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 DarkBlack wrote:
I meant other wargames. I'm curious, how many non-GW wargames have you played?

Most of the contemporary ones. Most recently, Frostgrave and Infinity.

In card games, like Magic, deck building is a large part of the game. It's part of the design, so it's not comparable in terms of this discussion.

I disagree. How is army building not basically the same thing as deck building? How do these games not suffer in the same way from the imbalances introduced by player choice?

No one asks for perfect balance, the consensus seems to be that perfect balance is impossible, but "good enough" balance is desirable. Why would perfect balance be extremely unpleasant though?

I'm saying, don't even bother with "good enough", or at least that "good enough" is far broader than what you are probably thinking. When it comes down to it, the players are responsible for creating the game experiences they want, and it is not the game's responsibility to cater exclusively to that. Instead, it is better that a game does not even attempt balance, but instead gives a big sandbox full of toys, from which the players can find the experiences they want.

For instance, Necromunda (and Frostgrave) do not even attempt to be balanced games. There's scenarios where you are at a distinct disadvantage, where you might start with a fraction of your units, and be significantly behind in power compared to your opponent - and yet, the games can still be fun. You won't win a scenario, but you can fight to minimize your losses, or to kill an enemy's champion, or just to gain some exp to upgrade your characters. Your memorable moments aren't whether you win, but where you accidentally dropped a grenade and blew yourself up.

But then, I started my tenure here on Dakka, arguing that Age of Sigmar, lacking points was awesome (and I think AoS is a much, much less interesting or varied game with them). People here were incensed, and really rather rude (to put it gently), at the proposition that the players be a partner in the game's balance, rather than a slave to it.

As for why perfect balance would suck - in order to achieve it, you'd have to drain all the originality and variety out of the game. It is only achievable when both sides are identical and all luck has been removed, and even then, somebody has to go first. Both Chess and Go are completely abstract games where each player has identical opportunities, but going first can still make a difference regardless of how well you play. But if balance was really important to you, you'd be playing Chess or Go. Since you are playing with space marines, I have to assume that the pew pew trumps balance. When you get right down to the core of it, I mean.

I would argue that the game and how it is designed has an impact on the players who are attracted to the game and how the community acts.

Honestly, I'd suggest it is more based on how popular it is. It doesn't get much bigger than Magic or 40k. A small community can police itself, but once the community gets too large, you start getting cliques and the power gamers tend to start rising to the top of the social hierarchy. It may simply be a case of strangers being able to rank strangers easier through some sort of achievement system - the same way we use SAT scores to rank high schoolers, when their homeroom teachers may rank them more accurately due to personal familiarity.

Maybe it is all just a fear of keeping That Guy reigned in, which is itself a sort of "Stranger Danger" anxiety. We don't know whom we will play again, so we fear them. They have the power to ruin a game, or an entire day playing games, or even entire games. But when we know That Guy personally, we either just don't play them or carefully choose the circumstances in which we engage. But strangers... who knows what lurks in the hearts of 40k players?

 DarkBlack wrote:

Sqorgar wrote:

 auticus wrote:
No one would play chess if white won 75% of the time because they had rules that made them far superior.

White wins 53%-56% because of the first turn advantage. If Chess were played by Warhammer players, they would fight over who got to play White (blood has been shed over much less than a 6% advantage), and would immediately concede the game if they were forced to play Black.

The problem is not the balance, it is not the game, it is the players. They have a diseased mindset that poisons the experience.

Where does that mindset come from and why don't other game have the same?

Semi balanced games magically draw them in, i feel.

I reiterate my point.
When the listbuilding is more deciding then the play, you get what is normally called Wallet warriors, which are btw often also sore losers.
But that is anecdotal.

 Ensis Ferrae wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:

I think it is a problem in many wargames that killing the other guy first tends to be the dominant strategy. Even when it's purely a matter of holding objectives you need to kill the other guy's stuff so it can't hold objectives, and make sure your stuff holding objectives isn't killed. I'm not saying that's bad, or trying to be reductionist. That's just what stuff in Warhammer 40,000 can do, complications included. Certainly there's plenty of times in games where you need to run for the objectives instead of finding an optimal target and killing it, and it would be cool to have more of those, but in those situations you're not so much taking a risk as not just throwing the game for the excuse to kill a few models. I don't know how to tweak Warhammer to engineer more of that in the game than anyone else.

But consider, if you will, how some of the stuff you mentioned is suddenly going to become so much more important if you play a game where you can't kill enemy models. It's not just a matter of all those points wasted on valuating weapons, armour, and abilities models won't be able to use, but about how the goals and decisions constituting the game are played out. Warhammer and Infinity and such are very different from work placement or area control games, despite having some similarities, and a big difference seems to be the logistics of defeating an opponent's capabilities as much as competing with those capabilities.

I think one of the core rules that leads to the "kill everything first, hold objectives second" mindset is that, at least in GW games, if your opponent has 0 models on the table, they automatically lose the game. I don't know if its changed, but when I tried out Malifaux 1e, I quickly noticed a line saying to the effect of "even if you table your opponent, that does not guarantee victory" . . . ie, you NEED to accomplish your objectives before your opponent, tabling them has little effect on winning (unless that is an objective you draw)

I don't know how I missed this, but it's a really good point: there's a big problem with the game-end conditions matching the victory conditions. There's the Endless War missions from CA 2018 with the 'Acceptable Casualties' rule that negates the perverse incentives of Sudden Death (game ends with the loser wiped out), but that kind of doubles-down so that people can still run up the score if they table someone on the first turn of a tournament game. Me, I've always loved rules that let me recycle casualties back onto the board as it seems to represent hordes better than cluttering the board at the beginning of the game and hoping you have enough models to survive the game. In particular it works really well for stuff like Tyranids where they kind of break the lower end of the points-scale. Take two armies for example, with the same number of models, and give one half the range of the other, and the ability to recycle models onto the board and suddenly it's more interesting how the players solve the imbalance. You also have a horde army and an elite army with the same number of models so it doesn't break the bank to play the former rather than the latter...

Decoupling the end-game and scoring conditions seems like a really good idea. I'm not sure how scoring works in Malifaux, but I should look it up.

 DarkBlack wrote:

Where does that mindset come from and why don't other game have the same?

Another point on this I left out of the earlier paragraph.

Part of the problem with 40k is simply that GW lost the trust of its playerbase and allowed it to take the reigns. Whenever I've seen a game get dominated by houserules, comp or other attempts to "fix" the game; the lack of developer authority creates a sort of paranoia that is really hard to repair. Players quickly stop taking responsibilities for their own failures and immediately start looking to change the game instead. Conversely, the community stops celebrating success and instead turns it into something of a witch hunt to route out the latest "problem" that needs to be changed. The longer this goes on, the less the game the developers are developing matches up with what the community is playing. It gets harder and harder to fix things as player feedback doesn't really line up with the game in its true form. GW did a fairly decent job of taking the wheel with 8th and the regular errata has helped keep the playerbase from fracturing too much, but there's still some serious divides in terms of scenario play.

Nurglitch wrote:

I don't know how I missed this, but it's a really good point: there's a big problem with the game-end conditions matching the victory conditions. There's the Endless War missions from CA 2018 with the 'Acceptable Casualties' rule that negates the perverse incentives of Sudden Death (game ends with the loser wiped out), but that kind of doubles-down so that people can still run up the score if they table someone on the first turn of a tournament game. Me, I've always loved rules that let me recycle casualties back onto the board as it seems to represent hordes better than cluttering the board at the beginning of the game and hoping you have enough models to survive the game. In particular it works really well for stuff like Tyranids where they kind of break the lower end of the points-scale. Take two armies for example, with the same number of models, and give one half the range of the other, and the ability to recycle models onto the board and suddenly it's more interesting how the players solve the imbalance. You also have a horde army and an elite army with the same number of models so it doesn't break the bank to play the former rather than the latter...

Decoupling the end-game and scoring conditions seems like a really good idea. I'm not sure how scoring works in Malifaux, but I should look it up.

Malifaux's entirely a scheme and strategy based scoring system. You get points for things like "Place scheme markers on three corners of the table" or "Walk a specific model up to another specific model and interact". The game sort of rests on the fact that both players have the same strategy (where half their points come from), but the other half of their points come from two secretly chosen schemes (out of a randomly generated pool of five that both players choose from).

The game does still sometimes end up in a situation where you can win by killing everyone else indiscriminately. But most of the time, you at least have to go through the effort of killing the right models in the right places. (One of the schemes that I expect to come back into rotation is the one where you scored VP if you provoked the other player into killing your designated "Frame for murder" model.)
--
I think Warmachine/Hordes is a better example of the limiting effect of an automatic victory condition is, though.

There were lots of times where discussions of Steamroller scenarios would degenerate into "Give up on the scenario and go for assassination" or "The scenario requires too many improbable things to happen, ignore it and go for assassinate."

On the one hand, usually it's not easy to get an assassination victory, and it gives the player a choice. On the other hand, there's a definite bar on what you can do in scenarios. If there were records concerning scenario victory vs. assassination victory at tournaments for the different years of Steamroller, that'd probably be really interesting to show where the complexity cap rests.

Okay, so here's a weird thought. It's funny how these things come to you when you're thinking of something else, but another seemingly unrelated issue in 40k is spamming units. I think it would be interesting to see a kind of Highlander style of army construction where you can have one of each battlefield role on the table per detachment, and only once that unit is wiped out can you bring another unit in as reinforcements.

So if you decide to have an army made up of Leman Russ tank squadrons, then you get one squadron at a time, and every time the last tank in that squadron is destroyed you roll the next one onto the battlefield from your table edge.

A big part of the issue, besides "balance" being subjective, is that Warhammer more than any other game has this weird situation where you can be rewarded or penalized based on picking models/factions you like, exactly what all of the rulebooks say to do when discussing choosing an army.

Without even getting into the actual min/maxers who will scrutinize every unit to determine which 10% is "the best" and then summarily ignore the other 90%, with Warhammer (and I'm sure other games have this issue just I've never seen any as bad as GW's games) you have the risk of someone inadvertently picking something that's incredibly underpowered or way overpowered, because external balance is so haphazard. Let me illustrate with an example; it may not hold true anymore but I'm going to use it anyways as it's the first thing that popped into my mind:

Michael and Dwight decide to start playing 40k. They look at the various armies and Michael decides that he really likes mecha and futuristic looking armies, so he chooses Tau. Dwight finds the Orks hilarious after reading how they operate and picks up Orks. Now in this hypothetical edition of 40k (which may or may not be 8th) Tau are really good, Orks are fairly weak (as we're talking about new players here, we ignore the probable single viable tournament build because a new player isn't going to know that or likely rush out to buy a tournament list). Already, we see a problem. Our two players have picked armies which they like the look of, which is exactly the way GW claims you should choose an army (we all know this is BS, but GW still pushes it), yet the two armies are on polar opposites of the spectrum and one player is going to be much better off than his friend, for no real reason other than the GW studio decided to make the Tau rules better than the Ork rules.

But now it gets worse. What if they enjoy unis which are very strong or very weak? Not only is Dwight punished for picking Orks, a weaker faction because of reasons, but what if he likes certain units which are weak (I'm not familiar with Orks to really know what's good or bad, so I won't name specific units)? Now he's being punished twice because the system fails to have balance internally as well as externally. Now, on the other hand, Michael is rewarded simply because it just so happens that he likes anime mecha and Tau scratch that itch, without any other factors playing in other than for whatever reason, GW made Tau stronger and Orks weaker, and will likely beat poor Dwight frequently even without optimizing his army.

THAT is the problem. That's why we say that GW has such poor balance. I can't think of any other game, now or in the past, where there is such an extreme imbalance in the design that you are immediately punished for liking a particular army that just so happens to be on the weak side or rewarded just because you were attracted to the army that's strong at the moment. Sure, lots of games aren't perfectly balanced and nobody really wants that, but in every other game I think of the factions are at least externally balanced to the point where simply picking one doesn't give you an advantage. In Warmahordes, for example, sure Cryx was super good in Mk2 but you didn't get a huge advantage ONLY because you chose Cryx instead of Khador. Liking Trollbloods didn't automatically put you at a disadvantage because you didn't like Legion.

The only games I can think of that has these problems to these extremes are GW's games. Instead what should happen is there should be enough care given to external balance that, all else being equal, every faction has an equal chance of beating any other faction. There should be enough internal balance that there's a meaningful choice between units such that there isn't any good reason to take, say, Assault Marines because Vanguard cost the same and do more or that there's never a reason to take a particular weapon because plasma is just so good, and choosing to not take plasma is punishing you because you're ignoring an obvoiusly better weapon.

That's really not unique to GW games though. That happens all the time. I mean in MK2, if you liked Man O War and your buddy liked Banes... you were gonna have a bad time. Probably as bad as any of the worst 40k matchups honestly. It's a problem in every system that stems from the fact that its pretty rare to get more than say... 10 viable archetypes in any competitive meta. As your game grows, the problem seems worse, because 8 seemed pretty good when you had a dozen options. 10 is even better, but feels a lot worse now that there's 50 or more archetypes to choose from.

 LunarSol wrote:
That's really not unique to GW games though. That happens all the time. I mean in MK2, if you liked Man O War and your buddy liked Banes... you were gonna have a bad time. Probably as bad as any of the worst 40k matchups honestly. It's a problem in every system that stems from the fact that its pretty rare to get more than say... 10 viable archetypes in any competitive meta. As your game grows, the problem seems worse, because 8 seemed pretty good when you had a dozen options. 10 is even better, but feels a lot worse now that there's 50 or more archetypes to choose from.

But there were ways to make MoW/Banes viable, with the right support and even win tournaments as a dark horse. Not so much with 40k, which is part of the issue. The worst balance is in Warhammer; other games have it but also have ways to work around it. With the right solos and caster, even MoW could be decent. Not great, but perfectly fine for games and even local Steamrollers depending.

 solkan wrote:

Nurglitch wrote:

I don't know how I missed this, but it's a really good point: there's a big problem with the game-end conditions matching the victory conditions. There's the Endless War missions from CA 2018 with the 'Acceptable Casualties' rule that negates the perverse incentives of Sudden Death (game ends with the loser wiped out), but that kind of doubles-down so that people can still run up the score if they table someone on the first turn of a tournament game. Me, I've always loved rules that let me recycle casualties back onto the board as it seems to represent hordes better than cluttering the board at the beginning of the game and hoping you have enough models to survive the game. In particular it works really well for stuff like Tyranids where they kind of break the lower end of the points-scale. Take two armies for example, with the same number of models, and give one half the range of the other, and the ability to recycle models onto the board and suddenly it's more interesting how the players solve the imbalance. You also have a horde army and an elite army with the same number of models so it doesn't break the bank to play the former rather than the latter...

Decoupling the end-game and scoring conditions seems like a really good idea. I'm not sure how scoring works in Malifaux, but I should look it up.

Malifaux's entirely a scheme and strategy based scoring system. You get points for things like "Place scheme markers on three corners of the table" or "Walk a specific model up to another specific model and interact". The game sort of rests on the fact that both players have the same strategy (where half their points come from), but the other half of their points come from two secretly chosen schemes (out of a randomly generated pool of five that both players choose from).

The game does still sometimes end up in a situation where you can win by killing everyone else indiscriminately. But most of the time, you at least have to go through the effort of killing the right models in the right places. (One of the schemes that I expect to come back into rotation is the one where you scored VP if you provoked the other player into killing your designated "Frame for murder" model.)
--
I think Warmachine/Hordes is a better example of the limiting effect of an automatic victory condition is, though.

There were lots of times where discussions of Steamroller scenarios would degenerate into "Give up on the scenario and go for assassination" or "The scenario requires too many improbable things to happen, ignore it and go for assassinate."

On the one hand, usually it's not easy to get an assassination victory, and it gives the player a choice. On the other hand, there's a definite bar on what you can do in scenarios. If there were records concerning scenario victory vs. assassination victory at tournaments for the different years of Steamroller, that'd probably be really interesting to show where the complexity cap rests.

I've found the biggest hurdle 40k has in developing a really engaging scenario is just how weird positioning is treated in the game. Models are actually, for the most part, very slow and not particularly capable of moving around the map, but if you're melee oriented, the act of getting into melee moves things extremely fast. Melee itself is also kind of a weird mechanic, where the game has a very tower defense style of "kill them before they get here and you win, but if they make it you lose". Part of that just comes from the very binary nature of shooting and engagement and how heavily armies specialize in one over the other. It just makes it extremely difficult to design scenarios that cater to everyone.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Wayniac wrote:

 LunarSol wrote:
That's really not unique to GW games though. That happens all the time. I mean in MK2, if you liked Man O War and your buddy liked Banes... you were gonna have a bad time. Probably as bad as any of the worst 40k matchups honestly. It's a problem in every system that stems from the fact that its pretty rare to get more than say... 10 viable archetypes in any competitive meta. As your game grows, the problem seems worse, because 8 seemed pretty good when you had a dozen options. 10 is even better, but feels a lot worse now that there's 50 or more archetypes to choose from.

But there were ways to make MoW/Banes viable, with the right support and even win tournaments as a dark horse. Not so much with 40k, which is part of the issue. The worst balance is in Warhammer; other games have it but also have ways to work around it. With the right solos and caster, even MoW could be decent. Not great, but perfectly fine for games and even local Steamrollers depending.

Seems like you're reaching. MoW never won a thing. Locally? Sure, but local metas have plenty of Ork champions. Honestly, 8th edition has on the whole, had some of the better examples of diverse faction success of any game I play. It's not my favorite game to play competitively, but I don't find the competitive hoops any worse to jump through than any other game I play. Mostly I just feel like its just got a larger community of players unwilling to make the jumps compared to other systems.

Not every option for every game should be made for balance.

Some stuff has to be in there for fun. Filling out a world or background or whatever.

White wins 53%-56% because of the first turn advantage. If Chess were played by Warhammer players, they would fight over who got to play White (blood has been shed over much less than a 6% advantage), and would immediately concede the game if they were forced to play Black.

The problem is not the balance, it is not the game, it is the players. They have a diseased mindset that poisons the experience.

Ehhhh.... I don't think so in regards to 53% win ratio meaning everyone is flocking to white.

Because when i talk about bad balance i am *specifically* talking about the gdubs and their 40k and aos ruleset. In which case we aren't talking about factions with a 53% win rate being unbalanced.

I'm not even close to saying thats true.

I'm talking about the big cheese that gets over 70% win ratio by virtue of it showing up on the table. Thats the bad balance I'm talking about. (whose numbers are confirmed by the honest wargamer's stats that are published periodically showing about as close to actual stats as we have to go off of beyond our own anecdotal local experiences)

White winning 53 or 54% or whatever games in chess is such a small tiny little advantage that I don't know of many people that see that as insurmountable odds that would ruin the experience.

I do however have a problem with showing up to a casual game and my opponent dropping 3 keepers down on the table.

Because lolz.

There is no point playing that game. That in the chess analogy would be my opponent replacing four or five of his pieces with queens before the game begins.

That is not a good game. Nor do I feel having to socially engineer my playerbase to plead with them to not powergame so that anything other than powerlists can have a good game.

Because I play a ton of other games and don't have that problem anywhere else.

50/50 balance is not a thing that I am striving for nor do I think its possible. 70/30 or thereabouts balance however is flat out flaming garbage and needs reigned in.

When I was heading up Azyr Comp for AOS our primary goal was to not let things get beyond a 60/40 spread. We achieved that, even getting it down to a 57/43 before it got canned when GW adopted SCGT comp for its official points.

As already mentioned no real battle was every truly balanced as no military commander wants a fair fight. but in the realms of tabletop both players want a good time and a chance to win.

If you have played as many different systems as I have you really notice the difference in mechanics and how they effect the game.

40K is the 400# gorilla in the room since everybody is used to its I go/you go system. as mentioned above it has also taken on some aspects of deck building ALA magic thanks to CP farming/stratagems with 8th edition.

Lets walk through just a few of them

classic battletech-
a game that dates back to the late 80s and really hasn't changed that much with rules or combinations of rules to cover just about anything you can imagine which is why you only need 4 1/285 scale minis to play the game.
it has a battlevalue system, some people prefer tonnage as an alternative, but when to comes to game balance it means absolutely nothing. it is there for structure for events. as the true balancer is critical hits.

It doesn't matter what tech level you have, what exotic weapons you use, how awesome your pilot is or how many BV points you spent to get all that. if I get a lucky head shot that does 10 damage with a crit on the cockpit or anything that does 12 damage+ your dead. or I get s floating crit that takes out engines, or gyros or cooks off ammo the outcome is generally the same. the system relies on alternating movement where you try to maximize outgoing attacks while minimizing the incoming. but shooting and melee attacks are all simultaneous, so even if you die you still get to take your final action.


Infinity
when it comes to building a force it is probably one of the most balanced games out there.
all the gear and weapons across all factions have the same stats by type no matter what they look like or who is using them. the big difference is in the fact that you have a points cost system, unit availability system, and a support weapons system.
The real big one to prevent power gaming is the support weapons system especially combined with points cost. the number of actions you get a turn is based on how many units in your squad (max 10) are alive and awake. so if you spend all points on the best dudes your army isn't getting anything done because it has so few actions.

remembering that all weapons are the same the unit you choose and its weapons are adjusted by how useful that unit will be with said weapon. in a standard 300 point game you get 1 support point for every 50 of gameplay so in this case 6. for a basic average trooper with a special weapon your going to pay a few more points like 16 and a support point cost of say .5, but then you take that same gun and give it to a specialist or heavy trooper then the cost pushes over 30 points and the support points jump to 1.5 or even 2.

That's not even taking into account gameplay which includes a full reaction mechanic so both players are always playing and not just making armor saves, a 2 part action mechanic, a critical hit mechanic and the fact it uses a d20 system with not only shooting and close combat skills but also tests of technical skill and strength.

DUST 1947
This is a game that combines a lot of what makes infinity a good system while streamlining it a bit like 40K. it uses an alternating activation system and fresh initiative rolls at the start of each turn as well as a limited range chance and full reactive actions.

it tempers this with representing how hard something is to hurt by assigning more or less dice used in attacks based on the armor class of the unit targeted, combined with the fact it uses symbols on D6s (3 types -army/bullseye/shield 2 per dice each)with a success generally being on-army symbol- only 2 sides of the dice (or 33%).

Making it still a fast fun game but a much friendlier and less alpha strike prone game like 8th edition 40K has become.

At the other end of the spectrum you have warmahordes which is effectively steampunk/monster chess, the adage is everything is broken so everything is fair.


So in the end when you say balance the real question is what you really mean by the term.
people go on without end about 40K because it was never intended to be a truly balanced game based on points structure as it exists on it's lore, which is so vast it makes the various armies overblown with special gear/weapons/rules. allowing tournament minded players to find ways to push the rules beyond the designers intent.

for me balance goes back to my opening comment-is it fun for both players and do they both have a reasonable chance to win within the games mechanics. that to me is balance.

for me balance goes back to my opening comment-is it fun for both players and do they both have a reasonable chance to win within the games mechanics. that to me is balance.

Nicely said!

I'm curious why no one else has brought up 30k. Now, I understand some folks prefer the rules for the 40k system over the rules for 30k, but the main difference in 30k is you have marines fighting marines- less variation which promotes more balance. Yes, there are a few units that should be thrown out, or have their rules modified, but I have to say, I have played far more 30k games that came down to the last turn than 40k.

Honestly 40k could be balanced in a tournament setting- give everyone the same battleforce. Let them play with the same models. However, no one would pay to enter a tournament like that.

30K is great with a few exceptions it is fixed 7th edition minus the game breaking formations (now replaced with stratagems for 8th ed ) and the inclusion of compulsory units actually being good.

the only 2 things I don't like about it is the retention of the WHFB magic system phase with the dice pool. 5th was far more intuitive and easy to follow.

the other is the combination damage chart and health points on vehicles. pick one or the other 2 systems for damage is abusive.

Again, I would argue, easy to follow and balanced are two different things. Are there rules that could be stream lined in 30k - most certainly, although I never felt the 2 damage systems (armor and wounds) was abusive. Maybe it was harder to remember, but playing with that system for 20 years, made it pretty second nature. Any system with less options is going to be easier to balance than one with hundreds of different combinations. In 30k both armies are mostly choosing from the same pool of units and then there is the fact that some of the units are duds and few people choose them which limits the army pool even more. Its not uncommon for opponents to be using many of the same units in their armies, with them painted a different color.

Personally I find a game is balanced when the focus is less on what I do/did outside of the game, but rather what I do/did in the game.

Placement, positioning, target selection, and the like should allow even a poor list put together on the fly to have a chance to win over a list that was finely tuned. Player experience and good tactics should trump gamey things like Command Points, Strategems, and the like.

GW are trying to make an environment where a complete novice can win over someone who has been playing for years, this is done by removing 'fiddely' things like arcs, and limitations on moving and firing, and adding boons that opponents can't effect or cancel. While this does allow more people to play, it does set the learning very low. When I first started gaming way back in '89, I used to lose a lot as I was new to the hobby, so didn't have a grasp of basic strategy. Losing a lot allowed me to learn and see what I was doing wrong and from that I had a firmer grasp of strategic play.

The weird thing is that when I propose things like preset or mirror lists for games people suddenly get squirrely. People don't really seem to want balance as much as they want asymmetry.

Nurglitch wrote:
The weird thing is that when I propose things like preset or mirror lists for games people suddenly get squirrely. People don't really seem to want balance as much as they want asymmetry.

Gaming has an element of self expression to it. There's a reason people latch on to specific fighting game characters, and why the concept of GI Joe like Avatar characters has taken over everything from DotA to Magic. There's a huge appeal in choosing the way you represent yourself in a fantasy world, even when represented by an entire army. That's a big part of the reason you get the backlash from imbalance. People put themselves into the game via there choices and really don't like it when they find out that they are, by proxy, systematically bad. On the flip side, there's a huge desire to tinker and optimize and explore the system. It drives players to the next game and to talk about the game between games. It's also somewhat inevitable. No matter how good something is, there's always optimization where there are choices.

I think one of the healthiest realizations you can have with balance is recognizing that its a scale. Nothing is ever so balanced that you can put no thought into it and be "competitive". I think its important to accept imbalance to a degree, but with the above, the recognize where to prioritize it. Take Warmachine: currently the game has Factions as the primary umbrella with Themes and warcasters breaking the units in factions up into smaller groups. To that end, its really important that every faction has a way to be competitive and only then is it critical to see every theme be competitive. The more you can get the better, but that kind of focus helps appreciate the balance you have. Sure someone LOVES Man O War Bombardiers, but if the MoW theme isn't competitive or if Khador as a whole isn't competitive, then worrying that Bombardiers aren't as good as Shocktroopers kind of misses the point. Likewise, when you've got 2-4 versions of various casters at this point, its worth remembering that maybe its okay if Sorscha2 isnt' that great when there's 2 versions that are just fine.