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My interest in this topic stems from having a pool of casuals and a minor pool of competitive players that bring competitive lists to all games and it causes an isssue when trying to set up narrative campaigns that are also public. There are certain games that this isn't an issue, because the game is mostly balanced and there aren't whole factions that are useless.

Then there are other games like... 40k... and.... AOS.... where whole factions are useless.

But the question is.. what is balance?

Is it Communist Equity? That's balance. That leads to a very bland game. Which was a problem early on with HH games, sometimes called Power Armor only Game. Everyone had bolters and power armor, everyone had pretty much the same items available. That's communist equity with variety of units, which is better than everything the same, which would be a game made up completely gents with the same stat line and power armor and bolters. Imagine how bland that game would be. But it would be 100% balanced, 100% fair. Everyone had the same number of units with identical stats and equipment.

Or is it Rock-Paper-Scissors (hence forth referred to as RPS Balance). That is balance. But then rock always beats paper and paper is always beat by Scissors and Scissors is always beat by Rock. Which again leads to VERY boring games. Everyone will take a Rock, a Paper, and a Scissors and will seek to set them against their SURE WIN counterpart. This leads to tactically boring games.

The last form of Balance is the concept of Counter Balance. This is the most complex and the favorite of Mathhammerites. It's also the hardest to get right and the Mathhammerers will hammer at it till they find the place you made a mistake and exploit it like mad in tournies.

Most wargames do not go for Communist Balance or RPS Balance but instead for the Counter Balance (think of weights on either side of a pivot point, units and their costs shift things around). This means you can build very unbalanced lists that might actually perform very well against X, Y, or Z opponent and this form of intentional imbalanced lists that are used when a given tournament circuit becomes rife with a Mathahmmered Exploit List. Because the imbalance when considered against the ret of the concept brings balance against the exploited and overplayed list. Which is why you see tournament s dominated in swinging waves by one wave of UBER then the next wave of uber that invalidates the previous over played list that everyone bandwagoned in on.

The problem is that any game dev, computer or tabletop cannot achieve true balance. The mathammerers will always find the loophole and ride it like a 2 buck.. ehehm.. ride.. Which leads to the more or less form of Balance of Imbalance. Or moving balance.

It's why 8th sucks for narrative players vs 7th. 7th was more "rich" while 8th was focused on removing loopholes and exploits which moved towards Communist Balance (removal of options and complexity comrade).

40K is simply too model complex to really balance and not end up with loopholes and if you went a Warmachine "living" edition way you'd be making edits and they'd then hammer out another exploit and then you'd close that and on and on and on because one change leads to a cascade of unexpected changes and people looking for the "unfair" advantage (who wouldn't in competitive play is simply not playing competitively). will torture your rebalance till it gives up the secret of whatever advantage is to be found.

Balance is HARD, balancing for competitive beyond some kind of cardboard boring limited options communist balance is just NOT possible. But that doesn't mean you can't do reasonable things to limit it and I think GW is doing just that with the kind of changes it makes with each Chapter Approved, they throw a wrench into the works and let the mathammers bang on it and then throw another wrench..

they do this mostly because screwing with the balance in a somewhat random fashion (its not really random) makes people buy models and competitive players will ALWAYS buy the new hotness. ALWAYS. Its a sure sales thing to nerf bat the current hotness to get sales on the new hotness. Sales have never been better.

That might piss you off but, as with the rest of the universe, he with the most $$ will tend to win things. And in competitive play, he with enough $$ to chase the hotness, will have whichever cheese list is the current thing. No matter the cost for the wallet.

Eh this is a hard question for a few reasons

1) if you are talking about say a PC/console game where tweaks can be made quickly, then its very important

2) If we are talking about 40k what type of meta are we talking about, the casual where people try to tone their list up or down to match their opponent? In which case its not that important because players will self balance the game, no 1 is going to bring Ynnari vs Grey knights.

If we are talking about the competitive scene then its more important, but generally no 1 is going to bring the underwhelming factions to those. That said 40k will never be balanced competitively no matter what they do. The game is designed from the ground up around the idea of being around a table talking, joking, and sharing some beers with your friends. 40k was never designed for competition, thats the community at large forcing a square peg into a round hole.