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I originally played 40k as a teenager back in the Rogue Trader days, and stopped just as 2nd edition came out. Not because 2nd edition came out, but because I went to Sixth Form in a different town and A-levels and life took over. I came back to the hobby in 2018 as an adult just after 8th edition launched and put together a new firstborn Ultramarines army. The Space Marines codex was already out so I didn't experience the 8th edition indexes, but I was right there for the Primaris-replacing-firstborn angst. When Chaos Knights were introduced I started a second army, and during 9th edition I bought the Hexfire boxed set and started another two armies - GK and TSons. With the advent of 10th edition (and the subsequent firstborn cull) I've retired my Ultramarines and bought index cards for my other three armies.

So in summary, since I came back to the hobby, I've retired one fully painted army, 2 BRBs and two editions worth of codexes.

Until recently I felt somewhat annoyed by edition churn and the additional expense that involved, but more recently I think I've come to accept that it's a good thing to keep me interested in the hobby. There's a limit to the amount of armies I can collect, and I'm a sucker for a physical rulebook, so buying a BRB and 3 codexes every few years for around £100 is actually quite a nice way of keeping the game fresh for me. The index cards gave me a bit of concern when 10th edition launched, but because I play Chaos Knights, GK and TSons I'm going to get a year's use out of all of them before the codexes come along, so even that seems okay.

I guess my opinion might be somewhat skewed by being an adult with disposable income - that and having other hobbies that are more expensive than 40k - but in any case I think my view has changed recently.

How do you feel about edition churn?

 dreadblade wrote:


How do you feel about edition churn?

I don't mind change.
But the permanently changing meta and rules should be free of charge and not tied to codexes.

They made points free, that's good. Now they need to untie datasheets from printed material, so that updating them is just as easy as making points adjustments.

I don’t mind changes, but I feel personal that GW has mostly fallen into a churn of rules. Where the game barely changes in depth or what it’s achieving, but changes massively in how it gets there.
End in a shallow game that mostly just feels like going though the motions, and players not engaged enough to really put out any quality work of there own.

In comparison I see other games, even those abandoned by GW get mountains of content of great quality that keeps me engaged even for what is basic games.

I have more story’s and happenings in most Mordheim campaigns, than I do for 40K in the last 5 editions.
With 40K stuff mostly just happening, but not really living up to what happens more naturally in other games.
Even campaign books for 40K are awful and throwaway content, when they should be highlights of editions.

Something to go back to, but I just don’t think GW will ever put out that quality.

 dreadblade wrote:
How do you feel about edition churn?

While I'd prefer that each edition ran 5 years, the current rotation speed isn't really more than a minor annoyance.

What I despise is all the constant errata, pts changes, "Balance" updates, etc.

GW is slow to update my dudes. The updates they do are often at the tail end of an edition, which leaves very little or no time to use them, if something like covid happens.

Their updates and points changes, often change very little. Some faction can go through 5+ supposed nerfs and still be a top 3 army. The no rules changes outside of codex, way GW deals with armies that don't have a codex yet is very anti player. But I guess GW thinks that if someone doesn't like an army they should buy a different army, and not expect theirs to be fixed. Almost as if GW was the hobby and not the game.

Studio favouritism, slow update cycle and fast nerf cycles, combined with nerfs to factions that don't need it, are just a bonus. In general if GW and w40k especialy wasn't a monopolist, I would say that playing their games on a budget is not a wise thing to do.

 dreadblade wrote:
How do you feel about edition churn?

It's entirely unnecessary and driven purely by greed, and not the creative process.

It's why I stopped buying printed material for 40k (outside of the rulebook, and that's just 'cause it comes with the big sets at the start of the edition). Just a waste of money overall.

My gaming group (and myself) is a bit burned out by it and partly moved to One Page Rules or other games altogether because of it.
I've started my Orks 4 years ago, now have enough to field 2000points and during that time their rules changed 3 times with some options vanishing and most of the squadsizes changing, it's madness.
I'd say it's one of the most serious aspects holding 40K back to become a really good game (The other being the no models no rules policy.) At the end of each edition there are a couple of months were you think: they just have to improve these 2 or 3 things and do some balance patches and we're good to go- and then they burn it all down.
GW can do better, see lotr and HH. Those rules got refined a bit but if you started lotr 20 years ago you'll still be pretty familiar with the current rules.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
My gaming group (and myself) is a bit burned out by it and partly moved to One Page Rules or other games altogether because of it.
I've started my Orks 4 years ago, now have enough to field 2000points and during that time their rules changed 3 times with some options vanishing and most of the squadsizes changing, it's madness.
I'd say it's one of the most serious aspects holding 40K back to become a really good game (The other being the no models no rules policy.) At the end of each edition there are a couple of months were you think: they just have to improve these 2 or 3 things and do some balance patches and we're good to go- and then they burn it all down.
GW can do better, see lotr and HH. Those rules got refined a bit but if you started lotr 20 years ago you'll still be pretty familiar with the current rules.

I agree, One Page Rules is a ton of fun and how quickly and smoothly it plays is a big bonus for me. I keep looking at the 40k rules and they just seem a bit much in comparison. Lots of fluff to add complexity without adding any depth.

I always give an edition a solid chance before moving on to something else.
The pace is maybe 30% irritating mostly because playing HH1 was an absolute nightmare at times with the lack of rules updates. Before HH2 came out we'd gone almost three years without an FAQ and while it was fine, the issues with the game were community policed which meant you weren't guaranteed they wouldn't pop up in a game.

 dreadblade wrote:

How do you feel about edition churn?

I started in 2nd, enjoyed 4th edition the most, took a break for several years due to life/marriage/divorce/etc., and also came back during the beginning of 8th which I enjoyed until the 2nd space marine codex released and the rules/stratagem bloat significantly increased. I skipped 9th due to even more bloat, and don’t like what I see with 10th’s balance, especially power level instead of points.

So edition churn, including constant new rules, errata “patches” and “balance” updates, has turned me off of the 40k game (I still paint old OOP 40k minis). Despite having 5+ painted armies, they sit in a display case and I now just play Blood Bowl and MESBG which both have great rulesets with mostly only minor revisions over the past 20+ years. Lesson learned: good games stick to the same core rules set and should only need minor balance updates occasionally, not constantly. I tried One Page Rules; it wasn’t bad, but too “lite” for my tastes. I’d like to go back to a ruleset similar to 3rd-5th edition 40k. I am interested in getting into Horus Heresy/30k, as I mostly like the rules I have read. As a “specialist” game, I hope HH2.0 does not suffer from the same rules churn as 40k and AOS.

Reminder: GW rules churn is not designed to improve the game rules or balance in any way. It is designed to sell more rulebooks, codexes, supplements, cards, etc. to please stockholders, not fans. As long as you continue to purchase those books and accessories GW will continue to reset everything every three years or so, even if a good, balanced ruleset is somehow achieved. Your army will eventually be invalidated in some form or another to motivate you to buy new “better!” “ bigger!” models. I like my old painted models and have no desire to contribute to this corporate greed (a big reason why the old great 40k game designers like Rick Priestley and Andy Chambers left GW . . .).

Edition churn is bad. Having to constantly change a game to keep people interested means the game's value is based in novelty, not depth of mechanics or interesting player decisions that keep players interested because of a continually rising skill ceiling. Ideally an edition change should be a refinement of rules, not a total overhaul every three years.

Honestly I don't think GW even needs edition churn for the effect. Whenever people are talking about a new edition its often "OMG look at X and Y armies and all the new models they got" rather then "OMG the new hotness rules!"

IF anything the rules excitement is more "maybe this time it will be balanced" or "Maybe this time my army won't suck" or "maybe sub-faction army will come back as a bulidable option" .


Ergo people don't really get excited that GW changed how to roll for shooting; they are more excited about the potential for the game to fundamentally work better or for their armies to work better. Those latter things you can get without major edition reshuffle.s


Of course big adjustments mean GW can sell books with rules in them to everyone; so its very hard to ween GW off that model of sale. Thing is we can all see that there are many ways GW could leverage its resources and its style of release to produce a better quality game; support it for longer and improve balance greatly over time. GW choose not to do it and I suspect won't change unless new staff take on key roles to push it from inside; or GW sees what happened when Warmachine was on the rise - a continual drop in sales and popularity that they can trace back to rules (as one major contributing factor).




I like that GW is so fast with FAQ and Errata today; but I don't like having all these expansion books; not to mention somewhere after 4th edition Gw lost the ability to write codex rules in a logical fashion. It used to be even worse where you'd have to flip through many pages of a codex for each single model which makes army building and ingame referencing really complicated. Not because the game and information was complex; but because its layout was a jumbled mess.

I think edition churn is fundamentally antithetical to ever fixing anything or improving the game. GW's insistence on burning everything down and starting over, with one significant update to any given army every time, means that they can't iterate or improve on anything and are stuck frantically guessing.

 Overread wrote:
Honestly I don't think GW even needs edition churn for the effect. Whenever people are talking about a new edition its often "OMG look at X and Y armies and all the new models they got" rather then "OMG the new hotness rules!"

IF anything the rules excitement is more "maybe this time it will be balanced" or "Maybe this time my army won't suck" or "maybe sub-faction army will come back as a bulidable option" .

Around 2 months before GW rules drop for 10th, the forges here started getting a ton of orders for models by people outside of Poland. And those were not the top units/models for end 9th ed. Ton of warp spiders , GSC infantry orders parts for knights, bucket loads of custodes tanks etc. And then when the edition actualy started the good stuff was, as always, gone from the site in seconds. The only people I have seen do the "maybe" stuff are some western players and people that played w40k for one edition. If someone played the game longer, they know the game is not going to be balanced. Especialy after seeing the leaked rules for most w40k stuff posted on Telegram.

It's good to see a different opinion once in a while OP. Personally, I'll be happy when 10th dies if GW gets rid of the stupid melee rules.

If 9th edition had stuck around for 5 more years it'd be a big commitment, but you'd at least get a long period of enjoying having a deep knowledge of all the gotchas and stuff, but why even bother if you only have 4 months with the latest codex?

Edition churn is fine if GW are trying to fix various things and they don't add too much homework. GW should have limited themselves to changing 3 Stratagems, removing 3 Stratagems and adding 3 Stratagems from each 8th edition codex, that would not have been an immense amount to learn and adapt to, same for relics. 25 removed Stratagems, 30 new Stratagems was ridiculous. The problem of rebuying the artwork a third time in 10 years is why I believe we should have indexes with rules and collectors guides with fluff, specialist games, art, dioramas and lore, buy 1 collectors guide every 10 years, one index every 2-4 years. The bad value and the bad design are the two reaosns why I try to borrow as many 40k books as possible instead of buying them from GW. I don't think the main rulebook changing once every 3 years is a big deal, especially if GW releases a compact version with the competitive mission pack.

10th actually has a decent amount of homework because of the baffling choice to move Stratagems into unique abilities on datasheets You were so close GW, Stratagems aren't a homework factor anymore because you can read 6 Stratagems in a fifth of the time it would have taken to read the 30 Stratagems in a 9th edition codex but explaining all the abilities units have is a chore and a half. Immortals and Warriors are totally different, they don't need snowflake abilities to make them distinct. I don't think every USR needs to be in the main rulebook, but just having a standard version of "takes objectives from the enemy" "stickies objectives" "kills things on objectives" would go a way toward making the game not a huge homework assignment.

new editions would be fine if each time the game iterated it got significantly better as a core set of rules and unit stats based on experience and to expand the framework to cope with new items

churn for the sake of churn where it never really gets better or seldom by much and then new army lists gradually break it until reset isn't good

by now 40k should be among the best written rule sets out there

How do I feel about edition churn? I went back to 3rd Edition. Won't catch me chasing the dragon ever again.

new Edition and change would be ok, even with the 3 year cycle, if the core of the game would be the same and we see improvements over time

every 3-6 years a new game that is the same in name only, with everything they learned from the past being forgotten by both GW and the players, is not worth the money any more

I don't like it, I mean, Bolt Actions been going with only two edition for a long long time and it doesn't stop them from adding stuff to keep us interested I think.

I came at a bad time though because I started right at the turn of 6th to 7th and teenage us couldn't update at the time. Then I saw the rules and codices pile up and always thought no, I can't catch up, that's just to many books going live and whenever they stop pouring them it's pretty much that it'll go out and onto 'ext edition.

What's more, now with the 2nd wipeout of the rules following relatively closely on that of 8th, I'm nowhere confident enough to throw money at it and see it all vaporised in the end because they'll rewrite the fundamentals again.

Note that, as I always repeat, I personally never left 6th/a bit a 7th in the end.

It doesn't help that the last edition was mostly dominated by covid issues so for 3 year editions where the first 1-2 years were lockdowns, worries, concern, stress and such there were likely far fewer games played. Lots of models bought, but far fewer games before suddenly BOOM new edition.

Yeah sticking to the 3 year cycle this time around feels especially egregious because a) 9th was in a genuinely good spot when they pulled the plug on it and b) the first year and a half of the edition was just continually fethed up by repeated covid lockdowns. It's sort of what happened with AOS2 where people were annoyed at 3rd edition coming out because covid literally just stopped the latter half of the edition from really being a thing.

I was actually super ready for 8th to end because it was a giant mess but 9th could have and should have stayed around for much longer.

I am fully supportive of regular balance updates though. They're a long overdue thing and outside of emergency ones, I think the rumoured new method of doing them in bi-annual instalments and quarterly points updates is better than quarterly balance updates and bi-annual points updates.

As it says in my sig, I quit the churn years ago, but a friend of mine who stopped by a hobby shop last week was sorely tempted by some of the new ork stuff and contemplated building an army and getting back into the hobby.

But he knew the game had totally different rules from when he played, and that they would change in three years, so better not to bother.

I think in the long run the churn hurts more than it helps financially. If the rules were stable, I'd probably have bought some of the new units. As it is, I haven't bought anything from GW in at least 15 years.

leopard wrote:
new editions would be fine if each time the game iterated it got significantly better as a core set of rules and unit stats based on experience and to expand the framework to cope with new items

churn for the sake of churn where it never really gets better or seldom by much and then new army lists gradually break it until reset isn't good

by now 40k should be among the best written rule sets out there

Suppose you have a company, let's call them WG, they have untalented designers and their development methods are primitive and outdated so whenever they try to iterate to improve upon feedback they make mistakes and mess things up. Do you ask WG to never iterate and respond to feedback? They just update pts based on tournament results until they get everything in a satisfyingly balanced range. It doesn't matter if games end turn 2 or if the best anti-flyer weapon is flamers? Or do you take the rocky road toward a better game two steps forward, one step back once in a while?

 kodos wrote:
new Edition and change would be ok, even with the 3 year cycle, if the core of the game would be the same and we see improvements over time

every 3-6 years a new game that is the same in name only, with everything they learned from the past being forgotten by both GW and the players, is not worth the money any more

8th and 10th are the same in name only? Come on. Vehicles got tougher, army construction and Stratagems got simplified, small changes to cover, fly, modifiers and flyers. Listing all the things shared between the two editions would take days. GW learned that wombo combos and aura castles were bad in 8th. GW learned that stat creep was bad in 9th. What are your problems with 10th compared to 9th?

 Bosskelot wrote:
Yeah sticking to the 3 year cycle this time around feels especially egregious because a) 9th was in a genuinely good spot when they pulled the plug on it and b) the first year and a half of the edition was just continually fethed up by repeated covid lockdowns. It's sort of what happened with AOS2 where people were annoyed at 3rd edition coming out because covid literally just stopped the latter half of the edition from really being a thing.

I was actually super ready for 8th to end because it was a giant mess but 9th could have and should have stayed around for much longer.

I am fully supportive of regular balance updates though. They're a long overdue thing and outside of emergency ones, I think the rumoured new method of doing them in bi-annual instalments and quarterly points updates is better than quarterly balance updates and bi-annual points updates.

Agree with everything here. Do you think the magnitude of changes between 8th-9th and 9th-10th were right (ignoring whether you liked the changes that were made).

FWIW, 9th edition had me pretty burnt out between all the different power sources and the 7+ objectives active in a given game. Plus the general sense of power creep. I was definitely ready for a reset. Of course, 10th didn't really go far enough with simplifying missions for my taste, and it has its own host of issues, so it hasn't proven to be the refresh I was hoping for.

In general, I like the smaller changes that feel like productive improvements to balance and gameplay in general. I'm less fond of the changes that end up piling up and making it a pain to figure out how things work if you've stepped away from the hobby for too long. And as others have said, all the rule changes are much more acceptable if you aren't forking over a ton of money for books every time they do it.

I started in 2nd edition. Mostly enjoyed 3rd while bemoaning all that had been lost, quit for a while during 4th because it was awful, played the hell out of 5th, and lost interest in 6th. Once 7th edition rolled around, I had no interest in learning yet another version of the game that just took it further away from the game I actually enjoyed playing instead of improving what was already there, and nothing I've seen since has really changed that.

If I go back to 40K at this point, it will be to revisit 2nd edition.

I dont like the churn, especially since 10th edition might be the last edition to support firstborn (via Legends).

Thankfully, KT21 is going strong with no edition resets in sight

 dreadblade wrote:
How do you feel about edition churn?

I don't care about the money cost. Rules are free and buying new stuff is only necessary if you're chasing the meta for competitive play.

I do care about the constant change for the sake of change, where GW never learns from their mistakes and refines the game into something better because they're constantly flipping the table and starting over from zero. I care about the inevitable cycles of power creep and rules bloat over the life of an edition, where players are stuck with a bad codex for years and keep falling further behind with each new release. And I care that all of this is dictated by marketing department timelines, not by the actual needs of the game. But fortunately current GW rules are not necessary to enjoy the 40k hobby.

 vict0988 wrote:

Agree with everything here. Do you think the magnitude of changes between 8th-9th and 9th-10th were right (ignoring whether you liked the changes that were made).

9th felt about right. It was building on 8th and addressing specific 8th issues and trying to fix and improve on them. It felt like a natural and needed evolution.

10th is just.... bizarre. I don't begrudge them for wanting to reset things a little bit, if only to just try and develop a new paradigm for Vehicle and Monster toughness, but there is just so much change for the sake of change, breaking things that worked and reintroducing old problems that were fixed in late-8th or 9th that it's just baffling. It really speaks to the insular nature of GW's rules teams and how little communication is done, OR it speaks to some unchecked egos/salty designers who are being actively spiteful that the community rejected past ideas and so now they're going to force them on people.

Plus the whole "simplified no simple" mantra is anything but a success. I'm someone who enjoyed the (overblown) complexity of 9th and I think that 10th is a slog to play and actively more complicated than needed in several areas. It's too complicated and has shifted its burden of knowledge around, rather than solving it, so that it can still be hard to access for newer players, meanwhile there is so much uncontrolled and un-fun randomness now that it's also a lot less satisfying for more experienced crunch-focused players to actually enjoy. It doesn't really feel like its appealing to anyone except for 40+ year old dads who have been playing since 3rd. And hey, if that's the demographic GW wants to chase then that's fine, but 8th and 9th's success wasn't built off of the back of those types of people.

 vict0988 wrote:

Suppose you have a company, let's call them WG

Warlord Games is not something we should compare GW to

and GW listens to player Feedback, problem is what the players say is not what they mean that GW needs to change
like people complain about too many books and to many units by asking to make the game "less complex" so the game gets easier and easier but increase the amount of books and rules

people feel that the downtime between actions or too long and call this "IGoUGo needs to be removed", so GW listens and adds Stratagems in 40k (and double turn in AoS) to break IGoUGo. as this term simply means that the opponent does not act during my "Go" and not alternating player turns, so as soon as the opponent acts during my "Go" or can have 2 "Go" in a row IGoUGo is gone, but this is not what the player wanted, they thought that taking a full turn is too long and alternating turns should be replaced by something shorter (be it phases or unit activation)

people get what they ask for, but they forget that they already asked for those things and don't understand that for a different outcome they need to ask for different things

 vict0988 wrote:

8th and 10th are the same in name only? Come on. Vehicles got tougher, army construction and Stratagems got simplified, small changes to cover, fly, modifiers and flyers. Listing all the things shared between the two editions would take days. GW learned that wombo combos and aura castles were bad in 8th. GW learned that stat creep was bad in 9th. What are your problems with 10th compared to 9th?

except that for what GW learned it is the same situation between 7th and 8th? Karol said it very well, GW learns the lessons, the problem is that they learn the same lessons with every Edition and than start fresh again

or better, tell me which rules stayed the same, the "to wound" table that "to hit" is a profile value now, AP reduces Armour Saves, and what else?
this is not a new Edition were changes are made to improve it of the same game if more than halve of the rules changes, it is a new game starting with the very same problem again as every other Edition

PS: you can call Bolt Action a new Edition of 40k as well, because the amount of rules that are the same as 8th Edition 40k is equal to 10th Edition. Should call it 40k Historical by now because by that definition it is the very same game, just with some minor changes

Anyone care to educate me on what things changed for the sake of change? It seems like a recurring criticism. Is it the PL thing which led to a lot of stat changes to equalise the value of weapons? Is it stuff like lowering the range of Immortal weapons 6"? I see weapon ranges being too long for the size of the table criticized every once in a while, although I can see how not having that problem in 9th would make any such reductions feel dumb and random. There must be at least 3 other important things right? Fly I certainly can see, but what else is totally random?