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https://www.warhammer-community.com/2018/11/14/14th-nov-the-generals-handbook-2019-we-need-yougw-homepage-post-3/

It looks like GW is looking for player feedback for the next General' s Handbook. So I thought that we can use this thread to discuss possible changes or areas of improvement for the game.

What's the O/U on the word count for auticus' feedback?

All I know is that I've made my submission.

My feedback is pretty small.

It said "hire a mathematician to get you actual statistics. Asking the community for points values is folly."

Not submitted but clariifying: Otherwise Bob's favorite army should have lower points and the army Bob gets beat by should have their points increased by a lot.

As for improving the game, there is nothing that I can add here that we have not gone over round and round all year, so I am not going to participate in that here. The masses have spoken in regards to what they want out of the game, and there is not room in that for what I want out of a tabletop game, so I have found other things to do with my time and resources.

Should they release a killteam version of AOS like KOW did with Vanguard, I'll consider picking that up because I find with games involving individual model movements, I prefer small model count and I love story and leveling up models more than I love deckbuilding/listbuilding, false choices leading to singular build types, and combo min/maxing type games with a large number of models that have to be manipulated individually.

I'd definitely be interested if they hired a statistician to help them with their points too, at least in looking at what the changes are and seeiing how that has impacted the current game, but I think there is a greater chance for the Second Coming happening before that.

You've spent the last three years on a soapbox professing how much better your method is for balancing the game, and now that GW is actually asking the community for feedback on game balance, your response is to be dismissive?

I'm sure we'll see AoS "Kilteam" or just updated skirmish rules once more of the factions have Battletomes and it makes sense for GW to have an outreach/gateway product that's dirt cheap (by hobby standards) to buy into to get started with. Right now isn't the right time when half the whole range is missing battletomes

 EnTyme wrote:
You've spent the last three years on a soapbox professing how much better your method is for balancing the game, and now that GW is actually asking the community for feedback on game balance, your response is to be dismissive?

The TL;DR of a lot of my "soapbox" has been for them to hire a mathematician, so I gave them the TL;DR version. Hire a mathematician.

It is quite obvious the AOS fanbase doesn't care about that though (actual true balance or closer to that) and are just fine with the way things are, nor the things that interest me in a game, and there's no need to continue peeing into the wind in that regard. Once I found that I could continue using my model collection somewhere else with a system that meets more of the things that interest me without needing to flush my investment down the toilet and be forced to rebuy and repaint an entire new collection, there was really no more desire to engage with this subject any longer beyond cursory reading of topics and responding about certain topics that don't involve what one hates about the game. Should they move in a direction that gets serious about removing the false choices and mono-builds that they encourage and put some things in that address the issues I discussed all year, I'll consider investing energy into them again. If not, oh well.

I'll always have Blood Bowl

Reset the clock!

Shame that they are only asking for input on points. I’d like some better parity in Command Traits and Artifacts, redoing the Fyreslayer Lodges to be more in line with the newer Battletome “mini-factions” and a few other non points related things. Hopefully that kind of post is coming soon.

Oh believe you me, I'm making notes of more than just points.

Also there's been a rumor floating around for a bit that Fyreslayers, Seraphon, and a few others are going to see redone Battletomes to bring them in line with the current books.

I think this is an excellent outreach.

I really doubt they will take some of the point suggestions to heart, but seeing which unit people are criticizing or commenting on gives them a place to start looking with their own team.

 nels1031 wrote:
Reset the clock!

Because they've asked for feedback? They've done it before so it's not really anything new.

 Ghaz wrote:

 nels1031 wrote:
Reset the clock!

Because they've asked for feedback? They've done it before so it's not really anything new.

No, that was for something/someone else entirely.

I think you'll see a lot of DoK, LoN, and SCE criticisms in how well they do and how much a cut above they are.

auticus wrote:

 EnTyme wrote:
You've spent the last three years on a soapbox professing how much better your method is for balancing the game, and now that GW is actually asking the community for feedback on game balance, your response is to be dismissive?

The TL;DR of a lot of my "soapbox" has been for them to hire a mathematician, so I gave them the TL;DR version. Hire a mathematician.

It is quite obvious the AOS fanbase doesn't care about that though (actual true balance or closer to that) and are just fine with the way things are, nor the things that interest me in a game, and there's no need to continue peeing into the wind in that regard. Once I found that I could continue using my model collection somewhere else with a system that meets more of the things that interest me without needing to flush my investment down the toilet and be forced to rebuy and repaint an entire new collection, there was really no more desire to engage with this subject any longer beyond cursory reading of topics and responding about certain topics that don't involve what one hates about the game. Should they move in a direction that gets serious about removing the false choices and mono-builds that they encourage and put some things in that address the issues I discussed all year, I'll consider investing energy into them again. If not, oh well.

I'll always have Blood Bowl

I think it's a shame that some people would rather be snarky when GW does outreach like this. Telling GW to hire someone in response to this just baffles me. When a company gives you a blank check to give feedback, you should take the opportunity to do so.

I applaud the move. I don't have any points suggestions, however I did submit a couple of other ideas (read: wishlist items) for a couple factions.

There is nothing snarky about my response. Asking the community for feedback on what they think should be raised in points and what should be lowered in points is one of the most useless gestures that can be done other than to make you feel good that you think they care.

Because my army should come down in points and your army should be raised in points.

Or you can employ a mathematician like other games have been known to do and get an actual honest look at where your stats have gone awry and figure out what your tolerance levels for out of bounds are and fix them.

auticus wrote:
There is nothing snarky about my response. Asking the community for feedback on what they think should be raised in points and what should be lowered in points is one of the most useless gestures that can be done other than to make you feel good that you think they care.

Because my army should come down in points and your army should be raised in points.

Or you can employ a mathematician like other games have been known to do and get an actual honest look at where your stats have gone awry and figure out what your tolerance levels for out of bounds are and fix them.

There is nothing snarky about your response? I guess we have two different views on what snarky means, but your response so far has been textbook imo.

Your argument makes a lot of assumptions. Not everyone is going to automatically ask for their armies to be reduced in points, and all others get bumped up. You are being intellectually dishonest. Additionally, you are assuming that they don't have staff to already do stuff like this. Do you know who they do and do not have on their payroll? Why can't they both employ a team to cover this topic internally, and at the same time look for feedback from the community?

It's fine if you don't feel leaving feedback is worth the effort, but to just throw it back in their faces and tell them to hire someone?

Ok. If you say so. I've been playing GW games for onward 20+ years. They have had balance issues almost the entire time which has caused rifts and strife with those that want balance and those that don't really care about balance.

If they want to balance their game, they need to do what other developers do... and get some math involved with someone that is highly skilled in math and statistics.

That is the root cause of everything that I feel is a problem. Doing some community outreach isn't going to solve that problem.

My answer is not any more snarky than anyone else's answer of "inflate unit X or decrease unit Y" since it is a response to a perceived problem. I have a feeling you may feel it "snark" because you disagree with it. Based on dictionary definitions of what that word is supposed to mean, I can 100% wiith certainty say I am using no sarcasm, nor am I mocking.

auticus wrote:
There is nothing snarky about my response. Asking the community for feedback on what they think should be raised in points and what should be lowered in points is one of the most useless gestures that can be done other than to make you feel good that you think they care.

Because my army should come down in points and your army should be raised in points.

Based on what? That community can't make balanced points? Community can kick ass GW in terms of balance and they have proven it. Epic Armageddon.

Better arqument would be GW not being honest with the motivation and being more of what you see in 40k where sales rather than balance dictate changes. But that shows already how GW is bad one to put in charge of points and where community can kick GW with right hand tied.

I couldn't toss out many opinions since I started to get into AoS just this month but I had to point out the Bloodseeker Palanquin being at least 100 points over costed (it's basically a cross between a Mortis Engine and a Coven Throne but costs the same as Akham for no reason) and asked about why a Vampire Queen on a Coven Throne wasn't a Vampire Lord.

Other than that I've just been reading the comments and I've seen just as many people asking their armies to be more expensive (like the new Stormcasts that are better than older Stormcasts but are the same points cost) as I've seen people pointing to specific things and saying they're overcosted.

So I think there are some no brainers.

My personal take:

Liberators go down in points, or Sequitors go up. Same with Paladins/Evocators.
All KO Boats get a steep points decrease.
Hag Queens get a steep price increase.
Arkhan goes up in points.
All Magmadroths come down in points.*
Vulkite Berserkers get their discount back.**
Endless Spell Chromatic Cogs should get a steep increase.
Idoneth Eels go up in points and/or everything else Idoneth thats not riding an Eel goes down.

Thoughts? Did I miss anything egregious? Think my list is bonkers?

*They feel like the softest monster in AoS, so might need some actual rules buffing aside from any points changes.
**Admittedly torn on that though, as they are very resilient at full power.

Hag queens can go up if Heartseekers go down.

I think it is great that GW is looking for feedback! GW of five years ago would never have done that.

But I think that it is a bit pointless to ask about points values when there is still so much summoning in the game making points kind of meaningless.

auticus wrote:
My feedback is pretty small.

It said "hire a mathematician to get you actual statistics. Asking the community for points values is folly."

Not submitted but clariifying: Otherwise Bob's favorite army should have lower points and the army Bob gets beat by should have their points increased by a lot.

As for improving the game, there is nothing that I can add here that we have not gone over round and round all year, so I am not going to participate in that here. The masses have spoken in regards to what they want out of the game, and there is not room in that for what I want out of a tabletop game, so I have found other things to do with my time and resources.

Should they release a killteam version of AOS like KOW did with Vanguard, I'll consider picking that up because I find with games involving individual model movements, I prefer small model count and I love story and leveling up models more than I love deckbuilding/listbuilding, false choices leading to singular build types, and combo min/maxing type games with a large number of models that have to be manipulated individually.

I'd definitely be interested if they hired a statistician to help them with their points too, at least in looking at what the changes are and seeiing how that has impacted the current game, but I think there is a greater chance for the Second Coming happening before that.

My feedback is 'hiring a statistician would certainly be helpful getting things closer to balanced, but don't bet the farm on him because plenty of other people have tried to 100% mathhammer out points and none of their systems are all that much better than yours is.'


Automatically Appended Next Post:

tneva82 wrote:

auticus wrote:
There is nothing snarky about my response. Asking the community for feedback on what they think should be raised in points and what should be lowered in points is one of the most useless gestures that can be done other than to make you feel good that you think they care.

Because my army should come down in points and your army should be raised in points.

Based on what? That community can't make balanced points? Community can kick ass GW in terms of balance and they have proven it. Epic Armageddon.

Better arqument would be GW not being honest with the motivation and being more of what you see in 40k where sales rather than balance dictate changes. But that shows already how GW is bad one to put in charge of points and where community can kick GW with right hand tied.

Okay, so I know we all really want to believe that the community is across the board better than GW is at balancing things(we quite possibly are) but let's reel it in a bit, yeah? The community is prone to stongly disagreeing with itself and vast overreactions. I've seen people say Hag Queens for example should be 120pts and that they're fine at 60. I've seen people say Stormcast Paladins are 60pts too expensive and 40pts too cheap and etc etc.

The big thing the community feedback SHOULD be used for is identifying problem units on both ends of the power spectrum, explaining why they're weak where they are, and making determined, if conservative, efforts to fix them.

Some things I've noticed that I hope they onboard is that 1) They have a much bigger problem with units that are too WEAK than they do with units that are too strong. Look at the new Stormcast book, for example. Evocators and Sequitors, along with Gavriel Sureheart, are quite a bit too cheap for what they do. So you fix those 3 units and stormcast are fine right? Nope, because the nerfs the REST of the book took means that without their two broken units they're looking at 3-5 'solid' units(Knight Incantor, Celestar, others) 2-4 mediocre units(fulminators, dracolines) and like 25 god-awful units(Tempestors, Desolators, all of the Paladin varieties, liberators, vanguard hunters, hurricane crossbows, concussors aren't very good, Knight Zephyros) and that's no way to build an army. ESPECIALLY when you consider that none of the different stormcast chambers have any synergy with each other at all.

For the stormcast haters out there, forget that last paragraph and think about this: Percentage wise, what units in the game are Great vs. Good vs. Terrible across the whole game? In my experience it's about a 10-30-60 split if you include non-battletome armies. Even with only battletome armies it's still something like 15-40-45. There are way more useless units than there are OP ones, and I would like to see those get fixes just as much as the OP stuff.

2. GW taketh, but it's not so great at giveth. GW should start using something of a 'League of Legends' approach to their balancing. Almost every codex has some really great units and some really terrible ones and any significant hit should be accompanied by conservative buff. For example: People want to see witch elves, SoS, and Hag queens go up in price, which is absolutely fair. So let's say they increase Witch Aelves by 30pts, SoS by 30pts and Hag Queens by 20, a moderate nerf. Well, DoK have plenty of units that aren't seeing any significant play and now you should have some wiggle room to buff them. Lifetakers could easily go down 20pts and not cause problems and Blood Stalkers are actually so bad that you could drop them down 40pts to 120 and not make any waves. It might not make much of a difference in terms of who's bringing what to tournaments, but it evens out the power curve and offers a smidge more freedom in list building.

Rather than unit balance I think faction balance has to be the aim. The feeling that you picked the dummy faction and are now doomed to unfair games forever is what burned me out on GW games in the end. Other games manage a much fairer power balance between factions, even if there are garbage or OP units in each faction.
Part of this is to do with the way they approach design from a personnel and time management perspective, and I see a lot of that actually changing over time, so perhaps things will get better. They also need to be a lot more strict on a business sense on forcing the creatives to confront and work on neglected factions rather than leaving them to languish because no one on the design team is "excited" about them. That is not a professional way to approach game design where your customers are going to invest huge amounts of money in your products.

GW seem to have gotten a lot better in many ways and management structures seem to be changing, which is why I am now hanging around these boards after years away. But I still see many of the issues that made me drop the game at the start of 8th fantasy and 6th 40K. Hopefully they will address them. Often I get the impression the GW design studio is a really unprofessional and ad hoc kind of place.

Faction balance is about ensuring each faction is viable, but also has more than one build - something that GW seems to be a lot better at as of late.


My impression is that the rules team for GW is a bit too experienced at playing each other. The terrain rules kind of show this in how short clipped they are. They seem to miss out a lot of specific interactions which I think reflects that those writing the rules are:

1) Under management pressure to keep them to the 8 pages limit which results in them having to cut a lot of material

2) So used to playing each other at wargames that they have a lot of rules (like terrain) which run on logic rather than rules. So they never think to write them into the rules because they play them like that automatically without thinking about it.

I would wager it could be a bit of both and it would explain why sometimes rules appear to be missing bits. Another aspect, of course, is that they don't have the same tight standard of writing and key words that rules writers like those who work for MTG have. That said I think they are getting better, plus lets not forget that the management attitude under Kirby (who ran the company for many years) was very dismissive of rules in general (as we saw with the release of Age of Sigmar). So that likely harmed the rules culture at GW in general for a long while and left them a legacy to have to work through to resolve into a new age and attitude.

I think you are likely spot on with that, and you expressed it more clearly than I could. I think there is reason to be hopeful for the future of GW rules if the current team take on board outside influences and ideas. I think they have been at times a bit defenisve or dismissive in the past, though I imagine they put up with an awful lot of meaningless noise masquerading as criticism as well.

I feel like GW is more going to take a tally of each thing mentioned that we feel needs to go up or down and why and then fix the points up their own way which means things may not move as much as we'd like. That said, I feel like it's still a better mechanic than the old ivory tower cut off from the world doing these changes they used to have.

auticus wrote:
Ok. If you say so. I've been playing GW games for onward 20+ years. They have had balance issues almost the entire time which has caused rifts and strife with those that want balance and those that don't really care about balance.

If they want to balance their game, they need to do what other developers do... and get some math involved with someone that is highly skilled in math and statistics.

That is the root cause of everything that I feel is a problem. Doing some community outreach isn't going to solve that problem.

My answer is not any more snarky than anyone else's answer of "inflate unit X or decrease unit Y" since it is a response to a perceived problem. I have a feeling you may feel it "snark" because you disagree with it. Based on dictionary definitions of what that word is supposed to mean, I can 100% wiith certainty say I am using no sarcasm, nor am I mocking.

I do say so, but agree to disagree in this case I guess.

Community outreach is actually a great thing, and its a practice that is embraced by successful enterprises. We should applaud the fact that GW has decided to ask for the customers feedback. Baby steps. Maybe this wasn't the best first step - and I think asking for point values left something to be desired - but this step still shows that they want to include us in the process. Being inclusive is a good thing.

I would still rather them move to actually balance the game and move away from their business model of keeping things imbalanced to force people to buy new models every cycle.

To do that they are going to actually have to invest in some kind of higher level mathematics.

Things like Evocators for example should never have been released with the points values that they were given. They were obviously from the first moment you tallied all of their damage output and saw that they cost roughly the same as other units that had half their output and defensive stats broken and overpowered.

And I don't think thats accidental because it was so obvious, it was to me a marketing push to push the new plastic models and get people to buy them.

Which destroys the game's integrity.

IMO.

auticus wrote:
I would still rather them move to actually balance the game and move away from their business model of keeping things imbalanced to force people to buy new models every cycle.

To do that they are going to actually have to invest in some kind of higher level mathematics.

Things like Evocators for example should never have been released with the points values that they were given. They were obviously from the first moment you tallied all of their damage output and saw that they cost roughly the same as other units that had half their output and defensive stats broken and overpowered.

And I don't think thats accidental because it was so obvious, it was to me a marketing push to push the new plastic models and get people to buy them.

Which destroys the game's integrity.

IMO.

But surely then the Castigators and the mounted Evocators and the Lord Exorcist would also be overpowered? They are also new kits.

It is clear the SCE didn't have a well-balanced army book written, but it seems more rushed than cynical.