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What do you guys think? I know there are a combination of things at play, but which factor is the leading one that has resulted in the rules we know and hate? Are there particular design decisions that seem more driven by one or the other?

Poll needs more options.

Let us pick multiple answers too. I picked 3, but 2 is not necessarily wrong (though it may in part be caused by 3).

The third option is a subset of the second.

My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

 Tokhuah wrote:
My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

You may need this, just in case.

 Tokhuah wrote:
My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

Even if this was true, and we could argue all day long if it is, why does that mean the game has to be bad? These things are not mutually exclusive.

 Tokhuah wrote:
My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

The balance problems that make 40k bad for tournament gaming also make it bad for everything else. 40k's problems are failures of game design, not a deliberate choice to be better at one thing at the expense of others.

Right now, a combination of stupidity and disinterest based upon that stupidity.

And the silly thing is that there's no reason for this, either. With GW's legacy status, they'd probably have accomplished designers lining up to be on board, likely for cheap even, if given the opportunity. With a name as big as GW's in the industry, they're in a position where they should be headhunting the best of the best of this generation's designers.

Instead, they choose to be completely ignorant that other games even exist, let alone poaching their talent.

Is your poll bad because:
A) you are evil and you want an unbalanced poll.
B) You are stupid and incompetent at making good polls
C) You are disintrested. The poll is only there to insult GW.

Only one answer please.

40k is unbalanced because the players buy into it.

 Traditio wrote:
40k is unbalanced because the players buy into it.

No that's the game's fault, the players are just using the game's rules

 CrownAxe wrote:

 Traditio wrote:
40k is unbalanced because the players buy into it.

No that's the game's fault, the players are just using the game's rules

Nobody forced players to buy wraithknights, wave serpents, imperial knights, storm surges, riptides, Magnus the Red, etc.

Companies make bad products all the time, and people don't buy them.

It's on GW that they made a bad product.

It's on the players/consumers that they decided to buy it.

If players/consumers refused to buy, GW would have one of two options:

1. Go bankrupt
2. Make a product that the consumers are actually satisfied with.

 Traditio wrote:

 CrownAxe wrote:

 Traditio wrote:
40k is unbalanced because the players buy into it.

No that's the game's fault, the players are just using the game's rules

Nobody forced players to buy wraithknights, wave serpents, imperial knights, storm surges, riptides, Magnus the Red, etc.

Companies make bad products all the time, and people don't buy them.

It's on GW that they made a bad product.

It's on the players/consumers that they decided to buy it.

If players/consumers refused to buy, GW would have one of two options:

1. Go bankrupt
2. Make a product that the consumers are actually satisfied with.

These aren't bad products, its just a game you do not like

Hanlon's Razor.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity,

A strong combination of B & C.

Theyre a model company first and foremost and are very open about that, rules are there just to move models. At the same time, they really do seemingly go out of their way to make really bad rulesets.

none of the above?

Book codex balance and the "it's not broken 'till you break it" concept (not 100%, but that DOES play a role into it)

Definitely a combination of 2 and 3. Their stupidity makes them not realise that while imbalanced rules might sell big stuff to existing customers a balanced typeset that would be more fun to play would attract more new customers.

I think its mostly 2. 3 Is certainly a factor, but I suspect the rules writers are really passionate, just unfamiliar with balance (hence forge the narrative, obession with special rules to make everything as special snowflake and epic as possible, etc), and combined with 3 (rules to push model sales) results in a shoddy rule set.

Now, I don't mean push model sales as in write op rules. Otherwise things like pyrovores would be op. I mean more in the sense that marketing tells them they want a new big thing to sell, so the rules team makes one, but since they don't know how to properly balance it they either clumsily shoehorn it into the rules (hence titans in sub 2k points games), phone it in (hence pyrovores), or get a bit too eager and fanboy-e and make it super powerful (Riptides)

Assuming it goes Marketing Request --> Rules > Model design, which is the most logical form of progression to me
I suppose it could also be Marketing Request --> Model design --> Rules, which would explain the new special weapons that are popping up, as one would have to make new rules for new weapons.
Or perhaps even both of those.
My point still stands though; as the rules team don't know how to balance or write rules, they would be able to effectively write good rules (or names, for that matter) for new weapons.

 Tokhuah wrote:
My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

The product is sold as a complex hobby that combines many enjoyable activities: modelling/converting, painting, and playing the game (possibly, in addition, the chance to build campaigns and scenarios in an almost RPG manner).

As a customer, one expects that each part of the product deserves the proper attention from the company: but here, you are essentially saying "the hobby is composed by different parts, the part I enjoy the most work fine for me, so quit your whining".

The game is now very complex, rules are spread, and some rule combination can leave bitter surprises even to causal hobbyists. I know people dropping CSM and Orks because playing with the models they loved and carefully painted has become an exercise of frustration. The CSM player did not come back after the legion book, because it was essentially "too little, too late".

Remember that if other customers (customers that could have different priorities from yours, I realise this could be shocking for you) drop the game, such game can die, and even the models (that for you are the most important part) can be discontinued. I should perhaps remember you that this already happened with a game of the same company.

So I have to kindly ask you to restrain your contempt for other hobbyists that have a different set of priorities from yours but expect a serious, professional behaviour from a company that fails to deliver.

 Tokhuah wrote:
My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

Doesn't matter what is intended by the incompetent design team and single minded marketing staff. With the time needed just to learn the massive glut of rules, and the literal years it can take for someone to build up their armies, there is an investment there that demands at least the most basic level of competence. I may be a modeller far and away first, but when I put all of my hard work on the table, you better bet that I want those models to get their value in that manner too.

 Tokhuah wrote:
My answer is...

D. 40K is a model crafting hobby that is playable as a game, not a tournament focused game, a fact so many people who complain on message boards fail to realize.

Then why have GW run grand tournaments in the past and are continuing to do so on Twitch?

Where is the fourth option where GW doesn't think people would abuse point values to try and get an advantage over their opponents?

A wraithknight and a unit of scatbikes isn't overpowered in an 1850 point list when your army should include a pile of guardians/dire avengers according to the fluff. It actually seems to confuse them when someone says they spam powerful units...

To answer to the OP, I will shamelessly repost from an older thread (still raging, is the "can we agree GW goes better - as another poster said, no we cannot agree).

I selected C, because GW does not care, but is a de facto combination of B and C - GW does not care if its designers are amateurish buffoons.

GW game design suffers:

- Poor Math Skills : is more than clear now that many people in the team have a very poor grasp of probability and statistics. Many monsters are underpriced because the designer did not get the basic math behind the chance to hit, wound, and saves. Think about the Riptide. Jeremy Vetock cannot do math, full stop. He has to go back. In school.

- Overdesign: they introduced rules that added no true value to the game, but still are something new one has to remember (in other words, make the game more complicated but not necessarily more depth). Think about Salvo, that is often ignored or worked around with relentless platforms. In order to use in a even semi-competitive manner the weapon with such rule, you have to work against the very rule used to balance such weapon. Chapeau.

- Love for randumb: the number of rolls added since 3rd edition is huge. Most of these rolls are not desired by the player base (like the introduction of WHFB-like psionics in 7th, or the Chaos Boon Table. That table is an example of something that hit the mark of everything wrong in design. It looks fake for how bad it is. Phil Kelly is an hack).

- Bookeeping out of control: stuff like Soul Blaze should not exist. I see you like DoT in videogames but keeping track of this on the tabletop is a nightmare. And this adds up to all sort of other rolls.

- Sloppy design: small armies like the Tempestus would have benefited immensely from a small point reduction of vehicles and a better order system (most of these orders were already in the IG book). Is not even creating stuff, is copying the right one from older content. The lack of care and allegedly of playtest is disconcerting. They even added "gets hot" on the already dubious Volley Guns. They errataed that soon, but even thinking about adding that rule to such mediocre weapon means that you, designer, did not playtest, nor have any idea of how the game works (that is, what makes a unit strong, and why).

- Pet armies: some armies are treated "better" because they a designer plays them. Space Wolves and Eldar for Phil Kelly. Cruddace, on the other hand, ruined Tyranids forever. Orks? Who cares. This led too, to the increase of stupidly powerful weapons, high rate of fire, creation of stuff against the fluff, and the decline of iconic units like the tactical squad because they had to push each his own special snowflake. The winner of this wingwong-measuring contest is Matt Ward, a guy who destroyed a whole game (WHFB) and established the problems we have now with monstrous creatures.

- General lack of vision: they do not know which army should be better at what (that is, they don't have a vision concering the strong and weak point of each army), they do not know the scale of the game and how to integrate small infantry and big super heavy. Point cost is all over the place. Dumb units are fixed with formation, that leads to Spamhammer and barrier entry for newbies. In addition, they are now designing armies and formations that mix and match different factions: this means we will never have any resemblance of balance or factions with specific, flavourful characteristics and game style because all will be suffocated under te banner of "sell everything to everybody).

These people are absolutely terrible at their job and a good part for the frustration of the player base is because they, every time, address the wrong problems in the game (to an extreme, see AoS for WHFB after that abomination of 8th edition).

Lythrandire Biehrellian wrote:
Where is the fourth option where GW doesn't think people would abuse point values to try and get an advantage over their opponents?

A wraithknight and a unit of scatbikes isn't overpowered in an 1850 point list when your army should include a pile of guardians/dire avengers according to the fluff. It actually seems to confuse them when someone says they spam powerful units...

That falls under the second one.

 Kaiyanwang wrote:
To answer to the OP, I will shamelessly repost from an older thread (still raging, is the "can we agree GW goes better - as another poster said, no we cannot agree).

I selected C, because GW doss not care, but is a de facto combination of B and C - GW does not care if its designer are amateurish buffoons.

GW designer suffer:

- Poor Math Skills : is more than clear now that many people in the team have a very poor grasp of probability and statistics. Many monsters are underpriced because the designer did not get the basic math behind the chance to hit, wound, and saves. Think about the Riptide. Jeremy Vetock cannot do math, full stop. He has to go back. In school.

- Overdesign: they introduced rules that added no true value to the game, but still are something new one has to remember (in other words, make the game more complicated but not necessarily more depth). Think about Salvo, that is often ignored or worked around with relentless platforms. In order to use in a even semi-competitive manner the weapon with such rule, you have to work against the very rule used to balance such weapon. Chapeau.

- Love for randumb: the number of rolls added since 3rd edition is huge. Most of these rolls are not desired by the player base (like the introduction of WHFB-like psionics in 7th, or the Chaos Boon Table. That table is an example of something that hit the mark of everything wrong in design. It looks fake for how bad it is. Phil Kelly is an hack).

- Bookeeping out of control: stuff like Soul Blaze should not exist. I see you like DoT in videogames but keeping track of this on the tabletop is a nightmare. And this adds up to all sort of other rolls.

- Sloppy design: small armies like the Tempestus would have benefited immensely from a small point reduction of vehicles and a better order system (most of these orders were already in the IG book). Is not even creating stuff, is copying the right one from older content. The lack of care and allegedly of playtest is disconcerting. They even added "gets hot" on the already dubious Volley Guns. They errataed that soon, but even thinking about adding that rule to such mediocre weapon means that you, designer, did not playtest, nor have any idea of how the game works (that is, what makes a unit strong, and why).

- Pet armies: some armies are treated "better" because they a designer plays them. Space Wolves and Eldar for Phil Kelly. Cruddace, on the other hand, ruined Tyranids forever. Orks? Who cares. This led too, to the increase of stupidly powerful weapons, high rate of fire, creation of stuff against the fluff, and the decline of iconic units like the tactical squad because they had to push each his own special snowflake. The winner of this wingwong-measuring contest is Matt Ward, a guy who destroyed a whole game (WHFB) and established the problems we have now with monstrous creatures.

- General lack of vision: they do not know which army should be better at what (that is, they don't have a vision concering the strong and weak point of each army), they do not know the scale of the game and how to integrate small infantry and big super heavy. Point cost is all over the place. Dumb units are fixed with formation, that leads to Spamhammer and barrier entry for newbies. In addition, they are now designing armies and formations that mix and match different factions: this means we will never have any resemblance of balance or factions with specific, flavourful characteristics and game style because all will be suffocated under te banner of "sell everything to everybody).

These people are absolutely terrible at their job and a good part for the frustration of the player base is because they, every time, address the wrong problems in the game (to an extreme, see AoS for WHFB after that abomination of 8th edition).

Great post (though I strongly disagree about the new psychic phase, which is far better than the old one IMO, and I personally like soulblaze). The game definitively suffers from a general and a specific (for each army) lack of direction. Introducing super formations in the middle of an edition as they did is simply idiotic. Too cheap to hire a statisticians team to offer a semblance of balance (since they barely do any playtesting). Seems like game design and points allocation are still run as it was in the beginning, when it was basically a couple of friends doing it from their basement.

I've always doubted that they use the rules to sell models, because frequently brand new models suck. For instance, the Maleceptor is the worst unit available to any army, and a new model this edition. Another example is the Gortkanaunt and Morkanaunt. Fabulous models. Insane price. Crappy rules.

 Kaiyanwang wrote:
- Poor Math Skills : is more than clear now that many people in the team have a very poor grasp of probability and statistics. Many monsters are underpriced because the designer did not get the basic math behind the chance to hit, wound, and saves. Think about the Riptide. Jeremy Vetock cannot do math, full stop. He has to go back. In school.

On the Twitch Feed Yesterday this was fairly obvious. Simon Grant the rules writer behind Fall of Cadia, and Wrath of Magnus said he isn't a "Math Guy", and at one points asked if anyone in the chat was good at math and statistics.

Some other things we learned. The entire rules team for all game systems is 5 people. Those 5 people are given instructions by the model design group, and the narrative writing group, and Jervis Johnson is the supervisor.

The do do playtesting, but implied that they used houserules while playtesting. He spoke about the 1st tests of Magnus the Red having set the points at 450, only to find that he killed more than that in 2 turns.

Simon Grant appeared a bit more comfortable discussing Age of Sigmar.

The interview was heavily steered away from detailed process discussion, and a night and day contrast to the Heavy Metal interview that followed which discussed process in detail.

First, your poll is really poor.

Second, It's a combination of reasons, really:

1) The fact they like to go with "rule of cool" versus actual balance. So they will give a model some neat killer ability, without really understanding what it does for the larger game.

2) The model is designed before rules and then just handed to the designers and told "Here make rules for this", which is fundamentally wrong to a game (see below) since the model is designed without regard for how it plays in the game, and then the rules need to be warped to fit how the model looks e.g. if a model has a huge gun, the rules need to reflect a huge gun, so rules tend to appear ad hoc.

3) GW wants to be a model company with rules as a secondary (or tertiary) concern, despite almost all the marketing being about how to use the models to play the game. Coupled with #2 above this means rules are all over the place to fit models that are being shoehorned into the game because model trumps rules, when they should be hand in hand so you aren't constraining design with some kewl new model that needs to be plugged into the setting.

4) The design team is too small. There should be one design team for AOS, one for 40k and then maybe 1-2 guys who work on the other games (e.g. Blood Bowl, Silver Tower, etc. the board game type things), each team with Lead, and then Jervis as the overall Manager (I'm using USA terminology here). Jervis is experienced enough with all the overall lore to be able to provide guidance, but each team should have some autonomy.

5) The rules need a solid framework to build upon; AOS has this to an extent but 40k doesn't. There doesn't need to be a myriad of special rules that do similar things but not quite; there should be a handful of rules that can be applied to things as needed. There needs to be less randomized charts that feel like they take away from player choice, and things that could be too strong if you could just pick them (e.g. psychic powers) need to be redone to have meaningful choice without having some that you would always take.

Wayniac wrote:
First, your poll is really poor.

Second, It's a combination of reasons, really:

1) The fact they like to go with "rule of cool" versus actual balance. So they will give a model some neat killer ability, without really understanding what it does for the larger game.

2) The model is designed before rules and then just handed to the designers and told "Here make rules for this", which is fundamentally wrong to a game (see below) since the model is designed without regard for how it plays in the game, and then the rules need to be warped to fit how the model looks e.g. if a model has a huge gun, the rules need to reflect a huge gun, so rules tend to appear ad hoc.

3) GW wants to be a model company with rules as a secondary (or tertiary) concern, despite almost all the marketing being about how to use the models to play the game. Coupled with #2 above this means rules are all over the place to fit models that are being shoehorned into the game because model trumps rules, when they should be hand in hand so you aren't constraining design with some kewl new model that needs to be plugged into the setting.

4) The design team is too small. There should be one design team for AOS, one for 40k and then maybe 1-2 guys who work on the other games (e.g. Blood Bowl, Silver Tower, etc. the board game type things), each team with Lead, and then Jervis as the overall Manager (I'm using USA terminology here). Jervis is experienced enough with all the overall lore to be able to provide guidance, but each team should have some autonomy.

5) The rules need a solid framework to build upon; AOS has this to an extent but 40k doesn't. There doesn't need to be a myriad of special rules that do similar things but not quite; there should be a handful of rules that can be applied to things as needed. There needs to be less randomized charts that feel like they take away from player choice, and things that could be too strong if you could just pick them (e.g. psychic powers) need to be redone to have meaningful choice without having some that you would always take.

You forgot #6

6) At some point through the lifespan of 7th edition(purportedly, it was when they started working towards the Tau books, they didn't want to put out a full Codex Update without doing a full Codex rewrite and instead they just added in the new campaign material as a stopgap measure with the reprints of the Tau book) they decided it was a lameduck and rather than fully update the books and adjust points and other necessary changes, they would just do add some new bits and bobs and release the material they already had done until 8th.

Setting aside the fact that GW is a model company, not a game company (despite their name indicating otherwise), there is really only 1 reason why 40K has poor balance:

Different rules writers. Each with their own ideas of what is balanced, internally & externally.

If you need a good example of this, just go pick 5 random topics in the Proposed Rules on this very forum. There is almost never a consensus on what is balanced. Sure some ideas might come close, but at least 1 person will disagree.
The GW rules writers are almost assuredly the same. They like the army they are working on and think the rules they come up with are good, cool, balanced, and/or reflective of the fluff. Some of the writers may care more about one of these factors more than the others. And often some writers have no idea what others may be working on (they may have an idea, but no specifics)

So what we end up with is a bunch of armies with wildly different "power levels" and since we, the players, assume GW has one cohesive vision (they don't, but it seems to be getting better) we blame them as a company for making an unbalanced game.

-