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 Zweischneid wrote:
Not achieving something it doesn't try to achieve is not a failure. Successfully achieving something you tried to do is not failure either.

It is if the goal is stupid.

 insaniak wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
Not achieving something it doesn't try to achieve is not a failure. Successfully achieving something you tried to do is not failure either.

It is if the goal is stupid.

If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
Not achieving something it doesn't try to achieve is not a failure. Successfully achieving something you tried to do is not failure either.

It is if the goal is stupid.

If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

It's stupid when it's billed as a requirement to play the game, because you can't always guarantee that everyone you play with will agree with it, or that different people will agree to the same things every time.

As I said above it's perfectly reasonable to assume that LotD should only be fielded as allies as this fits the fluff. However, the RULES state they can be fielded as an entire army themselves.. The same rules also state that, unless you're playing that specific scenario or your opponent agrees, you auto-lose on Turn 1 if you play a LotD army as a primary detachment, and how often do you play one scenario exclusively? As I also stated above, while most sane players wouldn't have a problem with ignoring that rule so the LotD player can actually play, they are under no obligation to do so. A tournament that plays by the rules in the book, for example, would prevent any LotD player from fielding it as a primary army if they chose to do so, because it can't function without a house rule. Do you honestly not see why that is a bad thing (and don't spout out that "40k isn't meant for tournaments" garbage. 40k has always been billed as suitable for all play styles, except it's really not)? Do you honestly think it's fine that a player can auto-lose a game because the rules are so poorly written and the designers are either incompetent or lazy, simply because the rules don't give them a way to play their otherwise-legal army and it's 100% reliant on their opponent agreeing to it beforehand, and/or because they chose to "play the game wrong" by wanting to play in a tournament?

Any game should be able to be played at any level the players want - that means competitive or casual. 40k takes the approach of "Casual is the only way" and pretty much gives competitive gamers the finger. No other miniatures wargame *forces* open communication between players before the game is played, and it's compounded by the fact that the most senior designer of 40k (i.e. Jervis) not only thinks this is good but wants to push it more along with other ridiculousness such as random charts - if you want to bring up WD articles I read one where he was espousing how randomness makes things more interesting; not to mention the one after the Imperial Knight was released where he went on this nonsensical diatribe about how the IK is good because it forces people to change things up to deal with it and in the same article stated there should be no such thing as a TAC army, and it's somehow considered a good thing when it basically craps on a portion of the playerbase.

Back to the balance issue for a moment, the irony here is that 40k gives competitive/non-casual gaming the finger *as a direct result* of the fact that its rules are imbalanced. A game that is actually balanced (whether that is complete balance or "perfect imbalance"), which 40k is not at all, could satisfy all spectrums of play. The rules would be concise enough to not require house rules, each army and the units therein would have enough balance between them so that virtually every choice, with the right supporting units and tactics from the player, has a roughly equal chance of winning on the battlefield. The game could encourage house rules and narrative scenarios without *forcing* that as the "one true way" of playing and telling everyone else to feth off. This is how most other wargames play, and what do you know they are growing whilst 40k is declining (slowly but surely).

Instead 40k is a game where the rules as written often *require* house rules just to fix glaring issues that either the designers overlooked, had no idea it would even be an issue (and hence out of touch with ways the games are played, or worse just assuming everyone plays the way they do) or just not caring to address it, where forces are imbalanced to the point where some armies are completely outclassed in every way and some units have literally zero reason to be taken unless you *want* to lose games, and a game in which hashing out what house rules are needed and what type of game you want to play is all but required under the guise of "forging the narrative" and yet this is somehow a good thing as opposed to the above example of a balanced game, which would in no way prevent talking with your opponent but also not make it a mainstay of the game while pretending everything else is badwrongfun and doesn't exist.

 Zweischneid wrote:
If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

Cute.

Most of us have no problems talking to our opponent. You know what does get in the way of that conversation? Having to cooperatively write half the damn rules of the game with a complete stranger before you can get around to putting models on the table.

Selling incomplete rules and expecting your customers to just figure the rest out for themselves is not a goal. It's a cop-out.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
Not achieving something it doesn't try to achieve is not a failure. Successfully achieving something you tried to do is not failure either.

It is if the goal is stupid.

If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

This is what I think whenever I see complaints about the game being "broken" or "unplayable". It's playable just fine amongst my friends and I, I honestly think the people who struggle with it struggle with social interaction in general. Not a critisism in any way - I used to have crippling social anxiety, especially when I was younger. But I can see why such people might struggle with a social game like 40k. Hell there's plenty of things I think are stupid simply because they involve too much social interaction for me

KommissarKarl wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
Not achieving something it doesn't try to achieve is not a failure. Successfully achieving something you tried to do is not failure either.

It is if the goal is stupid.

If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

This is what I think whenever I see complaints about the game being "broken" or "unplayable". It's playable just fine amongst my friends and I, I honestly think the people who struggle with it struggle with social interaction in general. Not a critisism in any way - I used to have crippling social anxiety, especially when I was younger. But I can see why such people might struggle with a social game like 40k. Hell there's plenty of things I think are stupid simply because they involve too much social interaction for me

There's a big difference between a game that encourages discussion, and a game that requires interaction and communication with people to even start playing, because the rules are a jumbled mess that needs to be hashed out beforehand.

I figured it out! Between the total religious-like faith in GW and his complete failure to write anything coherent....Zwei works for GW! Please tell me you are Mathew Ward. I have a bone to pick with you about the fluff in the GreyKnight codex.

Bad game design being considered good in order to encourage discussion is one of the crazier things I've heard

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Bad game design being considered good in order to encourage discussion is one of the crazier things I've heard

Game design you don't like being considered unequivocally bad is one of the most arrogant things I've heard.

 Zweischneid wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Bad game design being considered good in order to encourage discussion is one of the crazier things I've heard

Game design you don't like being considered unequivocally bad is one of the most arrogant things I've heard.

....sorry... difficult to stop laughing at the stupidity of that comment.

Game design that requires you to hash it out with your opponent before hand to actually play the game is unequivocally "bad game design". You can argue it's good (eg, like you argued that it's good that it promotes discussion), but it is most definitely "bad game design" and prepare for it to be called "one of the crazier things I've heard".




...sorry... really hard to stop laughing. "one of the most arrogant things" buahahaha

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

Game design that requires you to hash it out with your opponent before hand is unequivocally "bad game design".

And in 14+ years of playing GW games, from 2nd edition onward, I never had to "hash it out with my opponent beforehand" to play games anywhere from casual pick-ups at an LGS I never played in before, to RTTs, to GW GTs, to Adepticon, to my regular gaming group.

The only exceptions were two instances in GW GTs where the one player was clearly being a during the course of the entire game, and the other where the "rules lawyer" brought his photocopied sections of the designers notes, pre-highlighted, to argue his obviously exploitative "tactic", you know, in case he got called on it. So two instances, both in "competitive" situations, in 14+ years clearly indicates bad game design to me. Clearly...

So lets see if I can get this right.
I've been trying to follow along for the last 20 pages and even in the other thread that Zweis started this argument in.

So GW makes a rule set where the rules are so bad that people will actively seek to fix the rules between players and create house rules for units to make them playable.

This, to Zwies, is better than the alternative that GW makes a rule set where the rules are more agreeable to the players considerations beforehand leading to less houseruling and so forth.

And to go further, that this would be bad to the game because players are talking less, because they agree more initially. This somehow causes the effect that players will not be open to slightly changing rules, creating custom scenarios, and houseruling units because.... Well I'm sure we'll find out in the next 20 pages.

Do I have it all down so far?

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
Bad game design being considered good in order to encourage discussion is one of the crazier things I've heard

Game design you don't like being considered unequivocally bad is one of the most arrogant things I've heard.

....sorry... difficult to stop laughing at the stupidity of that comment.

Game design that requires you to hash it out with your opponent before hand to actually play the game is unequivocally "bad game design". You can argue it's good (eg, like you argued that it's good that it promotes discussion), but it is most definitely "bad game design" and prepare for it to be called "one of the crazier things I've heard".




...sorry... really hard to stop laughing.

Happy you are in a good mood.

But no. A game design that requires you to do X is not "bad game design". It's simply a game design that requires you to do X.

Magic the Gathering requires you to shuffle your cards. Monopoly requires you to deal a certain amount of money to each player. Most LARPs require you to dress in an uncomfortable costume and put on make-up, and many Casinos require you to not dress "casual" before you can play. Bolt Action requires you to put a bunch of dice in a little bag. Many party games basically tell you to get wasted before playing. X-Wing requires you to line up all those fiddly cards and tokens. 40K encourages you to have a brief chat with your opponent (you can, of course, skip that part with your friends if you like).

Of all these, 40K is probably the quickest to get through the "pre-game" stages.

The horror!!! A game that requires you to do something. It never happened!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!



How could they!!

I just think that the idea Zwei obviously has in his head of a design meeting that went something along the lines of..

"You know what... feth all this gaming gak. What we need..... what we need is to make 40K into something that really, really makes people talk to each other, man! You know, really connect. nobody just hangs out and talks any more!"

Just adorable!

Would love to take credit, but not my idea.

I guess in your version, game-designers and Tom Kirby got together in a room and decided, well ... feth it, we're going to make our game more like those other games that don't sell 10% of what 40K sells, and we're also gonna do it really badly. Off to work!

It all makes sense now.

I am sure they have a scoring board in the office for awards for "worst rule of the week", so the designers don't get lazy and fail to live up to the internet tin-foil-hat-theories.

No, my position on GW's attitude is clear, and I've said as much for some time now

"They'll buy what we make, we don't make what they'll buy"

They are so confident in their position/have such little regard for their customers, that they're happy to churn out any old crap.

People who continue to buy stuff and therefore reward all the sub par product they make with cash (all they care about) continue to perpetrate that idea in the heads of those in a position to affect change, so why would they?

It is why I was so pleased to see the dip in figures, not because I want GW or 40K to fail, but because falling sales is the only thing that may result in a change in attitude. I'm thinking you feel the opposite, so you'd better get your credit card out!

 azreal13 wrote:

"They'll buy what we make, we don't make what they'll buy"

I presume this means you think they don't make the specific product you / "the internet" would enjoy most?

Nobody doubts that.

No company could, because what people "want" is diverse. Different people want different things.

Steve Jobs wrote:"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.”

Henry Ford wrote:If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.

Companies don't produce what customers ask for (least of all on the internet, where, like it or not, vocal minorities can skew perceptions, irrespective of whether or not that is the case with 40K).

They try to pre-empt the trends and make a product that customers will want, once they see it.

Of course, that kind of experimentation can backfire. But that doesn't mean the attempt to create something that "doesn't yet exist" / "is different from everything currently on the market" is not intentional.



If GW would "listen" to "what the internet wants", all they'd be doing is make next "Beyond the Gates of Antares".

Yeah...

The difference between Ford and Jobs and Kirby is that the former two were, despite some fairly unpleasant elements to their character (thinking more Ford here, but Jobs had his critics) singular visionaries that one sees only a handful of times, if that often, in each generation.

Kirby used to be a taxman.

But frankly, if you're equating anyone at Lenton with the abilities to be another Ford or Jobs, you need to pull your nose out before you suffocate.

Nobody at Lenton is a Ford or Jobs. Obviously. I was not implying them.

But people at Lenton are smarter than the Rick Priestley-types out there that believe the internet-soundboard would provide an accurate echo of what people will end up spending money on.

 Zweischneid wrote:
If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

Yes, it's absolutely ing stupid. You know why? Because it doesn't encourage meaningful talk. Having to say "hey, GW hasn't FAQed my broken army yet, can we use the obvious fix" doesn't in any way lead to a discussion about what kind of game each player wants, the fluff of their armies and how to represent it with special mission rules, what level of list-building optimization will lead to a fair game, etc. It just means that every time that Legion of the Damned player starts a game they get a little more annoyed about GW's lack of concern for making a quality product.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

And for anyone who just wants to take their game out of the box and start playing. The fact that you have to have a pre-game discussion about how to fix the game, which implies being dedicated enough to learn about how the game is broken and how you want it to work, is a major barrier to entry for new players and a compelling reason to just play some other game that can be played right out of the box. When I have some friends over for board game night we don't negotiate about how we want to play the game, we get out a game, pass around the rules for anyone who hasn't played it before, and start playing.

Guys I'm pretty sure Zweischneid is trolling you.

 Zweischneid wrote:
But people at Lenton are smarter than the Rick Priestley-types out there that believe the internet-soundboard would provide an accurate echo of what people will end up spending money on.

Nobody is disagreeing that GW has a plan for getting money. Our point is that we shouldn't start looking for bizarre secret design goals when there's an obvious explanation: GW's target market (hardcore collectors and young children) don't play the game, so GW has sacrificed development funding to the point that they're releasing rough drafts as finished products. You can simultaneously say that this is a profitable business plan (at least for the immediate future) and also an incredibly low-quality product.

 Veteran of The Long War wrote:
Guys I'm pretty sure Zweischneid is trolling you.

He's too passionate to be a troll, I think he just doesn't see the problem that we're talking about and therefore it looks like we're just complaining or want 40k to be something it's "not". Basically he's acting like I must imagine GW itself acts - they play the game a certain way, so they never see any of the things that others talk about in regards to imbalance, and wonder scratching their heads what the problem is.

That's what it looks like to me. Zwei just plays the game completely different to the way we do, but it just so happens he plays it closer to how GW intends, so all of this is like "What on earth are you guys whining about?" rather than acknowledging our complaints are valid. It's roughly the equivalent of a rich investment banker wondering what's all this talk about a recession because they just bought a summer home and a new yacht, so there can't be a recession at all.

 Zweischneid wrote:
Magic the Gathering requires you to shuffle your cards. Monopoly requires you to deal a certain amount of money to each player. Most LARPs require you to dress in an uncomfortable costume and put on make-up, and many Casinos require you to not dress "casual" before you can play. Bolt Action requires you to put a bunch of dice in a little bag. Many party games basically tell you to get wasted before playing. X-Wing requires you to line up all those fiddly cards and tokens. 40K encourages you to have a brief chat with your opponent (you can, of course, skip that part with your friends if you like).

And of course you miss the key difference here: other games require pre-game actions that are inherently necessary to play the game and couldn't be removed without destroying the game. 40k requires pre-game actions that are only required because GW can't afford sufficient development time to release a finished high-quality product, and they could be removed entirely without losing anything.

 Veteran of The Long War wrote:
Guys I'm pretty sure Zweischneid is trolling you.

I'm well aware.

We're through the looking glass here.

I was going through Extra Credit's other videos lately just on a whim and I discovered one that I think does point to a lot of issues with the game. The topic is play testing. More importantly, open play testing. The feedback system is an amazing tool when used right. When collecting information on a game it's more important to get it from the community than in house. As it's been mentioned already, GW codex authors probably play a lot of games in house and against the other authors/play testers with certain decisions already made or a specific objective.
That in itself is fine. It doesn't work for most of the issues with the game though.

Two players for example want to make a game. Player 1 and Player 2 make rules on movement and go over the process in depth using a board and tape measure. When they go to write down the rules they write it in a way that makes sense to them because they've both know how it works already. However when handed the rules Player 3 notices the glaring issue that there rules didn't account for going around obstacles, because 1 and 2 thought it was common sense to them.

Going a bit off topic, in Halo and Halo2 multiplayer there were a few things that would bring the game to a halt. In Halo you could use grenades to launch a Warthog on top of the capture point for capture the flag games. In Halo 2 you could fly Banshees up to a hidden section on the map with the objective and camp there, holding the objective left it in play and the Banshee wouldn't respawn leaving the game stuck in over time. These aren't things that the developers intended and really it's not even there fault for not foreseeing it.

The problem is that GW is making the game with a very close knit group with no community feedback. They are making the game they want to play. This would be fine if they weren't selling it outside their group or if they clearly labeled it as such. If there is even a label for such a thing. GW is every day making the problem even worse though. Look at the extended FOC that exists. There is no way that an inhouse playtester could ever go through 1/10 of the possible combinations from that in a reasonable time, if they could even do it in one edition. They're making the game go beyond the point of play testing because they don't feel that they need it I guess. When you know your opponent and both have an established interpretation of how things are supposed to go, it's figure out where the improvements could be made. The Khorne Lord of War is a great example of this. They knew the price of the thing and probably just played a bunch of random smash ups without ever trying to see if that price was justified.


at around 2:35 is when I think applies the most

You've apparently abandoned the other thread Zweis, so I am going to re-post my questions here.

 Zweischneid wrote:

 MWHistorian wrote:
I think that's awesome though I won't say why.

I repeatedly said why I think it is awesome.

Whether my reasons are similar to those of GW, I cannot say.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kain wrote:

What's so narrative about Blood Angels, Ork, or Tyranid failing to even vaguely annoy a Taudar, Imperial mess of allies list, or Tzeentch Daemon list that sweeps them off the table in a storm of firepower without taking any casualties of note?

Again and again and again.

Again my answer.

You have stated your reasons on many occasions, but allow me to explain why I personally disagree.

I have been playing 40k for over 6 years now. Over the years, many armies have slowly vanished into obscurity: Sisters of Battle, Orkz, Blood Angels, Tyranids and Grey Knights to name a few. I no longer have the opportunity to play against these armies, nor does anybody else in my local gaming area. I know many fellow gamers who used to run these armies, and virtually all of them either shelved or sold them for the same reason: playing against the new power gaming armies, your Eldar, Tau, Daemons, etc. week after week with their underpowered armies became frustrating, and they either switched armies or abandoned the game entirely. Their departure takes something away from the 40k community as whole. I would like to see my fellow SoB, Ork, BA, GK and Tyranid players return to the hobby and to be able to enjoy the 40k again, and balancing 40k would be a small price to pay to rebuild the community.

On an independent note I have noticed that both myself and my opponent obtain the most enjoyment from a game of 40k in close, tight games that are not decided until the very last round. This situation occurs most frequently when the opposing armies are well balanced. Conversely, when the game balance is skewed, one army just steamrolls the other, and both players tend to get bored and disinterested.

My observations resulting from playing 40k for the past 6 years suggest the game would be vastly improved if GW would balance the various units and factions in the game so everybody could enjoy a fair game regardless of the factions or units they chose. I know the cost of leaving the game imbalanced: people leaving the game permanently, leaving the community poorer. Entire armies vanishing from the gaming scene, to rarely, if ever, be seen or played against. Boring, frustrating and tedious matches that are decided before they began. All of which could be fixed through improved game balance.

Now as you have mentioned you have repeatedly explain why 40k should remain imbalanced. In fact, I count at least three massive threads where these explanations can be found throughout. However, I find myself wholly unable to comprehend or understand most of these explanations. The few I can understand simply aren't satisfactory. You claim you personally prefer imbalanced games as a subjective preference, but that provides me with no further insight into why. You claim it could diminish variety, even though their are methods of balancing the game, such as adjusting the points cost, that do not eliminate any of the options currently available. Finally, you expressed a desired to play various narrative based scenarios, which would be unaltered by any game balanced adjustments made to 40k.

What I fail to understand is how the game could be made poorer if you eliminated the inherent imbalances. How does imbalance enrich the game? What is lost when the game is balanced? What are you no longer able to when the game becomes balanced? You should still be able to run scenarios, come up with your own house rules, ignore rules you dislike, and provide interesting narrative descriptions of the tabletop battles taking place. I know I would be able to do all these just as easily in a balanced game system as an imbalanced game system. So where is the deficiency? What is it? And what is it specifically you would be unable to do if the game were balanced, especially if this were achieved by largely by just changing the point cost associated with each unit so that every option remains available?

What is so important about maintaining game imbalance that improvements cannot be made to bring my fellow SoB, Ork, BA, GK and Nid players back into the hobby?

The other problem with GW's playtesting approach is that they play the game, they don't playtest it. Playtesting involves playing the game with a specific goal, not just playing normal games. For example, if you're trying to balance the new drop pod rules you might only play 2-3 turns of the game, long enough to see how well the alpha strike did, before ending the game and starting a new one. Or you might set up a specific mid-game situation, play the interaction between the units you want to test, and ignore the rest of the game. And even when you're playing full games your goal is to find problems that need to be fixed, not to have fun. So you deliberately push all of the boundaries, take the most overpowered choices, rules lawyer everything you can, etc. And you carefully document all of those things, fix the problems you discover, and repeat until even the most hardcore WAAC TFG can't find anything to break.

GW, on the other hand, don't seem to do this. One of their WD articles from around the 6th edition release described a "playtest" game where they played a game between their personal armies, and then had a third player join in halfway through because it would be "fluffy". That's not playtesting, it's just screwing around. You're not going to get any meaningful information out of it unless there's something so obviously broken that it should have been caught a long time ago.

Phanixis wrote:


You have stated your reasons on many occasions, but allow me to explain why I personally disagree.

All valid. I never claimed people cannot not like 40K or the direction it is heading.

It's the arrogance to mistake your bias for a fact, that should not happen to any rational person.

Phanixis wrote:


I have been playing 40k for over 6 years now. Over the years, many armies have slowly vanished into obscurity: Sisters of Battle, Orkz, Blood Angels, Tyranids and Grey Knights to name a few. I no longer have the opportunity to play against these armies, nor does anybody else in my local gaming area. I know many fellow gamers who used to run these armies, and virtually all of them either shelved or sold them for the same reason: playing against the new power gaming armies, your Eldar, Tau, Daemons, etc. week after week with their underpowered armies became frustrating, and they either switched armies or abandoned the game entirely.

A curious observation for somebody in it for 6 years. Most "dakka-ites" who played not just six years ago, but only 2 or 3 years ago, complained about the exact inverse, that Blood Angels and Grey Knights are allegedly "overpowered" and armies like Tau, Eldar or Daemons serve no no purpose, are not played by anybody, languishing on the shelf.

But if that is your experience, it just proves that all those years of whining about Grey Knights = Overpowered were now a universally shared experience.

Phanixis wrote:

On an independent note I have noticed that both myself and my opponent obtain the most enjoyment from a game of 40k in close, tight games that are not decided until the very last round. This situation occurs most frequently when the opposing armies are well balanced. Conversely, when the game balance is skewed, one army just steamrolls the other, and both players tend to get bored and disinterested.

Great. I have noticed that both myself and my opponent obtain the most enjoyment from the game when we don't concern ourselves with wining or "closeness" of results. Or results.

Phanixis wrote:

My observations resulting from playing 40k for the past 6 years suggest the game would be vastly improved if GW would balance the various units and factions in the game so everybody could enjoy a fair game regardless of the factions or units they chose. I know the cost of leaving the game imbalanced: people leaving the game permanently, leaving the community poorer. Entire armies vanishing from the gaming scene, to rarely, if ever, be seen or played against. Boring, frustrating and tedious matches that are decided before they began. All of which could be fixed through improved game balance.

My observation resulting from at least as many years of playing 40K, on and off, is that 6th Edition is by far the best Edition for my enjoyment. Everybody could enjoy the game more if they'd embrace the idea of a short pre-game discussion to make the game exactly the way they want to do, and no person would ever again need to suffer through the dull, "bean-counter" point games that defined previous editions of 40K, unless they intentionally chose to do so.

Phanixis wrote:

Now as you have mentioned you have repeatedly explain why 40k should remain imbalanced. In fact, I count at least three massive threads where these explanations can be found throughout. However, I find myself wholly unable to comprehend or understand most of these explanations. The few I can understand simply aren't satisfactory. You claim you personally prefer imbalanced games as a subjective preference, but that provides me with no further insight into why. You claim it could diminish variety, even though their are methods of balancing the game, such as adjusting the points cost, that do not eliminate any of the options currently available. Finally, you expressed a desired to play various narrative based scenarios, which would be unaltered by any game balanced adjustments made to 40k.

As noted, the claim that possibility of unaltered narrative emphasis in balanced games, which people repeatedly claim, has not been born out in experience, not in previous editions of 40K and not in other games by other companies.

I am sorry that my reasons do not satisfy you. Above, you claimed that you get the most enjoyment from balanced, close-fought games, but that equally doesn't provide me with further insight into why. Just that you do.

What I fail to understand is how the game could be made poorer if you eliminated the inherent imbalances.

What I fail to understand is how the game could be made poorer if all other options are eliminated. The ability to play balanced games is in no way diminished if you take the time to declare this as the mutual ambition between yourself and your opponent before the game, and ensure that this happens.

But other people enjoy other things, and forcing your preferred style of gaming on other people, just because you feel incapable of a minute of pre-game talk, seems unusually ego-centrist and intolerant to me.

What is so important about maintaining game imbalance that improvements cannot be made to bring my fellow SoB, Ork, BA, GK and Nid players back into the hobby?

What is so important about little numbers on a page that you let them stop you from playing the armies you enjoy?

 Zweischneid wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:
Not achieving something it doesn't try to achieve is not a failure. Successfully achieving something you tried to do is not failure either.

It is if the goal is stupid.

If you consider the goal of making people talk to each other stupid, I suppose it is.

I have to admit that it might make the game slightly more difficult to pick up for people with antisocial personality disorder.

So GW is discriminating against people on the Autistic spectrum because of their poor rules? How is discriminating against a group which seems (based on the number of members on dakka who are diagnosed at some level of Autism) to be drawn to these types of games good?

Why can't people who find it difficult enough to interact with others go into a store and enjoy a game they like without first having to sit down and work through all the poorly written rules. People quite high on the autism spectrum would also find it difficult to deviate from the written rules they've learned, so that makes it doubly bad.

Also, as another user said, the term is not antisocial personality disorder, unless you're talking about people who could also be diagnosed as Psychopaths or Sociopaths (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder)