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The new Ork flyer and its pretty underpar (crap?) rules got me thinking.

Premise: GW want to sell as many kits as possibly.
Whether they are old or new and depending on production availability it matters not.
However newer kits are obviously a boon since players should want to snap them up (new stuff!) and a lot of them of late cost more than old (ork flyer, maleceptor, wyvern etc).

But we've seen with the following kits simply awful rules (a few examples only):
ork flyer
maleceptor
exocrine
trygon
DA flyer
Wraithlord (I know hes an older sculpt but could have got a rules redo)
Land Raiders (old again but expensive kits)


So my question is this:
Does GW have two rules writing teams - one tasked with what they consider their bigger selling armies (Tau/Eldar/Marines)
And another for the poor sods (Orks/Nids, DE etc).

Thrown into that mix you then have anomalies such as the Wyvern (generally great rules, cheap points etc) but in an army that dosent seem to be loved any longer.

Ive posited before with GWs recent release schedule (quite fast/lots of updates), do they possibly outsource the non core army rules to external writers and hence why we have such imbalance, since the core studio cant keep up with production schedules?

Or is it down to pure production runs? They decide to charge 100ish for a Wraithknight so give it totally OP rules. They know it will sell of course. However, as a result, old aforementioned kits (LRs etc) wont get a production run due to capacity so they simply dont bother updating them or OP'ing them.

Thoughts on that ramble?

The Trygon and Wraithlord were actually powerful when they came out (the Trygon, in fact, was suspected as the reason why the Carnifex was nerfed so hard in 5th edition).

Older kits are given bad rules because they're either so old that everyone has one (land raider) or they were the flavour of the month everyone ran out to buy last time around so they had to give you another reason to run out and buy them (Trygon). In the case of the Exocrine and Maleceptor, I get the feeling GW tried to make them OP, but their (at the time) loose grasp of the meta of the game made them severely underestimate their power.

The way I've envisioned GW's workflows, it's one-man teams working on quick memos sent by the product department with tight deadlines and little to no feedback.

They are less game designers than copywriters.

GW also doesn't play the game the way most of the rest of us play it. If a given unit is "OP", then the guy at GW that plays that army only fields one and, as well, might not add any units it synergizes with to the list or might self-apply a points handicap, so it ends up being like a 500 vs 1000 point game. Or they might not field it at all.

 Psienesis wrote:
GW also doesn't play the game the way most of the rest of us play it. If a given unit is "OP", then the guy at GW that plays that army only fields one and, as well, might not add any units it synergizes with to the list or might self-apply a points handicap, so it ends up being like a 500 vs 1000 point game. Or they might not field it at all.

At this stage I suspect GW doesn't play the game at all.

They're seemingly putting some work into drafting some points costs for AoS just because the game was pretty much dead on arrival.

Some pieces of work, like the latest Eldar codex, seem to be the product of someone at the Studio not wanting to ever lose a game (Phil Kelly I'm looking at you).

Fair points ME7000.

I think you're imagining a much greater link between rules writing and projected sales than actually exists.

Based on the inconsistency of rules for new models over the last 20 years or so, I very strongly suspect that GW don't think that rules have any impact on sales at all... they expect their models to sell because they're pretty.

They've never shown any evidence of understanding that the effectiveness of a unit has an impact on whether or not some players will choose to buy it.

 insaniak wrote:

They've never shown any evidence of understanding that the effectiveness of a unit has an impact on whether or not some players will choose to buy it.

To believe anything other than this is folly. There has never been any consistency in the long-held Internet belief that new units get good rules. There is no over-arching plan: when they get it right--a great model with great rules--it's pure, random chance. And they get it wrong at least as often as when they get it right.

They have outright stated in White Dwarf that they come up with rules that they think/feel suit the model, and worry about "balance" last, if at all. Remember, GW plays a very different game to virtually everybody else. To them the "visual spectacle" of a game of 40k is as good, if not better, than the experience playing. If you ever browse through old White Dwarf issues, or even any time you see GW battle reports, you tend to see armies that look visually impressive but often have questionable list choices, the reason being is that the staff are playing 100% for enjoyment and nothing else. I recall in, I believe, the Crusade of Fire book Matt Hutson was playing Red Corsairs, and he was taking mostly CSM squads, Terminators, tanks, etc. in his own words it was very much like a Loyalist force, because in his view the Corsairs were recent renegades so wouldn't have access to Daemon Engines.

The end result is that GW makes cool kits and assumes that everyone is like them: They won't care about the rules, they'll care how cool the model looks and how impressive it will look in their collection. The DA flyer is I think a great example: It IS an awesome looking model. The rules suck (so I've heard) but GW probably felt the rules suit the model (not balance-wise, just the rules they gave it. I don't think they really look at unit balance beyond "Hey, it would be cool if this model could..." type of things) and more importantly figured that every DA player is going to want one because it looks so cool.

GW doesn't seem to get that cool models with good rules will sell better than cool models with gakky rules, because they aren't focusing on the rules. The rules/gameplay is an afterthought for them, something that exists only to allow you a reason to take your lovingly-painted and converted models in your "collection" out of the cabinet and put them on the table for a few hours. They play in a way that seemingly nobody outside of Nottingham plays.