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The return of VDR would be nice, but given the direction the game's gone I'd rather just play 4th and use the actual VDR anyway.

@BanjoJohn - How do you calculate the worth of an ability such as Amphibious, which the Chimera used to have?

Any usable formula for points is going to be so insanely complicated that estimating points based on testing is the only practical way to develop the game. You'll have so many values to juggle that you end up approximating the formula anyway, which defeats the whole purpose of trying to perfect it.
Even at a first glance, the value of something will change wildly depending on the makeup of your gaming scene. Hence the proliferation of anti-Marine guns versus anti-horde. Every new release is going to change the broader meta which in turn will mean all points need adjusting. Your formulas would be in constant flux which is both impossible to create, but also utterly horrible for the consumer to write a list.
Imagine a situation in which the new Thousand Sons codex is a popular hit because the models are so good. Players will pick it up even if the book is perfectly balanced and suddenly, every anti-MEQ and anti-psyker piece becomes more valuable. Your formula will need to reassess the entire game to maintain balance.
There's also the question of deliberate imbalances being a good thing. A world in which White Scar Bikers are typically a better deal than their Dreadnoughts, for example. Deliberately under/overcosting units is a potentially useful tool when you are trying to encourage particular playstyles.

Unless you are willing to build a list in which your points are fluctuating every single game, we must accept a degree of imbalance in points. Guessing based on experience is not only adequate, it's preferable.

BanjoJohn wrote:
hey, I know what that is. I really don't know how more times I have to say it though. Yes you can do statistical derivations about strength 3 vs toughness 3, s3 vs t4, etc, etc, and combine with the statistics of the dice results.
I know that all the math behind deriving the formulas for points is not easy, but it can provide easy points tables for building units.

For example, it might end up something like..

Strength 1 is 2 points, Strength 2 is 3 points, Strength 3 is 5 points, Strength 4 is 8 points, Strength 5 is 14 points, etc, and so on and so forth.
Then you'd have your armor saves where it might be like.. Armor 6+ gives a points modifier of 90%, Armor 5+ gives a points modifier of 100%, Armor 4+ gives a modifier of 120%, etc.

You can make arguments that a boltgun is worth more points in the hands of a marine than a guardsmen, but that's why the marine costs more points than a guardsmen, and should be in the points reflected in the marine and the guardsmen, and the points for the boltgun should be the same no matter who is holding it.

I mean, I really don't think the dunning-kruger applies to me in this situation.

I don't want to turn this into an ad hominem mudfight, but you pretty much demonstrated that you are lacking the skills to even describe such a formula, therefore you are unable to see the problems with such a thing.

It's a fair assumption that any stat has a value, and increasing that stat also has a value. But that value can't be calculated in a vacuum. For strength, even if you just consider the datasheet itself, you need to add ballistic skill, AP, damage, number of shots, range, speed, damage multipliers, mobility skills, anti-X rules and whether that specific profile is something common to your army or not.
Then you need to consider all possible leaders for that unit, their army rule, detachment rules and stratagems.
On top of that, the value of strength isn't linear. Going from S4 to S5 is very valuable, going from S7 to S8 might not be, depending on the rest of the profile. Going from S9 to S10 is probably the most valuable jump in the game. Then again, going from S12 to S13 on a AP 0, 1 damage gun might as well be free.

So just to find the value for strength for a single weapon, probably the easiest stat to evaluate, you are looking at a non-linear formula with at least 15 variables, and at the value of range, AP, damage, number of shots, movement, speed and abilities are also impacted by the strength of that gun.
For a simple datasheet with one boring ranged weapon and one boring melee weapon, we are looking on 15x8 variables just to find its offensive value. For a small army like death guard we are looking at 32 datasheets, some armies have more than three times as many, times 24 factions. So with some napkin math, we are looking at a formula with hundreds of thousands of variables that needs to be solved.

Not taking into account the value of defensive stats
Not taking into account that it's night impossible to calculate the value of mobility abilities
Not taking into account that models often have more than one gun and weapons with multiple modes
Not taking into account any synergy

Just for comparison, neuronal networks, the AI technology before LLMs like ChatGPT had a similar amount of variables as a single datasheet in 10th would require to calculate.

The math behind deriving the formulas is not just "not easy", humanity as a whole did not have the ability to calculate formulas of that complexity until a few years ago, and still is only able to do that with vast amounts of training data.
And that is the very definition of the dunning-kruger effect. You lacked the ability to see how complex and unsolvable the problem is and therefore assume that it would be possible.

The reason why we use statistics to figure out tomorrow's weather is the same, by the way. The formula to accurately calculate the weather simply requires too many variables, and therefore has never been found.

You can make arguments that a boltgun is worth more points in the hands of a marine than a guardsmen, but that's why the marine costs more points than a guardsmen, and should be in the points reflected in the marine and the guardsmen, and the points for the boltgun should be the same no matter who is holding it.

This assumption is demonstrably false, by the way. We literally had situations in the past where GW had to increase the points of weapons for scions and space marine characters because they were massively overperforming when held by a model with a better WS/BS.