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It's a good thing I never drew a comparison between 40k and Starcraft even once in my post then. The closest I got was the correlation I made between the complaints about non-existent bad balancing when there isn't none, and to my hopes that the reason every 40k player complains about balance isn't secretly because they want their own army to be OP and won't be happy otherwise.

Good thing.

And to be honest, its not often you see a Tau or Eldar player ever complaining that the assault mechanics need to be buffed

Again I will try to think like a creator of a game, at risk of being stoned.

There are two situations where I wonder if there are easy solutions.

Fixing a broken combo. One example brought up was dark eldar and eldar with the baron providing a good save to the unit. How would you, as a creator, prevent this? Change the rules for the Baron? Disallow dark eldar and eldar allying? Would this rule change have no other effect? And would this rule change make everyone happy, including Dark Eldar players?

I am thinking of a situation of software changes. A change in software options and capabilities would usually require testing to make sure the change does not bug something out somewhere. So even with what we may think is a fix, may end up with unintended changes to the game and produce another loophole.

The second situation is point cost. Since we have solutions suggested about how to arrive at a point cost, perhaps we can attempt to cost something correctly. If we do the Penitent Engine, what is the right point cost? 75? 80? 85? 35? I suspect even as a community of a brain trust (good term) that we are, we will find no agreement even on that.

I find it interesting that people thing 40k isn't supposed to be balanced when it has a points system.

 SHUPPET wrote:
It's a good thing I never drew a comparison between 40k and Starcraft even once in my post then. The closest I got was the correlation I made between the complaints about non-existent bad balancing when there isn't none, and to my hopes that the reason every 40k player complains about balance isn't secretly because they want their own army to be OP and won't be happy otherwise.

Yea you are right. But I still dont think video games and Wargames should be compared.

I had a huge reply typed up... but for some reason it didnt post.

In a much nicer and shorter way, video gamers contain a huge amount of degenerates hungry to fulfill some creepy power fantasy at others expense. This is far less common in hobbiests who place more importance on skill and competition than personal gratification.

So do not worry. Most 40k players arent after OP units to feel powerful and crush all those in their path.

Playtesters don't need to play hundreds or thousands of permutations of games. Fundamentally, a game doesn't really matter if it is Tau vs Eldar or Necrons vs Daemons: you look at archetypes of units/abilities, rather than units/abilities themselves. Once you know roughly how a walker functions, and roughly how a lascannon functions, you have a decent idea of how a walker with a lascannon works. And after years of experience with very similar rule sets, you could consider 6th ed to be a kind of extensive beta for 7th ed anyway: 95% of the base mechanics did not change.


I think the thing is that the GW playtesters just aren't interested in tournament level balance. They design for campaign level balance, with game masters and forged narratives and whatever. And as far as I can tell, they are a relatively insular group - not heading out to tournaments but rather just playing their 'oh wouldn't it be cool if I had a radical inquisitor today' games. Coming from a software testing background - they are testing the program the way they want people to use it, making sure that everyone inputs stuff in the correct format in all fields, but they're not testing what happens if people don't use the game in the 'correct' way as envisaged by the designers.



The issues in 7th ed were pretty much all noticed within hours of the book release (if not before from leaks). Some of them are only potential issues (is the daemon factory really a viable game-winning list, or is it simply annoying?) but others are real issues. You would think that with even a month of open beta these things could have been found, playtested and resolved, and everyone would have been better off.

LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results. Sure you canskew the odds in your favour, but there's no rule saying you can't roll seven 1's in a row.

Balance is for a game built for tournament play. This game is about creating a sandbox world (and selling models and books) where you and a friend can get together and play a narrative game with real world results. The rules really are just guidlines for a recipe for fun.

 Gibblets wrote:
LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results.

Do you consider games like Backgammon or Poker random?

 Gibblets wrote:
LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results. Sure you canskew the odds in your favour, but there's no rule saying you can't roll seven 1's in a row.

The chance of rolling seven 1's in a row is around three-and-a-half million against. A player who plays such that the odds are in their favour will beat a player that thinks: "this could happen so I'll play as if it might".

Well, at least three million four hundred and ninety-nine times out of three and a half-million, they will.

The game could be playtested by an open beta and by computer modelling.

As mentioned above, it doesn't take long for the internet to find out the flaws in any new rules edition or codex from GW.

Modelling would be cheap and easy though the results probably would be less useful than human testing. If I were in charge I would use both approaches.

It would be better, but they will view it as possible loss of profits on over-priced Rulebook sales, and being that they are already desperately struggling to keep their profits up, combined with the fact that even at the best of times they are still one of the most money-hungry businesses I've ever dealt with, it's never gonna happen.

 milkboy wrote:
Again I will try to think like a creator of a game, at risk of being stoned.

There are two situations where I wonder if there are easy solutions.

Fixing a broken combo. One example brought up was dark eldar and eldar with the baron providing a good save to the unit. How would you, as a creator, prevent this? Change the rules for the Baron? Disallow dark eldar and eldar allying? Would this rule change have no other effect? And would this rule change make everyone happy, including Dark Eldar players?

I am thinking of a situation of software changes. A change in software options and capabilities would usually require testing to make sure the change does not bug something out somewhere. So even with what we may think is a fix, may end up with unintended changes to the game and produce another loophole.

The second situation is point cost. Since we have solutions suggested about how to arrive at a point cost, perhaps we can attempt to cost something correctly. If we do the Penitent Engine, what is the right point cost? 75? 80? 85? 35? I suspect even as a community of a brain trust (good term) that we are, we will find no agreement even on that.

The thing is, we're not the professional game designers. The whole point of playtesting and betas is to get feedback. If you see a consensus in the feedback that X in undercosted or Y produces a gamebreaker, then that's all the playtesters need to do--draw your attention to something that needs fixing. So adjust it in the way you as a game designed consider best, and then see if the players consider it fixed or if feedback still agrees that there's a problem. This isn't a hypothetical scenario, this is how betas & playtesting work.

It's a very annoying straw man to say "lawl, you can't agree on exactly what to do, so the opinion of every player on the planet is 100% worthless".

In the case of your examples, you try out different solutions with the playtesters to see what the best way to eliminate the 2+ rerolled is, or the point cost / rules changes where people field Penitent Engines but don't consider them an auto-include. Simple as that.

Hi Elemental, just as an example about something which was stated to be either broken or not to the fluff. The fact that Tau could ally with multiple factions, battle brothers in some cases as well. Maybe the player base feedback was heard by the testing team. Maybe they tested it and removed the ability of multiple possible Tau alliances. But in the end, it shifted the equilibrium towards the Imperium armies. So we see forum posts disagreeing with this move. There are also those who felt it to be an improvement.

So my point it, perhaps they do listen, perhaps they do play test somewhat. But it does not guarantee that the end result will have no hatred posts concerning. With the large player base 40k has, there will always be dissenting views. Another case in point would be the helldrake change. Some may feel that the helldrake needed the needing. Some may feel that it is unwarranted. So perhaps for that they have listened and they have playtested as well.

I guess I am just trying to be fair. It is easy to join in with the GW bashing and scream bloody murder everytime a broken combination/tactic is discovered and that they should have picked his up etc.

I am just thinking that perhaps everyone's opinion of what is balanced may be different. It is not to say that since no one thinks alike, screw balance and be done with it. More of, whatever we choose, some groups will say its unbalanced. Lets test it, make a decision and move on. After all, GW playtesters and designers are human? Errors still happen.

The Heldrake example has two schools; those who wanted the nerf because its a pretty powerful unit, while those think it was too strong because the rest of the chaos book isn't that great.

Continuing with the example, if GW listened to feedback (they don't), they'd find that the solution to the Heldrake problem was to nerf it, but simultaneously buffing several other units and otherwise improving on the codex's internal balance.

Its not a simple answer, but that's the whole point of having a beta test team. Further, you don't listen to what everyone has to say. Some people are more right than others. When someone claims that X is OP, while another claims that X is UP, you weigh the arguments and test. You don't throw your hands up and claim the community is too conflicted to ever help balance anything.

For game design, you want to have conflicting opinions. Having everyone agree is a bad thing. I'd argue that's what happening with the current design team with 40k; they all just agree with whoever is the project/team lead.

Which is why a beta test team of different people with different views, opinions, and experiences is a very good thing for a game. Debates may get heated, but leveler heads will prevail and find the solution somewhere along the spectrum between the two ends.

I can assure you that GW has not done any testing outside of their own group, which is hardly any real testing. Balance issues aside, there are some pretty significant mechanical issues that were caught not even a few hours into the release by the player base. The FAQs were another example of general laziness/carelessness.

So while errors happen, having an outside perspective of people who are going to be the consumers is always a benefit to a game. They all check eachother and reduce those errors to a reasonable amount, which can than be later caught with some minor FAQs after the wider community takes a look.

How is it possible that GW didn't see that a ++2 with re-rolls hit and run etc maybe a bit edition warping ? It is not even the case of differnt design team as both eldar and dark eldar were writen by the same dude.

Same with tau buff commanders joining Riptides.

Sometimes I think that people working for GW not only aren't testing the game at all, but they don't even know the rules for their own game .

There is no reason why GW can't do an open Beta like PP or Wyrd did. Both companies combined don't equal a fraction of GW resources.

GW could do it, they simply choose not to. And before anyone says '40k is too complex' consider that Warmachine has over 800 different unit rules/traits NOT including the USRs.

Possible? Yes.

Will they? Haha.

I think they just don't care, the design team has one idea of how the game is played and literally lives in a insulated bubble.

You can tell just by reading their battle reports.

They purposely don't play that way.

Why would you playtest something that is meant to be "casual", who cares they state change things if you want.

 milkboy wrote:


Fixing a broken combo. One example brought up was dark eldar and eldar with the baron providing a good save to the unit. How would you, as a creator, prevent this? Change the rules for the Baron? Disallow dark eldar and eldar allying? Would this rule change have no other effect? And would this rule change make everyone happy, including Dark Eldar players?

In this case, using something like Warmachines "Friendly Faction" would probably help- basically, only models from the same army book benefit from at least one of the rules. This would really help balance out some of the allies problems, by eliminating some of the broken combos.

When Jervis (iirc) talks about them buffing Psykers because everyone in the studio takes Chaplains, you know they don't play test. They literally play a different game.

There are some things that they have put out that are so bad (or strong) that you dont even have to play test it to see its crazy powerful (or bad).

Vespid. Their rules make 0 sense, theyre suppose to be anti-MEQ in a codex that excels at anti-MEQ as it is and they do it insanely bad compared to other, similar costed models. I dont need to playtest to see theyre worthless. Too expensive for how easy they die and how lamely they kill.

Wave serpents. Unless they gave them the same dedicated-transport treatment as necron fliers in terms of firepower, this thing screams "I am strong, spam me" without even diving into the math on it. No play testing needed to see how crazy it is for the cost/spammability.

Things like that are just sad to have happen as often as they do (just a quick off the top of my head example without diving into it too deep). Other things that are found after awhile using Allies or something are excusable as if you arent a tournament player or close, you probably wont even know the rules well enough to see those tricks in the first place.

 Zweischneid wrote:

WayneTheGame wrote:


Nobody is talking about 100% balance, which is just as impossible as 0%.

No, but you are talking about balance as if it were a universally good thing, and more balance better than less balance. That is not the case.

Stop just stop. Everyone is tired of having that conversation with you.

Makumba wrote:
How is it possible that GW didn't see that a ++2 with re-rolls hit and run etc maybe a bit edition warping ? It is not even the case of differnt design team as both eldar and dark eldar were writen by the same dude.

Same with tau buff commanders joining Riptides.

Sometimes I think that people working for GW not only aren't testing the game at all, but they don't even know the rules for their own game .

They don't see it because they play a specific way that would never ever think of such a combination. You have to keep in mind that GW plays the game in a certain fashion: Scenario games, typically fluff-driven. They choose and build armies the same way. The Studio army has a lot of varied units to showcase all the different things, and generally is built for show, not for gaming per se so you often find lackluster and not-used units there because they look cool or show off some aspect of the faction. I recall in the past some WDs where a designer lamented the fact that the Studio army was built in a certain way for variety and they didn't have the units they wanted but had to make do with what was available.

However, this has largely bled into how the staffers build their own armies. You will typically see an army built around a cool concept or fluffy idea; so for example outside of a White Scars or Ravenwing army (or their successors) you will never see a SM army using all bikes, and if you did they wouldn't all have grav weapons; you're more likely to see a "balanced" SM army with a couple of tac squads, assault squads, maybe a dev squad, and tanks because they look cool. For a Chaos army you'll never see Typhus Zombie Spam unless the battle report was specifically to replay out that scenario - you would see lots of CSM squads, maybe a cult unit or two (but rarely multiples), possibly a daemon engine. You would *never* see Eldar + Dark Eldar together unless the battle report was some kind of weird Eldar alliance narrative. GW staff has never built armies based around what works, they by intention build armies around what looks cool or to fit a specific theme or idea. A unit's effectiveness is irrelevant. If a designer thinks that Vespid are cool looking, or likes the fluff, or whatever, you'll see them in his Tau army based on that alone.

That's why they don't see it. It's not so much they don't test, it's that they don't theorycraft and look at options in combinations, they look at options as a whole. You won't see Tigurius fielded because the person likes how Sicarius looks or his army is the 5th Company or something so he made up his own character and converted a cool model.

That's how GW has always played the game. You rarely if ever see anything remotely resembling a netlist, and that's indicative of their entire design standpoint. They allow these things because they don't want to restrict you from doing anything, but they don't balance it because they'd never think of all the permutations that break the game. I bet if you asked about fielding Baron Sathonix or whatever his name is in an Eldar Seer Council, you'd get some kind of response like "What are you, crazy? My Farseer would never ally with that blackhearted monster!" The fact that it would make the unit almost invincible with a 2++ reroll or however it works wouldn't even factor into the equation.

That's how they think. They treat 40k almost like a roleplaying game so their "concept" trumps effectiveness. I've seen exactly that behavior in D&D in the past - "that guy" who has his leather armor wearing, dagger using Fighter (no, he won't play a Rogue. Fighter fits his concept better!) who used to be a basket weaver before becoming an adventurer. The guy who's an awesome roleplayer, but totally useless outside of that and gets angry when you point it out because he's not a powergamer and clearly anyone wanting to be effective is a munchkin powergamer who isn't playing the game right.

Trasvi wrote:
I think the thing is that the GW playtesters just aren't interested in tournament level balance. They design for campaign level balance, with game masters and forged narratives and whatever. And as far as I can tell, they are a relatively insular group - not heading out to tournaments but rather just playing their 'oh wouldn't it be cool if I had a radical inquisitor today' games. Coming from a software testing background - they are testing the program the way they want people to use it, making sure that everyone inputs stuff in the correct format in all fields, but they're not testing what happens if people don't use the game in the 'correct' way as envisaged by the designers.

Except the problem is that they don't design for "campaign level balance", because campaign balance is exactly the same as tournament balance. What they actually do is fail to playtest sufficiently and then throw in a statement about "forge the narrative and invent your own rules" as an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for the shameful quality of their work.

 Gibblets wrote:
LMAO it's a dice game. How can anything be balanced when the core mechanic is centered around random results. Sure you canskew the odds in your favour, but there's no rule saying you can't roll seven 1's in a row.

Well, you just convincingly demonstrated that you don't know anything about game design. 40k involves dice, but dice (in sufficient quantities) have a nice bell curve of outcomes that allows you to make a balanced game with interesting decisions.

Balance is for a game built for tournament play. This game is about creating a sandbox world (and selling models and books) where you and a friend can get together and play a narrative game with real world results. The rules really are just guidlines for a recipe for fun.

And yep, confirmed your lack of knowledge even more. Balance is just as important in "sandbox" games as it is in tournaments. And GW's "the rules are just guidelines" statements are nothing more than an attempt to sell you garbage and convince you that the problem is the people who expect more than garbage from their $50 rulebooks, not the fact that you just paid $50 for garbage.

You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

Johnnytorrance wrote:
Maybe play testers don't play full games? Maybe they just use situations and circumstance

They shouldn't need to play full games. Five starting draws of Tactical Objective cards was enough to make it plainly obvious that the system is nonfunctional for an evaluative game.

Similarly, the opening two or three turns will tell you a huge amount about whether there is a problem with a unit, or a type of army build. Unfortunately, GW also seems to be in love with fielding bad armies which can't possibly be giving them good playtesting data.

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

They make cell phones for the older generations, with big buttons and simple interfaces. : D

We got my mom one last year.

 Swastakowey wrote:
You remind me of angry old people who try use a computer. The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

You are exactly like one of my bosses.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

You are definitely gonna be one "of those" elderly people when you advance in your years.

And so the pot calls the kettle black

 Swastakowey wrote:
The point was being made that the product isnt designed for people like you, and they dont have to design it for people like you. No reason to get mad because its not tournament friendly.

Which is a terrible point, because that's not what's happening. This isn't a case of GW designing an amazing narrative game at the expense of making it less than ideal for tournament play, it's a case of GW publishing garbage and using "forge the narrative" as an excuse for why you should buy it anyway. 40k is actually a pretty bad narrative game, GW (and their white knights on the forums) have just created a marketing concept that a good casual/narrative game is entirely defined as "bad for tournaments", and turned all of their failures into "successes". It's a brilliant bit of marketing, but it doesn't change the fact that they're still publishing and selling garbage.

Doesnt understand why someone wont use a brick phone over a smart phone. But he likes the idea of a smart phone. Gets angry at his smart phone, blames the smart phone creators because he cant use it the way its intended. Then doesnt understand why other people would pay the smart phone companies for "garbage that wasnt made properly" and anyone who says otherwise doesnt understand and is just failing to see the big picture.

Except that's not a good analogy because 40k doesn't function well for ANY intended customer. The better analogy would be if your boss was complaining about the new iphone coming with a cracked screen, constant software bugs that never get patched, and no phone service without a $500 upgrade that doesn't even work half the time. And meanwhile the white knights would still defend the iphone and insist that you're TFG if you want a screen that works because all decent people use voice commands instead.