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@Los pollos hermanos

Good for you. Sounds like you met up with some awesome people.

At the end of the day, 99% of all game systems still use points out there (and will benefit from sensible people not abusing them, but using them to create enjoyable afternoons/evenings).

GW trying something different and new can only be an enrichment to the hobby as a whole. It may fail, but that's the risk of innovation, no?

Wonderwolf wrote:

GW trying something different and new can only be an enrichment to the hobby as a whole

Thats still a very wrong statement.

If the Boeing 747 has a design fault you don't take off the wings all together or try to make it a biplane, you fix the fault. Had GW put more time and effort into AoS they could have just fixed the issue instead of taking the easy opinion and simply removing a huge component of the game altogether. AoS was a rushed development so instead of playtesting and looking into some of fantasies issues they simply removed anything (even if it was good just with minor flaws) out of the game entirely, couldn't be bothered actually fixing any issues so just pulled everything out and left it up to the players. Which is why they ended up with 4 pages of rules. They basically tore out most of the game for times sake. Its like throwing away all four tires on your car because one had a puncture but im straying into one too many analogies so I'll end it here.

Ok maybe one more for fun:

AoS is like taking your car (fantasy) to the GW body shop. They work on it and when your car comes back its full of spoilers, silly windshield wipers, big rims and a glowing paintjob. Its looks ok but its a bit too much. You ask GW to take it back and just tone it down (fix some of the issues) and when they return it (AoS) its literally the cars framework and some wheels. You look at it and go, what have you dont to my car? but they say "Hey its ok because now you can make the car anyway you want it. Its a clean slate to make up your own car! (the AoS rules) some people happily drove away on their framework not unhappy that what was a car is now just a car frame all because they didn't like the colour of their original car. When their friends ask what happened they will say my car was horrid, everything was wrong with it! (even though it was just the colour before) and convince themselves that this new frame car was what they were after all along and their original car was too rigid and didn't allow them any leg room. Basically what you get isn't very much so to compensate you over hate on your old car to make it seem like anything is now suddenly better than what you had.

No its more like ditching cd's for mp3's like apple did. Bold move, not as popular, but the right choice in the long run.

Naysayers will naysayers I guess.

 455_PWR wrote:
No its more like ditching cd's for mp3's like apple did. Bold move, not as popular, but the right choice in the long run.

Naysayers will naysayers I guess.

This.

And like the above event, it's puzzling how people think this would mean Apple would break into their house to steal their CD or Vinyl collection. They didn't. And fans of the latter still enjoy theirs, just as they will continue to enjoy pre-AoS games. It's simple one more option to enjoy gaming. Where before there were only X options, now there're X + 1 options. Nobody loses anything.

Wonderwolf wrote:

GW trying something different and new can only be an enrichment to the hobby as a whole. It may fail, but that's the risk of innovation, no?

Lets be fair here, what GW did really was just release a set of rules that pretty much only covers model interactions and very little else, abdicating almost everything else for players to figure out themselves. Calling that different is true...calling it enriching is perhaps inaccurate.

Wonderwolf wrote:

 455_PWR wrote:
No its more like ditching cd's for mp3's like apple did. Bold move, not as popular, but the right choice in the long run.

Naysayers will naysayers I guess.

This.

And like the above event, it's puzzling how people think this would mean Apple would break into their house to steal their CD or Vinyl collection. They didn't. And fans of the latter still enjoy theirs, just as they will continue to enjoy pre-AoS games. It's simple one more option to enjoy gaming. Where before there were only X options, now there're X + 1 options. Nobody loses anything.

Except that events for the older system are likely to be nonexistent going forward, as is store support, and many stores (primarily GW stores) no longer allowiing its play at all...

 455_PWR wrote:
No its more like ditching cd's for mp3's like apple did. Bold move, not as popular, but the right choice in the long run.

That analogy is rather, well, reaching to say the least. The ultimate product you're consuming, the music, remains the same, just the format of its storage is changing. AoS is different enough from previous editions of Warhammer Fantasy that they're not the same ultimate product, and GW hasn't tried to hide that, there's a reason they didn't call it WHFB 9E.

 Vaktathi wrote:

Lets be fair here, what GW did really was just release a set of rules that pretty much only covers model interactions and very little else, abdicating almost everything else for players to figure out themselves. Calling that different is true...calling it enriching is perhaps inaccurate.

Let's be fair, that is simply not the case. They released rules with a different emphasis to what most games do, but not necessarily worse.

And the main question was, why apparently nobody spoke out against the problems of the old systems. Since you continuously fail to see the problems with "balanced" games of the old kinds and build one straw man after another on the basis of flawed and incorrect assumptions, it's little wonder people would eventually stop arguing with the likes of you. There's no conversation to be held with ideological bullheadedness.

Suffice to say, many people were missing the core of what made wargaming enjoyable in the more laid-back days of the 80s and 90s during the past decade-and-a-half, and welcomed the direction both 40K and even more so AoS is going. If you cannot wrap your head around how deeply flawed and unsatisfactory the competitive/balanced approach to wargaming is for some people, and how they would be desperate for one company out there to break the mold, because "balance" does not, and never did serve anyone, but only a tiny minority of gamers, I can only pity you.

On the plus side, there'll always be the soulless, cynic and accountant-driven companies out there, who simply steal some rules from minor systems (say, Wings of War), slap on an established IP without needing to invest one drop of actual creativity (say, Star Wars) and milk the crowd with no risk, effort or creativity needed. So there'll always be games for the people not interested in AoS & Co.

Wonderwolf wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

Lets be fair here, what GW did really was just release a set of rules that pretty much only covers model interactions and very little else, abdicating almost everything else for players to figure out themselves. Calling that different is true...calling it enriching is perhaps inaccurate.

Let's be fair, that is simply not the case. They released rules with a different emphasis to what most games do, but not necessarily worse.

With almost nothing to it except model interactions and what amounts to a single scenario with a couple variant victory conditions, it's certainly a whole lot less complete.

And the main question was, why apparently nobody spoke out against the problems of the old systems.

I brought up this point earlier, nobody thought "points" were, as a fundamental concept, a terrible thing until like 2 weeks ago.

Since you continuously fail to see the problems with "balanced" games of the old kinds

What, that GW was bad at actually making them work? That's not a problem with the fundamental concept, it's a problem with GW losing all sense of scale and trying to hamfist everything of every size into the same system, while routinely putting out tremendously poorly points costings, and refusing to engage in any sort of playtesting and rules adjustment & support the way you see with other games.

As is very common with GW, the problem was execution, not fundamental concept.

and build one straw man after another on the basis of flawed and incorrect assumptions,

You can call things strawmans and incorrect assumptions all you want, but if you're not going to directly address any and explain why such is true, I'm assuming you're tossing this line in here for hyperbole's sake.

it's little wonder people would eventually stop arguing with the likes of you. There's no conversation to be held with ideological bullheadedness.

I'm not the one engaging in ad-hominem attacks instead of directly addressing arguments here...

Suffice to say, many people were missing the core of what made wargaming enjoyable in the more laid-back days of the 80s and 90s during the past decade-and-a-half, and welcomed the direction both 40K and even more so AoS is going. If you cannot wrap your head around how deeply flawed and unsatisfactory the competitive/balanced approach to wargaming is for some people, and how they would be desperate for one company out there to break the mold, because "balance" does not, and never did serve anyone, but only a tiny minority of gamers, I can only pity you.

And you're not explaining your position, you're only saying bad things about me for apparently not understanding the position you're not explaining.

AoS doesn't do narrative gaming any better than older editions did aside from simply get rid army composition rules, which you could always disregard anyway if your opponent was ok with it. It certainly doesn't offer the tools for narrative scenario play that many other games offer. It's 4 pages of model interactions and a basic scenario setup and that's it.

Meanwhile, AoS is just as (almost certainly more) open to power gaming and rules exploitation as previous editions by those who wish to engage is such behavior, with even fewer restrictions on what players can bring and do and "what's legal", than older editions which at least had limits on certain types of units and abiliites (e.g. couldn't have more than X power dice, couldn't bring more than 25% rare, etc)

On the plus side, there'll always be the soulless, cynic and accountant-driven companies out there, who simply steal some rules from minor systems (say, Wings of War), slap on an established IP without needing to invest one drop of actual creativity (say, Star Wars) and milk the crowd with no risk, effort or creativity needed. So there'll always be games for the people not interested in AoS & Co.

You mean, like the publicly traded company that openly states it's business is selling models (not games), that goes out of its way to note that it does no market or customer research, has actively and aggressively shut down all communities it has ever had (such as its corporate facebook page, its own forums, etc) and and *borrowed* money to pay dividends (with the CEO and chairman of the board being the same person and also one of their 5 largest shareholders at the same time?) that happens to be named Games Workshop? You want to talk about accountant-driven companies? Games Workshop is by far the most guilty of that of any in the gaming industry currently.

There is a stench around this discussion (across several threads) that people who like points and competition are somehow lesser, somehow engaging in Badwrongfun and need to be re-educated and improved. I find it distasteful. I used to roll my eyes at HBMC's "casual gaming mafia" schtick, but there's been an undercurrent of passive aggressive (or directly aggressive - OP refers to points based play as "a disease") statements since AoS was released. At least it's all out in the open now and perhaps that sort of player will confine themselves to AoS going forward.

Also, GW as our savior from souless accountancy driven gaming companies ahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Oh man. That's either some mighty fine trollin' or...well, a really positive outlook on GW, let's say!

 Da Boss wrote:
There is a stench around this discussion (across several threads) that people who like points and competition are somehow lesser, somehow engaging in Badwrongfun and need to be re-educated and improved. I find it distasteful.

Is it?

I've seen no casual gamer ever deny the competitive guys their games and have all the fun they want, play like they have a pair or whatever floats your boat.

It's the arrogance of the "balance serves everyone"-lie, claiming balance is some kind of universal goal, that explicitly tries to prescribe a certain approach to gaming to people who'd rather game without.

We have plenty of games that pride themselves on super-tight, super-balance rules. We have AoS (and to a lesser extend 40K) as games that set different priorities and don't care about balance. If people simply accept diversity and pick the game for the style they prefer, there'd be no issue.

It's the ceaseless attempt to deride AoS (or 40K) as objectively inferior to Infinity, Warmachine, whatever, just because they are different, that is thoroughly distasteful. Leave people to play what they like best and accept that some people enjoy different games and game-styles than you do.

I certainly see no AoS-fans rampaging across the Warmachine or Infinity forums on Dakka telling people there that they are "doing it wrong" and that the game of their choice is "gak".

Wonderwolf wrote:

I certainly see no AoS-fans rampaging across the Warmachine or Infinity forums on Dakka telling people there that they are "doing it wrong" and that the game of their choice is "gak".

Come on now *oh you face* you know thats totally different to whats happening in this instance. Warmachine was never WHFB AoS directly replaces fantasy so that comparison doesn't work.
A slightly closer comparison would be a halo forum turning into a halo wars discussion forum and the players of FPS halo complaining that its become about an RTS and halo wars totally replacing the FPS games onwards. Or something like that.

In fact you could say its actually the AoS players rampaging across what was recently a WHFB forum saying to those who use points systems or liked 8th that "They're doing it wrong" and that their game was "rubbish"

@Wonderwolf: Really? You've never seen a casual player use disparaging terms about competitive players? Perhaps it's a bias on my part (though I do not see myself as a "competitive" or "narrative" player- I do both when I feel like it, I just like balanced systems as it makes it easier for me), but I can recall an endless stream of "casual" players bemoaning "WAAC", with "WAAC" being used as a slur for anyone who likes to play a competitive game. I've seen people saying that the competitive players "killed" WFB. I've seen countless people implying that "TFG" is almost always a hyper competitive player.

It's been going on for years and getting worse as GW moves to dump it's competitive players and the "casuals" cheer them on. This very thread calls balance a disease.

My view on it is pretty straightforward. A casual player who works primarily on agreement with his group of buddies can always choose to ignore any subsystem in a game (points or magic or whatever). They can always choose to do lopsided battles, make up on the spot rules, base things on a narrative rather than a pre-determined idea of balance. There has never been ANYTHING stopping you from doing that with likeminded friends.

On the other hand, a competitive player or even one who wants a fair and easy pick up game with strangers (a demographic that many claim does not exist, but I am in that demographic myself and have been for 5 years) cannot do what they want to do without some of these subsystems - a balancing method, a way to determine a "fair" battle, and so on. By removing these elements, that section of the playerbase is inconvenienced and can no longer participate as they would like to.

I think (as far as I understand it) the argument against points is that it encourages a mindset amongst the playerbase that results in the narrative style of gaming not being as prominent and everyone playing "tournament" style games. I can sort of see where that position comes from, but I also think it's based on some false assumptions. Assumption number 1 for me being that competitive players have no narratives in their tournament prep or pick up games.

Actually to me the bigger issue is simply that GW have been terrible at balancing their games for ages, and people who exist primarily in the GW gaming ecosystem kinda don't believe that games actually can be balanced. To many, "balance" means "someone will be able to take a cheese list!". But AoS does not prevent that any more than 7th does.

I was going to start a thread in discussions about the toxicity of the "narrative" vs. "competitive" false dichotomy, but I don't know if I will bother. The whole thing is so poisonous at this stage I'm not sure if we can have a productive discussion.

 Da Boss wrote:
@Wonderwolf: Really? You've never seen a casual player use disparaging terms about competitive players? Perhaps it's a bias on my part (though I do not see myself as a "competitive" or "narrative" player- I do both when I feel like it, I just like balanced systems as it makes it easier for me), but I can recall an endless stream of "casual" players bemoaning "WAAC", with "WAAC" being used as a slur for anyone who likes to play a competitive game. I've seen people saying that the competitive players "killed" WFB. I've seen countless people implying that "TFG" is almost always a hyper competitive player.

It's been going on for years and getting worse as GW moves to dump it's competitive players and the "casuals" cheer them on. This very thread calls balance a disease.

My view on it is pretty straightforward. A casual player who works primarily on agreement with his group of buddies can always choose to ignore any subsystem in a game (points or magic or whatever). They can always choose to do lopsided battles, make up on the spot rules, base things on a narrative rather than a pre-determined idea of balance. There has never been ANYTHING stopping you from doing that with likeminded friends.

On the other hand, a competitive player or even one who wants a fair and easy pick up game with strangers (a demographic that many claim does not exist, but I am in that demographic myself and have been for 5 years) cannot do what they want to do without some of these subsystems - a balancing method, a way to determine a "fair" battle, and so on. By removing these elements, that section of the playerbase is inconvenienced and can no longer participate as they would like to.

I think (as far as I understand it) the argument against points is that it encourages a mindset amongst the playerbase that results in the narrative style of gaming not being as prominent and everyone playing "tournament" style games. I can sort of see where that position comes from, but I also think it's based on some false assumptions. Assumption number 1 for me being that competitive players have no narratives in their tournament prep or pick up games.

Actually to me the bigger issue is simply that GW have been terrible at balancing their games for ages, and people who exist primarily in the GW gaming ecosystem kinda don't believe that games actually can be balanced. To many, "balance" means "someone will be able to take a cheese list!". But AoS does not prevent that any more than 7th does.

I was going to start a thread in discussions about the toxicity of the "narrative" vs. "competitive" false dichotomy, but I don't know if I will bother. The whole thing is so poisonous at this stage I'm not sure if we can have a productive discussion.

I would hope GW ditch the whole casual/competitive thing and just focus on making minis and give away their IP to other rule makers to use their toys and such, they make their toys, they make the lore, the others make the rules and scenarios and points etc... everyone wins... heck you could have multiple companies making multiple style of rules and anyone can use them in store if they want.

I believe I am one of the few people that agreed with the GW CEO (or something) that said GW is in the business of making toys not rules (or something like that) I am all for that... GW has NEVER been good at rules... lore is great and their minis are in the top 3.... wasting their resources on rules just creates this sort of tension :/... and funnily if they "stop" making the rules they can invite anyone to their store to play with any rules (KoW, WMH etc) as long as they use their minis instead :/ their stores could actually become more vibrant.

 Da Boss wrote:


It's been going on for years and getting worse as GW moves to dump it's competitive players and the "casuals" cheer them on. This very thread calls balance a disease.

At least we agree that GW has been open about their design goals for years, and that this is not a new phenomenon.

I enjoy a good chess-match as much as the next person. But GW games aren't trying to scratch that itch. Never did. Not with AoS. Not with 40K. Not with Mordheim. Not with Necromunda. Not with Dark Future.

Just like Ferrari isn't trying to build frugal family cars. Surely low petrol consumption and in-built children seat benefit everyone right? Well, some products simply target a different market, a different audience. Not every product needs to appeal to "everyone".

The problem is, competitive 40K/WFB players seek to impose a certain gaming philosophy on 40K/WFB, which it doesn't aim for. You're happy to use the systems such, as long as you're aware that you're rigging the product in ways it wasn't necessarily designed to do, like taking your family of six on a week-long road-trip in a two-seat Ferrari. It's gonna be inconvenient. But that doesn't mean Ferrari should stop making Ferraris and start making family-cars, just "because it's good for everyone". There other companies specialized on catering precisely to that need. If Ferrari wants to focus on 2-seater sports-cars, that's their prerogative. If GW wants to focus on no-tournament narrative games in their vision of narrative, that is their prerogative. It might not be the product for you, but that doesn't mean it's inherently flawed.

It's this pouting of people who want Ferrari to make nice comfy suburban family cars (it serves everyone, right?), and continue to be angry because Ferrari is aiming for a different audience, instead of simply going for a car company that makes family cars, that I simply don't get. It's not like there is a shortage of the kind of product you are looking for.

@Wonderwolf: Again, phrases like "pouting" are a bit toxic. Better avoided.

I don't really accept your premise that GW have never tried to make a balanced game. I've been playing 40K since 2nd edtion and Fantasy since 5th. My view on it would be:
40K -
2nd edition was pretty unbalanced and mostly narrative. Piles of fun in it's way but quite unsuited to a competitive style of play.
3rd edition was a pretty strong pull into a more balanced approach and the kind of play that can be easily ported into many settings.
4th edition was a fairly bland "touch up" of 3rd edition with many of the same design goals.
5th edition was an attempt to marry "fluffy" list construction with "balanced" play and competition. I believe it was broadly successful.
6th edition, I did not really play much, because it seemed to me to be a drift back towards the 2nd edition "loose" style, and I have not looked at 7th edition (are we even on seventh by now? I lose track) because it is broadly the same with unbound and so on.

Fantasy:
5th edition was likewise the hero-hammer and crazy magic edition. Fun for what it was but not balanced
6th edition was a very balanced and fun edition. I look back on it fondly. It had narrative elements and rules for seiges and so on, but also functioned very well as a "pick up" or tournament game. Big fan.
7th edition was a tweak of 6th that was mostly pretty good until the balance was destroyed by poorly written army books. I enjoyed it but the army book balance left a poor taste in my mouth.
8th was an attempt, like 5th, to marry balance and narrative in one system. Arguably it was a failure as it splintered the playerbase and increasing costs drove people out.
9th/AoS is a swing towards a "pure" narrative style of play.

So I think there are competing forces within GW that push the game in one direction or another. I think they've up to now always at least made a nod towards both sides of the coin, sometimes very successfully (Fantasy 6th and 40K 5th in my view). Currently they are on a pure narrative kick with Fantasy, but I don't accept that that has "always" been their design goal. I think it is clear that in the past some designers attempted to build a game that would please everyone.

bitethythumb: I kinda agree with you actually. I am not wedded to any one system, I am interested in everything, and I will use whatever models float my boat for them. GW make some great models that I use without any agonizing if I think the price is right. But not everyone is in the position I am in.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 455_PWR wrote:
No its more like ditching cd's for mp3's like apple did. Bold move, not as popular, but the right choice in the long run.

That analogy is rather, well, reaching to say the least. The ultimate product you're consuming, the music, remains the same, just the format of its storage is changing. AoS is different enough from previous editions of Warhammer Fantasy that they're not the same ultimate product, and GW hasn't tried to hide that, there's a reason they didn't call it WHFB 9E.

I'd say that ultimately the product you are consuming are the models, and the format in which you use them is the thing that has changed. If you've burned all your CDs to your hard drive, you can throw out the CDs and buy only MP3s from now on. You can throw out your 8th edition rules (CDs) and still use the models (music) with AoS(MP3s). Or you can convert them to another format (Kings of War).

In 40K, 4th and 5th editions opened with an explanation of the fact that points values were used to help create a fair and balanced game. This paragraph was dropped in 6th edition, though points continued to be used.

That is hardly GW being open for years that they have had a design goal of a narrative game. If anything, they abandoned narrative games when they canned Mordheim, Necromunda and Blood Bowl.

AoS doesn't contain any narrative rules at all. It's a simple tactical skirmish game.

I would also point out that points values and narrative games are not mutually exclusive.

Aye, Necromunda and Mordheim have systems for maintaining balance (you pay for your troops in credits or gold, and you get a Gang or Warband rating) but they are great narrative games in the best sense.

I'm getting tired of the whole "points create balance" thing. It's a lazy argument which assume the points system is perfect in the first place.

It doesn't allow that many units have historically been over- or under-powered for their points cost, or that there is allegedly a power creep in modern army books. It doesn't allow for any kind of unbound armies either: is a 1500 point army of Termagants, Hormagaunts and Pyrovores going to win against a 1500 point army made of entirely of Leman Russ tanks and allied Dreadnoughts?

In Warhammer, Beasts of Nurgle used to be 100 points each. This was approximately twice as expensive as a Fiend of Slaanesh. So were Beasts twice as good on the battlefield? Don't ask me - nobody ever used them, and when I made army lists including them I was told to drop them as they were too expensive. This alone destroys the "points cost brings balance" idea.

Why is it that in LotR, the good side always seems to win? I never read an official battle report where this occurred, because there was always one or more Good heroes who ended up defeating dozens of Evil line troopers on their own. Surely this shouldn't always be the case, as the points values between the armies were balanced?

I've been reading through the Age of Sigmar book, and you know what's fantastic?

1. there's a picture of a battle with no less than four Bloodthirsters. Okay, I know it's not ten (or twelve), but there's so much else in the picture that they could easily have put another six in.
2. there's even a passage that talks about "a spearhead of Bloodthirsters" attacking a fortified city.

Also, I can't get over how incredible the Bloodthirster model is. Really great! Does anyone have $1500AUD they don't want? We could do the ten Bloodthirster battle!!

 Da Boss wrote:
Aye, Necromunda and Mordheim have systems for maintaining balance (you pay for your troops in credits or gold, and you get a Gang or Warband rating) but they are great narrative games in the best sense.

Again, the purpose of the gold/credits-systems in Necromunda and Mordheim wasn't to create "balance" (and if it were, it would've failed miserably at that, luckily that wasn't why they were put in). False assumptions lead to false conclusions.

 NoPoet wrote:
I'm getting tired of the whole "points create balance" thing. It's a lazy argument which assume the points system is perfect in the first place.

It doesn't allow that many units have historically been over- or under-powered for their points cost, or that there is allegedly a power creep in modern army books. It doesn't allow for any kind of unbound armies either: is a 1500 point army of Termagants, Hormagaunts and Pyrovores going to win against a 1500 point army made of entirely of Leman Russ tanks and allied Dreadnoughts?

In Warhammer, Beasts of Nurgle used to be 100 points each. This was approximately twice as expensive as a Fiend of Slaanesh. So were Beasts twice as good on the battlefield? Don't ask me - nobody ever used them, and when I made army lists including them I was told to drop them as they were too expensive. This alone destroys the "points cost brings balance" idea.

Why is it that in LotR, the good side always seems to win? I never read an official battle report where this occurred, because there was always one or more Good heroes who ended up defeating dozens of Evil line troopers on their own. Surely this shouldn't always be the case, as the points values between the armies were balanced?

Do you have any examples there that aren't GW? Because then the problem isn't that points don't create balance, but that GW is apparently incapable of using points in a manner that creates balance.

And you say 'official' battle reports - you mean the ones that were in White Dwarf? The ones intentionally done to sell a product? Just looking in the Dakka subforum, I can find games where Evil wins.

Wonderwolf wrote:

It's the arrogance of the "balance serves everyone"-lie,

!

Balance does serve everyone. A properly balanced ruleset allows all types of players to utilise that system. One that doesn't even attempt to make a fair game immediately cuts off large chunks of its potential player base while still making 'narrative' games problematic because unit A will always be superior to unit B.

Points don't = balance but if you going to allow players a wide range of freedom where it comes to army selection then they are really the only option. Points+intelligence army building+lots and lots of playtesting=balance to at least a reasonable degree. The only other option is to only play pre created scenarios using nothing but forces sanctioned for that particular scenario but that's frankly a terrible idea for something as thematically complex as Warhammer.

If you want the AoS pile of models approach then you can do that in any system simply by ignoring the army structure rules. If you want a fair game with AoS (especially if you like armies comprised of ordinary troops) then good luck...........

Incidentally I am in no way a WAAC player. I haven't been to a tournament in over a decade, I prefer real narrative games (I'm currently in the midst of a Mordheim campaign but I am also a big fan of RPGs) and I always use fluffy armies comprised mostly of 'core' units irrespective of their worth in the eyes of netlist builders. The key thing with me though is that I like close games; I don't like to see players tabled in the first couple of turns. This is why, aside from the extremely shallow rules and the utter destruction of one of the most venerable of wargaming settings, that I will not even consider playing AoS because getting a close game in AoS seems to be based almost exclusively on luck (with a hint of diplomacy).

+1 to what Infinite Array says.

Of course points won't be absolutely perfect- there will need to be tweaking and inevitably some things will be slightly more powerful than others. But the answer is to just continue to tweak and get the best balance possible. Other games manage this, GW just does not have the competence to do so, apparently.

Wonderwolf: What is the purpose of starting gold and credit and gang rating if not for balancing?

Wonderwolf wrote:

Again, the purpose of the gold/credits-systems in Necromunda and Mordheim wasn't to create "balance"

Of course it was, it was there to create reasonably balanced starting gangs/warbands while allowing a reasonable level of equipment progression. As the campaign progressed gang's power levels obviously fluctuate but there are other mechanisms in play to try to keep things in check.

 Da Boss wrote:

Wonderwolf: What is the purpose of starting gold and credit and gang rating if not for balancing?

Immersion into the background of assembling a gang of mercenaries/gangers. Incentivize campaign play and drive its "between-games-economy". Gameification (odd term to apply for a game, but hey) of progression/achievement. Etc.., etc..

Why would "balance" be your first assumption? Especially with GW games, which we know don't strive for balance?

Not simply "define" a given game-mechanic in such a narrow-minded way is a good example of the toxic environment narrative players face everyday in games with points(gold, etc...)-systems.

That is not the fault of any individual gamer's preferences for "balance" or "competitiveness", but a clear impact of a balance/competitive-minded gaming community on certain games and thus a clear example why "balance" is skewing the socioenvironment against certain game-styles, which in turn require their own games that eschew balance in a diverse gaming-landscape, so that everyone is represented in the hobby.

We don't know that, it is merely an assertion on your part, contradicted by a lot of evidence.

Wonderwolf wrote:
Especially with GW games, which we know don't strive for balance.....

......anymore.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

Wonderwolf wrote:
Especially with GW games, which we know don't strive for balance.....

......anymore.

Nor did originally. Did for a brief time, but stopped, precisely because the tournaments they ran and the toxic gaming-culture they invited by doing so poisoned the hobby as a whole (which, admittedly, nobody could've predicted at the time). Again, read Jervis Johnsons "Points? Who needs em?" from 2002 (?). He outlines how the cultural changes wrought by "tournament players" overwhelmed the design-studio in ways they hadn't thought possible when they started doing tournaments.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
We don't know that, it is merely an assertion on your part, contradicted by a lot of evidence.

As is the assertion that their purpose was balance.

That is merely your assertion with no substantial evidence in support and lots of evidence against.

I've read Jervis' points, I just think he is wrong.