bid CP's for the right to pick sides/deployment zones (so, for example an army that struggled to attack in certain missions could bid CP's for the right to remain on defense). Give players the tools to customize mission parameters to better balance the scenario before you even start pushing models around.
CP bid is a good idea, but then armies like DE start with 12 almost all the time.
The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.
Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.
This is the cost of streamlining and making the game as accessible as possible. Everything has a cost, and the cost here is you get very simplified and easy missions.
Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?
Few things going on...
First - we should talk about what direction we're coming at this from.
I'm thinking about balance from a non-tournament perspective, and lamenting that tournament-style play and attitudes have taken over what was once more casual. From this more casual perspective, "balance" is more about having a feeling that my win's and losses will average out over time. Some missions I'll be favored to win, others I'll loose, but "winning" isn't the driving call to play. If all casual play is shoehorned into a competitive ITC format, those army lists that excel in that format will routinely win over and over against armies that aren't well positioned for it. That's the issue I see.
Next is the matter of balance in a tournament-format. If people want to play defined missions and list-build around a tournament mission pack, go right ahead. That's totally fine and no one is stopping anyone from doing that.
I DO, however, wonder about what a slightly less-competitive tournament format could look like with there being a more diverse mission pool and a way for players iteratively select a mission that both sides find agreeable. Rather than strict wins and loses, points could be awarded based on margin's of victory determined by the missions and normalized over the course of the tournament. Just a side thought...
Thirdly - the point of all of this mission design stuff IS to impact list construction as well. "What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?" I'd argue that players should considered the "what if" of having to hold a bunker during list construction, along with all the other what ifs that the missions might require. A more diverse mission pool would INTEND to erode the ability to optimize a list towards a narrow set of objectives. By forcing players to consider these what-ifs, it has the knock on effect of forcing more TAC style of lists IMHO.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
auticus wrote: This is the cost of streamlining and making the game as accessible as possible.
I agree with that intent/desire in theory. In practice, I don't think 40K has ever been more convoluted and challenging. The core rules are fairly simple, but codexes are incredibly dense and rule overhead of the game has grown considerably IMHO.
I'm thinking about balance from a non-tournament perspective, and lamenting that tournament-style play and attitudes have taken over what was once more casual. From this more casual perspective, "balance" is more about having a feeling that my win's and losses will average out over time. Some missions I'll be favored to win, others I'll loose, but "winning" isn't the driving call to play. If all casual play is shoehorned into a competitive ITC format, those army lists that excel in that format will routinely win over and over against armies that aren't well positioned for it. That's the issue I see.
Define casual.
Because as I understand it, "casual" encompasses a massive and broad spectrum, from pick-up games with strangers to friendly games in a well established communities to narrative games.
Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?
Few things going on...
First - we should talk about what direction we're coming at this from.
I'm thinking about balance from a non-tournament perspective, and lamenting that tournament-style play and attitudes have taken over what was once more casual. From this more casual perspective, "balance" is more about having a feeling that my win's and losses will average out over time. Some missions I'll be favored to win, others I'll loose, but "winning" isn't the driving call to play. If all casual play is shoehorned into a competitive ITC format, those army lists that excel in that format will routinely win over and over against armies that aren't well positioned for it. That's the issue I see.
Next is the matter of balance in a tournament-format. If people want to play defined missions and list-build around a tournament mission pack, go right ahead. That's totally fine and no one is stopping anyone from doing that.
I DO, however, wonder about what a slightly less-competitive tournament format could look like with there being a more diverse mission pool and a way for players iteratively select a mission that both sides find agreeable. Rather than strict wins and loses, points could be awarded based on margin's of victory determined by the missions and normalized over the course of the tournament. Just a side thought...
I guess I'm confused. Crusade has asymmetrical missions that seem to fit what you're looking for.
Thirdly - the point of all of this mission design stuff IS to impact list construction as well. "What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?" I'd argue that players should considered the "what if" of having to hold a bunker during list construction, along with all the other what ifs that the missions might require. A more diverse mission pool would INTEND to erode the ability to optimize a list towards a narrow set of objectives. By forcing players to consider these what-ifs, it has the knock on effect of forcing more TAC style of lists IMHO.
I don't know if this is practical given some armies are just different overall. Lists have been pretty TAC in my eyes. Knights don't use four superheavies, people rarely take massed anti-tank, melee and ranged units are useful, and so on.
List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.
Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.
List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.
Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.
List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.
Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.
I think that is about where I land with it too. But yeah... someone that is very competitive is never going to see things like that or want to participate in something like that.
And I think thats ok. But depending on your community if they are all like that (like mine was) that is going to push you out. But them's the breaks I suppose.
Daedalus81 wrote: Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?
Then your opponent knowingly built an army that can't play as well to one of the known missions and you have the advantage. Is that actually a problem? You wouldn't build a list with no mobile units and no obsec and then complain that you can't play missions with progressive scoring.
Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought. And more power to them if that's really the kind of game they want; but it sucks for the rest of us when the core game doesn't even have attackers and defenders (let alone varied objectives) because traditional tournament formats can't handle it.
List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.
Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.
There's a pretty big range of people at tournaments. I'd say at least 20% at bigger tournaments are literally just there to roll dice and have fun, win or lose.
Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought.
I agree with that thought, especially after years of being screamed at for non traditional scenarios for that very reason.
For the same reason random elements are taboo. If you can't optimize ahead of time for it, its seen as bad or a waste of time because thats testing reactionary skills which is a completely different set of skills that the modern game pushes.
The more actually DIFFERENT scenarios you have, the harder it is to optimize for them all which means the harder it is to lean hard on a traditional skewed list.
Which is no surprise to me that the scenarios in 40k have largely been about the same type of thing only dressed different to give the illusion of a variety of mission types.
40k is as much pivotal around building a list and seeing how that combination works in a static set of parameters as it is about the gameplay during the game, if not more so for many many people.
List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.
Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.
I’m going to slightly disagree with my main point here by stating I don’t think mission designed in 9th is the problem.
I think you are conflating people’s natural desire to win with issues in mission design. As stated, there are plenty of crusade missions that are much more narratively driven and can be asymmetric in both scoring, and board setup. Many people don’t play these at all, and those that do usually only do it every once in a while as breath of fresh air from the usual matchplay missions.
Do the mission designs favor certain armies? Of course, but that’s always going be the case. End of game scoring missions favor armies that can kill effectively. Maelstrom missions favored armies with excellent mobility over armies with less good options. Asymmetrical missions favor armies that better fill their conditions.
However, It’s not the missions that are forcing people to play competitively, it’s because they want to win. When talking about 8th being more balanced than 9th people’s main counterpoint was “yeah but what about all these soup lists?” Literally all you needed to do to stop these was just agree with your opponent to play mono-book armies, but this rarely happened. Why? Because unlike what you and many posters on here claim, most people playing games are there to primarily to test their skill and army builds. Not build a story or use luck to determine a winner. If a mission design changes to one of your suggested models, then people will just restructure their armies to better take advantage of them.
Automatically Appended Next Post: To those asking what evidence I have 9th is less balanced than 8th, it’s mainly due to LVO winrates. Look Peter the Falcons 2019 article on that years LVO winrate (2018 ITC season). In that article he has chart showing lists that had a certain armies winrates. The highest faction with any play % was Ynnari at just sub 60%. Those dreaded knight soup builds had a 55% winrate. Guard had a 52% winrate,
Admittedly things got worse post SM 2.0. That said a lot of you are overrating how bad it was simply because SM are more common than the more dominant factions of this edition. For example, pre-nerf ironhands had basically the same winrate as pre-nerf DE. Most SM chapters had worse winrates than Custodes, Tau, and Tyranids had this past weekend. And let’s also remember that the 2.0 era only lasted 3/4 of year, not even 1/4 of 8th’s life span.
And remember that those of you saying that’s just competitive winrates, it is as perfectly fine for you and your opponent to agree not to soup.
The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.
Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.
I don't think 40k has ever been smarter than that.
But about the mission discussion: 9th missions are ITC missions with some tweaks.
In 8th theres a reason why outside of america not many people played ITC missions. I tried some ITC spanish tournaments and didn't liked them at all.
And thats the bigger reason why I cannot enjoy 9th, because I enjoyed 8th even having worse rules for my armies and the game being as streamlined as 9th.
And is not something I can point out to ITC style missions to say why I don't enjoy them or find less enjoyable than the last incarnations of malestrom missions. But I do. And many of my friends feel the same.
Jidmah wrote: Orks currently have 74 datasheets available for play. Two thirds of that is ~49. Show me a single codex in the game that has ever had that many datasheets show up top tournament lists in any edition.
Do you feel that every datasheet in the codex is on the same level as the ones that had to be hard-limited, or are you missing the actual point, which was that aircraft and buggies doing great does not mean everything in the codex is doing equally great, and internal balance is still a concern?
There are tournament winning lists without a single buggy or plane. This is alone is sufficient proof to debunk your argument.
Buggies were limited because of squig buggies, full stop. Planes were not just limited because of orks, but also because of ad mech. Good planes and cheap shooting units that ignore LoS have been a problem all through 8th and 9th, for all sorts of factions, each time for the exact same reason.
The reason why they were spammed was because they reached a critical mass that way. A single squig buggy isn't a more powerful model than a snazzwagon or SJD, but bringing 9 allows you to wipe out your opponent's counters to your army no matter how well they are hidden.
So yes, internal balance is not a concern for orks outside of the troops slot.
Jidmah wrote: No proof, just yet another person stating their subjective opinion as absolute truth and telling everyone to complain to GW while they complain to dakka.
Statistically we're probably not likely worse off, but I think with the pace of things it gets very difficult to deal with new armies.
Take T'au -- W4/W8 suits with W2 drones that have a 4++. Previously D2 was becoming verboten, but now it might need some sunlight to deal with suits and drones. Trying to puzzle that out while still striking a balance against other armies like Custodes with W5 bikes can be difficult - especially if you're not a Dark Lance army.
We're going to be dealing with GSC, Custodes, T'au, Eldar, and Tyranids all within 3 months worth of time or so. And then we'll have CSM not long thereafter.
It's a ton of info to process.
Yeah, the combination of ridiculous power creep in the last few codices combined with blast-from-the-past balance adjustments doesn't paint a great future for 9th. If they don't change course soon, this is not going to end well for neither competitive nor casual players.
Daedalus81 wrote: Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?
Then your opponent knowingly built an army that can't play as well to one of the known missions and you have the advantage. Is that actually a problem? You wouldn't build a list with no mobile units and no obsec and then complain that you can't play missions with progressive scoring.
Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought. And more power to them if that's really the kind of game they want; but it sucks for the rest of us when the core game doesn't even have attackers and defenders (let alone varied objectives) because traditional tournament formats can't handle it.
I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".
I think the best approach is something used in a number of games, most notably a couple of FFG's Star Wars miniature games. Each player has cards with deployment maps and missions on them, chosen from a larger set of cards, and these form a pool of options at the start of the game. There's a back-and-forth mechanic of eliminating cards from the pool until you end up with a mission/deployment combination (there's also a third set of cards that may or may not be secondary objectives, can't recall right now). It's quite similar to how pairings work in team tournaments in that there's some control for both sides but rarely total control. So you can choose to bring missions that favour your own army, but you may not actually get to play those in some games so you still need flexibility. The good thing about this system is you don't need a huge number of options to create a large number of possibilities. It also leads to scenarios where both players may generally favour the same mission/deployment combo but you then have to decide whether the specific match-up of players and armies favours your preferred mission or whether you'd have a better chance of winning by coming out of your comfort zone.
Look at their financials. They’re there for the viewing.
Sales are down in the financials, but they made more money in royalties. It's too early to tell if this is the Covid bubble deflating, or if people are just not happy with the direction of the game and leaving for other things though.
List is easy. It's basically putting together a list where, for whatever reason, the overriding imperative is NOT to maximize or over emphasize its power and expected potential to win. It could be someone starting out in the hobby and they just bought units they like. It could be someone trying to run a fluffy list with no eye towards being particularly competitive. It could be someone taking a list they think we will perform well, but they aren't trying to chase or respond to any particular meta. It could be just a matter of simply not deciding to overly optimize unit selection and options.
Attitude for casual play is more about playing to make sure everyone has FUN, and feels like they are in the running, rather than just playing to win. This may mean doing things with your units that are suboptimal in-game just in order to make a more narrative moment or give a minor concession to your opponent.
As for attitude, that's not an argument between casual and competitive mindsets. It just depends on the person.
I've played with lots of "WAAC" competitive players who were a joy to play with (the only ones who play by intent, usually) and "fluffy casual" ones who spent the whole 3 hours bitching constantly.
I can't speak for how balanced 9th's missions are exactly, nor will I try to speak to how "fun" people should find them, but I will say that I think the game moving away from killing being the main mode of scoring (with all the killing points options being secondaries) has been a healthier move for the game in a competitive sense..
That said, I get that some people just don't like objective missions. That's always been the case and I can't count the number of times in past editions where the game mode defaulted to 'kill stuff' over playing objective missions because it required less thinking and you could just smash armies into each other and the more efficient one tended to come out on top.
That's not to say the current missions are perfect, but I like the trajectory we're on and GW seems intent on trying to make the game more balanced by tweaking mission design and secondaries regularly which makes for a better competetive game.
That said, sometimes you want to just line up on Dawn of War deployment and mash armies into each other (because that happens even in 40k lore too, after all not every battle is a WWI style affair of trading the same ground back and forth over and over again), which seems better suited to be something for Narrative missions where the balance doesn't have to be as tight because the intent is a good story over a balanced game.
Salt donkey wrote: To those asking what evidence I have 9th is less balanced than 8th, it’s mainly due to LVO winrates. Look Peter the Falcons 2019 article on that years LVO winrate (2018 ITC season). In that article he has chart showing lists that had a certain armies winrates. The highest faction with any play % was Ynnari at just sub 60%. Those dreaded knight soup builds had a 55% winrate. Guard had a 52% winrate,
I feel soup serves to make quantifying "power" back in 2018 (and then comparing the situation today) significantly more difficult.
For example in the article, 24.81% of lists of that LVO included Guard. 22% included Knights. (Just shy of 10% of lists each for "primary detachment" - but that terminology has always been kind of suspect).
Then you've got about 14% of lists including CWE, DE and 7% Ynnari. But in terms of primary detachment its 4%, 7% and 6% respectively.
So okay - we can say "Armies with a Knight Detachment got a 55% win rate" - but what does that mean? Is someone running your cliched Guard+Knight+Smash Captain build really the same as someone who ran mono knights? Or someone relatively casual who brought along a bunch of unsynergised Tactical Marines and a knight because, why not they look cool?
Further down in that article we get some more interesting facts. If you took the 84 players in the top 150 of the ITC at the LVO, their collective average win rate was 70%. Rising to some 79% against players outside this bracket. The balanced thing would be the variety of lists those 84 ran - almost every faction. And to be fair - most factions got one player to 5-1 or better.
But again - what that means is hard to quantify. So for example only 11.29% of lists with a Guard Primary Detachment went 5-1 or better. But... 32.26% of lists that went 5-1 or better had "some" guard presence. Out of the 43.56% of all Imperial lists that could have souped in Guard. What does that tell us about Guard Power? Is this a loyal 32? Is this 1000+ points? Is it mono Guard with 17 Space Marines?
If we look at the more recent LVO two things step out.
First - there's probably a greater concentration at the top. In terms of getting 4 wins there is very widespread factions. But at 5+ wins, Custodes, DE and Tyranids clearly stand out - with most other factions only getting 1 or a handful through (4 Orks, 5 GK.). But this might actually be fairer than saying "X made it" because they were the largest detachment in a soup list.
Second - and maybe this is special pleading - but the lack of soup is likely to spike the win % stats. Because there's a cleaner delineation. A DE list is a DE list. It isn't anything from 100% DE, to say 40% DE, 35% Ynnari and 25% CWE (or Harlequins etc). People can presumably build bad DE/Custodes/Tyranid lists - but the pool is potentially lower. As I think the most played faction in this LVO (if we give Space Marines their special flavours) 7% of the field ran Custodes. Compare that with the 24% or 22% of lists having some Guard or Knights above.
Put another way - if you thought (as most competitive players probably did) that Custodes, DE and Tyranids were the factions to beat, they were weirdly unrepresented at the LVO - making up sub 25% of lists. Also Ad Mech did actually win and their faction win rate was only 45%.
Not entirely sure how you'd crunch it - but "Imperial Soup" and "Eldar Soup" were approaching 50%~ of the lists at the 2018/19 LVO. I also think that meta had been in place for about 6 months and had become somewhat hardboiled as a result. The lists that worked (and in turn, the lists that worked against the lists that worked) had largely been in place for six months. By comparison I feel the LVO meta was very different to say the situation in July 2021 - and its been reset again last week.
Look at their financials. They’re there for the viewing.
Sales are down in the financials, but they made more money in royalties. It's too early to tell if this is the Covid bubble deflating, or if people are just not happy with the direction of the game and leaving for other things though.
Revenue is up. Profit is down. Which means sales are up.
Profit will fluctuate based on what portion of sales go through FLGS who get product 50% off. When the pandemic hit the only way to buy from GW was their website, which is essentially 99% profit. Profit going down when people are exiting the pandemic ( for now ) and inflation is rising doesn't mean GW is failing.
The half year before the pandemic was 148M. This one was 192M.
I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".
Back when I played GWGT's in the dark ages, GW came to the tournament with the missions in hand (each mission was different for 6 rounds). As a player, I had no idea what missions, objectives, terrain stuff, or whatever would be in the mission. So I had to build my lists to be as flexible as possible. Now, of course it was possible to hyper specialize and roll some scenarios, but it wasn't foolproof. Also, the overall winner wasn't the one with the most wins/victory points, but that's another discussion.
Point is you played scenarios from the last GT, the rulebook, and whatever supplements had come out to see how your army performed overall.
Later, GW started putting the scenarios in their tournament packs, so people could practice those scenarios, but you still didn't know who you'd be facing, or what terrain might look like.
The more the random element gets strangled out of the game, the less swings you get, and the less the game requires "skill" as a determining factor. There are just more and less optimal choices of what to do with your units now. Pick list, make obvious moves/choices, profit. All in my opinion. And its why I stopped attending tournaments and got off the churn wagon, especially when tournaments were going to be the focus (nod to Crusade as the way things should be baseline).
Revenue is up. Profit is down. Which means sales are up.
Yeahhhhh, that's not really true.
Profit will fluctuate based on what portion of sales go through FLGS who get product 50% off. When the pandemic hit the only way to buy from GW was their website, which is essentially 99% profit. Profit going down when people are exiting the pandemic ( for now ) and inflation is rising doesn't mean GW is failing.
The half year before the pandemic was 148M. This one was 192M.
But this part is true, and certainly the last part. It's choppy waters on the seas of high finance right now.
Daedalus81 wrote: I think the power of some books is a little more difficult to control. DE took quite a few nerfs ( and some dumb buffs ), but kept on ticking, because what makes them run isn't entirely locked behind points.
Custodes, in theory, should be kept in check by -1D stuff, but they're so god damn efficient it doesn't matter.
T'au is running a ton of units that should promote D2, but people probably still dodge it, because of D1. I haven't had the pleasure of playing them yet, but most of the lists look like they just aim to mostly wipe you out as fast as possible.
Nids are running an AoR with book mechanics that they shouldn't have.
With the Custodes points ping pong and the book schedule so clearly awry is seems GW can't stay ahead of the curve. It's very reminiscent of patching video games after release. I do think they have some overarching design decisions, but nothing is ready to test with everything before it.
Fortunately, we do have an outlet with 6 month CA and 3 month slates, but few want to deal with the seesaw if the spikes are going to be this steep.
I think with enough ( calm ) pressure we could perhaps force GW to put point adjustments in the slate until the book releases calm down or they get their internal issues under control.
Except, as demonstrated by the CA and balance sheet we've already had, GW doesn't intend to use CA OR the slate to do anything to balance the game.
CA2022 and the Balance Slate arguably made balance WORSE. They didn't do much to curb the most powerful armies, took the legs out from under mid-tier armies, and did nothing to help low tier armies/units.
I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".
Back when I played GWGT's in the dark ages, GW came to the tournament with the missions in hand (each mission was different for 6 rounds). As a player, I had no idea what missions, objectives, terrain stuff, or whatever would be in the mission. So I had to build my lists to be as flexible as possible. Now, of course it was possible to hyper specialize and roll some scenarios, but it wasn't foolproof. Also, the overall winner wasn't the one with the most wins/victory points, but that's another discussion.
Point is you played scenarios from the last GT, the rulebook, and whatever supplements had come out to see how your army performed overall.
Later, GW started putting the scenarios in their tournament packs, so people could practice those scenarios, but you still didn't know who you'd be facing, or what terrain might look like.
The more the random element gets strangled out of the game, the less swings you get, and the less the game requires "skill" as a determining factor. There are just more and less optimal choices of what to do with your units now. Pick list, make obvious moves/choices, profit. All in my opinion. And its why I stopped attending tournaments and got off the churn wagon, especially when tournaments were going to be the focus (nod to Crusade as the way things should be baseline).
Randomness is almost always anti-skill. The 'swings' are what hand weaker players victories. The more 'swings' there are, the less likely it is that 'who is the better player' will determine the victor.
The common counter argument is that skill is demonstrated by dealing with adversity, but that's only true in the incredibly narrow area where the amount of adversity faced is less than or equal to the skill difference between the two players. If you bring a mechanized infantry army against knights in what ends up being a pure killpoint match(oldschool, where it was 1 unit=1 kill point and nothing else mattered), there's no real way to win that. If the scenario has randomized points values for objectives (which GW missions have had in the past) and your opponent rolls all maximum values and you roll all minimum, you'd need to score multiple TIMES more objective than your opponent. You skill would be largely irrelevant.
Also, people say 'oh, the correct moves are obvious' and then proceed to very rarely make the correct moves.
The issue right now for external balance is that GW has spun the rules reset again and so certain codexes which kind of worked with multi-chapter builds are now wanting. GW should release points updates to recognise this reality. But they need data.
What they really need is not data but actually well working brains, how dumb it is to pile nerf on nerf on nerf on SoB as a very good example of an army that wasn't even Top Tier but is strongly affected by the no mixed chapters rule is so painfully obvious, if Grey Knights would be broken i would immediately suspect Matt Ward is back.
The other factor is, I truly believe, the streamlining and simplification of the core rules. Simplification of morale, removal of vehicles, eliminations of restrictions for firing and target selections, etc. all reduce the avenues for counter-play and generalship that previously created openings for different units to play an impactful role on the battlefield. This in turn makes the game even more of a numbers game than it already was. If there is no avenue for counte rplay, all I can do is hope that I can statistically put out more fire than you and roll well enough to get ahead.
Exactly this, the dumbing down of gameplay until only two battlefield roles remain: be good at standing in circles or be good at removing things from circles.
I don't think 40k has ever been smarter than that.
People think that because it took 35 pages to explain how movement worked (not hyperbole, to be able to move a unit from one side of the board to the other used to take 35 pages of rules, which was stupid) and they used to have to roll a 4 instead of a 3 to instantly kill a tank if they were standing in front of it; that previous editions were masterclasses of tactical acumen and strategic decision making.
ERJAK wrote: Randomness is almost always anti-skill. The 'swings' are what hand weaker players victories. The more 'swings' there are, the less likely it is that 'who is the better player' will determine the victor.
It really depends on the volume of randomness and to what extent it can be mitigated.
The randomness related to mission design is heavily mitigatable. Taking an extreme example, let's suppose there are two missions A and X. One player makes an army that will perform exceptionally well in one mission, but poorly in the other. Depending on what mission is drawn and what their opponent's army is (well suited, not-well suited, or neutral) will determine their success. A strategy could be to make an army that wins mission A 75% of the time, except against other well-suited armies (and then it's a 50% chance). But they then only win Mission X 25% of the time. Or do you make an army that has a good chance (e.g. 50%) of winning regardless of mission drawn and regardless of what the opponent plays. Expand this out to a pool of 5 or 6 fundamentally different styles of missions. Maybe your army is only going to excel at 1-2 or them, versus the more generalized army that has a modest chance at all 5 or 6.
List design can be used as a mitigating factor when it comes to the randomness in the mission setup.
People think that because it took 35 pages to explain how movement worked (not hyperbole, to be able to move a unit from one side of the board to the other used to take 35 pages of rules, which was stupid)
What are you even talking about? What 35 pages of rules?
Daedalus81 wrote: Assymetrical stuff is fine...if both players play the game twice and switch sides. They're otherwise hugely impractical for tournaments. What if you're just a better bunker holding army and you win that roll off?
Then your opponent knowingly built an army that can't play as well to one of the known missions and you have the advantage. Is that actually a problem? You wouldn't build a list with no mobile units and no obsec and then complain that you can't play missions with progressive scoring.
Frankly, it sounds like the game some competitive players want is a single fixed mission with a single fixed battlefield layout laid out in the rulebook, just to make absolutely certain that everything about the 40K Competitive Experience is completely predictable ahead of time and can be ruthlessly optimized without having to prepare for any contingency besides what list your opponent brought. And more power to them if that's really the kind of game they want; but it sucks for the rest of us when the core game doesn't even have attackers and defenders (let alone varied objectives) because traditional tournament formats can't handle it.
I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".
I think the best approach is something used in a number of games, most notably a couple of FFG's Star Wars miniature games. Each player has cards with deployment maps and missions on them, chosen from a larger set of cards, and these form a pool of options at the start of the game. There's a back-and-forth mechanic of eliminating cards from the pool until you end up with a mission/deployment combination (there's also a third set of cards that may or may not be secondary objectives, can't recall right now). It's quite similar to how pairings work in team tournaments in that there's some control for both sides but rarely total control. So you can choose to bring missions that favour your own army, but you may not actually get to play those in some games so you still need flexibility. The good thing about this system is you don't need a huge number of options to create a large number of possibilities. It also leads to scenarios where both players may generally favour the same mission/deployment combo but you then have to decide whether the specific match-up of players and armies favours your preferred mission or whether you'd have a better chance of winning by coming out of your comfort zone.
You're leaving out that there's a 'bidding system" that determines which deck gets used. i.e. whoever has the fewer points gets to use their own deck.
Ask anyone who plays Star Wars Legion and they'll tell you that plenty of games are won and lost in 'turn 0'. People sacrifice entire units worth of dead points just to secure blue side so they can use their own deck.
MCP has a similar system, each mission has creates two decks of 3 objectives; secures and extracts. The player with priority (i.e. first turn) decides whether they want to use their extract deck or their secure deck. The one they don't choose uses the OTHER player's deck. Then one card is drawn at random from the 3 and that's the mission for that round. That seems like it should be pretty fair but is honestly just another thing to optimize. If your army is predominantly focused on aggressive fighting, you choose center map objectives that force squads into close combat. Even if your opponent's cards are more spread out, you can usually get enough points off the center map to only need a token effort on the spread out objectives.
If your squad is focused on objective control, you take secures and force spread out fights on 4 corners objectives. Extractions generally reward high movement and activation count anyway so you force your opponent's aggressive list to try and match you in speed a lot of the time. Getting priority can be a very significant advantage and a lot of thought goes into exactly what 3 cards to bring in each deck. The decks also aren't necessarily well balanced against each other, secures are generally much more valuable because they don't move like most extractions do AND there are almost twice as many options for secures as their are for extracts. Cases where extracts are more valuable generally revolve around edge cases where certain characters can capture every objective in one turn with shenanigans.
ERJAK wrote: Randomness is almost always anti-skill. The 'swings' are what hand weaker players victories. The more 'swings' there are, the less likely it is that 'who is the better player' will determine the victor.
It really depends on the volume of randomness and to what extent it can be mitigated.
The randomness related to mission design is heavily mitigatable. Taking an extreme example, let's suppose there are two missions A and X. One player makes an army that will perform exceptionally well in one mission, but poorly in the other. Depending on what mission is drawn and what their opponent's army is (well suited, not-well suited, or neutral) will determine their success. A strategy could be to make an army that wins mission A 75% of the time, except against other well-suited armies (and then it's a 50% chance). But they then only win Mission X 25% of the time. Or do you make an army that has a good chance (e.g. 50%) of winning regardless of mission drawn and regardless of what the opponent plays. Expand this out to a pool of 5 or 6 fundamentally different styles of missions. Maybe your army is only going to excel at 1-2 or them, versus the more generalized army that has a modest chance at all 5 or 6.
List design can be used as a mitigating factor when it comes to the randomness in the mission setup.
People think that because it took 35 pages to explain how movement worked (not hyperbole, to be able to move a unit from one side of the board to the other used to take 35 pages of rules, which was stupid)
What are you even talking about? What 35 pages of rules?
The explanation for how to move all the different unit types in the game from out in the open into a building (which is going to be necessary to move from one side of the board to the other) required you to memorize 35 pages of rules in 7th edition. Dangerous terrain, difficult terrain, jetbikes, monstrous creatures, etc, etc, etc.
AoS tried designing missions like that for a long time and what happens is that around 20% of games end up finishing with 10 minutes of deployment. People still skew, hoping for favorable draws. If they get those good draws against a TAC army or an army with an unfavorable skew, they win pretty much automatically. If they get bad draws against tac armies or against an army that has a more favorable skew, they pretty much always lose. So you end up with a lot of events where the results were: 1. Skew army that got lucky, 2. Tac army that didn't draw skew in the bad missions, 3. Slightly less lucky skew army, 4. Slightly less lucky skew army.
I do not understand the logic here. They're up 5M from the last half year and those figures are pre price increases.
I also don't really understand why people get mad at business for focusing on "increasing the numbers" and then consider a business failing if the numbers don't hit some imaginary line.
I'll shut up on this now though since we're way off the thread.
ERJAK wrote: AoS tried designing missions like that for a long time and what happens is that around 20% of games end up finishing with 10 minutes of deployment. People still skew, hoping for favorable draws. If they get those good draws against a TAC army or an army with an unfavorable skew, they win pretty much automatically. If they get bad draws against tac armies or against an army that has a more favorable skew, they pretty much always lose. So you end up with a lot of events where the results were: 1. Skew army that got lucky, 2. Tac army that didn't draw skew in the bad missions, 3. Slightly less lucky skew army, 4. Slightly less lucky skew army.
Was going to post something like this.
Whether in a casual game or a tournament, its not fun to roll up the mission and find one list has a major advantage over the other.
Saying "players should mitigate" is a bit meaningless - because some won't.
Jidmah wrote:So yes, internal balance is not a concern for orks outside of the troops slot.
So internal balance is still a concern for Ork infantry.
So, past all the nitpicking of things you've read into my posts, you actually agree with my original point.
Slipspace wrote:I agree. It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place. It's true that you need to be really careful with the mission design in an system with asymmetry because you can't just create scenarios that are flat-out "this style of army loses".
I think the best approach is something used in a number of games, most notably a couple of FFG's Star Wars miniature games. Each player has cards with deployment maps and missions on them, chosen from a larger set of cards, and these form a pool of options at the start of the game. There's a back-and-forth mechanic of eliminating cards from the pool until you end up with a mission/deployment combination (there's also a third set of cards that may or may not be secondary objectives, can't recall right now). It's quite similar to how pairings work in team tournaments in that there's some control for both sides but rarely total control. So you can choose to bring missions that favour your own army, but you may not actually get to play those in some games so you still need flexibility. The good thing about this system is you don't need a huge number of options to create a large number of possibilities. It also leads to scenarios where both players may generally favour the same mission/deployment combo but you then have to decide whether the specific match-up of players and armies favours your preferred mission or whether you'd have a better chance of winning by coming out of your comfort zone.
Dust Warfare took a similar approach. Basically you got a number of points pre-game to spend on mission, deployment, and condition tracks. You and your opponent take turns allocating points to advance the tracks (they're all one-way, so you can't spend points to undo what your opponent did). So if you were playing a gunline, you could put points into battlefield conditions to get rid of night fighting and ensure clear visibility- but then if your opponent was a melee army, they might put points into deployment to start the armies closer together.
I find that the challenge with these systems (and with pick-your-own secondary objectives) is that it's tough to make it so that you can mitigate a bad matchup, without also making it such that you can skew the game to favor your list. I haven't played Star Wars, but I would think that if I have a static gunline, I'd bring just deployments and missions that favor me, and so I'm bound to get something that gives me a leg up. But if it does work in practice, I'd definitely be open to something like that for 40K.
As time goes on, the more I think that 40K's approach of having armies, missions, and battlefields all determined in a vacuum is pretty dated. We talked a little bit about it in the 'do they just make it up as they go along' thread, but I'd be interested to see a 40K where there's more of a tangible connection between those pre-game elements. Maybe a sideboard or 'reinforcement points' so you can bring in tailored forces to counter your opponent or suit the mission, or just mechanics like you discuss where players have some input into the mission setup. I think a lot of the heartburn over skew lists and varied mission objectives could be alleviated if you had some control over the process.
The WarCom article today showing the new Howling Banshee rules really make me scratch my head.
The banshee mask rule is either massive oversight that will be FAQ'd or working as intended and the power level is through the roof.
RAW you can declare a charge on every single unit within 12" of a banshee mask unit and those units cannot overwatch or set to defend that turn... You do not even need to successfully make a charge roll...
Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
Tittliewinks22 wrote: The WarCom article today showing the new Howling Banshee rules really make me scratch my head.
The banshee mask rule is either massive oversight that will be FAQ'd or working as intended and the power level is through the roof.
RAW you can declare a charge on every single unit within 12" of a banshee mask unit and those units cannot overwatch or set to defend that turn... You do not even need to successfully make a charge roll...
Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
Well, if you can you'll probably be paying 85+ points to do so and tanking their charge. It'd be something that would concern me more in 8th when overwatch was free and unrestricted.
That said this is the way they have to word it. The charge result can't be determined prior to overwatch.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: The WarCom article today showing the new Howling Banshee rules really make me scratch my head.
The banshee mask rule is either massive oversight that will be FAQ'd or working as intended and the power level is through the roof.
RAW you can declare a charge on every single unit within 12" of a banshee mask unit and those units cannot overwatch or set to defend that turn... You do not even need to successfully make a charge roll...
Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
Well, if you can you'll probably be paying 85+ points to do so and tanking their charge. It'd be something that would concern me more in 8th when overwatch was free and unrestricted.
That said this is the way they have to word it. The charge result can't be determined prior to overwatch.
I think the leaked rumor has them at 18 points per model as well. Seems like a risky gamble, but does appear to be a bit of an oversight. I'd be curious how they can reword it to work. Maybe "Cannot fire overwatch or etc at this unit when the charge is declared"
ERJAK wrote: AoS tried designing missions like that for a long time and what happens is that around 20% of games end up finishing with 10 minutes of deployment. People still skew, hoping for favorable draws. If they get those good draws against a TAC army or an army with an unfavorable skew, they win pretty much automatically. If they get bad draws against tac armies or against an army that has a more favorable skew, they pretty much always lose. So you end up with a lot of events where the results were: 1. Skew army that got lucky, 2. Tac army that didn't draw skew in the bad missions, 3. Slightly less lucky skew army, 4. Slightly less lucky skew army.
Was going to post something like this.
Whether in a casual game or a tournament, its not fun to roll up the mission and find one list has a major advantage over the other.
Saying "players should mitigate" is a bit meaningless - because some won't.
That's why you need to have a system where you do something like draw/roll three missions, and then players each get to veto one.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: The WarCom article today showing the new Howling Banshee rules really make me scratch my head.
The banshee mask rule is either massive oversight that will be FAQ'd or working as intended and the power level is through the roof.
RAW you can declare a charge on every single unit within 12" of a banshee mask unit and those units cannot overwatch or set to defend that turn... You do not even need to successfully make a charge roll...
Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
Well, if you can you'll probably be paying 85+ points to do so and tanking their charge. It'd be something that would concern me more in 8th when overwatch was free and unrestricted.
That said this is the way they have to word it. The charge result can't be determined prior to overwatch.
I think the leaked rumor has them at 18 points per model as well. Seems like a risky gamble, but does appear to be a bit of an oversight. I'd be curious how they can reword it to work. Maybe "Cannot fire overwatch or etc at this unit when the charge is declared"
I suppose they could just say up to two units and not worry about legitimate edge cases.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
What really needs to happen is content creators need to start publicly dragging them for it, but that is unlikely to happen because people love those clicks too much.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
What really needs to happen is content creators need to start publicly dragging them for it, but that is unlikely to happen because people love those clicks too much.
There are plenty of content creators who entire platforms are built on dragging GW (such as Spikey Bits), thing is when all you do is drag GW for everything then it all becomes white noise, especially for those being targeted by it.
It's not that I don't think deconstructing the game and what works and what doesn't wouldn't be valuable, I just think that your average person who'd want to drag GW for their design choices are the ones who farm reactionary clicks all the time to the point that I don't think GW would notice.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: The WarCom article today showing the new Howling Banshee rules really make me scratch my head.
The banshee mask rule is either massive oversight that will be FAQ'd or working as intended and the power level is through the roof.
RAW you can declare a charge on every single unit within 12" of a banshee mask unit and those units cannot overwatch or set to defend that turn... You do not even need to successfully make a charge roll...
Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
Well, if you can you'll probably be paying 85+ points to do so and tanking their charge. It'd be something that would concern me more in 8th when overwatch was free and unrestricted.
That said this is the way they have to word it. The charge result can't be determined prior to overwatch.
Doesn't need to be this way. Could have been a simple 'you cannot shoot overwatch at this unit' and it would still have done the job.
Tittliewinks22 wrote: The WarCom article today showing the new Howling Banshee rules really make me scratch my head.
The banshee mask rule is either massive oversight that will be FAQ'd or working as intended and the power level is through the roof.
RAW you can declare a charge on every single unit within 12" of a banshee mask unit and those units cannot overwatch or set to defend that turn... You do not even need to successfully make a charge roll...
Is it time to boycott GW until they can get competent rules team?
Well, if you can you'll probably be paying 85+ points to do so and tanking their charge. It'd be something that would concern me more in 8th when overwatch was free and unrestricted.
That said this is the way they have to word it. The charge result can't be determined prior to overwatch.
Doesn't need to be this way. Could have been a simple 'you cannot shoot overwatch at this unit' and it would still have done the job.
I guess the intent was they wanted it to apply even if the Banshees fail their charge?
ClockworkZion wrote: I guess the intent was they wanted it to apply even if the Banshees fail their charge?
That or WHC isn't showing the full rule again.
That's the full rule, the whole datasheet has been leaked already (picture of the codex page). RAW, they turn off overwatch against every target they declare to charge.
ClockworkZion wrote: I guess the intent was they wanted it to apply even if the Banshees fail their charge?
That or WHC isn't showing the full rule again.
That's the full rule, the whole datasheet has been leaked already (picture of the codex page). RAW, they turn off overwatch against every target they declare to charge.
So a 12" bubble of no overwatch followed by auto-failing their charge because they can't reach out and touch every unit they're targeting.
Slipspace wrote: It's odd when the counter arguments for changing the mission design are "but then each mission would favour different types of army" when that's kind of the point in the first place.
To me the benefit of diverse missions is changing how you win, not whether you win. If the mission decides the victor once in a while I'm okay with that, even if the missions were designed for competitive play, but I am saying that is an unfortunate but acceptable cost to get something desirable (different ways to enjoy the game) not the goal in and of itself. If all you wanted was randomly determining whether your army is good or bad at a mission you could just give each player 1D20 VP at the start and/or end of the game. It's much easier to make a game imbalanced than it is to balance a game. How do I wave a wand to get balanced games against Knights if there is a "Titanic bad" mission and a "vehicles bad" mission and the remaining missions are "Titanic stomping ground" missions? I'd much rather every mission be more or less equally easy to play against Knights. If the Knight player wants to go easy on me they can bring a softer Knight list and if I want to go easy on the Knight player I can bring a softer list.
ERJAK wrote: AoS tried designing missions like that for a long time and what happens is that around 20% of games end up finishing with 10 minutes of deployment. People still skew, hoping for favorable draws. If they get those good draws against a TAC army or an army with an unfavorable skew, they win pretty much automatically. If they get bad draws against tac armies or against an army that has a more favorable skew, they pretty much always lose. So you end up with a lot of events where the results were: 1. Skew army that got lucky, 2. Tac army that didn't draw skew in the bad missions, 3. Slightly less lucky skew army, 4. Slightly less lucky skew army.
Was going to post something like this.
Whether in a casual game or a tournament, its not fun to roll up the mission and find one list has a major advantage over the other.
Saying "players should mitigate" is a bit meaningless - because some won't.
That's why you need to have a system where you do something like draw/roll three missions, and then players each get to veto one.
Yeah, the ideal system is one where neither army gets their ideal scenario but both have a workable path to victory.
Except, as demonstrated by the CA and balance sheet we've already had, GW doesn't intend to use CA OR the slate to do anything to balance the game.
CA2022 and the Balance Slate arguably made balance WORSE. They didn't do much to curb the most powerful armies, took the legs out from under mid-tier armies, and did nothing to help low tier armies/units.
Real cool that a mono-build mid-tier at best army like Daemons got fethed. And people expect me to pay GW for their books?
Jidmah wrote: I'd wager that even some of the most diehard fans didn't pay 40 bucks for the new missions and worthless points updates.
Don't mention that to some of the posters here, the idea that I'm not paying for my rules drives them up the wall.
I think the issue is less that GW is losing out on money because of you, but rather that you are publicly promoting illegal activities despite the forum operators explicitly not wanting that. There is a difference between pointing to wahapedia when it fits the topic and regularly starting rallying cries for piracy whenever the word "book" is used.
I buy a lot of books that other peoples wouldn't, but I draw the line where GW isn't even close to providing enough value for the money I spend. Book of Rust was a book like that which I didn't buy because they were massively overcharging for the content. However, compared to this pair of booklets with just 12 missions and an afternoon's work worth of point updates, even the Book of Rust looks like an awesome publication. There are white dwarf issues with more content than that.
So internal balance is still a concern for Ork infantry.
Only if you believe that troops have to be the bulk of the army. For example kommandos and stormboyz are great, and they're basically boyz (just faster or with better save in cover + infiltration trick), meganobz are ok. Even trukk boyz are ok. Or snaggas in kill rig based lists.
Overall we never had an internal balance so high. It's not perfect of course, but for GW standards we can't complain. At least half of our codex see play at competitive levels, even more if we just consider semi-competitive metas, and ours is a pretty wide roster.
Jidmah wrote: I'd wager that even some of the most diehard fans didn't pay 40 bucks for the new missions and worthless points updates.
Don't mention that to some of the posters here, the idea that I'm not paying for my rules drives them up the wall.
I think the issue is less that GW is losing out on money because of you, but rather that you are publicly promoting illegal activities despite the forum operators explicitly not wanting that.
There is a difference between pointing to wahapedia when it fits the topic and regularly starting rallying cries for piracy whenever the word "book" is used.
I buy a lot of books that other peoples wouldn't, but I draw the line where GW isn't even close to providing enough value for the money I spend. Book of Rust was a book like that which I didn't buy because they were massively overcharging for the content. However, compared to this pair of booklets with just 12 missions and an afternoon's work worth of point updates, even the Book of Rust looks like an awesome publication. There are white dwarf issues with more content than that.
Not speaking from experience, but don't most large companies just factor in "theft" as "loss". When I worked in Lowe's Sales, we called it "Loss Prevention" and it was factored into the cost of the goods, and the amount we did for sales. The biggest item not surprisingly was obviously Copper wire/pipe. A 100' roll of copper conduit might never go on sale, because we would get 6-10 bundles stolen per month.
Point being, I am sure GW likely has some form of similar metric/calculation for IP Theft. They aren't playing or even trying for 100% product sales. They are happy if 40-60% of their consumer base buys the books. Because they know that it only cost them X dollars to write it, print it, and ship it. If they make X>|=60% they've covered costs and made a suitable return on investment.
Someone with an economics degree please help me to understand this. Am I wrong?
Jidmah wrote: I'd wager that even some of the most diehard fans didn't pay 40 bucks for the new missions and worthless points updates.
Don't mention that to some of the posters here, the idea that I'm not paying for my rules drives them up the wall.
I think the issue is less that GW is losing out on money because of you, but rather that you are publicly promoting illegal activities despite the forum operators explicitly not wanting that.
There is a difference between pointing to wahapedia when it fits the topic and regularly starting rallying cries for piracy whenever the word "book" is used.
I buy a lot of books that other peoples wouldn't, but I draw the line where GW isn't even close to providing enough value for the money I spend. Book of Rust was a book like that which I didn't buy because they were massively overcharging for the content. However, compared to this pair of booklets with just 12 missions and an afternoon's work worth of point updates, even the Book of Rust looks like an awesome publication. There are white dwarf issues with more content than that.
Not speaking from experience, but don't most large companies just factor in "theft" as "loss". When I worked in Lowe's Sales, we called it "Loss Prevention" and it was factored into the cost of the goods, and the amount we did for sales. The biggest item not surprisingly was obviously Copper wire/pipe. A 100' roll of copper conduit might never go on sale, because we would get 6-10 bundles stolen per month.
Point being, I am sure GW likely has some form of similar metric/calculation for IP Theft. They aren't playing or even trying for 100% product sales. They are happy if 40-60% of their consumer base buys the books. Because they know that it only cost them X dollars to write it, print it, and ship it. If they make X>|=60% they've covered costs and made a suitable return on investment.
Someone with an economics degree please help me to understand this. Am I wrong?
You’re correct that GW is just looking for a % of it’s x consumers to buy various books (and I’m sure these % goals differ based on what the book is).
That said this is different from loss prevention. Because product theft and general loss causes a business to physically lose the product. That means loss prevention has to include costs of replacing, shipping, and potential of lost sales of a product in its calculations.
Pirating just causes lost sale as you are more less copying their product not taking it away from someone else. This means GW just needs to worry about cost of inventory retention and revenue loss when dealing with it. Why I don’t really feel bad doing it as I don’t believe their non-fluff books warrant existence as a product.
And being able to access the books for free might keep someone in the game and buying models who wouldn't otherwise, which is a clear net positive for sales.
I personally still will buy books that are directly related to my army, I know I'm practically getting scammed but I like the feeling of having a physical book.
But anything beyond that like CA? yeah there are other ways.
It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
Nah not really, they have no need to because 3d printing is not an threat to GW.
When you really break it down and look at it, GW has no reason to worry about 3d printing currently like many people like to say it is and here is why.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products. The other things is, look at the people who are 3d printing, they fall into 3 major groups.
Bit printers
Terrain printers
Full blown model reprints.
The first 2 groups are non issues to GW, because the bit printer groups are a market that they cant actually maintain themselves, the cost to make all the various shoulder pads, doors, helmets, special weapons is in no way possible to do on a global scale, the market for people who want a kopesh power sword for their thousand sons, or a rune marked storm shield for terminators, is not big enough to warrant them sculpting, building, stocking, shipping and making the mold for, so this is really no revenue loss to them, if anything it helps them because when people can make the models look the way they want, they would be more inclined to buy the base model from GW.
This is however a great market for OnDemand printing, which we see great success with through things like pop goes the monkey.
The second group, being terrain printers, also dont really pose an issue to GW as this again is not a market they really do anything in, and GW terrain overall has been notoriously bad/overpriced, so much so, that GW hardly even stocks the things anymore, good luck finding a bastion or an imperial bunker in the store. So really, they dont care, + they know that they cant force people to use GW terrain no matter how hard they try, imagine if GW said you had to use realm of battle boards when they existed.
Then finally the third group is the one that so many people think is going to be the down fall of GW, but it wont be. The people who invest this type of time, and money, to go out of their way to 3d print models, are the same group of people who already buy china cast, who downloads the books from mega up loads, the people who are not in the store buying paints, or brushes from GW. The main audience that are doing this are already not really GW customers, they are just changing where they are getting the product from, rather then GW, rather then China, they are just doing themselves, so GW was never really getting a profit from them any way.
The other reason why 3d printing is not a threat, is because its not reasonably fast enough to be a reasonable production threat like recasting is over in china.
The cost to get a recasting set up is far cheaper then the set up to 3dprint. Think of how long it would take you to print a single warlord titan, then think how long it takes for a re-caster to do so?
So even then, its not a threat to their production like recasting is.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
That'd be almost impossible to enforce and generally not worth it. Most tournaments don't allow third party minis anyways (including 3D printing) and 3D prints are currently not good enough to be indistinguishable from real 40k sculpted minis. You can't make it illegal to print vaguely similar minis with a printer, so they really don't have much they can do that they aren't already doing.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
That'd be almost impossible to enforce and generally not worth it. Most tournaments don't allow third party minis anyways (including 3D printing) and 3D prints are currently not good enough to be indistinguishable from real 40k sculpted minis. You can't make it illegal to print vaguely similar minis with a printer, so they really don't have much they can do that they aren't already doing.
I agree more with the point “they can’t” over the point “it’s not worth it.”
First off let me say 3D printing by itself will never completely bring down GW. You’re the right that generally it’s quality isn’t up to GWs standards yet, Honestly, it may take a very long time for this to be the case without significant, individual investment. People don’t like breaking rules (even company ones) so their will always be a subset of the community that will buy official GW models.
However, your point about tournaments not allowing non-GW models is completely false. I’ve been to plenty of tournaments where someone (or many people) is/are bringing units (and sometimes whole armies) that only sorta represents the units they are portraying (many times these models look sweet btw). Wracks and grotesques are a big example I’ve personally seen of this.
Yes the people who do this often times would have bought Chinacast as well, but not all. Especially considering that Chinacast often requires you to go through sketchy websites/individuals, whereas 3rd printing does not. In addition, 3rd printing is ever cheaper than chinacast. The combination of connivence and Cheapness also becomes more and more alluring as GW continues to pass costs down to the customers. It also becomes more socially acceptable to print your models when everyone is mad at GW for raising prices. GW can withstand some people printing their models, but what happens if it’s 20% + who do so?
GW doesn’t even want the idea of this existing, especially if when 20% of this includes current model buyers. The chapterhouse lawsuit proves. The problem is part 2 of why GW should view 3rd printing as threat. They are basically powerless to stop it. The US government has tried and failed to regulate the internet. If they can’t do it, there’s no reason to think GW can. Take a down/ delete a file and it will just appear elsewhere. If 3rd printing takes off to the point where it’s hard to distinguish GW models from its, then all that’s stopping people from not buying GW’s stuff is their own Morality/ the ease of which it is to print these models. Again this is actually enough to stop a large portion of people from doing this. However, enough people doing this will sink GW.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products.
Lol, keep spewing the non-sense.
It is when you compare it to just buying the kit you want to print.
You are also putting a LOT of faith in the average buyer/person who plays this having the knowlege to do it. Its not hard to do by what we know how to do. But remember most people still struggle with basic technology concepts.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products.
Lol, keep spewing the non-sense.
It is when you compare it to just buying the kit you want to print.
You are also putting a LOT of faith in the average buyer/person who plays this having the knowlege to do it. Its not hard to do by what we know how to do. But remember most people still struggle with basic technology concepts.
Let's also remember that the best detailed models are printed in resin. And resin isn't a super popular material to work with.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products.
Lol, keep spewing the non-sense.
It is when you compare it to just buying the kit you want to print.
You are also putting a LOT of faith in the average buyer/person who plays this having the knowlege to do it. Its not hard to do by what we know how to do. But remember most people still struggle with basic technology concepts.
Ah, and now we're adding "Most people are too stupid" to the list of nonsense.
Look, I won't deny that there's way too many stupid people drawing breath. But they generally don't play these games, so they aren't a factor.
Setting up a couple hundred $ print system, learning to use it even to moderate results, & then easily getting your $s worth out of it isn't rocket science.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
Nah not really, they have no need to because 3d printing is not an threat to GW.
When you really break it down and look at it, GW has no reason to worry about 3d printing currently like many people like to say it is and here is why.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products. The other things is, look at the people who are 3d printing, they fall into 3 major groups.
Bit printers
Terrain printers
Full blown model reprints.
The first 2 groups are non issues to GW, because the bit printer groups are a market that they cant actually maintain themselves, the cost to make all the various shoulder pads, doors, helmets, special weapons is in no way possible to do on a global scale, the market for people who want a kopesh power sword for their thousand sons, or a rune marked storm shield for terminators, is not big enough to warrant them sculpting, building, stocking, shipping and making the mold for, so this is really no revenue loss to them, if anything it helps them because when people can make the models look the way they want, they would be more inclined to buy the base model from GW.
This is however a great market for OnDemand printing, which we see great success with through things like pop goes the monkey.
The second group, being terrain printers, also dont really pose an issue to GW as this again is not a market they really do anything in, and GW terrain overall has been notoriously bad/overpriced, so much so, that GW hardly even stocks the things anymore, good luck finding a bastion or an imperial bunker in the store. So really, they dont care, + they know that they cant force people to use GW terrain no matter how hard they try, imagine if GW said you had to use realm of battle boards when they existed.
Then finally the third group is the one that so many people think is going to be the down fall of GW, but it wont be. The people who invest this type of time, and money, to go out of their way to 3d print models, are the same group of people who already buy china cast, who downloads the books from mega up loads, the people who are not in the store buying paints, or brushes from GW. The main audience that are doing this are already not really GW customers, they are just changing where they are getting the product from, rather then GW, rather then China, they are just doing themselves, so GW was never really getting a profit from them any way.
The other reason why 3d printing is not a threat, is because its not reasonably fast enough to be a reasonable production threat like recasting is over in china.
The cost to get a recasting set up is far cheaper then the set up to 3dprint. Think of how long it would take you to print a single warlord titan, then think how long it takes for a re-caster to do so?
So even then, its not a threat to their production like recasting is.
It truly is a boogie man.
You forgot the most important one.
People that don't have income issues will many times buy models at the local store because doing so they support it.
The "Pay where you play" is still as strong as ever.
Personally I wouldn't feel at ease going into the store with printed or recasted models, not because they are banned, but because I would feel like leeching.
Stores are not sailing in good waters at the moment, and even when they do, they keep GW articles around more as a personal hobby than an actual commercial choice. The game takes too much store space for the bucks it brings in compared to any TCG. So if your store is supporting wargames, then you feel like you should at least do your part.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
Nah not really, they have no need to because 3d printing is not an threat to GW.
When you really break it down and look at it, GW has no reason to worry about 3d printing currently like many people like to say it is and here is why.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products. The other things is, look at the people who are 3d printing, they fall into 3 major groups.
Bit printers
Terrain printers
Full blown model reprints.
The first 2 groups are non issues to GW, because the bit printer groups are a market that they cant actually maintain themselves, the cost to make all the various shoulder pads, doors, helmets, special weapons is in no way possible to do on a global scale, the market for people who want a kopesh power sword for their thousand sons, or a rune marked storm shield for terminators, is not big enough to warrant them sculpting, building, stocking, shipping and making the mold for, so this is really no revenue loss to them, if anything it helps them because when people can make the models look the way they want, they would be more inclined to buy the base model from GW.
This is however a great market for OnDemand printing, which we see great success with through things like pop goes the monkey.
The second group, being terrain printers, also dont really pose an issue to GW as this again is not a market they really do anything in, and GW terrain overall has been notoriously bad/overpriced, so much so, that GW hardly even stocks the things anymore, good luck finding a bastion or an imperial bunker in the store. So really, they dont care, + they know that they cant force people to use GW terrain no matter how hard they try, imagine if GW said you had to use realm of battle boards when they existed.
Then finally the third group is the one that so many people think is going to be the down fall of GW, but it wont be. The people who invest this type of time, and money, to go out of their way to 3d print models, are the same group of people who already buy china cast, who downloads the books from mega up loads, the people who are not in the store buying paints, or brushes from GW. The main audience that are doing this are already not really GW customers, they are just changing where they are getting the product from, rather then GW, rather then China, they are just doing themselves, so GW was never really getting a profit from them any way.
The other reason why 3d printing is not a threat, is because its not reasonably fast enough to be a reasonable production threat like recasting is over in china.
The cost to get a recasting set up is far cheaper then the set up to 3dprint. Think of how long it would take you to print a single warlord titan, then think how long it takes for a re-caster to do so?
So even then, its not a threat to their production like recasting is.
It truly is a boogie man.
You forgot the most important one.
People that don't have income issues will many times buy models at the local store because doing so they support it.
The "Pay where you play" is still as strong as ever.
Personally I wouldn't feel at ease going into the store with printed or recasted models, not because they are banned, but because I would feel like leeching.
Stores are not sailing in good waters at the moment, and even when they do, they keep GW articles around more as a personal hobby than an actual commercial choice. The game takes too much store space for the bucks it brings in compared to any TCG. So if your store is supporting wargames, then you feel like you should at least do your part.
Hell, "pay where you play" had me paying full price for years just to make sure that my FLGS kept it's doors open. 40k and MtG where the two prongs that kept it open though other games came and went too.
I agree more with the point “they can’t” over the point “it’s not worth it.”
First off let me say 3D printing by itself will never completely bring down GW. You’re the right that generally it’s quality isn’t up to GWs standards yet, Honestly, it may take a very long time for this to be the case without significant, individual investment. People don’t like breaking rules (even company ones) so their will always be a subset of the community that will buy official GW models.
However, your point about tournaments not allowing non-GW models is completely false. I’ve been to plenty of tournaments where someone (or many people) is/are bringing units (and sometimes whole armies) that only sorta represents the units they are portraying (many times these models look sweet btw). Wracks and grotesques are a big example I’ve personally seen of this.
Yes the people who do this often times would have bought Chinacast as well, but not all. Especially considering that Chinacast often requires you to go through sketchy websites/individuals, whereas 3rd printing does not. In addition, 3rd printing is ever cheaper than chinacast. The combination of connivence and Cheapness also becomes more and more alluring as GW continues to pass costs down to the customers. It also becomes more socially acceptable to print your models when everyone is mad at GW for raising prices. GW can withstand some people printing their models, but what happens if it’s 20% + who do so?
GW doesn’t even want the idea of this existing, especially if when 20% of this includes current model buyers. The chapterhouse lawsuit proves. The problem is part 2 of why GW should view 3rd printing as threat. They are basically powerless to stop it. The US government has tried and failed to regulate the internet. If they can’t do it, there’s no reason to think GW can. Take a down/ delete a file and it will just appear elsewhere. If 3rd printing takes off to the point where it’s hard to distinguish GW models from its, then all that’s stopping people from not buying GW’s stuff is their own Morality/ the ease of which it is to print these models. Again this is actually enough to stop a large portion of people from doing this. However, enough people doing this will sink GW.
Fair enough, I should have clarified that I'm going off observations of my local tournaments. It is at least *somewhat common* for tournaments, especially those run by GW stores, to require first party models.
I think it's also a fair comparison to say that, while most people own regular printers, they still typically go out and *buy books* if they want to read a physical book. I could pirate and then print out a copy of a novel at home, bind it myself, and read that, but the cost and time investment isn't worth it. I think if 3D printing did become ubiquitous and high quality it may force GW to reduce prices a little (or at least keep prices static,) but there's still a point at which the extra effort of 3D printing isn't worth the marginal amount of money saved.
Look, I won't deny that there's way too many stupid people drawing breath. But they generally don't play these games, so they aren't a factor.
Setting up a couple hundred $ print system, learning to use it even to moderate results, & then easily getting your $s worth out of it isn't rocket science.
It's not rocket science but unless we're talking about people who already have in mind to collect hundreds of miniatures, and stay in the hobby for decades, buying the originals is much simpler and not even that more expensive.
I for example know people who use 3d printers and I could learn quite easily thanks to them but to me the effort of learning how to use that stuff, all the work that printing and curing resin requires, and the final results (since to me GW miniatures are still the best looking ones) don't worth saving some money. Not up to a few hundreds over a few years at least.
I think the issue with 3d printing just comes down to "why are you in this hobby to begin with".
Shouldn't say MTG have died aeons ago due to the invention of the photocopier? Shouldn't D&D have keeled over because every book they try to sell can be pirated online more or less instantly?
GW's main push is marketing. I'm not convinced the average 12 year old - or 35 year old for that matter, getting drawn in with "that looks interesting" is going to go "right, I need a 3d printer, a load of files, and get my army". They are going to enter the shop, buy a box and see where it goes.
Spoletta wrote: You forgot the most important one.
People that don't have income issues will many times buy models at the local store because doing so they support it.
The "Pay where you play" is still as strong as ever.
Personally I wouldn't feel at ease going into the store with printed or recasted models, not because they are banned, but because I would feel like leeching.
Stores are not sailing in good waters at the moment, and even when they do, they keep GW articles around more as a personal hobby than an actual commercial choice. The game takes too much store space for the bucks it brings in compared to any TCG. So if your store is supporting wargames, then you feel like you should at least do your part.
Hell, "pay where you play" had me paying full price for years just to make sure that my FLGS kept it's doors open. 40k and MtG where the two prongs that kept it open though other games came and went too.
Same here. For MtG, 40k, P&P books, tabletop games and hobby utensils I regularly pay more than I could have to just to support a store that is nice and helpful.
However, the stores offering 3D printing services are exploding as well, so that might change, too.
As for 3D printing being just as easy as buying models... just no. Even if you have your own printer and have already gone through the entire learning curve of how to print which models, you still have to handle a ton of issues which you never face when just buying a box of GW plastics.
I'm currently in the process of getting a custom kill rig made because I dislike GW's model and it's not even close to as little effort as just going out and buying a box.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products.
Lol, keep spewing the non-sense.
It is when you compare it to just buying the kit you want to print.
You are also putting a LOT of faith in the average buyer/person who plays this having the knowlege to do it. Its not hard to do by what we know how to do. But remember most people still struggle with basic technology concepts.
Ah, and now we're adding "Most people are too stupid" to the list of nonsense.
Look, I won't deny that there's way too many stupid people drawing breath. But they generally don't play these games, so they aren't a factor.
Setting up a couple hundred $ print system, learning to use it even to moderate results, & then easily getting your $s worth out of it isn't rocket science.
Look, I'm not gonna talk about most people, I'll just talk about me.
My company bought an Ender 3 V2 more than a year ago. Three different people tried to put it together before we finally got the damn thing built. It took a 4th person to get the damn thing leveled. Then they couldn't get it to track on the X-axis. Then it needed a firmware up date. It came with instructions to put it together but none to operate it, and the downloadable PDF is not helpful.
Now we've got another consultant coming in to get it up and running. And then there will be training. So more than a year, and not a single thing printed.
Now I know that my experience is not everyone's experience. But I think you need to realize that YOUR experience is also not everyone's experience.
If someone of average computer skills were to ask me for advice about 3d printing? I'd tell them to steer clear.
And as for a resin printer? If I wanted resin models I wouldn't be wining about GW prices in the first place.
3d printing, for all its ease of access that it has is still a very cumbersome, lengthy, and space consuming process that is not something you can just go out and easily get into and then come out ahead in a matter of a few months over just buying GW products.
Lol, keep spewing the non-sense.
It is when you compare it to just buying the kit you want to print.
You are also putting a LOT of faith in the average buyer/person who plays this having the knowlege to do it. Its not hard to do by what we know how to do. But remember most people still struggle with basic technology concepts.
Ah, and now we're adding "Most people are too stupid" to the list of nonsense.
Look, I won't deny that there's way too many stupid people drawing breath. But they generally don't play these games, so they aren't a factor.
Setting up a couple hundred $ print system, learning to use it even to moderate results, & then easily getting your $s worth out of it isn't rocket science.
Stupidity =/= ignorance
Most people are ignorant when it comes to technology still. Most people still struggle with simple things like connecting a printer, this is why the IT field still is a billion dollar industry. Because while these are still simple things to us, so many many people, it is not.
Again this is very anecdotal, but, just as example, i work for possibly one of the largest entertainment companies in the USA, and considered an extremely large technology company that has billions and BILLIONs of dollars in technology and hardware across the US.
The amount of people in the company that STILL don't understand the concept of a shared drive and that saying "Yeah i lost connection to my X drive i need it back." Means nothing when you can label a shared drive what ever you want when you map it is staggering.
Its not that these people are stupid or dumb, its that they just are ignorant of how it really works.
This is the same concept in 3d printing, most people are ignorant on how to get them to work, and just like in a working environment, people will just go the path of least resistance to get what they want.
Like i said before, the people that are putting in the effort to 3d printing are already people who are going out of their way to not buy GW and get china cast.
This is the same concept in 3d printing, most people are ignorant on how to get them to work, and just like in a working environment, people will just go the path of least resistance to get what they want.
And let's add "Too lazy" to the list....
This is the most accurate thing you've typed yet though. Because yeah, people will just tend to go along - until they hit a certain degree of resistance. Varies by individual. Then they have to decide how (or if) to continue. And in our hobby of miniatures gaming the major points of resistance are: Cost & Availability. Mostly cost.
This is the same concept in 3d printing, most people are ignorant on how to get them to work, and just like in a working environment, people will just go the path of least resistance to get what they want.
And let's add "Too lazy" to the list....
This is the most accurate thing you've typed yet though. Because yeah, people will just tend to go along - until they hit a certain degree of resistance. Varies by individual. Then they have to decide how (or if) to continue. And in our hobby of miniatures gaming the major points of resistance are: Cost & Availability. Mostly cost.
And just like i said earlier, Path of least resistance =/= lazy
If your job is to be an accountant, and balance the books, whats more important? learning out networking and how networking drives work? or just asking IT to fix it.
If you are really big into painting more so then playing, are you lazy because you choose to just buy the model rather then work to set up a 3d prining operation in order to pint the model.
Most people do not choose to go down the path of 3d printing, just like most people do not go down the path of recasting. Recasting has been around for decades and the thing is, GW still has not been killed by it, in fact GW has been more profitable in recent years then in the past, and recasting and 3d printing has i no way slowed down if anything its sped up. So even recasting which can and does outperfom 3d printing, and is far easier to set up, is not crippling or hobbling GW, why? because its far easier to just buy the models.
The people who are getting into 3d printing models, not bits or terrain, but 3d printing existing models, are the same people who already are putting in the effort to not buy from GW.
I never said anyone was lazy, or stupid for not setting up a 3d printing set up, thats your words and i would ask you not imply im saying that, because im not.
My company bought an Ender 3 V2 more than a year ago. Three different people tried to put it together before we finally got the damn thing built. It took a 4th person to get the damn thing leveled. Then they couldn't get it to track on the X-axis. Then it needed a firmware up date. It came with instructions to put it together but none to operate it, and the downloadable PDF is not helpful.
Now we've got another consultant coming in to get it up and running. And then there will be training. So more than a year, and not a single thing printed.
This is gonna sound mean but when a company thinks it's a good idea to buy the most basic chinese home use entry level budget machine and by the sound of it keeps throwing more money at it than it would cost to just get a plug and play industrial grade machine... I'm not surprised nobody there is smart enough to get it working.
It's like saying cars are too complicated because you can't get a Hyundai you found at a scrap yard to run.
My company bought an Ender 3 V2 more than a year ago. Three different people tried to put it together before we finally got the damn thing built. It took a 4th person to get the damn thing leveled. Then they couldn't get it to track on the X-axis. Then it needed a firmware up date. It came with instructions to put it together but none to operate it, and the downloadable PDF is not helpful.
Now we've got another consultant coming in to get it up and running. And then there will be training. So more than a year, and not a single thing printed.
This is gonna sound mean but when a company thinks it's a good idea to buy the most basic chinese home use entry level budget machine and by the sound of it keeps throwing more money at it than it would cost to just get a plug and play industrial grade machine... I'm not surprised nobody there is smart enough to get it working.
It's like saying cars are too complicated because you can't get a Hyundai you found at a scrap yard to run.
Welcome to modern corporate America, this kinda thing happens literally all the damn time.
when a company thinks it's a good idea to buy the most basic chinese home use entry level budget machine and by the sound of it keeps throwing more money at it than it would cost to just get a plug and play industrial grade machine... I'm not surprised nobody there is smart enough to get it working.
It's like saying cars are too complicated because you can't get a Hyundai you found at a scrap yard to run.
A post like this makes a fair number of assumptions.
You probably don't know that we are a non-profit facility that provides educational and employment services to multi-barriered individuals, and that this printer was purchased with a small grant for a particular program. And it isn't a matter of stupidity or laziness- the fact is that most of the employees are engaged in direct client service for 40-50 hours per week and that most of us were trained as educators or social workers.
Every hour spent learning to run a 3d printer is hour not spent teaching people to read or helping people find employment.
Quite frankly, had there been more open and honest discussion about how 3d-printing DOES have a steep learning curve, we might have made some different choices with the limited amount of resources at our disposal. Unfortunately, there are some very loud voices on the internet that are very enthusiastic about 3d printing, just like there are on Dakka. These folks don't always take into account that their comfort level with relatively sophisticated hardware and the software platforms required to operate it are a factor in their enthusiasm, and that without that comfort level, learning how to slice an STL might require some dedicated professional development time.
I appreciate the disclaimer, and it does take some of the snark out of the post, which I'm sure was your intention.
For the record, it doesn't go as far as actually re-thinking the post and phrasing it in a way that doesn't sound mean... But it's a start, so thanks for that.
PenitentJake wrote: Look, I'm not gonna talk about most people, I'll just talk about me.
My company bought an Ender 3 V2 more than a year ago. Three different people tried to put it together before we finally got the damn thing built. It took a 4th person to get the damn thing leveled. Then they couldn't get it to track on the X-axis. Then it needed a firmware up date. It came with instructions to put it together but none to operate it, and the downloadable PDF is not helpful.
Now we've got another consultant coming in to get it up and running. And then there will be training. So more than a year, and not a single thing printed.
Now I know that my experience is not everyone's experience. But I think you need to realize that YOUR experience is also not everyone's experience.
If someone of average computer skills were to ask me for advice about 3d printing? I'd tell them to steer clear.
And as for a resin printer? If I wanted resin models I wouldn't be wining about GW prices in the first place.
Not all printers are the same. I bought a $150 resin printer and had these in a couple of days. No assembly needed, zero knowledge of 3D sculpting, I just started with reference settings from Google and followed the instructions on calibration. With the amount of reference material on the Internet (and files for download without needing to learn to work with .stls), it was by far easier to learn how to 3D print than it was to learn to paint when I first started painting in the mid-00s.
Plus, this hobby already has a non-negligible skill baseline when it comes to assembling and painting models, let alone learning the rules. If you can learn to play 9th Edition Warhammer 40,000 with all the bells and whistles, you absolutely can learn to operate a 3D printer.
Frankly, I don't think GW needs to be worried about Dakka's grognards buying printers en-masse. They need to be more worried about Etsy shops providing the printing services while significantly undercutting GW's prices, and kids and college students with more time than disposable income deciding that getting models for pennies might be worth the learning curve.
PenitentJake wrote: Look, I'm not gonna talk about most people, I'll just talk about me.
My company bought an Ender 3 V2 more than a year ago. Three different people tried to put it together before we finally got the damn thing built. It took a 4th person to get the damn thing leveled. Then they couldn't get it to track on the X-axis. Then it needed a firmware up date. It came with instructions to put it together but none to operate it, and the downloadable PDF is not helpful.
Now we've got another consultant coming in to get it up and running. And then there will be training. So more than a year, and not a single thing printed.
Now I know that my experience is not everyone's experience. But I think you need to realize that YOUR experience is also not everyone's experience.
If someone of average computer skills were to ask me for advice about 3d printing? I'd tell them to steer clear.
And as for a resin printer? If I wanted resin models I wouldn't be wining about GW prices in the first place.
Not all printers are the same. I bought a $150 resin printer and had these in a couple of days. No assembly needed, zero knowledge of 3D sculpting, I just started with reference settings from Google and followed the instructions on calibration. With the amount of reference material on the Internet (and files for download without needing to learn to work with .stls), it was by far easier to learn how to 3D print than it was to learn to paint when I first started painting in the mid-00s.
Plus, this hobby already has a non-negligible skill baseline when it comes to assembling and painting models, let alone learning the rules. If you can learn to play 9th Edition Warhammer 40,000 with all the bells and whistles, you absolutely can learn to operate a 3D printer.
Frankly, I don't think GW needs to be worried about Dakka's grognards buying printers en-masse. They need to be more worried about Etsy shops providing the printing services while significantly undercutting GW's prices, and kids and college students with more time than disposable income deciding that getting models for pennies might be worth the learning curve.
Well and that kinda goes back to what i originally posted.
People printing full blown models that are direct coppies, yeah GW needs to shut down, and usually dose.
But bit makers, and terrain makers? GW has no real feasiable way to take up this market, so its a non threat to them because its a market they are not even in.
Do you really think GW is going to spend the effort to make bits like rune marked shields, kopeshes, or other specifically themed weapons that are bought by a subset of the consumer base?
Or are they just gonna let someone print on demand these bits that they have no real way to market at profit.
Backspacehacker wrote: People printing full blown models that are direct coppies, yeah GW needs to shut down, and usually dose.
Not in the US. You can print whatever you want in your own garage.
Yes but you cant sell them, and before you again say "Well they will just sell them outta their garage."
These again are the same people that GW arnt making money off of anyway, these are the same people buying china cast already.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
Most tournaments don't allow third party minis anyways (including 3D printing)
Citation needed. Complete and utter hogwash there mate.
FezzikDaBullgryn wrote: It's actually funny to me that GW hasn't come down with far more draconian anti-3d printing measures. Surely they stand to lose the most money due to non-sales of minis?
Most tournaments don't allow third party minis anyways (including 3D printing)
Citation needed. Complete and utter hogwash there mate.
Since I already responded to this exact point earlier today, I'll just quote my response there:
Fair enough, I should have clarified that I'm going off observations of my local tournaments. It is at least *somewhat common* for tournaments, especially those run by GW stores, to require first party models.
Gert wrote: Good to see if you disagree that 3d printing is God's gift you get slammed for it. Way to be mature guys.
Sadly an all too common thing I've run into. I once mentioned I didn't want to get a resin printer because I live in a small apartment and don't have a good way to print things without soaking my lungs in resin fumes only to be told off that the fumes aren't a "real problem".
Yeah, no. I've had a bad lung infection years ago and that made me very sensitive to fumes from basically anything so even if resin fumes aren't dangerous to my health I'm still not messing around with that.
stupid people drawing breath. But they generally don't play these games, so they aren't a factor.
