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Might be a bit early, but this discussion is going to come. I read the new WD and the Maelstrom rules and the only question I have is 'Who the hell is responsible for writing this atrocity'?

I'll give the rules credit as there are two really positive things about it. First, Players are back to placing objectives where it makes sense for their respective armies. Second, is that there is a different level depending on the size of the game. An unnecessary fix to the rest of the Beta rules, but at least their addressing the only issue with the 7e Maelstrom rules in relation to the size of the game. Deployment Zones being detached from the missions is an improvement over the current Mission. It doesn't make any sense, or have any impact on the outcome of the games in the Matched Play mission and unfortunately it won't now because of how Objectives are generated.

Other than that, all they did was removed the 'Primary' mission objective from the MP mission and expand the new 'Secondary' mission Mechanic. Makes sense since players are back to placing their own objectives. Like the current Mission, Players will be able to select 3 'Categories' that will remain through the game. At the start of each Battle Round, players will generate a random objective from each of the chosen categories for the turn with slight variations based on which actual mission is being played. I can only see this slowing down the game more until cards are released. Functionally, it's no different than the Current Mission where you have ~15 points that you can score each turn, which is stupid since we already have a mission pack with that mechanic in it.

There is a 'Unachievable Objective' rule as well. A stupid inclusion based on a common house rule fix to the 7e Maelstrom where you could discard an objective if it wasn't achievable. This removed a core feature of Maelstrom from 7th/8th, and is unnecessary in the current rules since objectives don't hang around until you achieve them. Like the current Matched Play mission, it's like they expanded on the Tournament pack of rolling each turn, instead of an actual Maelstrom Objective set.

No Random Game Length, the Inability to Table your opponent, and the 'Rule of 3' are all still around as well. These rules don't accomplish anything in the Matched Play mission, and make even less sense in a 'Maelstrom' setting. The sadder effect is that players who have been pushed out of the Matched Play Mission, are now being pushed out of the Maelstrom format if this makes it to a final form. Maelstrom was the last hope for those in the 40k community holding out for something playable, or even functional.

It's looking more and more like we're going to have to wait until Warhammer 40k X before we see any improvement on the game.

 Akar wrote:
There is a 'Unachievable Objective' rule as well. A stupid inclusion based on a common house rule fix to the 7e Maelstrom where you could discard an objective if it wasn't achievable. This removed a core feature of Maelstrom from 7th/8th, and is unnecessary in the current rules since objectives don't hang around until you achieve them. Like the current Matched Play mission, it's like they expanded on the Tournament pack of rolling each turn, instead of an actual Maelstrom Objective set.

Help me understand how unachievable objectives were fun, like the Necron destroy a vehicle objective against Tyranids, how is being handed this objective fun or fair when Thousand Sons have 0 such objectives? The issue was fixed by allowing people to cut out cards from their decks pre-game but that might actually have been a worse option than just discarding impossible objectives because it took longer to set up before the game while discarding/re-rolling impossible objectives was spread out across the turns and didn't involve any active choice, just recognition that the objective is impossible.

No Random Game Length, the Inability to Table your opponent, and the 'Rule of 3' are all still around as well. These rules don't accomplish anything in the Matched Play mission, and make even less sense in a 'Maelstrom' setting.

Random game length makes it less important who is the better player and makes who is the luckier player more important, removing it is an obvious choice for competitive missions. I have won and lost a decent chunk of games based on random game length in Maelstrom games, never happened in the ITC Champions missions because of set game length.

Tabling your opponent leading to an automatic victory means that players can win while ignoring the mission, missions are meant to establish a narrative and incentivise using your models for things other than killing the enemy dead ASAP, if you can focus all your attention on killing the enemy ASAP without losing the game then why would you ever do objectives? This leads to players foregoing every strategy other than the ones that kill the enemy the fastest. With anti-tank being cheap and chaff being expensive this edition I think it makes sense to not give a free win to anybody that tables their opponent.

Edit (missed your Ro3 comment): Rule of 3 prevents one single overpowered unit from dominating a game mode. Let's say faction A is 10% undercosted and faction B is 10% overcosted but faction A's best unit is 30% undercosted and faction B's best unit is costed appropriately. A's army spamming their best unit will be massively better than one taking a variety of units while B's best army will only be slightly better, at the same time there is no guarentee that B is spamming their best unit which could lead to an army worth 1800 pts facing one that is worth 2500.

It's looking more and more like we're going to have to wait until Warhammer 40k X before we see any improvement on the game.

Making custom missions has been a long-standing tradition in the hobby, if you need help you can post over in the Proposed Rules section of Dakka with your rough ideas for how you want your ideal mission set to work and then I can help you write the details. Maelstrom is a bit involved but designing an Eternal War-style mission set like 8th had takes little time. If you keep missions simple enough then you should be able to have your opponent learn the rules at the table before the game.

This leads to players foregoing every strategy other than the ones that kill the enemy the fastest. With anti-tank being cheap and chaff being expensive this edition I think it makes sense to not give a free win to anybody that tables their opponent.

But doesn't it makes factions who can't win on scenarios, really bad, and the players rather salty, if the same armies could at least try to win by tabling of the opponent?

I have not been able to review it yet so I don't have an opinion, but I don't quite understand your logic for this sentence:

No Random Game Length, the Inability to Table your opponent, and the 'Rule of 3' are all still around as well. These rules don't accomplish anything in the Matched Play mission

I see no issues with fixed length games, Ro3, or no tabling victories under any format. Could you elaborate why you feel this way?

In any case it is a beta so if you can convince enough people to speak up GW will change it. It might not swing all the way to what you desire, but GW will change things.

Karol wrote:

This leads to players foregoing every strategy other than the ones that kill the enemy the fastest. With anti-tank being cheap and chaff being expensive this edition I think it makes sense to not give a free win to anybody that tables their opponent.

But doesn't it makes factions who can't win on scenarios, really bad, and the players rather salty, if the same armies could at least try to win by tabling of the opponent?

That's a fair point Karol, but ideally, every faction would be able to win the scenario. The situation where #1 army A wins the scenario way more than army B and #2 army A does not win the tabling game way more than army B seems unlikely. Most likely you have a situation where A is more likely to win both the scenario game and the tabling game and if they don't have to play the scenario game then they'll just play the tabling game to end the game with a quick tabling instead of a drawn-out objective game. Especially in a casual format one would hope that every faction has a chance to win through some means and you want to encourage players to have fun with the mission instead of going for the throat to win ASAP.

Yeah I guess. It is probably impossible to create a core rules system when the power differences between armies within, are so big. The most one can hope for is majority armies working and your faction being good.

I think one of the reasons they may have doubled down on secondaries rather than inventing new Maelstrom missions is that there are only so many logical objectives in warfare, and look at how many secondaries there are, or will be once all the codices are out. It's a HUGE number.

Not sure how many objectives you can come up with before you start repeating. And maybe someone just said, "Look, by the time the codex cycle is over, there will be 150+ choices of secondary, so if we just find a way to use those differently rather than wrack our brains trying to think of something that feels different enough, we'll be further ahead."

Karol wrote:

This leads to players foregoing every strategy other than the ones that kill the enemy the fastest. With anti-tank being cheap and chaff being expensive this edition I think it makes sense to not give a free win to anybody that tables their opponent.

But doesn't it makes factions who can't win on scenarios, really bad, and the players rather salty, if the same armies could at least try to win by tabling of the opponent?

tabling your opponent should be what you do in order to win on the scenario.
If you don't have midfield presence to camp on objectives, just blast your opponent's army and then walk on the objectives uncontested. Its a feelsbad way to play the game and to play against. Tabling should never be its own win condition in any wargame.

Okey, but then you play an imperial knight army and you will just lose based on the game core mechanics, if you try to move and kill stuff. And it is specially bad, if your army no longer can blow up the other army or if you get stoped from doing damage by something as trivial as terrain rules being worded in a such a way that you can get shot by your opponent, but the other way around it doesn't work.

Tabling as win condition, isn't maybe fun of an option for the opponent, but when you army isn't the best, you can at least try to take the best units and hope the dice will roll hot. When the option doesn't exist, then some armies and some match ups are just not worth playing. And I don't think being an owner of a 800-1000$ army that isn't worth to play is good thing. I am talking from a tau or knight perspective here. GK pre 9th ed played like that too, you tried to kill specific units opponent had and then hoped to hold out. Now it is no longer possible, and when killing the opposing army does not give you a win, it is kind of hard to find enjoyment in some games.

Karol wrote:
Okey, but then you play an imperial knight army and you will just lose based on the game core mechanics, if you try to move and kill stuff. And it is specially bad, if your army no longer can blow up the other army or if you get stoped from doing damage by something as trivial as terrain rules being worded in a such a way that you can get shot by your opponent, but the other way around it doesn't work.

Tabling as win condition, isn't maybe fun of an option for the opponent, but when you army isn't the best, you can at least try to take the best units and hope the dice will roll hot. When the option doesn't exist, then some armies and some match ups are just not worth playing. And I don't think being an owner of a 800-1000$ army that isn't worth to play is good thing. I am talking from a tau or knight perspective here. GK pre 9th ed played like that too, you tried to kill specific units opponent had and then hoped to hold out. Now it is no longer possible, and when killing the opposing army does not give you a win, it is kind of hard to find enjoyment in some games.

With the concept of a four knight army? Sure, games would suck. Knights can be more dynamic than that with cheap baby knights running around or other support that isn't tied down being CP generators. If Knights pick up obsec they'll be golden.

In other words - don't try and force an outdated army to alter the progress of the game.

Well that is nice then. I know people tried to play their knight lists, and did try the mini knights, but it somehow did not work. Maybe you the FW ones to make the lists tick. I ain't an expert.

And yes, I guess if someone has an up to date army, they aren't interested in game aspects unfun to armies which aren't updated. I just think that hearing something like that, and with a possible codex update in a year, after a few months of 9th ed already, someone with a bad list is very keen of waiting, or the rules staying unchanged.

And I do agree that GW could have fixed more stuff in their not-winter CA. But from my 8th expiriance, it looks like they only do real mechanics changes when codex comes out.

Knights are actually gimped by a common houserule. So common that we don't even notice that it is an house rule.

They have issues on codex level obviously, but they can actually play a game based on negating the opponent's points.

The issue with that? The games end with you winning (if winning) at 50-55 points.

Since we have the houserule that ties in events are resolved by using the total points scored, the knights right now are gimped by BOTH their codex AND the event rules.

Thank You, and I'll respond as best as I can. I've had to break up your response in a specific order in an attempt to avoid going back and making points relevant to the different mechanics. Bear with me!

 vict0988 wrote:
Help me understand how unachievable objectives were fun, like the Necron destroy a vehicle objective against Tyranids, how is being handed this objective fun or fair when Thousand Sons have 0 such objectives?

Help me understand how playing the same mission over and over is fun? There isn't a single element of fun left in the Matched Play mission.
I'm not saying this out of spite, but attempting to illustrate a point. 'Fun' is something that is relative to the player and doesn't prove anything. This is something that 'Competitive Matched Play' has ignored. They are operating under the belief that they're making the game fun, but are only listening to those who attend their events while continuing to exclude portions of the 40k community.

I like to refer to this issue as the 'Necron/Tau Psychic' problem. How can Necron/Tau players achieve the 'Cast a psychic Power' Objective without access to any psykers. Believe it or not, it was NEVER an issue for a variety of reasons, and I'll reference the reasons in the relevant responses. I only mention it here because you mentioned that it wasn't fun. It was a bigger issue if this was the main reason that players were NOT having fun in a Maelstrom mission.

 vict0988 wrote:
Tabling your opponent leading to an automatic victory means that players can win while ignoring the mission, ..., if you can focus all your attention on killing the enemy ASAP without losing the game then why would you ever do objectives? This leads to players foregoing every strategy other than the ones that kill the enemy the fastest. With anti-tank being cheap and chaff being expensive this edition I think it makes sense to not give a free win to anybody that tables their opponent.

The win condition of 'Stayin alive' is the core rule of most games and it's not just limited to Tabletop games. When players learn 40k for the first time, they're often taught the basic mechanics of 'How to kill your opponents Toy Soldiers'. Objectives are often introduced later on once players have an understanding of the core game mechanics, before getting into mission mechanics. There are quite a few players out there who never find any other aspect of the hobby even remotely interesting. Removing SD simply made it easier for players who were up on objectives a way to win when they forgot that there was an objective to keep ONE model alive and don't feel that THEY should be responsible for that, when competitive players never had an issue with this. I do agree that removing the SD objective from the game forces players to focus on the ones that remain. I fail to see how this makes it any more competitive?

The tragedy isn't that SD is no longer a win condition, but the removal of the players from competitive events who are no longer able to 'Have Fun'. Sure, they are told that they're welcome to still attend, but unless they can take a personal victory for tabling their opponent, the only other options are to play the way others are having fun, or quit. Imagine if WotC changed the win condition of MtG to being purely based on who has a higher life total? The entire mechanic of decking your opponent out would still end the game, but mean nothing if they had a lower life total. Decks would be made invalid, and most of 'Blue' would become less competitive.

 vict0988 wrote:
Missions are meant to establish a narrative and incentivise using your models for things other than killing the enemy dead ASAP

The current Mission would need to have rules to create a narrative and incentivise players to buy models to support this. When you look at the lists here, it's not uncommon to see a player being told that something is or isn't competitive. Maelstrom should be able to create a narrative and incentivises players to play with a variety of units available to them. It would allow them to take the units they actually like and not just the ones that perform better under a limited set of objectives.

 vict0988 wrote:
The issue was fixed by allowing people to cut out cards from their decks pre-game but that might actually have been a worse option than just discarding impossible objectives because it took longer to set up before the game while discarding/re-rolling impossible objectives was spread out across the turns and didn't involve any active choice, just recognition that the objective is impossible.

When Maelstrom was implemented in 7th, there was only one issue with it. Unachievable objectives wasn't one of them. All 36 objectives in the original Maelstrom were in place before a list was made. This was what really made Maelstrom Great.

In order for Maelstrom to succeed, players were required to break that mentality that you couldn't get every objective like you could in the Eternal War Missions. Players simply couldn't get comfortable with the idea that they had no control over not being able to get an objective, when they actually did. 'Linebreaker' for example, was something that if it wasn't scored it was something that they could do something about. Maelstrom not only up'd that game, but gave us more objectives than we would likely see. Players would be lucky to see 1/4 to 1/3 of their total objectives depending on how aggressive they were. This was actually a positive move on GW's part because the result was a less predictable. This led to a broader spread of which armies won, which is something the community had been asking for and is still looking for.

 vict0988 wrote:
Random game length makes it less important who is the better player and makes who is the luckier player more important, removing it is an obvious choice for competitive missions. I have won and lost a decent chunk of games based on random game length in Maelstrom games, never happened in the ITC Champions missions because of set game length.

I realize that a good chunk of current 40k players started around 5th ed. and don't really know a 40k without RGL. RGL was introduced as a way to find out who the better player was and not the other way around.

In 3rd and some of 4th, the fixed turn length was the cause of most of the problems. Most of it was linked to what the mission objectives were, but it was significantly easier to figure out how to get the most points knowing the game was going to end. There was much less risk involved late game, when players could easily decide between which units get 1/2 points for, vs. finishing off to get the highest score. When the game moved away from straight VP's and objectives were introduced, that didn't change much. We would simply play a 4 game round of shooting each other, then on Turn 5 get on the objectives and then win.

RGL addressed that issue as players now had to risk overextending a turn early in the hopes that the game would end while still planning on how to stay alive should the game go 2 more rounds. As 'Mathhammer' became easier to access through websites doing all the complicated math for you, it was a brilliant move by GW to offset the results. There seems to be this idea that players want to see the win ratios of armies be more balances while removing rules that allow that to happen.

 vict0988 wrote:
Rule of 3 prevents one single overpowered unit from dominating a game mode. Let's say faction A is 10% under-costed and faction B is 10% over-costed but faction A's best unit is 30% under-costed and faction B's best unit is costed appropriately. A's army spamming their best unit will be massively better than one taking a variety of units while B's best army will only be slightly better, at the same time there is no guarantee that B is spamming their best unit which could lead to an army worth 1800 pts facing one that is worth 2500.

You know what else the Ro3 prevents? The option to take more of an underpowered unit to offset it. It doesn't just stop there though. It limits the lists available to players who are trying to succeed in a format if it doesn't support their playstyle. It also stops those players from bringing the models they actually like while forcing them to diversify their collection.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why the Ro3 came about. It's there to limit the WAAC players who base their lists purely off of what is the most powerful. It was supposed to be a temporary fix to a permanent problem. Like the removal of SD as an objective, WAAC players will be less inclined to base their lists off of doing that without having some element of their list focused on the other objectives. The intent of the rule is to discourage WAAC players from coming to a tournament, and ruining everyone else's fun and then walking away with the prize money.

The problem is that the Ro3 fails to do ANY of that. Going back to 3rd-6th editions, we had a standard FOC. This was great until GW offered specialized lists that mixed it up. Alaitoc Rangers, Iyanden, Deathwing/Ravenwing were all armies that opened a door for players to take lists with the models that they like instead of forcing them to take more standardized forces, but still limited them to the standard FoC. 7th changed all of that and instead of the tedious task of picking which units were to move to the troops selection, they introduced the detachments which allowed ANY player to take any number of whichever selections they wanted to. This was another brilliant move on GW part as we no longer needed a separate rulebook, or WD article to play specialised armies. Now we're back to forcing players to take models they don't want or that they're not even interested in.

Like the removal of SD, and RGL, Making the Ro3 a part of the game has set the whole game back a few editions. It's like we need to learn the mistakes of previous editions all over again. The reason that the Ro3 is the biggest failure of the three is that it doesn't remove the cause of the problem. WAAC players still get the benefit of being able to attend events. They don't have any attachments to a specific army, list, unit/models, or even care about what the format they play is. They only care about winning, which is the only thing that is 'fun' for them. To be clear, they should absolutely be allowed to play in events along with the rest of the community. Unfortunate that the current Tournament set up doesn't do this.

 vict0988 wrote:
(Back to Maelstrom)The issue was fixed by allowing people to cut out cards from their decks pre-game but that might actually have been a worse option than just discarding impossible objectives because it took longer to set up before the game while discarding/re-rolling impossible objectives was spread out across the turns and didn't involve any active choice, just recognition that the objective is impossible.

When Maelstrom was implemented in 7th, there was only one issue with it. Unachievable objectives wasn't one of them. All 36 objectives in the original Maelstrom were in place before a list was made. This was what really made Maelstrom Great. Players had to look at all the objectives and not only had the option of making a list to be suit them, but also which objectives they were going to go after and which ones they were going to ignore.

The surprisingly great thing was that the opponent had the same set of objectives. For every choice a player looked at, there as also the possibility of giving up VP's to the opponent for taking them. Some even gave more VP's should you or your opponent chose to stack certain units. This meant it was entirely possible for a player to create a list that actually DENIED objectives should they draw one. The value of a unit was more than just what it could do, but whether or not it was worth giving up the potential VP's to your opponent for. So going back to the 'Necron/Tau Psychic'. You wouldn't be able to cast a power, but your opponent wouldn't be able to kill a psyker either. If you really wanted to be able to achieve it, you just took an ally that could do it or waited it out to discard it at the end of the turn. This only became a problem when players house ruled 'Allies' out and limited the field. It's no surprise that they complained that objectives couldn't be completed when the ability to achieve them was also removed.

The 'Unachievable Objective' house rule CREATED the first problem by allowing players to replace the objective for free if they ran into the 'Necron/Tau Psychic problem' in the first place! If you end up paired against an opponent who brought a list based on denial, you get to filter through your objective deck to get to your achievable ones faster. Any CCG player who understands the basics of Card Advantage will tell you how bad of an implementation this was. Since that solution failed, the next solution was to force players to take every objective, which Necron/Tau couldn't do after they removed 'Allies'. The other solution was the allow players to remove a set number of cards so that the number of objectives remained equal. This was fine until that player to built an objective denial list STILL forced some 'Unachievable Objectives', which players didn't like, despite also having Stratagems to also reduce the appearance of 'Unachievable Objectives'. The CA19 result was the final nail in Maelstroms coffin by cutting down the number of objectives down to something where you wouldn't see any 'Unachievable Objectives' and even those who liked Maelstrom stopped playing them.

The Maelstrom Beta rules have continued this trend to make it even more unplayable. You've gone from 36 objectives down to 18. There are only 5 turns so you'll see 15 of those 18, which is helped out by replacing all of the objectives at the start of each round instead of holding on to them until you achieve them. I'm still waiting for my copy to show up, but I don't remember if duplicates are allowed or not. I believe they would be, since the 'Unachievable Objective' rule exists, you'd have to allow duplicates. There are additional stratagems to manipulate the randomness even further, so it's barely Maelstrom at all.

In order for Maelstrom to succeed, players were required to break that mentality that you couldn't get every objective like you could in the Eternal War Missions. Players simply couldn't get comfortable with the idea that they had no control over not being able to get an objective, when they actually did. 'Linebreaker' for example, was something that if it wasn't scored it was something that they could do something about. Maelstrom not only up'd that game, but gave us more objectives than we would likely see. Players would be lucky to see 1/4 to 1/3 of their total objectives depending on how aggressive they were. This was actually a positive move on GW's part because the result was a less predictable. This led to a broader spread of which armies won, which is something the community had been asking for and is still looking for.

 vict0988 wrote:
Making custom missions has been a long-standing tradition in the hobby, if you need help you can post over in the Proposed Rules section of Dakka with your rough ideas for how you want your ideal mission set to work and then I can help you write the details. Maelstrom is a bit involved but designing an Eternal War-style mission set like 8th had takes little time. If you keep missions simple enough then you should be able to have your opponent learn the rules at the table before the game.

House rules have been a part of what has made 40k successful for so long. I've got ZERO issues with house rules until you attend events where there is a conflict between 40k and the Tournament House rules. The problem we have in 9th is first edition that house rules have become a part of 40k. These are beta rules for Maelstrom and I would like to see Maelstrom come back. For those that like Set Game Length, No Sudden Death, and the Ro3, you already have a mission pack that provides for that.

There is an opportunity here to offer something to the 40k community that has been removed from participating in events based on how they play their hobby. We deserve more than a half assed attempt to make Maelstrom function like the Matched Play mission, which has already excluded us.

 Akar wrote:

Spoiler:

 vict0988 wrote:
Help me understand how unachievable objectives were fun, like the Necron destroy a vehicle objective against Tyranids, how is being handed this objective fun or fair when Thousand Sons have 0 such objectives?

Help me understand how playing the same mission over and over is fun? There isn't a single element of fun left in the Matched Play mission. I'm not saying this out of spite, but attempting to illustrate a point. 'Fun' is something that is relative to the player and doesn't prove anything. This is something that 'Competitive Matched Play' has ignored. They are operating under the belief that they're making the game fun, but are only listening to those who attend their events while continuing to exclude portions of the 40k community.

I like to refer to this issue as the 'Necron/Tau Psychic' problem. How can Necron/Tau players achieve the 'Cast a psychic Power' Objective without access to any psykers. Believe it or not, it was NEVER an issue for a variety of reasons, and I'll reference the reasons in the relevant responses. I only mention it here because you mentioned that it wasn't fun. It was a bigger issue if this was the main reason that players were NOT having fun in a Maelstrom mission.

The fun in the Nova-type mission is forged between you and your opponent both trying to win the game, each new game comes with a new opponent using a new list. It can also be fun to move the focus from your opponent to the mission with Maelstrom, a sort of third player in the game that will make things difficult for one or more players. But when that difficulty only applies to one player and because of arbitrary reasons then it stops being fun. Tyranids get countered by Necrons in the lore but because the designers thought an anti-vehicle objective card would be fun for Necrons the opposite is true from a mission perspective. Impossible missions were an issue to me, it feels unfair and like there is no game. Like opening a pack of Magic cards and then finding that it's all plains.

Spoiler:

 vict0988 wrote:
Tabling your opponent leading to an automatic victory means that players can win while ignoring the mission, ..., if you can focus all your attention on killing the enemy ASAP without losing the game then why would you ever do objectives? This leads to players foregoing every strategy other than the ones that kill the enemy the fastest. With anti-tank being cheap and chaff being expensive this edition I think it makes sense to not give a free win to anybody that tables their opponent.

The win condition of 'Stayin alive' is the core rule of most games and it's not just limited to Tabletop games. When players learn 40k for the first time, they're often taught the basic mechanics of 'How to kill your opponents Toy Soldiers'. Objectives are often introduced later on once players have an understanding of the core game mechanics, before getting into mission mechanics. There are quite a few players out there who never find any other aspect of the hobby even remotely interesting. Removing SD simply made it easier for players who were up on objectives a way to win when they forgot that there was an objective to keep ONE model alive and don't feel that THEY should be responsible for that, when competitive players never had an issue with this. I do agree that removing the SD objective from the game forces players to focus on the ones that remain. I fail to see how this makes it any more competitive?

The tragedy isn't that SD is no longer a win condition, but the removal of the players from competitive events who are no longer able to 'Have Fun'. Sure, they are told that they're welcome to still attend, but unless they can take a personal victory for tabling their opponent, the only other options are to play the way others are having fun, or quit. Imagine if WotC changed the win condition of MtG to being purely based on who has a higher life total? The entire mechanic of decking your opponent out would still end the game, but mean nothing if they had a lower life total. Decks would be made invalid, and most of 'Blue' would become less competitive.

I do not have a problem with multiple game modes, as long as only one mode is used in tournaments and GW balances the game around that game mode then I think everyone can enjoy the game however they like. When it comes to casual formats which I think Maelstrom has to be then it also becomes a concern what is fun and at that point I am fine with saying Blue sucks in this format because mill is boring to play against, at least it was in Yugioh. Removing the mechanic from competitive I am guessing is a result of wanting players to be able to score points. Otherwise, you would need to keep a part of your opponent's army alive to continue scoring turn 4 and 5 which would be wonky.

Spoiler:

 vict0988 wrote:
Missions are meant to establish a narrative and incentivise using your models for things other than killing the enemy dead ASAP

The current Mission would need to have rules to create a narrative and incentivise players to buy models to support this. When you look at the lists here, it's not uncommon to see a player being told that something is or isn't competitive. Maelstrom should be able to create a narrative and incentivises players to play with a variety of units available to them. It would allow them to take the units they actually like and not just the ones that perform better under a limited set of objectives.

SD means fewer units being able to compete since your list needs to be able to not get annihilated by turn 5 by glass-cannon lists, it's not enough that you simply outplay your opponent on objectives.

Spoiler:

 vict0988 wrote:
The issue was fixed by allowing people to cut out cards from their decks pre-game but that might actually have been a worse option than just discarding impossible objectives because it took longer to set up before the game while discarding/re-rolling impossible objectives was spread out across the turns and didn't involve any active choice, just recognition that the objective is impossible.

When Maelstrom was implemented in 7th, there was only one issue with it. Unachievable objectives wasn't one of them. All 36 objectives in the original Maelstrom were in place before a list was made. This was what really made Maelstrom Great.

In order for Maelstrom to succeed, players were required to break that mentality that you couldn't get every objective like you could in the Eternal War Missions. Players simply couldn't get comfortable with the idea that they had no control over not being able to get an objective, when they actually did. 'Linebreaker' for example, was something that if it wasn't scored it was something that they could do something about. Maelstrom not only up'd that game, but gave us more objectives than we would likely see. Players would be lucky to see 1/4 to 1/3 of their total objectives depending on how aggressive they were. This was actually a positive move on GW's part because the result was a less predictable. This led to a broader spread of which armies won, which is something the community had been asking for and is still looking for.

Considering that Necrons were trash for most of 8th I don't see how the "manifest a psychic power" objective helped more armies be viable. Even without objectives that are entirely impossible Maelstrom was still plenty random, you still had to zip and chase around the map to complete objectives or refocus your army's offence to take out objective targets. If impossible objectives are fun then you could just replace the "manifest a psychic power/destroy vehicle" objectives with blank objectives nobody can achieve. That way everyone gets the "fun" of drawing blank objectives. Having to build around objectives means fewer effective lists, denying objectives via list-building in a casual format strikes me as wrong.

I realize that a good chunk of current 40k players started around 5th ed. and don't really know a 40k without RGL. RGL was introduced as a way to find out who the better player was and not the other way around...

You're simply not going to convince me that randomness makes better players more likely to win. Yes, you could put yourself in such a dominating position that you win regardless of the game length rolls, but more likely you have to evaluate how likely the game is to end and then balance your strategy around whatever gives you the highest likelihood of winning if you take the average chance of winning in each scenario divided by the chance of the game ending on the relevant turn.

If you introduced a rule in chess that said the loser wins on a D6 roll of 6 after the game you change the likelihood of me beating the world's greatest chess player Magnus Carlsen from 0,00001% (he might get a stroke) to 17% (I might roll a 6). I might choose between 70% chance of winning a 40k game turn 5, 60% turn 6 and 40% turn 7 for an average of 57% chance of winning and another strategy that gives me a 50% chance of winning regardless of game length. The first strategy is the right choice, it gives me the theoretically best chances of winning, but if the player choosing the second strategy gets lucky and the game goes to turn 7 then he gets an advantage based on luck. Yes, the computation is more difficult to make, but in the end, a lot of people will just end up getting lucky and beating better opponents.

Me being a zoomer is kind of irrelevant, I played Maelstrom and Champions missions in 8th, one had random length, the other did not, we don't need to look at the Jurassic period to compare.

Spoiler:

 vict0988 wrote:
Rule of 3 prevents one single overpowered unit from dominating a game mode. Let's say faction A is 10% under-costed and faction B is 10% over-costed but faction A's best unit is 30% under-costed and faction B's best unit is costed appropriately. A's army spamming their best unit will be massively better than one taking a variety of units while B's best army will only be slightly better, at the same time there is no guarantee that B is spamming their best unit which could lead to an army worth 1800 pts facing one that is worth 2500.

You know what else the Ro3 prevents? The option to take more of an underpowered unit to offset it. It doesn't just stop there though. It limits the lists available to players who are trying to succeed in a format if it doesn't support their playstyle.

Could you expand on these points? Why do you want people to spam underpowered units? Surely they can find a few different underpowered units to use. If your playstyle isn't "fast" or "gunline" but "Ravenwing Command Squad" or "Doomsday Ark" then you do not have a playstyle, you just have a unit and a unit is not enough to create a playstyle.

It also stops those players from bringing the models they actually like while forcing them to diversify their collection...

If you can't find more than one or two units in your faction that you like then you should find a different faction. I'd prefer Ro2, I think diverse armies look neat, Plagueburst Crawler companies can go play in traffic or on Apocalypse tables.

There is an opportunity here to offer something to the 40k community that has been removed from participating in events based on how they play their hobby. We deserve more than a half assed attempt to make Maelstrom function like the Matched Play mission, which has already excluded us.

I tentatively agree, but the White Dwarf issue isn't even out yet.

 Akar wrote:
Thank You, and I'll respond as best as I can. I've had to break up your response in a specific order in an attempt to avoid going back and making points relevant to the different mechanics. Bear with me!

 vict0988 wrote:
Help me understand how unachievable objectives were fun, like the Necron destroy a vehicle objective against Tyranids, how is being handed this objective fun or fair when Thousand Sons have 0 such objectives?

Help me understand how playing the same mission over and over is fun? There isn't a single element of fun left in the Matched Play mission.
I'm not saying this out of spite, but attempting to illustrate a point. 'Fun' is something that is relative to the player and doesn't prove anything. This is something that 'Competitive Matched Play' has ignored. They are operating under the belief that they're making the game fun, but are only listening to those who attend their events while continuing to exclude portions of the 40k community.

Sports are great fun and most sports only have a single objective and a single field/court/rink setup. The fun in sport comes from bringing your best chance to win and pitting it against your opponent's best chance to win and seeing who comes out on top on the day.

If you want wild and wacky I suggest playing Crusades or building your own custom scenarios based on the armies that your playgroup actually runs. You'll always be able to do that better than GW as GW has to make rules for every possible combination of armies and models and can't tailor things to a local meta.

I'm sad to see that this rant has little, if anything, to do with maelstrom.
Almost all of it is about either bringing problems of old editions back for nostalgia's sake and introducing more randomness to make luck matter more than player decisions.

The last iteration of maelstrom in 8th was very close to being perfect, providing a dynamic, rapidly changing game without screwing anyone over because of their or their opponent's army choice. The only real problem was that the missions differed too little from each other, and some cards could have taken some re-balancing be cause just slapping every d3 VP card you could possibly archive in your deck was too obvious of a choice.

I would have been very curious how the game changed in comparison to that, but none of that is found here.

 vict0988 wrote:

I realize that a good chunk of current 40k players started around 5th ed. and don't really know a 40k without RGL. RGL was introduced as a way to find out who the better player was and not the other way around...

You're simply not going to convince me that randomness makes better players more likely to win. Yes, you could put yourself in such a dominating position that you win regardless of the game length rolls, but more likely you have to evaluate how likely the game is to end and then balance your strategy around whatever gives you the highest likelihood of winning if you take the average chance of winning in each scenario divided by the chance of the game ending on the relevant turn.

It's called risk management - which is a skill.

When playing games with RGL, your strategy is often forced to be more nuanced because you need to essentially build in contingency plans and hedge your bets. When do you rush the objective? What happens if the game doesn't end, are you leaving your opponent an opportunity? What if you do rush the objective and the the game doesn't end? Can you hold out? These sorts of questions and conundrums have no easy answer, and as a result add genuine strategy and interesting decisions to the game, as opposed to the current emphasis on mathematical optimization in a low-luck environment (all of which gets passed off as strategy).

That said, our group typically house rules it so that you roll for the last the turn in RGL at the start of the battle round. That way, both players can take their very last moves with the knowledge that the game is ending after that battle round. It's a nice way to balance both sides of the RGL equation - as you still need to think about force positioning relative to objectives and when they might score, but the final turn isn't quite a punishing if you make an earlier mistake.

Also, to the OP, 3rd and 4th edition had RGL as well. Not sure where you think that got added in 5th only. Not every mission used it, but many of the them.

Random game length is a rule that more than any other made entire games come down to a single roll. More often than not, there were no risks to manage - if you went all in on the game ending you simply lost when the game didn't, if you didn't go all in, you lost when you did. Some armies simply can just barely survive getting shelled for five turns, going to turn six of seven often meant an auto-loss when the die was rolled.
Neither has anything to do with risk management, because the player has zero control over it. Essentially it's just gambling.

It literally added nothing tactical to the game besides not knowing when you would be home. In my group almost every roll for last turn ended with a concession either immediately after the roll or after checking whether one or two units critical didn't fail their shooting/charge.
When both players know the game will be over by 5th and plan accordingly.

So am I right in thinking this is a thread where people talk about the beta rules without playing them?

Sounds about right!

Umbros wrote:

So am I right in thinking this is a thread where people talk about the beta rules without playing them?

Sounds about right!

To be fair, that's what most discussions on 9th currently are.

So still haven't played it, but I don't mind a lot of it.

Objective setup:
• Be wholly within a player’s territory.
• Not be within that player’s deployment zone.
• Not be within 3" of any battlefield edge.
• Not be within 12" of any other objective marker.

No more than half the objective markers can be set up within either player’s territory.

Also the Hold Objective 1/2/3/4/5/6 is gone. You won't yo-yo between the battlefield unless you picked the categories the allow for that.

You select 3 categories for objectives you want to roll on and they revolve around a theme so you can pick categories that are favorable against your opponent or better for your list, but the table you get to roll on is randomized each time.

Stratagems to help control objectives
- Pick one you had last turn
- Change an objective category
- +1 or -1 to a roll for an objective
- Change objective roll to a 1 (these are the harder, but more rewarding objectives)


Missions -
- Gain 4th objective for a round if you control more
- Pick opponent's objective and score double for it
- Score an extra 5 for one of your categories
- Cancel an opponents objective
- Picking a new objective costs 0CP
- Get a fourth objective if you have fewer VP

Personally - I'm not really a fan of when there isn't a nice link between the objective's gameplay and the thematic/lore of the mission. I also prefer old styles of missions when the victory conditions for the mission are distinct and there is just one aspect of focus. It makes the game more of a game-long strategic affair instead of a game where there are tons of little ways to score, a few points there, a few pints here, etc - or worse when you don't even know what the objectives are from round to round. It's doesn't make any thematic sense (without a lot of mental gymnastics) and I don't find the gameplay very rewarding either. Feels very contrived and "Gamey" to me.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Personally - I'm not really a fan of when there isn't a nice link between the objective's gameplay and the thematic/lore of the mission. I also prefer old styles of missions when the victory conditions for the mission are distinct and there is just one aspect of focus. It makes the game more of a game-long strategic affair instead of a game where there are tons of little ways to score, a few points there, a few pints here, etc - or worse when you don't even know what the objectives are from round to round. It's doesn't make any thematic sense (without a lot of mental gymnastics) and I don't find the gameplay very rewarding either. Feels very contrived and "Gamey" to me.

How do you balance those across a game as vast as 40k though? When you want to take out Snot Gozzits Runaway Grots and your opponent wants to bring out the 35th Imperius Legion of the Order of the Ebon Dawn and you set out like a dozen grots and some killa kans down and he's got SoB souped in with Knights. When I saw that you should make custom missions for your meta I mean just that. Look at what the people around you are playing and think of ways to make those fights cool. GW can't and won't do that for you.

I'm not sure "balanced" is truly obtainable in a game as diverse as 40K. That said, I think that inherently expanding the range of core types of missions that it is more likely that a greater range of armies, lists, and playstyles can find some chance or set of missions in which to be competitive or at least have a decent chance.

The current Matched play / GT2020 missions are all essentially the same primary mission type (with minor variations), which rewards armies able to better optimize for those objectives. Broaden the pool of objectives and those same armies are either going to struggle in other types of missions or be forced to diversify more, which might put them on a more even footing against other types of lists.

Maelstrom is a an alternative approach designed to encourage more diverse objectives - but I think for other reasons the maelstrom format isn't as successful.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Personally - I'm not really a fan of when there isn't a nice link between the objective's gameplay and the thematic/lore of the mission. I also prefer old styles of missions when the victory conditions for the mission are distinct and there is just one aspect of focus. It makes the game more of a game-long strategic affair instead of a game where there are tons of little ways to score, a few points there, a few pints here, etc - or worse when you don't even know what the objectives are from round to round. It's doesn't make any thematic sense (without a lot of mental gymnastics) and I don't find the gameplay very rewarding either. Feels very contrived and "Gamey" to me.

That's perfectly fine. I've always viewed maelstrom as an alternative way to spice up games when the "regular" way to play gets boring, similar to the open war deck. I don't think that creating a narrative game is its goal at all, and frankly it wont ever be good at that anyways.

 Jidmah wrote:
I'm sad to see that this rant has little, if anything, to do with maelstrom.
Almost all of it is about either bringing problems of old editions back for nostalgia's sake and introducing more randomness to make luck matter more than player decisions.
...
I would have been very curious how the game changed in comparison to that, but none of that is found here.

Thank You. This was my intent, but I got sucked into getting off topic (and deleted 3/4 of my orignal response)

The new Maelstrom Mission is simply this.
- Take the Matched Play Scenario
- Remove the Primary Mission Objective
- Take the Secondary Mission Objective concept, and create 6 objectives for each option.
- Pick 3 and every turn, generate 1 from each of the selected categories.

So it's just a repeat of the Matched Play scenario, and contains all of the elements of that scenario, with an additional rule that ensures that you simply have 3 goals to accomplish each turn.

So NOTHING like Maelstrom.

-----
The only issue from the orignal Maelstrom that is addressed was the size of the game problem. 7th ed. Maelstrom only had one problem. The smaller game sizes increased the frequency of these so called 'Unachieveable Objectives'. For my group, this seemed to be around the ~1500 point mark. Playing Maelstrom under the 1.5k game size wasn't really successful because it was more likely that the game would be one-sided. Especially in games where there were more objectives than units. As the game points when higher, the likelihood of seeing a one-sided game was the outcome of player choice, and less on random chance.

In 8th ed. GW addressed this. (Tournaments ignored it) The objectives themselves were adjusted to accomodate the different armies and the removal of the removal of using allies to fill any holes. The appearance of 'If there aren't any XXX, then...' objectives appeared, and this was an improvement for those that prefferred to stick to one army.

The game size issue wasn't really addressed until the CA were released. Stratagems offerning more control over the objectives, to the allowing players to remove a set number of objectives so that the number of objectives still remained equal all helped put more control in the players hands to manipulate that.

Where CA19 went too far and destroyed the Maelstrom mechanic, it did allow for Maelstrom to be played on lower game sizes. Removing the number of actual Objective markers has been reduced in the Beta rules based on the game size. Something that would have improved the original ruleset and would've made 8th Maelstrom even better after they removed Allies.

The current Beta rules are just another iteration of the Matched Play mission, which removes a game mode.

-----
The article does have a short discussion on what 'Beta Rules' are and how they look at it. They even include instructions on leaving feedback. Like the Beta feedbacks from before, I'm sure the team is going to be swamped, and any suggestions will get buried in a pile of emails.

 Akar wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
I'm sad to see that this rant has little, if anything, to do with maelstrom.
Almost all of it is about either bringing problems of old editions back for nostalgia's sake and introducing more randomness to make luck matter more than player decisions.
...
I would have been very curious how the game changed in comparison to that, but none of that is found here.

Thank You. This was my intent, but I got sucked into getting off topic (and deleted 3/4 of my orignal response)

The new Maelstrom Mission is simply this.
- Take the Matched Play Scenario
- Remove the Primary Mission Objective
- Take the Secondary Mission Objective concept, and create 6 objectives for each option.
- Pick 3 and every turn, generate 1 from each of the selected categories.

So it's just a repeat of the Matched Play scenario, and contains all of the elements of that scenario, with an additional rule that ensures that you simply have 3 goals to accomplish each turn.

So NOTHING like Maelstrom.

-----
The only issue from the orignal Maelstrom that is addressed was the size of the game problem. 7th ed. Maelstrom only had one problem. The smaller game sizes increased the frequency of these so called 'Unachieveable Objectives'. For my group, this seemed to be around the ~1500 point mark. Playing Maelstrom under the 1.5k game size wasn't really successful because it was more likely that the game would be one-sided. Especially in games where there were more objectives than units. As the game points when higher, the likelihood of seeing a one-sided game was the outcome of player choice, and less on random chance.

In 8th ed. GW addressed this. (Tournaments ignored it) The objectives themselves were adjusted to accomodate the different armies and the removal of the removal of using allies to fill any holes. The appearance of 'If there aren't any XXX, then...' objectives appeared, and this was an improvement for those that prefferred to stick to one army.

The game size issue wasn't really addressed until the CA were released. Stratagems offerning more control over the objectives, to the allowing players to remove a set number of objectives so that the number of objectives still remained equal all helped put more control in the players hands to manipulate that.

Where CA19 went too far and destroyed the Maelstrom mechanic, it did allow for Maelstrom to be played on lower game sizes. Removing the number of actual Objective markers has been reduced in the Beta rules based on the game size. Something that would have improved the original ruleset and would've made 8th Maelstrom even better after they removed Allies.

The current Beta rules are just another iteration of the Matched Play mission, which removes a game mode.

-----
The article does have a short discussion on what 'Beta Rules' are and how they look at it. They even include instructions on leaving feedback. Like the Beta feedbacks from before, I'm sure the team is going to be swamped, and any suggestions will get buried in a pile of emails.

You didn't even bother to read the Maelstrom Beta Rules correctly since you disregarded the fact that each category has to be assigned an Alpha/Beta/Gamma category and you DO NOT GET a random objective from each table but rather you roll three times a D3/D6 to choose the category and THEN the objective (which can for the most part be easily manipulated with 1CP Stratagems)

 Akar wrote:

Spoiler:

 Jidmah wrote:
I'm sad to see that this rant has little, if anything, to do with maelstrom.
Almost all of it is about either bringing problems of old editions back for nostalgia's sake and introducing more randomness to make luck matter more than player decisions.
...
I would have been very curious how the game changed in comparison to that, but none of that is found here.

Thank You. This was my intent, but I got sucked into getting off topic (and deleted 3/4 of my orignal response)

The new Maelstrom Mission is simply this.
- Take the Matched Play Scenario
- Remove the Primary Mission Objective
- Take the Secondary Mission Objective concept, and create 6 objectives for each option.
- Pick 3 and every turn, generate 1 from each of the selected categories.

So it's just a repeat of the Matched Play scenario, and contains all of the elements of that scenario, with an additional rule that ensures that you simply have 3 goals to accomplish each turn.

So NOTHING like Maelstrom.

-----
The only issue from the orignal Maelstrom that is addressed was the size of the game problem. 7th ed. Maelstrom only had one problem. The smaller game sizes increased the frequency of these so called 'Unachieveable Objectives'. For my group, this seemed to be around the ~1500 point mark. Playing Maelstrom under the 1.5k game size wasn't really successful because it was more likely that the game would be one-sided. Especially in games where there were more objectives than units. As the game points when higher, the likelihood of seeing a one-sided game was the outcome of player choice, and less on random chance.

In 8th ed. GW addressed this. (Tournaments ignored it) The objectives themselves were adjusted to accomodate the different armies and the removal of the removal of using allies to fill any holes. The appearance of 'If there aren't any XXX, then...' objectives appeared, and this was an improvement for those that prefferred to stick to one army.

The game size issue wasn't really addressed until the CA were released. Stratagems offerning more control over the objectives, to the allowing players to remove a set number of objectives so that the number of objectives still remained equal all helped put more control in the players hands to manipulate that.

Where CA19 went too far and destroyed the Maelstrom mechanic, it did allow for Maelstrom to be played on lower game sizes. Removing the number of actual Objective markers has been reduced in the Beta rules based on the game size. Something that would have improved the original ruleset and would've made 8th Maelstrom even better after they removed Allies.

The current Beta rules are just another iteration of the Matched Play mission, which removes a game mode.

-----
The article does have a short discussion on what 'Beta Rules' are and how they look at it. They even include instructions on leaving feedback. Like the Beta feedbacks from before, I'm sure the team is going to be swamped, and any suggestions will get buried in a pile of emails.

Thanks for adding some more content, but I still find your fixation on unarchivable objectives odd. Our group actively dropped they Maelstrom during 8th as their favored game mode and returned to eternal war because two thirds of the our maelstrom games were decided by what objectives were drawn. Unless one side was completely crushing the other, actual tactics mattered little in comparison.
The last iteration of maelstrom completely eliminated that issue, but sadly it wasn't played a lot due to the pandemic.

I guess we have to agree to disagree - if you enjoy to determining winners randomly, more power to you.

 Jidmah wrote:

Thanks for adding some more content, but I still find your fixation on unarchivable objectives odd. Our group actively dropped they Maelstrom during 8th as their favored game mode and returned to eternal war because two thirds of the our maelstrom games were decided by what objectives were drawn. Unless one side was completely crushing the other, actual tactics mattered little in comparison.
The last iteration of maelstrom completely eliminated that issue, but sadly it wasn't played a lot due to the pandemic.

I guess we have to agree to disagree - if you enjoy to determining winners randomly, more power to you.

When Maelstrom was released in 7th, the group I was in thought the exact same thing about the Unachievable Objectives because it was such a new concept. Watching videos and Reading Batreps, it appeared that others were struggling with the concept as well. We tried quite a few different things, but each came with their own issues. Discarding one that couldn't be achieved when you drew it was the most common, and also the most problematic. We didn't know how to handle drawing an objective that could have been completed at the start of the game, but had been eliminated by the time you drew the card. This led to starting the game by removing all the cards that couldn't be achieved before the game began. Quite often it would end up with one player having 28 objectives, while another player would end up with 34+. A problem that only grew if players brought allies to their list. It swung the balance the other direction where 1 player would see the easier objectives more frequently.

When playing Competitive 40k, the challenge is to play using the rules given to you, not ignoring them. So the group decided that when we played Maelstrom missions, it would be unmodified and we did this for about 3 mos. Maelstrom became awesome once we did that. I'm not going to say there weren't flaws, but it was also the first incarnation of Maelstrom, so there bugs would need to be worked out by the next edition. Since we were playing 1750-2000 pt games we learned that the idea of 'Unachievable Objectives' was a myth (mostly). When there were enough points in a game to ALLOW a player to accomplish every objective, it became apparent that any 'Unachievable Objectives' were the result of player choices, and not any flaw in the army choice.

The only way to correct the appearance of any 'Unachievable Objectives' and maintain what Maelstrom is, was to require players to fill every requirement of the 36 objectives, including ones designed specifically for an opponent to be able to achieve. This is a terrible mechanic because it would force diversity by requiring players to take units, either through their own list or allies, which may not synergize well. When we figured this out, we realized that it affected list building in a way that none of the previous editions ever did. There was now a drawback to taking a diverse army. If you decided to take Heavy Support, then you just gave your opponent another objective that wouldn't be 'Unachievable'. Not only was it entirely possible to build a list around objective denial, but it also made Troop heavy armies more Competitive since a player could build around succeeding on the objectives that mattered to him.

The removal of allies by Tournament 40k was a tragic outcome that only created actual 'Unachievable Objectives' since players no longer had access to achieving objectives that they felt might be important. Early 8th addressed this by providing alternate conditions on some of the limited objectives and also provided strats to discard additional ones when you drew them. No more freebies while maintaining the integrity of Maelstrom. The removal of 3 objective cards by player choice allowed for flexibility in size of the game. The CA19, destroyed Maelstrom. It made it little different than the EW missions, and it wasn't until this point, that players shifted back to the Standard missions as their norm.

The only thing Beta Maelstrom has improved on is the reduction of actual physical objectives for smaller games. This is brilliant and if we had done it in 7th and 8th, we would've been able to have fun at lower point levels.

My group wasn't "struggling with the concept". We almost exclusively played maelstrom for a long time, and during one after-game dinner one player complained about how the deck always decided the winner, so we decided to monitor that. During the next 30 games across seven players, a whooping 21 were completely one-sided with one person running away with a huge VP lead and the game being decided by turn 3, with no chance for the other player to catch up. Slightly less than half of those were won despite the losing player completely dominating the game. Only 9 games were considered close games by both players.
Thus, we decided to switch to CA2018's eternal war and the problem all but disappeared.

Unachievable objectives were only part of the problem. If one player drew only d3 VP objectives and the other didn't, the first player would simply win unless he got crushed. Bad mission design that had players snowball if they could quickly score objectives/hold mission markers didn't help either.

The CA2019 iteration of Maelstrom only required your army to be able to archive 18 objectives, and both players would usually go through most of their deck over the course of a game, so luck of the draw was minimized. The main reason why few people switched back was because eternal war missions were quite good at that time.
It is true that CA2019 felt like it had just a single maelstrom mission, but due the pandemic, that problem never came to bear.

I also fail to see what allies have to do with anything. Not everyone could take allies to begin with, and allies won't do jack for you if your three objectives are kill a psyker, a vehicle and a unit with FLY and my army is 100% ork infantry and the weirdboy blew himself up turn 1.