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auticus wrote:Yeah I'd second Tyel's comments. Players aren't interested in that type of list building. Thats just the current culture defining the game and what they want.

If I ruled the 40k world, you'd have a series of scenarios that were in the mix randomly generated that all benefited certain builds and were challenging for certain other builds.

The scenarios would enforce composition so if you min maxed one way, you risked rolling a scenario that didn't suit your min maxing, pushing you to have to keep all of those things in consideration.

That also is not desirable from a tournament player stand point because you can't optimize very well in that type of environment, but thats how any game I design is usually built around.

You literally just described what happens when you use the open war deck to figure out missions.

Thats awesome, I loved those cards.

They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".

 auticus wrote:
Thats awesome, I loved those cards.

They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense".

That's fething lame. Every single game I've played of 8th & 9th has been open war deck scenarios.

They can be totally unfair or screw both players equally. The only time we draw again is if it's something that will not effect either player.
What's the fun in that.

We also play on terrain rich tables with lots of features and actual environmental effects like; blackout, sand/duststorm, and acid rain(my personal fav).

I think you and I would have some good games - those are the types of games and tables and missions that I would have enjoyed with 40k.

In reply to OP.

No. Despite being a creative endeavour, the creators and artsy types working in the Studio make nothing up.

Rather, the Studio is home to a frankly magnificent Squid, called Robert, the like of which is entirely unknown to science.

Those who work within the studio simply massage Robert’s chesticles, and new content is squirted out. How good your new edition or Codex is depends entirely upon how much of Robert’s excretions can be caught, mid arc, in the very same plastic coffee cup for an early 80’s vending machine they’ve always used since the very beginning.

 Kanluwen wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.

LMFAO.

You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?

Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 catbarf wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 catbarf wrote:

Toofast wrote:
This is the classic "my way of having fun is the only way you're allowed to have fun" argument.

If you refuse to tone down your list so that a less-cutthroat opponent can have fun too, or refuse to take a thematic/narrative force for a narrative event when there's opportunity to min-max, that's exactly what you're doing.

Except certain armies are straight up better with a TAC list vs other armies and their TAC list. So how does that work for you?

Tweak as necessary, get somewhere in the ballpark of a fair fight, rather than crossing your arms and saying 'I refuse to use anything other than the strongest possible meta-chasing competitive build the rules will allow'?

You're missing the point. 8th Imperial Guard as a TAC was significantly stronger than a Daemons TAC, yes or no?

 auticus wrote:
You can look at some things and see how bent they are after about 5 minutes. Those are the things that need culled.

It's not hard to find bad hot takes, confirmation bias just makes it all seem obvious in hindsight.

 auticus wrote:
If I ruled the 40k world, you'd have a series of scenarios that were in the mix randomly generated that all benefited certain builds and were challenging for certain other builds.

The scenarios would enforce composition so if you min maxed one way, you risked rolling a scenario that didn't suit your min maxing, pushing you to have to keep all of those things in consideration.

That also is not desirable from a tournament player stand point because you can't optimize very well in that type of environment, but thats how any game I design is usually built around.

Bad takes like this.

Can you explain why that is a "bad take"?

Also we usually found the bent things 5 minutes after opening the book for the first time, not in hindsight. For both 40k and aos they were usually pretty easy to hone in on.

 auticus wrote:
Thats awesome, I loved those cards.

They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".

Did you poll them to see how many had actually played with them previously? From my own experience, I'd bet it was less than 1 in 10.

EviscerationPlague wrote:
You're missing the point. 8th Imperial Guard as a TAC was significantly stronger than a Daemons TAC, yes or no?

I'm sure I am missing the point, because you're not actually making one. Yes, some armies building a generic TAC list are stronger or weaker than others. A late-8th Marine army and a late-8th Tau army were not on the same level. So what? That doesn't mean you can't adjust to make a matchup more balanced.

Just a difference in mission taste, I don't want to win or lose based on the mission rolled before the battle or whether we face each other round 1 or round 4 in an event, I want the mission to change how victory is achieved, not whether it is achieved.

Bad Dakka predictions: Boyz will be terrible in 9th, T5 Boyz will be OP, transhuman Deathwing OP, Iron Hands/Drukhari/AdMech are fair.

Railgun HH stats are fine/insane, one will turn out to have been obvious but both have been made

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.

LMFAO.

You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?

Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?

Casual players were fine procuring those bits as well. The silly changes to unit loadouts has nothing to do with either casual or competitive player preferences.

Maelstrom/ETC encouraged a much less chess-like mentality to list building than ITC. Winning lists were generally much more focused on flexibility and therefore "softer" as a result. I.E. in 8th a list of mass Chimera with Guardsmen inside could win a big tournament - while in ITC this would surely just get nuked out of existence.

But equally, losing because you've just drawn a load of bad cards - while your opponents hand has gone "this turn do A, score loads of points, next turn do B and score loads more points etc" is kind of lame.

The best outcome would be to somehow marry up the two. But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.

chaos0xomega wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Thats awesome, I loved those cards.

They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".

Did you poll them to see how many had actually played with them previously? From my own experience, I'd bet it was less than 1 in 10.

I asked variations of it but would just get nasty responses in return about house rules and unofficial 40k and making up rules as I go. They really really hated the concept of anything that wasn't official ITC tournament 40k. (A lot of them also used "campaign" or pick up games as their tournament tuning games, so to them it would be a waste of time playing things that they wouldn't encounter in a tournament)

EviscerationPlague wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.

LMFAO.

You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?

Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise.

You have very different experiences than I do then. The comp players locally wouldn't shut the hell up about how it was "garbage" that the "Skitarii could take 3x plasmas but only came with 1" during the time of the Drop Pod Skitarii+War Convocations of 7E.

See this?

That was my "buy-in" for Skitarii. I sold the Calivers out of the boxes to the people running the Flesh Tearers Taxi Services, and they paid for two of my three initial Onagers...and when the War Convocation dropped? I added on another stack of Skitarii same as that size, sold off the Calivers again and got another 3 Onagers.

Do you know why I was able to pull that off?
It wasn't because the "competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise". There's a finite number of bits out there when it's something that's a big deal like Arc Rifles or Plasma Calivers.

Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?

Again, do you think that's casual players pushing it? Because it really is not.

 vict0988 wrote:
Just a difference in mission taste, I don't want to win or lose based on the mission rolled before the battle or whether we face each other round 1 or round 4 in an event, I want the mission to change how victory is achieved, not whether it is achieved.

Yeah - I don't see how thats possible unfortunately. In my experience you can't have both. If missions are the way they are now where the current listbuilding meta works with them, its just a stale set of scenarios that don't REALLY change up things. They are basically the same set of scenarios with minor differences but you still built lists the same way to achieve ALL of them.

But I also don't see missions being the arbitrator of what wins or not being much different from me showing up with my thousand sons and getting t-bagged by my opponent because I brought the wrong army (the non ITC tournament army). The only difference is that the scenarios being static way means I can 100% choose to chase the ITC meta and have good games. THe other I have to try and build along multiple mission parameters and cannot min max for any of them which makes it harder for me (but to me more satisfying).

I don't see my way ever happening in 40k land though so no worries

 Gadzilla666 wrote:

Casual players were fine procuring those bits as well. The silly changes to unit loadouts has nothing to do with either casual or competitive player preferences.

It actually does have to do more with the competitive playerbase. It's the same reason that the Kharadron Overlords' Thunderer unit had their loadouts changed.

But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.

Different mentalities. For those that want 100% control, yes its a huge feel-bad for a random element to occur you didn't optimize for.

For someone like me, that keeps the game fresher and allows for things I didn't even think of happening, which I enjoy quite a bit. However the maelstrom cards do have a tendency to go over the top with that so I agree they need refined a lot more.

It's funny how Open Play Cards are shouted unfair despite them being balanced in the long run, but at the same time 50% win rate for a faction is the metrics for balance, despite it being just a tournament statistic and has nothing to do with you and your particular army odds at the table in a given game.

One of the CAs, I don't remember which exactly, had a mission set that was very varied, with the exact goal of forcing flexible lists. It was widely considered to be unfair and too random for matched play.

Now I wonder how those would be perceived if a single 40K game took 30minutes instead of 3hrs, so you could play in the best-of-3 or best-of-5 manner in a single evening at the FLGS.

It's funny how Open Play Cards are shouted unfair despite them being balanced in the long run

A pick up game at your FLGS isn't exactly the long run. I can understand wanting an individual game to be balanced.

Campaigns it's fine. You roll up an Open War or a random "narrative mission" which clearly favors one force or the other, finish it in half the time as a "real" game, get your RP/Glory/Credits/whatever and upgrade your force. Hey, maybe you'll be the one with the good luck next time! At least you got something out of it.

Pick up games or tournaments? I don't think Open War style or incredible imbalanced missions are good for those.

Currently have this problem with a different, non-GW game where the missions heavily favor different types of units. Just means everybody skews towards killing (which always wins the match, regardless of mission). Makes me very wary of that sort of format for tournaments/pick-up games.

 auticus wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
Just a difference in mission taste, I don't want to win or lose based on the mission rolled before the battle or whether we face each other round 1 or round 4 in an event, I want the mission to change how victory is achieved, not whether it is achieved.

Yeah - I don't see how thats possible unfortunately. In my experience you can't have both. If missions are the way they are now where the current listbuilding meta works with them, its just a stale set of scenarios that don't REALLY change up things. They are basically the same set of scenarios with minor differences but you still built lists the same way to achieve ALL of them.

But I also don't see missions being the arbitrator of what wins or not being much different from me showing up with my thousand sons and getting t-bagged by my opponent because I brought the wrong army (the non ITC tournament army). The only difference is that the scenarios being static way means I can 100% choose to chase the ITC meta and have good games. THe other I have to try and build along multiple mission parameters and cannot min max for any of them which makes it harder for me (but to me more satisfying).

I don't see my way ever happening in 40k land though so no worries

In the new GW missions there's a mission that awards victory points for each unit killed to a max of 3 per turn, here your Thousand Sons would be at a disadvantage against Knights, while on the mission where your 5-man Rubric squads can plant or defuse bombs more pts-efficiently than Knights can you'd be at an advantage. Let's forget about secondaries and holding objectives and all the other things that are in the mission pack and just focus on what you like here. If you play against Knights you win all the time playing one mission and lose all the time playing the other mission, how is this one terrible game improved by the knowledge the Knight player will most likely win one of his other matches after you get a free win against him this time make the game more fun?

I think having 5 unique types of primaries and a unique combination of objective placement and deployment zones + a unique and thematic secondary option is more fair and interesting. A mission where there are 3 objectives along the sides of the battlefield where you have to hold 2/3 is vastly different from a mission where you only have to hold one of the 5 objectives that are placed near the center of the battlefield. Add the difference between the fighting for the middle against one type of list vs another and fighting for the sides vs one type of list vs another to me that's more fun than doing rock-paper-scissors to see if Knights or Thousand Sons get the easy win mission.

GW getting rid of the ITC Champions missions kill/kill more objective was a really good idea and actions are neat way to lower lethality in the game and give units with an otherwise small impact a chance to win the mission for you.

Tyel wrote:
Maelstrom/ETC encouraged a much less chess-like mentality to list building than ITC. Winning lists were generally much more focused on flexibility and therefore "softer" as a result. I.E. in 8th a list of mass Chimera with Guardsmen inside could win a big tournament - while in ITC this would surely just get nuked out of existence.

But equally, losing because you've just drawn a load of bad cards - while your opponents hand has gone "this turn do A, score loads of points, next turn do B and score loads more points etc" is kind of lame.

The best outcome would be to somehow marry up the two. But its hard to have random elements without feels bad moments.

I don't think you needed much flexibility for Maelstrom, ITC was too focussed on lists that could obliterate the enemy or were insanely tough, but it's not like that wouldn't work in Maelstrom since there were rewards like kill 3 units or cast a bazillion psychic powers which rewarded making lists that could kill 25% of the enemy army turn 1 or just spam psykers as much as possible instead of making something "softer". Needing to have a psyker in your Necron list to complete the Master the Warp objective didn't need you to create a softer list, it needed you to cheat since Necrons do not get psykers. The deck-building fix also turned out to be tedious and worsened what was a fun casual format in order to cater to the crazies that thought Maelstrom belonged in tournaments.

If you want balanced games you are using wrong company's games to begin with. Open war deck is LEAST of your worries.

tneva82 wrote:
If you want balanced games you are using wrong company's games to begin with. Open war deck is LEAST of your worries.

Ding ding ding!

how is this one terrible game improved by the knowledge the Knight player will most likely win one of his other matches after you get a free win against him this time make the game more fun?

All knight lists are skew lists. In warfare, skew forces are specialist forces great at certain things and not so great at other things. I was a tanker in the army, and there were absolutely missions you did not send us on because tanks were really bad at certain things.

I expect the same thing in wargames.

Skew lists are to me directly relational to bad balance. They are the min max lists that skew to one thing heavily to stack math in their favor and they flourish in an environment where they know they will always be good at.

Missions that have different primaries are great and what I am after. But they have to really be different enough or else they aren't doing their job.

Any missions where I can ignore mission parameters and just aim to kill my enemy to win is an example of (to me) bad mission design, because as a min max optimizer I can just ignore all mission parameters and optimize lethality. This is what many tournaments i've been to in the past 30 odd years of being involved in tabletop wargames have focused on and those allow skew to flourish.

The question then posed is "but is it fair for that skew player (knights, all melee, all long range anti tank, all tank parking lot, whatever skew you want to talk about) is going to be PUNISHED" and to me the answer is yes. If you actively choose to run a skew list, you should have some risks involved with that. As a balanced player trying to run thousand sons rubric marines the way the narrative says I should, I am punished by having to face something like all armor skew because I have to run anti-armor skew to have a fun game. So I'd have to know that ahead of time (which we call list tailoring which is as I have been told for a long long time evil and a bad thing and not fair or a good time).

The game tries to let you run skew lists and then treat them as if all of their matches should be even, which shoves the balance over to the skew lists, which is where you always get the phrase "its fine on the top tournament tables so its fine overall", because that just says "if you'd also run power skew you'd be fine so the game is fine". Its one big reason why balanced forces can't ever be balanced in 40k without your opponent and you cooperatively building lists to play against that would provide for that.

Armor is good at holding points on a battlefield. Armor is good to roll objectives with speed and good firepower. Armor is horrible at things like having to claim objective points (you need infantry for that) and horrible in battles where they are bottlenecked like city battles or canyons / keyholes.

I love systems that provide all of that so the one list to optimize them all can't exist. The open war deck with multiple mission types was a lot of fun in my experience, but the skew players always threw a fit because they couldn't optimize for them and their ITC lists were not able to dominate in that environment, and they did not want to go out and buy a force just for campaign so wanted all games to be ITC missions where their lists were tailor made and optimized for.

Open War cards are great. People actually banned them? Sheesh... talk about having fun the 'wrong' way.

 Kanluwen wrote:
You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?

You think players were responsible for that frigging trash?

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Yes, as competitive players were fine procuring bits otherwise. Or do you think Sword Brethren got that treatment for balance reasons?

You really think that the players (of any type) had a hand in GW's changing the rules for unit upgrades?

 auticus wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:

 auticus wrote:
Thats awesome, I loved those cards.

They were banned from every shop as well for being not fair and "open play nonsense". I tried using whatever they were a few years ago (things have changed I understand) and there was a revolt and a lot of all caps shouting in the facebook group for the narrative campaign about how they should be banned and the group voted and overwhelmingly felt that only ITC tournament missions should ever be used because "those were fair".

Did you poll them to see how many had actually played with them previously? From my own experience, I'd bet it was less than 1 in 10.

I asked variations of it but would just get nasty responses in return about house rules and unofficial 40k and making up rules as I go. They really really hated the concept of anything that wasn't official ITC tournament 40k. (A lot of them also used "campaign" or pick up games as their tournament tuning games, so to them it would be a waste of time playing things that they wouldn't encounter in a tournament)

pretty much my experience as well

 Backspacehacker wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

EviscerationPlague wrote:

Why not? Maybe not everyone wants to use silly looking loadouts like one-of-each special weapon like the Skitarii have right now, but you can thank GW for making the rules match the kit and the casual players for defending it.

LMFAO.

You think casual players were responsible for that frigging trash?

This lol

Most casual players I knew of were more then fine with units that did not come in the box. I never once saw a player happy that GW removed unit options that did not come in a kit.

Here's how I explain the "What's in the box" load out option:

I'm with HBMC in placing the blame on GW rather than any type of player, with the Caveat that GW's rationale was that they were removing a barrier to NEW players (Casual vs. Competitive likely didn't even cross their mind). I say this because if you ARE a new player, it is a barrier to see that some of the "options" for a list do require you an extra box for the sake of a single weapon.

People don't hesitate to call a choice that isn't optimal a "trap choice" - funny that they never thought to call an optimal choice a "trap" because it isn't economically viable.

It's also possible that a secondary motivation was an attempt to encourage TAC lists.

The other thing that I find odd about the topic is that folks frequently say "Every decision GW makes is to maximize profit" - I actually tend to agree most of the time. But if huge numbers of people were buying multiple boxes to get an optimize load out, then it would seem that these load out changes would actually result in making less money.

PenitentJake wrote:
The other thing that I find odd about the topic is that folks frequently say "Every decision GW makes is to maximize profit" - I actually tend to agree most of the time. But if huge numbers of people were buying multiple boxes to get an optimize load out, then it would seem that these load out changes would actually result in making less money.

But people weren't buying multiple boxes. They were going to bits sites and ebay to get them.

Except that the bits sites had to do what to restock?

Buy multiple boxes.

So whether the end user was paying GW or the bits seller was paying GW, the older lists would still be more profitable if large numbers of players were fielding an optimized load out.

(Barring recasters, knock-offs and 3d printers that is)

PenitentJake wrote:
Except that the bits sites had to do what to restock?

Buy multiple boxes.

So whether the end user was paying GW or the bits seller was paying GW, the older lists would still be more profitable if large numbers of players were fielding an optimized load out.

But GW doesn't see it that way. They see it as people buying bits from 3rd parties rather than buying entire new boxes from them.