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DarthDiggler wrote:
We can't wait for GW to change the rules, they won't.

Over and over again GW has stated this is not a rule set for competitive play. They don't want competitive play and they actively work to oppose competitive play.

Here we have a community who wants to turn this game into a competitive event when the game designers are vehemently opposed to competitive play.

Now we can change the core rules to make it more balanced and allow for more competitive play, but the community says 'no you can't'. We have to wait for GW to change the rules to make it more competitive. Why won't GW listen to me and make it more competitive?

Because they said they don't want a competitive game.

The community is trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Instead of changing the hole, they want the company who sold them the round peg to instead start selling square pegs. The company has said over and over again they will only sell round pegs.

This is precisely how I see the situation. To put a finer point on what I said earlier about the player base, I see most people are aware of this hypocrisy yet are unwilling to adopt a single house rule or make a concession of any kind, while simultaneously embracing everything official regardless of the damage it does. This tells me most 40k gamers are far more likely to move on when it finaly becomes unplayable for them than lift a finger on behalf of this game. Of course this doesn't apply to any of the fine folks here at Dakka. =)

How did Gee Dubs convince a whole swath of gamers that loose rules are better? Like seriously, if I am playing a game over beer and pretzels (mmmmm, homemade pretzels) the rules should come naturally. I shouldn't need to analyze the grammar on 5 different pages in three different books to come to a conclusion.Nor should my buddy and I come to a disagreement where the only conclusion is to dice off. That's just asking to leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.

JPong wrote:
How did Gee Dubs convince a whole swath of gamers that loose rules are better? Like seriously, if I am playing a game over beer and pretzels (mmmmm, homemade pretzels) the rules should come naturally. I shouldn't need to analyze the grammar on 5 different pages in three different books to come to a conclusion.Nor should my buddy and I come to a disagreement where the only conclusion is to dice off. That's just asking to leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.

Speaking for myself (and only for myself) it was always obvious that 40k at least was a very casual game. When I was playing around with my older brother and his friend with their 2nd edition 40k starter set, we used to change and adapt the rules as we saw fit just to have a laugh. While part of that was age, the fact is the rules *allowed* us to do that, in a way that they didn't with snakes and ladders.

Getting back into 40k as an adult it was obvious from the inset that the rules were meant as a background for having a laugh, getting two armies on the table and bashing at each other until one of you wins (or gives up and gets bored). I think a balanced ruleset would have been layed out differently and used different language to the 40k codexes/rulebooks.

How anyone could get into 40k knowing it's a casual ruleset, and then turn around and act surprised or angry when they find that 40k is a casual ruleset, is beyond me. And it has *always* been this way. I may as well complain about Apple making increasingly over-priced and pretentious crap...they always have done, they always will. Nothing fundamental has or will change in 40k, imo anyway.

 Xca|iber wrote:

DarthDiggler wrote:
We can't wait for GW to change the rules, they won't.

Over and over again GW has stated this is not a rule set for competitive play. They don't want competitive play and they actively work to oppose competitive play.

Here we have a community who wants to turn this game into a competitive event when the game designers are vehemently opposed to competitive play.

Now we can change the core rules to make it more balanced and allow for more competitive play, but the community says 'no you can't'. We have to wait for GW to change the rules to make it more competitive. Why won't GW listen to me and make it more competitive?

Because they said they don't want a competitive game.

The community is trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Instead of changing the hole, they want the company who sold them the round peg to instead start selling square pegs. The company has said over and over again they will only sell round pegs.

Except that is just an empty excuse. What GW produces is not "casual vs. competitive", it's "unclear vs. clear". They produce sloppily written rules and then get people to justify it by arguing "well they're supposed to be casual!!1!!"

It's like someone claiming to have made the best movie ever, then when it's terrible they say "Well it's supposed to be terrible - I meant to make it that way as a commentary on... blah blah blah"

Clear rules that don't require 2 hours of negotiations when strangers first meet to play benefits everyone, because then even casual players can go into a game store and play with confidence that they won't get their ass handed to them because someone thought Rule A worked like X instead of Y. This makes the game more accessible to casual players, not less.

The entire concept of "casual rules" vs. "competitive rules" is made up. The difference is between clear and unclear rules. Just because rules are clear, concise, and not open to seven interpretations, does NOT mean that casual players who want house rules cannot go ahead and make them. I don't understand this aggressive push to keep the rules unclear - it's like a group of people were forced to make house rules a long time ago and then got it in their heads that the best type of rules were ones that made them play that way. It's strange.

It's not that GW doesn't want competitive play. That's just a cover. It's that they don't care about the quality of their rules. As far as they're concerned, they are being forced to produce them because we ungrateful sheep aren't just lining up to buy their product to wave in the air yelling "PEW PEW" like children. They see 40k as a game of 10-year-olds playing pretend with their action figures, when it has the potential to be so much more than that. The original design team (and some of the current ones, to be fair) seem to understand this potential, but GW upper management definitely does not.

EDIT: Ninja'd. Again again.

EDIT EDIT: Not that I haven't waved my models around yelling PEW PEW , but for an expensive hobby I would also like to enjoy a slightly more engaging experience, game-wise.

They are not interested in the rules. They don't care what the rules say. all they are interested in is making money and if writing some rules gets them money so be it. They will write rules for chaos and you buy it. They write rules for black legion and you buy it. Notice they didn't put both sets of rules in one book. That wouldn't make them enough money.

GW has said over and over again. They are a model company. Rules are secondary. Your enjoyment of the rules is secondary. Tight rules are not something they care about. Internal balance is not something they care about. External balance is not something they care about.

Clear rules would require extensive playtesting and editing. These things cost money and they do not make GW any more money.

We can cry about what we want out of this game, but you are not going to get it from this company. You are going to have to go out and make the changes yourself.

GW is retreating into an ever tightening niche market. They are retreating from trying to be a game for the masses back into a niche hobby for a certain segment of hobbiest. I didn't say gamers, I said hobbiest. The game doesn't matter to them. The hobby of collecting models does.

DarthDiggler wrote:

 Xca|iber wrote:

DarthDiggler wrote:
We can't wait for GW to change the rules, they won't.

Over and over again GW has stated this is not a rule set for competitive play. They don't want competitive play and they actively work to oppose competitive play.

Here we have a community who wants to turn this game into a competitive event when the game designers are vehemently opposed to competitive play.

Now we can change the core rules to make it more balanced and allow for more competitive play, but the community says 'no you can't'. We have to wait for GW to change the rules to make it more competitive. Why won't GW listen to me and make it more competitive?

Because they said they don't want a competitive game.

The community is trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Instead of changing the hole, they want the company who sold them the round peg to instead start selling square pegs. The company has said over and over again they will only sell round pegs.

Except that is just an empty excuse. What GW produces is not "casual vs. competitive", it's "unclear vs. clear". They produce sloppily written rules and then get people to justify it by arguing "well they're supposed to be casual!!1!!"

It's like someone claiming to have made the best movie ever, then when it's terrible they say "Well it's supposed to be terrible - I meant to make it that way as a commentary on... blah blah blah"

Clear rules that don't require 2 hours of negotiations when strangers first meet to play benefits everyone, because then even casual players can go into a game store and play with confidence that they won't get their ass handed to them because someone thought Rule A worked like X instead of Y. This makes the game more accessible to casual players, not less.

The entire concept of "casual rules" vs. "competitive rules" is made up. The difference is between clear and unclear rules. Just because rules are clear, concise, and not open to seven interpretations, does NOT mean that casual players who want house rules cannot go ahead and make them. I don't understand this aggressive push to keep the rules unclear - it's like a group of people were forced to make house rules a long time ago and then got it in their heads that the best type of rules were ones that made them play that way. It's strange.

It's not that GW doesn't want competitive play. That's just a cover. It's that they don't care about the quality of their rules. As far as they're concerned, they are being forced to produce them because we ungrateful sheep aren't just lining up to buy their product to wave in the air yelling "PEW PEW" like children. They see 40k as a game of 10-year-olds playing pretend with their action figures, when it has the potential to be so much more than that. The original design team (and some of the current ones, to be fair) seem to understand this potential, but GW upper management definitely does not.

EDIT: Ninja'd. Again again.

EDIT EDIT: Not that I haven't waved my models around yelling PEW PEW , but for an expensive hobby I would also like to enjoy a slightly more engaging experience, game-wise.

They are not interested in the rules. They don't care what the rules say. all they are interested in is making money and if writing some rules gets them money so be it. They will write rules for chaos and you buy it. They write rules for black legion and you buy it. Notice they didn't put both sets of rules in one book. That wouldn't make them enough money.

GW has said over and over again. They are a model company. Rules are secondary. Your enjoyment of the rules is secondary. Tight rules are not something they care about. Internal balance is not something they care about. External balance is not something they care about.

Clear rules would require extensive playtesting and editing. These things cost money and they do not make GW any more money.

We can cry about what we want out of this game, but you are not going to get it from this company. You are going to have to go out and make the changes yourself.

GW is retreating into an ever tightening niche market. They are retreating from trying to be a game for the masses back into a niche hobby for a certain segment of hobbiest. I didn't say gamers, I said hobbiest. The game doesn't matter to them. The hobby of collecting models does.

Pretty much this. GW has always marketed itself as a model company. 40k is always referred to as 'the hobby', not as 'the game'. The game is less important to GW than the models. The game is just something to give people something to do with their models beyond collecting them.

DarthDiggler wrote:


We can cry about what we want out of this game, but you are not going to get it from this company. You are going to have to go out and make the changes yourself.

GW is retreating into an ever tightening niche market. They are retreating from trying to be a game for the masses back into a niche hobby for a certain segment of hobbiest. I didn't say gamers, I said hobbiest. The game doesn't matter to them. The hobby of collecting models does.

I wasn't actually disagreeing with this point. On the contrary, I think you're spot on. My point was that the bolded part of your statement is not a sustainable business model. At least, not the way they're running it anyway. If that's what they really want, they should go into producing extremely high-quality sculpts at perhaps a slightly larger scale and sell them purely as art pieces.

GW needs to figure out what they want to be, and do so in relatively short order, otherwise they're gonna continue to take hits to their profits and stock value. As a fan of the franchise, I would like to see them succeed and rake in the big bucks, but they openly refuse to pursue any alternative strategies of growing and developing their IP (hence why they are in their current predicament). So no, I don't expect them to ever change anything, but I do expect that they will find their market slowly getting drier year after year until they die or find a better way to improve business.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

DarthDiggler wrote:

 Xca|iber wrote:

DarthDiggler wrote:
We can't wait for GW to change the rules, they won't.

Over and over again GW has stated this is not a rule set for competitive play. They don't want competitive play and they actively work to oppose competitive play.

Here we have a community who wants to turn this game into a competitive event when the game designers are vehemently opposed to competitive play.

Now we can change the core rules to make it more balanced and allow for more competitive play, but the community says 'no you can't'. We have to wait for GW to change the rules to make it more competitive. Why won't GW listen to me and make it more competitive?

Because they said they don't want a competitive game.

The community is trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Instead of changing the hole, they want the company who sold them the round peg to instead start selling square pegs. The company has said over and over again they will only sell round pegs.

Except that is just an empty excuse. What GW produces is not "casual vs. competitive", it's "unclear vs. clear". They produce sloppily written rules and then get people to justify it by arguing "well they're supposed to be casual!!1!!"

It's like someone claiming to have made the best movie ever, then when it's terrible they say "Well it's supposed to be terrible - I meant to make it that way as a commentary on... blah blah blah"

Clear rules that don't require 2 hours of negotiations when strangers first meet to play benefits everyone, because then even casual players can go into a game store and play with confidence that they won't get their ass handed to them because someone thought Rule A worked like X instead of Y. This makes the game more accessible to casual players, not less.

The entire concept of "casual rules" vs. "competitive rules" is made up. The difference is between clear and unclear rules. Just because rules are clear, concise, and not open to seven interpretations, does NOT mean that casual players who want house rules cannot go ahead and make them. I don't understand this aggressive push to keep the rules unclear - it's like a group of people were forced to make house rules a long time ago and then got it in their heads that the best type of rules were ones that made them play that way. It's strange.

It's not that GW doesn't want competitive play. That's just a cover. It's that they don't care about the quality of their rules. As far as they're concerned, they are being forced to produce them because we ungrateful sheep aren't just lining up to buy their product to wave in the air yelling "PEW PEW" like children. They see 40k as a game of 10-year-olds playing pretend with their action figures, when it has the potential to be so much more than that. The original design team (and some of the current ones, to be fair) seem to understand this potential, but GW upper management definitely does not.

EDIT: Ninja'd. Again again.

EDIT EDIT: Not that I haven't waved my models around yelling PEW PEW , but for an expensive hobby I would also like to enjoy a slightly more engaging experience, game-wise.

They are not interested in the rules. They don't care what the rules say. all they are interested in is making money and if writing some rules gets them money so be it. They will write rules for chaos and you buy it. They write rules for black legion and you buy it. Notice they didn't put both sets of rules in one book. That wouldn't make them enough money.

GW has said over and over again. They are a model company. Rules are secondary. Your enjoyment of the rules is secondary. Tight rules are not something they care about. Internal balance is not something they care about. External balance is not something they care about.

Clear rules would require extensive playtesting and editing. These things cost money and they do not make GW any more money.

We can cry about what we want out of this game, but you are not going to get it from this company. You are going to have to go out and make the changes yourself.

GW is retreating into an ever tightening niche market. They are retreating from trying to be a game for the masses back into a niche hobby for a certain segment of hobbiest. I didn't say gamers, I said hobbiest. The game doesn't matter to them. The hobby of collecting models does.

Pretty much this. GW has always marketed itself as a model company. 40k is always referred to as 'the hobby', not as 'the game'. The game is less important to GW than the models. The game is just something to give people something to do with their models beyond collecting them.

Then the need to not produce rules and just produce models. No matter what they say, there's a game built around the models.

@ xruslanx.
'Casual' is a play style.
'Competitive' is a play style.

I can play chess casually with my kids, or competitively in a county event.

The rules are clearly defined and concise.And suitable for both styles of play.And can be house ruled ...(See what Allessio has done with chess at Mantic Games !)

Classic Battle-tech has been played casually , and competitively .(And we made up a load of house rules for our home brew pilots , and customized Mechs.)
Again clearly defined rules , written in an intuitive and concise way.

I can play 40k casually, we all can IF we agree on how to interprit /fix the rules in the same way.And agree to add our own house rules.

However, you can not just pick an army using the current FoC to an agreed PV , and walk into a LFGS, or GW store and play a pick up game.
The game rules are too poorly defined , and the game balance is all over the place.
Because GW put PV and FoC in the codex books , this level of competitive play is inferred, but NOT delivered.

40k is not a 'casual game', just a game with poorly defined rules , and limited unbalanced game play.That FORCES players to agree on how to fix the game the same way, if they want to have any enjoyment playing it.

This is not a good thing.

Please do not confuse over complicated, diffuse and counter intuitive rules with 'casual' .
Because clearly defined , concise intuitive rules allow 'casual' play too!

Honestly I never understood their position as a "model company" and explicitly not a "gaming company". It just doesn't make sense. The vast majority of people buy the models because of the game.. Yes, there are *some* people that simply buy models and don't play but those are the exception, not the rule.

Also, I never understood why they would ever claim that "it's a beer and pretzels game". It's not. Poker is a beer and pretzel game; so is anything on the XBox. I'm pretty sure most people take longer to get a new beer from the fridge than they spend setting up for a card or video game. 40k, at an absolute minimum, takes 15 minutes to get going and that's assuming the army lists for both players are ready to go and table is setup. Otherwise count on 45 minutes before you roll a single die. And you certainly aren't going to be drinking the entire time while playing an apoc game, 8 hours of drinking is rarely a good thing due to liver failure and all.

And ALL of that is before you layer on the rules you need to "discuss" before hand to make sure both players understood it the same way. Interestingly, when you look at an actual "beer and pretzels" game like Poker, you don't have those issues: 4 Aces beat 2 Jacks every day of the week... unless you've specifically house ruled it differently. 40k: you need to house rule even basic stuff so that people can just play the game.

GW needs to decide what 40k is going to be.

We have models, story and rules. Models, for the most part, are pretty good. The story is generally good - as long as you know what's actually considered "current". Rule quality varies radically from really bad to really good. With one major bad point being layout. It's just not very approachable, which leads to a lot of rule confusion. Well, the loose language certainly doesn't help either.

The choices then, as I see it, are that GW becomes just a model company or it becomes a gaming company. If it's a model company, then drop the rule books; just be aware that they would be out of business within a year. If it's a game company then they need to focus on tightening up their core product.

By tightening up I mean that they need to hire people to rip apart their books (rules and BL) and restructure everything to make it more approachable. I say "hire" because I'm not confident that anyone who is currently part of the process at GW can make it happen. A few things I'd like to see: a BRB which doesn't feel like someone whose scatter brained put it together. It should be polished, clear and concise. Right now it feels like someone bolted on whole sections with complete disregard for how those sections actually fit within everything else. Which, incidentally, is why they had to do things like Stronghold Assault (to fix buildings) and the FAQ rewrite of challenges. After 6 editions you'd think they'd have a pretty good system down.

Next, I'd like BL to stop selling books whose stories conflict with the current state of the fluff. Then I'd like them to actually put a roadmap of the universe together so that writers have something to build on. HH started off great. It was obvious the first 4 books had a very clear timeline and the authors knew enough about what was going to appear in each others books that they were able to successfully build upon it. Equally obvious is that strategy didn't hold beyond those 4 books. Later authors have ignored what's happened previously or twisted things in such a way that it just doesn't make sense anymore.

GW claims that their IP is super important - as evidenced by all of the lawsuits "defending" it. However, they don't seem interested in maintaining that IP in a meaningful manner. Instead, they act like a really large company whose employees have no respect or care for what's gone on before and think that copy/paste jobs with a new cover (Escalation, Death from the Skies) is the way to go. hint: it's not.

Rules take care and feeding. To make changes, it takes a group of people who are actually passionate about their work and willing to dive into the intricacies to pull it off. Being ambivalent about how the rules work isn't a good thing. Statements by Jervis, Warhammer world and others to the effect of not getting caught up in the rules is patently not good. Rolling off for it does not lead to a good experience as one person will inevitably feel as though they've been cheated. That entire situation can be avoided by being clear. In those cases where you aren't clear, release FAQs in a timely manner. The first part of last year was great as FAQs were quickly coming out; but that ended and there are a LOT of questions which need resolved.

I've tried to get into 40k several times now, and I finally just bought the rulebook, some models I thought looked cool and did it.

What has always put me off is how the rules are laid out in the book and how vague or contradictory they can be. I sat down at a demo table of Warmachine a few years ago and learned the basic game in ten minutes. The same for Malifaux and Infinity. Yet every single time I sat down with people to learn 40k or fantasy it was a sloppy and confusing endeavor.

Reading through [my first legitimately owned copy of] the rules, I kept noticing all the stuff about "forging a narrative" and enjoying all aspects of the hobby with friends, and not being a whiny jerkoff powergaming sore loser/winner. After I realized that I don't have to "be competitive", at least to start, I started having a lot more fun with the game, and now I love it.

I have to say that the ruleset is a mess and requires frantic page flipping and bookmarks on my part to figure out what I'm doing. I'm not saying it doesn't need a massive overhaul, but I've come to love that experience for the same reason I've always played D&D. I don't need to be godlike. I just need to have an immersive and fun experience.

xruslanx wrote:

JPong wrote:
How did Gee Dubs convince a whole swath of gamers that loose rules are better? Like seriously, if I am playing a game over beer and pretzels (mmmmm, homemade pretzels) the rules should come naturally. I shouldn't need to analyze the grammar on 5 different pages in three different books to come to a conclusion.Nor should my buddy and I come to a disagreement where the only conclusion is to dice off. That's just asking to leave a sour taste in someone's mouth.

Speaking for myself (and only for myself) it was always obvious that 40k at least was a very casual game. When I was playing around with my older brother and his friend with their 2nd edition 40k starter set, we used to change and adapt the rules as we saw fit just to have a laugh. While part of that was age, the fact is the rules *allowed* us to do that, in a way that they didn't with snakes and ladders.

Getting back into 40k as an adult it was obvious from the inset that the rules were meant as a background for having a laugh, getting two armies on the table and bashing at each other until one of you wins (or gives up and gets bored). I think a balanced ruleset would have been layed out differently and used different language to the 40k codexes/rulebooks.

How anyone could get into 40k knowing it's a casual ruleset, and then turn around and act surprised or angry when they find that 40k is a casual ruleset, is beyond me. And it has *always* been this way. I may as well complain about Apple making increasingly over-priced and pretentious crap...they always have done, they always will. Nothing fundamental has or will change in 40k, imo anyway.

There's a difference between "casual" and "poorly written". 40k is the latter.

I've never been remotely interested in competitive play, strictly a "casual" gamer. I still think 40k is a mess though.

A game can be clearly written and balanced and still be a good casual game. One does not preclude the other. In fact, GW and FW HAVE written games that are much less convoluted and still make for good casual games.... of course they axed them all.

The OP assumes GW cares. Allies was put in there to try and force people to buy more than 1 army. The implications on the game were never considered, because GW does not care.

As those ridiculous "editorials" plainly stated in the first "new" White Dwarf issue: this hobby is about collecting first before anything else: painting, gaming, etc.. Just buy buy buy.

Spartan Games wrote:Armoured Clash is a standalone, comprehensive game,
introducing an entirely new set of Wargames Rules,
including the Spartan Games Coloured Exploding Dice
System. The game is ideal for playing out the greatest land
battles depicted in the Dystopian Wars history, from the
entirety of the Second Battle of Waterloo as described in
Storm of Steel to Operation Bear Trap featured in this book.

The rules system is suited to any style of play, from highly
competitive tournament games to campaigns of linked
scenarios between friends.

I noticed this earlier and thought it would be worth posting here. Look at that second paragraph there, "suited to any style of play". There is no distinction between 'competitive' and 'casual' outside of how players act. THAT IS HOW IT SHOULD BE.

If players want to bring the hardest things they can then it's on them.

If players want to play a narrative battle then that is their choice too.

And the rules, as provided by Spartan Games with no house ruling or any of that, support both comfortably.


The entire 'competitive' vs 'casual' ruleset arguments are, in my opinion, utterly (and appears to be an issue unique to GW).
It comes down to how the players want to act, not how the rules are written. As has been said, chess can be played casually, why couldn't 40k if it had a better ruleset attached?
(And don't answer that it's because a better ruleset for competitive play would remove options from the game, there are plenty of games out there like warmachine, infinity and dystopian wars with just as many, or more, options and they all achieve much better balance in a much clearer ruleset.)





I'd also like to point out that the Armoured Clash core rules I took the quote from I downloaded for free from Spartan Games' website. The whole 'we are a model company, not a rules company' holds little weight when no one else on the market is trying to force anyone to buy anything other than their core rulebook, if that. GW on the other hand want's you to buy at the bare minimum a core book and a codex, but are pushing a supplement, an allied codex, potentially a second supplement for them, escalation and or the fortifications one, and dataslates on top of that.
As well the use of bolding and italics on keywords, as well as different coloured fonts, makes things look a lot more professional and leads to a lot less confusion.

"we don't want a competitive game" is an excuse for crappy rules and bad balance. In today's internet rich times where games go through breakdown quicker, it's made 40k straight awful.

You see, 40k has always been that game about special weapons and special units. Special weapons that ignore armor, and special units that ignore basic guns. The problem with that is that basic units are terrible in 40k as a result.

This problem was magnified in 6th edition with the inclusion of allies and flyers. So now, if you don't have the broken stuff, you can't even hang. You lose at the army list creation screen. You don't need to move models, you just pick your broken unit of brokenness, pick up a bunch of dice, and spray crap all over the table.

So 40k winds up being up about $$ expensive units, easily escalates, and because it isn't written cohesively, there are arguments every 5 minutes.

We joke that when we play 40k, there is the movement phase, then the argument phase. Then the shooting phase, followed by another argument phase. Games take hours, and the vast majority of games are decided when the player takes his models out. You aren't rewarded for good gameplay decisions or playing a themed list or even for using basic infantry. You are Rewarded for breaking the force org and spamming broken unit that basic guns can't hurt though. If a riptide has feel no pain, it would take something like 360 bolter shots (that's a lot of shots!) to kill a riptide. Hope you brought your special weapons!

How is this cesspool of crap fun?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

They are not interested in the rules. They don't care what the rules say. all they are interested in is making money and if writing some rules gets them money so be it. They will write rules for chaos and you buy it. They write rules for black legion and you buy it. Notice they didn't put both sets of rules in one book. That wouldn't make them enough money.

GW has said over and over again. They are a model company. Rules are secondary. Your enjoyment of the rules is secondary. Tight rules are not something they care about. Internal balance is not something they care about. External balance is not something they care about.

Clear rules would require extensive playtesting and editing. These things cost money and they do not make GW any more money.

We can cry about what we want out of this game, but you are not going to get it from this company. You are going to have to go out and make the changes yourself.

GW is retreating into an ever tightening niche market. They are retreating from trying to be a game for the masses back into a niche hobby for a certain segment of hobbiest. I didn't say gamers, I said hobbiest. The game doesn't matter to them. The hobby of collecting models does.

Well, since they feel that way, they can take their 38% operating margin decrease and hold that. Tight rules don't make money, but bad rules will cost you money. Just like customer service. Or PR. Hard to measure...until you mess up.

 scuddman wrote:
"we don't want a competitive game" is an excuse for crappy rules and bad balance. In today's internet rich times where games go through breakdown quicker, it's made 40k straight awful.

You see, 40k has always been that game about special weapons and special units. Special weapons that ignore armor, and special units that ignore basic guns. The problem with that is that basic units are terrible in 40k as a result.

Yeah, if they simplified the basic rules and made it so 95% of special things simply buff or nerf core rules, it would be a hell of a lot simpler and still allow for special items. It seems like they were trying to go for that in recent editions, but failed quite dismally. Maybe just because they are trying to keep the rules backward compatible with old codices, so they have to carry a lot of crappy convoluted rules from previous editions.

I think it's clear they don't care about a game and just about selling figures when there are codexes that don't have an update or figures for some things yet GW puts out multiple Space Marine codexes when their first priority should be making sure every army has an update to the latest edition first but of course it's about selling and Marines sell the most so...

Third edition had its flaws but when there were no codexes and just the army lists in the BRB it wasn't that bad and things were at least somewhat balanced for that brief time.

Their messed up priorities and shoddy rules are most of the reason I am slowly realizing the game is not something I want to play and the company is not something I want to support now that I'm older and realize how they operate.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Yeah, if they simplified the basic rules and made it so 95% of special things simply buff or nerf core rules, it would be a hell of a lot simpler and still allow for special items. It seems like they were trying to go for that in recent editions, but failed quite dismally. Maybe just because they are trying to keep the rules backward compatible with old codices, so they have to carry a lot of crappy convoluted rules from previous editions.

That looks to be the problem, backwards compatibility.
If they merged a lot of the special rules, that'd help a lot. Make armourbane the same as Melta, or fleshbane the same as poison.

The big problem we get is when a lot of rules come up at once.
Tried using a Krak grenade when in cc against a Dreadnought? What do you roll to hit, how many attacks do you get, what I is it at, what facing do you hit, etc?
And, using the same names for new rules.....
Skilled rider used to apply to all ICs. Not any more.
Run into assault? Once upon a time.

The rules are a mess, and cross-referencing is standard.
There needs to be more use of tables in the rules. What kind of unit can shoot and assault? The tables would be massive, but you just ignore the sections that don't apply.

One of the worst examples of poorly written and cross-referencing rules came up on another site I read recently.

Generating psykic powers. It's not mentioned at all where the psyker rules are. It's mentioned where the psykic powers in the BRB are. Which is like 300 pages away from the psyker rules. Why? Who in their right mind decided those rules should be 300 pages apart. Even the powers should be right beside the rules for psykers, because guess what? They only make sense in context with the rules for psykers. If you aren't going to put them together because you want the powers at the back for easier referencing, at least mention where they are.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Pretty much this. GW has always marketed itself as a model company. 40k is always referred to as 'the hobby', not as 'the game'. The game is less important to GW than the models. The game is just something to give people something to do with their models beyond collecting them.

I don't think that's true.

It wasn't GW that originally produced miniatures at all. It was Citadel. Nowadays they are interchangeable but there was a time when GW didn't just churn out any old rules, seemingly without quality control, just so they could sell miniatures. This is the company that published WFRP (and the Enemy Within!), Blood Royale, Block Mania.. great games.

If 40k isn't a great game then what is the point in using the 40k rules? Because a space marine is only what you call it. You could just as well play Infinity, use the 40k figures and call them space marines. It's all happening in your mind anyway, right?

I can very well understand why GW, confronted with their own product quality (rules), might well want to encourage people that the game balance doesn't matter. It's about the hobby. Just collect the figures! Convenient, non?

With a cutting edge video game I can understand bugs and patches. The technology is really complicated. With a tabletop game or board game, where you are using tape measures and dice, it is unforgivable. If GW can't design good games, well, that is unfortunate.

I am not telling anybody how to use their recreational time, though mine is limited and I therefore resent wasting it on shoddy games. But surely it would be better if the rules were good and were competitive and you felt as if you had won a game because of your superior skills, not because you researched the game to death and found out all the quirks and chain linked abilities. Or because the army list you are using is totally unbalanced.

I didn't read all 5 pages of the thread.

GW has created an issue where the product is currently seen as sub-par of the amount of time and money invested. A typical 40K army is going to cost $1000 and take 75+ hours to assemble and paint. We'll say the army has $2000 worth of "investment" by the player (hobbyist).

For that much money, players expect a certain level of entertainment to be returned. Using the movies as a benchmark, every hour of entertainment is worth $5. This means that a 40K army should give the player 400 hours of entertainment beyond assembling and painting the army. That equates to 200 games, with at 1 game a week is roughly 4 years of play out of one army. 4 years of continual play is a lot to expect from a game and as such, means the rules need to be solid and the game play fun to keep people interested.

On the other hand, someone can go to a MtG draft, spend $15, get smoked and is only out $15 for 2-3 hours of play. They made a relatively small investment, got the same $5 a hour entertainment, but if they don't like it, they don't necessarily feel like they got screwed by WotC, where I think a lot of players may feel GW has screwed them in some cases. because of the high investment cost. I have a game of Munchkin on my shelf that has only been played 3 times, it cost $20. I don't feel like I got screwed because I got my money back in entertainment, even though it was a 100x lower number of hours than my 40K army.

Things should happen which are memorable, epic and have no annoyance factors. I still remember my Worldeater Aspiring Champ punching a SM Captain in the face with a powerfst after the Captain failed to kill him with twin-lightning claws. I also remember my Chaos Lord rolling a 1 for his attacks and dying to his demon weapon; some would think this was funny, I find it not fun and one of the reasons I quit. GW needs to create tight rules and build a community, as that is what it takes to keep the entertainment value up on the game.


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clively wrote:
Honestly I never understood their position as a "model company" and explicitly not a "gaming company". It just doesn't make sense. The vast majority of people buy the models because of the game.. Yes, there are *some* people that simply buy models and don't play but those are the exception, not the rule.

Also, I never understood why they would ever claim that "it's a beer and pretzels game".

Many good points in your post.

I think GW knows while models make the money, the game sells the models. Otherwise, why would the keep changing the rules to basically force the player base to buy new models? Helldrakes and Riptides are prime examples of expensive models being created and pushed by rules. I think GW fails to realize that poor rules will result in players dropping the game, rather than buying the new models (which seems to be happening more and more).

The 40k 'problem' as i see is not that they've buggered it up wholesale, its that some of the things they have come up with are a few points off being rather 'interesting' if it wasn't for the fact that the GW team has no clue how the 'community' thinks and plays.

Add them all up and its got a little "that's bent" way too often and the competition offering runs rings around 40k in rules terms.

Lets face it the two recent additions, escalation and stronghold assault. Are interesting concepts, both screwed over by sheer stupidity in two units aka revenant titan & that D-weapon fortress. Now D-weapons are 'acceptable' when you can only fire one shot a turn, the shadowsword is 'balanced' in that respect and that fortress should have only been able to fire one shot as well (and be av14 as well just because D-weapons are allowed does not mean that it should not be vulnerable to 'standard' weapons'). Then there would not be a problem as one 5" template of doom isn't going to ruin games too much as it might get 1 or 2 off before it gets blown up. The Reveant ideally should only fire 2 D shots, as a rough balance and it would still be worth it but not as stupid. But what do I know...

The rules could be trimmed yes, but that isn't the problem, its each codex that is the problem. Allies makes the issue at the tournament side of things worse, especially with "Tau'dar", if it had been made much tighter it would not be as bad.

But in saying that we then bump into another problem what TOs want their tournament to be, and they can do whatever they please as its their house their rules So if they wanted to ban certain ally combinations they can do so and players will adapt.

And i suppose tha'ts the main gripe as well as the messy rules- some are stuck way back when the game started and haven't quite accepted that others like all the tanks etc in the game now. There is nowt wrong with that view, but i do 'agree to disagree' when they try to justify their dislike by saying 'it shouldn't be like that'. Its opinion and subjective and the players i know like that kind of stuff.

We are in transition it seems, and who knows where they will go with it. But i'm resigned to the fact i'm stuck with 40k as regardless of what happens its still the most popular game out there and I am not going to get rid of the stuff i currently have.

Barfolomew wrote:
On the other hand, someone can go to a MtG draft, spend $15, get smoked and is only out $15 for 2-3 hours of play. They made a relatively small investment, got the same $5 a hour entertainment, but if they don't like it, they don't necessarily feel like they got screwed by WotC, where I think a lot of players may feel GW has screwed them in some cases. because of the high investment cost. I have a game of Munchkin on my shelf that has only been played 3 times, it cost $20. I don't feel like I got screwed because I got my money back in entertainment, even though it was a 100x lower number of hours than my 40K army.

Not only this but if you go to an MtG draft/FNM, you meet more people (therefore making friends!) and can learn tips and tricks, while most 40k players seem to be anti-social and don't like to just socialize about things, and if you turn up at the FLGS there's no guarantee you'll even get a game, or it will be a game within the points that you have (worse for a newbie) or that the person you're playing won't be a WAAC basement dweller using the latest net list designed to table any and all opponents. So even beyond cost/investment, a MtG player KNOWS they can show up for Friday Night Magic and get in a couple of games, learn a couple of things and have a good time (and the community seems to be more friendly and accepting, especially towards new players - when I played 40k last and now granted this was a decade ago, there were unfriendly cliques of players that didn't take well to a newbie), while a 40k player spends $600+ on figures, paints them up and has to wonder if they'll get a game, and if they do if it will be fun or a waste of 4-5 hours.

Could you imagine if GW, beyond lowering the startup cost, had weekly mini-tournaments and the like that helped promote the game like WotC does with MtG?

I never played high end MtG , but I played tons of drafts and ton of starter on starter games and they are super fun . WotC managed to creat a game that is both complex for high end gamers and is fun to play for total casuals like me .

Am biased but to me it looks like there are people in GW that make good armies like Ward , there are those who do random stuff like Crud and there is Kelly who does random stuff , unless it is his eldar , then he goes on a power trip and makes them special .

 Juicifer wrote:

DarthDiggler wrote:
We can't wait for GW to change the rules, they won't.

Over and over again GW has stated this is not a rule set for competitive play. They don't want competitive play and they actively work to oppose competitive play.

Here we have a community who wants to turn this game into a competitive event when the game designers are vehemently opposed to competitive play.

Now we can change the core rules to make it more balanced and allow for more competitive play, but the community says 'no you can't'. We have to wait for GW to change the rules to make it more competitive. Why won't GW listen to me and make it more competitive?

Because they said they don't want a competitive game.

The community is trying to push a round peg into a square hole. Instead of changing the hole, they want the company who sold them the round peg to instead start selling square pegs. The company has said over and over again they will only sell round pegs.

This is precisely how I see the situation. To put a finer point on what I said earlier about the player base, I see most people are aware of this hypocrisy yet are unwilling to adopt a single house rule or make a concession of any kind, while simultaneously embracing everything official regardless of the damage it does. This tells me most 40k gamers are far more likely to move on when it finaly becomes unplayable for them than lift a finger on behalf of this game. Of course this doesn't apply to any of the fine folks here at Dakka. =)

This why I've played 200+ games of Starcraft versus 3 games of 40K in recent history.

I have no problem with anyone who wants a 10,000 point army with tanks, planes, etc.

My only issue is that the rules are not up to scratch. Okay so we could house rule but there is a reason why you buy rules instead of making them up. And adding house rules to a broken game is like adding sugar to sour milk.

When multiple people get together to play a game they want a disinterested party to establish a fair set of rules. That way everybody knows what the rules are and everybody accepts them as fair. 40k, WFB, Chess, Risk, Football or Rugby - it's all the same. If each group had to make the rules up themselves, well, the quickest football player wouldn't like the offside rule, the most impatient player would want a smaller chessboard and the weakest rugby player would object to scrums.

On the one hand I am tempted to suggest that a profit making corporation with a stock market listing should be able to produce a better product. But really, they can't. Because they aren't just making up the rules. They're selling everything else too. It is *because* they are a profit making corporation with a stock market listing that 40k is not really a game any more at all.

If FIFA was a profit-making corporation which had copyright on practically all the things you need to play football, including footballs, what would football be like? What would it's shareholders want it to be like? Well, they wouldn't care. Because they just want to get paid.

FIFA would release new balls all the time. It would frequently change the rules of the game so people had a strong incentive to buy the new footballs. Maybe you can use a smaller, lighter ball for throw-ins? Let's say a green ball might weigh more but goals scored with a green ball count as two goals. A green ball can of course be yours for a mere £1000. Of course if you have blue goalposts, green balls don't count. You don't want your opponent using your green ball against you! Blue goalposts then. Only £2000. Teams would have to wear the new strip in order to compete and this would be changed a lot. All the time, really. You want terrain on your football pitch? No problem! FIFA authorised dirt to make an ultra-hill is only £5000 a ton. Shovels are extra.

Is the 17th edition of FIFA multicolour ball unfair? Well, it's not a competitive game you see. More about collecting the expensive components. Which are, all admit, beautifully made.

A good amateur wiki describing an alternate 40k universe might help. Get the basics down, playtested and balanced and when GW release a new model simply post an alternative interpretation of its abilities, points, etc. But who has the time for that?

GW did not break 40K, to say otherwise is like blaming Blizzard for the kids who broke Starcraft with memorized build orders and keystroke sequencing. The players broke 40K, plain and simple. And in a game this expansive, there is always going to be a level of imbalance...some people will take advantage of that. Games Workshop does have sloppy rules, but ultimately it comes down to someone finding the best possible combo (like a re-rollable 2++) and exploiting it.

DavidJonas wrote:
If FIFA was a profit-making corporation which had copyright on practically all the things you need to play football, including footballs, what would football be like? What would it's shareholders want it to be like? Well, they wouldn't care. Because they just want to get paid.../snip

Your analogy is bad. I will us American Football as an example, as I am not as familiar with FIFA to use them as an example.

American Football is for profit with 32 teams. The rules are set by the NFL and fairly consistent from pee-wee all the way up to profession NFL football. There are slight differences between the tiers, but the overall concept is the same. The rules are different to encourage the game to be slanted in such a manner that it sells tickets. The game does not make the profit, but the teams make the profit being selling tickets and merchandise. Tickets are typically linked to how entertaining the game is to watch and merchandise has to do with how good the team is. The NFL looks at the rules every year and changes them in order to make the game safer and more entertaining. Safety has been the primary focus recently, and rules around not hitting above the head have been implemented. The NFL will tell you that player safety is the primary issue, but based on past rules changes, it's about keep the star players on the field. When a star player is out for the season, the fans don't show up and ticket sales go down.

FIFA does the same thing, changing rules to make the game more "fair" or incorporating new technology to keep the fans from having a bad taste in their mouth. FIFA doesn't benefit, but the people who "pay the bills" benefit because rule changes will keep the public involved and thus sell more tickets and merchandise.

It just so happens that GW is both the rules writer and the company who makes the profit. The two universal complaints about GW is that their prices are too high and their rules suck. The rules can be changed without drastically affecting profits, and that point of contention goes away. The issue with GW is that they change the rules to sell new models, while not keeping the game fair or interesting.




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 greyknight12 wrote:
GW did not break 40K, to say otherwise is like blaming Blizzard for the kids who broke Starcraft with memorized build orders and keystroke sequencing. The players broke 40K, plain and simple. And in a game this expansive, there is always going to be a level of imbalance...some people will take advantage of that. Games Workshop does have sloppy rules, but ultimately it comes down to someone finding the best possible combo (like a re-rollable 2++) and exploiting it.

If GW allows it within the rules, then GW allowed it to be broken. The primary issue with GW is that don't fix stuff when it is broken until maybe years down the road. WotC, Blizzard, etc. fix their games near immediately if something is shown to be game breaking. WotC bans cards when they are too strong, Blizzard patches the game when the game is broken. Starcraft is also a bad comparison because people don't have to drop a grand in order to play a different army.

 greyknight12 wrote:
GW did not break 40K, to say otherwise is like blaming Blizzard for the kids who broke Starcraft with memorized build orders and keystroke sequencing. The players broke 40K, plain and simple. And in a game this expansive, there is always going to be a level of imbalance...some people will take advantage of that. Games Workshop does have sloppy rules, but ultimately it comes down to someone finding the best possible combo (like a re-rollable 2++) and exploiting it.

If by "players broke 40k" you mean "spend a few minutes looking over the rules to realise what's good and what's not", then sure, I agree... which is to say I don't agree

GW are both sloppy and unbalanced. You can just read a single codex and usually see it's unbalanced even within a given book, let alone across different books. Then it's sloppy because the rules are just a mess. Even if somehow they managed to be balanced, they are still a mess.

 greyknight12 wrote:
GW did not break 40K, to say otherwise is like blaming Blizzard for the kids who broke Starcraft with memorized build orders and keystroke sequencing. The players broke 40K, plain and simple. And in a game this expansive, there is always going to be a level of imbalance...some people will take advantage of that. Games Workshop does have sloppy rules, but ultimately it comes down to someone finding the best possible combo (like a re-rollable 2++) and exploiting it.

Maybe, just maybe, some of us actually think its the company's responsibility to fix any broken aspect of the game when its been raised. Maybe take part in the community and listen to feedback. Maybe play test thoroughly before releasing a half finished product. Maybe even consider balance internally and externally.

But you're right, we should just be happy eating beer and drinking pretzels and close our eyes to all the problems and continue to shell out money for an inferior product.

Never the company's fault, always the players.

The ability of some to blidnly adhere to GW's byline baffles me. I get that sometimes the hate is too strong and maybe people wish for the end of GW too much but really? beer and pretzels game? Beer and preztle games can be played with some cups and a quarter. Beer and preztle games don't cost hundreds of dollars per person. The very statement is worthy of meme for its sheer idiocy, not even touching how detached from reality someone must be to think 40k is a beer and pretzle game.