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I also like most of the thematic summoning from a narrative standpoint. I thought some of the implementation was pretty cool.

I know that the design team are all regular tournament attendees though and I think that tunnel-vision played a role in them not seeing the big picture outside of the adepticon tournament hall.

Granting victory points would be another cool way to give a meaningful choice. The problem is a lot of scenarios are basically "capture these objectives and if you own them by this point you win otherwise count up kill points" so I'm not sure how you'd fully implement something like that (which is why I went with the sudden death victory conditions instead)

auticus wrote:
I also like most of the thematic summoning from a narrative standpoint. I thought some of the implementation was pretty cool.

I know that the design team are all regular tournament attendees though and I think that tunnel-vision played a role in them not seeing the big picture outside of the adepticon tournament hall.

Granting victory points would be another cool way to give a meaningful choice. The problem is a lot of scenarios are basically "capture these objectives and if you own them by this point you win otherwise count up kill points" so I'm not sure how you'd fully implement something like that (which is why I went with the sudden death victory conditions instead)

Right, the granting VP would only work in some scenarios. Those that are "if you hold Objective X at end of Turn 5 you win" are harder to fix with that implementation. I also thought about "if you summon a unit, your opponent gets a Command Point," but as you've pointed out, not all command abilities are created equal, so this wouldn't be an "even" benefit. Still, I think the current risk/cost for summoning, while better than the fully free and costing reinforcement points, is skewed a bit. I think what's really needed is some kind of small bonus to your opponent when you summon, so that you actually have to make a risk/reward calculation. Right now, there's no reason to not summon if you've acquired your summoning points for whatever, which I think is what the unbalancing part is (at least, when facing less summoning-capable armies; I agree with the tunnel vision).

What about letting the opponent spend CP to stop opponent summoning? Perhaps not tied to point cost but rather 1 cp the first time you use it, 2 cp the second, etc. That creates a dynamic where the summoner wants to throw out little stuff for the opponent to use cp in blocking but the opponent may let it go through to save cp for blocking something else later.

As a general note, CP can be farmed but it is not like 40k; there is notable investment. And taking those CP away from command abilities does significantly impact army performance.

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auticus wrote:
Thats good I'm glad you are entertained and amused. Appreciate the contribution to the conversation.

He is trolling, but there is a (no doubt accidental) wisdom in his post about not taking any of this too seriously. Insight can come from any source if you look at it the right way.

@Auticus I know I'm late to the party, but I would say both can be true at the same time - That you made some pretty great looking AoS expansion rules, that I have praised you for in the past, and still think is great work. But also that your posting tone, for a lack of a better word, turned pretty negative and repetative on TGA, as it can be here as well. I don't remember it being that way in the very early days of TGA, though.
In that regard I agree with Hulksmash that TGA was not the right fit for that sort of posting-habit, even though people certainly can and do critisise GW and AoS over there. It's simply more of an active approach to moderation than the very lax one applied on Dakka, I think.

What's more is that, at least I found it increasingly difficult to respond to your posts, because they often seemed grounded in what seems like an extreme community, toxic even from the way you present it sometimes, that is so far removed from my own and the sort of community that I can read others are playing in.

Anyways, don't stop looking into ways to integrate many different game modes into a larger whole, as that is what I remember being the most impressive part of the content that you have shared on the Louisville Gaming site (?), if I remember correctly.
Maybe you don't have many (any?) players locally that are into that sort of more narrative games, but I am certain there are others around that globe that do and can get enjoyment out of your work.

My stance is essentially to help discuss and drive a game that does not have to be as staunchly traffic controlled in terms of power gamer vs casual as AOS and 40k largely are, especially in comparison to other games to which that level of divide is not as stark or great.

There is a lot of great stuff in AOS that could be the entire package with minor considerations in simply sitting down and going "what if I'm playing an army that is more casual and Im playing against power gaming timmy, what can I do to lessen that divide without having to go to war with timmy to have him tone down his list which was made in the structure of the rules"

Because in the end the overall result is that the "casual" power level and the "power gamer" power level start getting closer towards each other and less of a stark gulf that it is now.

That should be overall first and foremost the most important consideration when you put anything into a game. I think the dev team being nothing but tournament players hurts that because they are only looking at things from the tournament player perspective, and on forums and the internet the tournament mindset is usually the predominant by a large majority mindset.

Even the narrative event organizers (NEO) group that does a lot of really cool things is largely a tournament group that puts out narrative games that are still tournament oriented.

GW hired Bottle though, and his claim to community fame is certainly from the narrative side of the game.

Bottle posted a lot about competitive play. He was a fairly steady tournament player that also happened to like skirmish gaming and wanted to see a solid skirmish ruleset in the game.

When it came to discussing narrative gaming and what not he was very staunchly on the side of no house rules and letting people use power lists because thats what the game allowed, so it was up to the player to adapt and learn to build better lists.

Thats not saying he was anti narrative games, but he seemed (and its been quite a bit since his last post here so forgive me if the years passed have blurred my clarity) very much rules as written and no restrictions. He and I had a couple replies back and forth on that subject and he was mostly against the fan points at the time and was hoping for GW points and expressed that he enjoyed going to tournaments but at the time that was hard because of so many point systems running around (and at the time his group was using the SCGT points that would a few months after become the basis for official points). I also follow him on twitter and he attends competitive events fairly regularly (along with the other developers on the team)

I don't necessarily think his claim to internet fame was narrative gaming as much as it was producing a skirmish ruleset which was badly desired by the community at large.

Spiky Norman wrote:
GW hired Bottle though, and his claim to community fame is certainly from the narrative side of the game.

Personally I see skirmish as more of its own category rather than strictly narrative. Compare to Path to Glory which is very much narrative but is also still the same AoS ruleset. Bottle tended to be semi-dismissive of balance concerns as simply not being a big deal, he was somewhat of a GW white knight. I personally think he may have deliberately kept negative opinions to himself in order to make a good impression with GW (and wisely so), but that is just a theory. Though if I were GW I would have Bottle working on a new skirmish & fluff rather than generic AoS. Hopefully with Kill Team's popularity we will see a proper AoS skirmish penned by Bottle. Could call it Skirmish II: Electric Bottleoo

At any rate, what GW needs to do is hire someone like Auticus. Now I know what you're thinking, but hear me out. I like Auticus as a poster because he brings up a lot of points I agree with much more importantly has a lot of backing to them. However (no offense here Aut) I find his stance can be a bit rigid and overly critical, also based more in numbers and statistics than I personally feel is needed. But that is exactly why GW needs someone like him; someone who is a total stickler for balance and runs tons of numbers rather than going with the flow. Because they do not seem to have anyone like that and accordingly are missing a major perspective on rules design.

A more simple & direct approach would be to just have someone on staff run numbers for average damage output vs defense on units when they are deciding on points. Because the costs we have indicate that they do not.

I've actually changed my stance several times due to forum discussions (either here or twitter or tga or other places) when presented with a counter point that is backed by legit data that I can consider other than the usual emotional response or hand waiving that most internet discussions are full of.

Its why I like discussing in the first place, because it lets me examine a topic from multiple perspectives which helps me consider direction in my personal projects or the events that I head.

I base a lot of my stance on numbers and statistics simply because thats the only real objective measure we have when it comes to a game that is driven typically wholly by numbers and mathematics.

I have had the pleasure and honor of working on a few gaming projects over the years, some very small independent things, and others with a larger audience funded by a company, both PC based and tabletop, and I'd say GW's way of doing things ... while profitable... totally hamstrings their game devs to marketing.

From a gaming developer standpoint, I could never do that and enjoy what I did. Additionally my opinion on gw's rules are all well known by the gw rules devs and when i was banished from TGA they had some minor fun at my expense lol so I would say based on past feedback that they are really not interested in worrying about this level of balance because quite honestly the community doesn't care that much about it as a whole and are dismissive of casual gaming in general as being a git gud or go home type response.

In this example with summoning, the most direct and obvious reason for it being brought back is that it sells more models.

The critical flaw in its implementation was that it was built to allow Powergamer Timmy to blow it up with no regards to how Casual Gamer Gary plays. It took some cool ideas like thematic summoning (blood tithe, depravity points, etc) and then soured it by giving obvious farmable summoning options (seraphon, legion of nagash) and other high end summoning options that i've seen some armies pull (noted in explicit detail in previous posts in this and other threads) that had no disregard to the game unless you were also powerlisting too to keep up. Git gud or go home.

In Magic the Gathering thats not as big a deal because the audience is much more numerous so Gary can find other casual players easier, and additionally because its dealing with cards that require no assembly or painting or investment of time to play with. Gary could just as easily put together a more busted powerdeck without needing to go out and buy models that need assembled and painted. He likely already has the cards in his inventory if he's doing pre-releases and if he is missing something he can shell out the money for the card, but requires no time other than that to play. Miniature games have to shelve entire collections to go out and buy a whole new collection, assemble it, and then paint it at the worst case. At the best case they typically have to at least buy some new models and put time into getting them ready (if not the whole collection) or use models that they really don't like but have the most optimized bang for the points. Its a lot more offputting and time consuming in the tabletop world to have to match up with Timmy Powergamer than it is for the card player population.

After implementing any ruleset I have ever worked on commercially or privately, the next step was always "now how can we bust this wide open and ruin the game". For GW they either skip this step entirely or hand waive it with "players can just choose to not play those type of people and it'll be all good".

Other games get a lot closer to bridging the gap between their extreme gameplay elements and the median. I know GW can do so as well. I know the developers on the team from following them on twitter and what not are all very smart guys with a lot of creativity and a lot of good ideas.

Alessio (whfb developer 6th edition, considered one of the most balanced editions of warhammer that existed, and i agree with that statement fully having played through its entirety as well as 5th, 7th, and 8th plus AOS 1 and 2) made a statement on his facebook around 2015 when AOS was released when someone posted that he should go back to work for them to help them produce a proper ruleset that he couldn't work for a company that stymied their developers with their marketing department ever again. Take that for what its worth. His work in Kings of War and Conquest are both pretty highly praised examples of systems that while flawed also have a wider bell curve of powerlist vs casual which enables more closely fought and fun games that are not one sided stompings on the regular. I admire both his and Rick Priestly's work (Antares is another great system that doesn't end in turn 1 beat downs because you took the wrong list at the opening bell). I also admire their work because they actively talk about this very issue and how important it is to make sure that they get the balance as right as they can so that they can keep negative gameplay experiences down to manageable levels, whereas the gw community mocks that idea or at the very least pokes fun at it.

Trust me, if you never changed your positions I would not respect your opinion nearly as much.

I think the shorter point of my post was to say GW needs to diversify their perspective. I have mentioned before that a big flaw I see holding them back as a company is how they approach balance.

To use summons as an example; having it around may sell 500 points or so of extra models at a high estimate (because let's be honest; almost everyone has more models for their army than make it into a given list, so even 1000 points of summoning is likely to include models that individual owned anyways). But that means if one person leaves the game or does not start they need five players with summoning armies to make up for it.

Now take that and apply it to balance as a whole. What I see is that selling more models to existing customers at the expense of balance results in a net loss of sales. Even the flat stats of players leaving/not joining due to balance issues are deceptively small because were those players engaged they would draw in others by weight of popularity.

GW really turned a corner in 2016 and I really enjoy the company they are today (as opposed to reluctantly tolerating them at best) but they still seem to be stuck in the mindset that the models are selling the game. There is indeed some back and forth there, but ultimately it is the game that sells the models.

(Warning: text dump)

Flash edit: Here's the TGA thread: https://www.tga.community/forums/topic/19633-overview-of-the-tournament-scene. Latest data (as of Oct. 2) is on page 2.

I think it's pretty clear that summoning is strong, but isn't dominating AoS' large-tournament scene.

TGA has a thread that tracks the performance of armies at tournaments with 5+ rounds and 32+ players; the top-performing armies by raw numbers of 5+ wins are:
1. Daughters of Khaine
2. Legions of Nagash
3. Stormcast Eternals
Rounding out the top-performing armies (in no particular order) are Idoneth Deepkin, Maggotkin of Nurgle, Sylvaneth, Blades of Khorne, Disciples of Tzeentch and Destruction.
(Note that this particular figure is not weighted by attendance, so it's misleading. I think it's a useful starting point because there's a strong population bias to these armies.)

Notably, most of the armies in this stratum have match win ratios of 50 to 55%. (Destruction is the only sub-50% match win army with 2 or more 5+ showings.) There are some disturbing figures in the data — in my opinion, Daughters (70.6%), Legions (60%) and Deepkin (64.5%) are all scoring far too high in overall win percentages — but outside of those jagged peaks, the meta looks pretty healthy to my eye. Only 1 of those beyond-the-pale armies is a summoning army. On the other hand, Seraphon — a summoning powerhouse — is faring very poorly; its 42.9% win rate is abysmal.

I wanted to eliminate the population bias inherent in the rankings as they're presented at TGA, so I tallied a "4+ share" for each army (that is, what percentage of the players for a given army won 4+ games at a tournament). (I chose 4+ to try to hedge a little against bad matchups; it was a gut decision, and you could easily draw the line elsewhere.) I divided these into 4+ share tiers; here's the relevant results:

S-Tier (Armies that performed at least 1 full standard deviation better than anyone else)
• Phoenix Temple (2 players, 100%)
• Daughters of Khaine (36 players, 47%)
• Idoneth Deepkin (22 players, 41%)
• Order Draconis (5 players, 40%)
• Bonesplitterz (8 players, 38%)

A-Tier (Armies that beat the average 4+ share of 20%)
• Legions of Nagash (88 players, 29%) (Note that this army's overall win rate is good enough that it would be in an S-tier for overall results.)
• Maggotkin of Nurgle (48 players, 27%)
• Death (4 players, 25%)
• Spiderfang Grots (4 players, 25%)
• Blades of Khorne (38 players, 21%)

If we remove outliers — I didn't calculate a confidence interval because it'd be pretty wide, and instead drew an arbitrary line at 10 players — we're left with DoK and Deepkin being the best reliable performers, with various flavors of Nagash/Death, Maggotkin and Blades doing consistently well. (There's a whole grouping of armies hovering just under that average of 20%; given how exceedingly well the top armies are performing, if we drew our A- and B-tiers based on data that excluded the S-tier, we'd actually see a hugely varied A-tier, including Chaos, Sylvaneth, Flesh Eater Courts and Kharadron in addition to the traditional summoning armies.)

Right now, summoning looks like it's a tool available to many strong armies — but it's apparently trumped by the incredible killing power of DoK and Deepkin. While the TGA data lacks lists, cursory research suggests that Witch Aelves + Blood Hags and Eeeeeeeels are both very powerful tools in their respective armies' quivers, and are likely powering these incredible finishes. Moreover, while summoning might be strong, it's clearly not a do-all bromide — my precious Seraphon aren't making a dent in the competitive showing. Moreover, while I'm loath to include outliers, it's clear that skilled players are seeing success with niche armies like Bonesplitterz.

That data is pertinent to the tournament scene which isn't the crux of our discussion here. The tournament scene is fine. It can even be argued that as far as the tournament scene is concerned, that AOS is somewhat a success due to the broader diversity of winning lists than in the history of whfb where only 2-3 lists typically had any chance.

That data, however, has nothing to do with the casual scene or solve how powerful summoning is against a non-tournament army.

Further that data is by itself flawed in that it is simply not enough data.

For example, it indicates the phoenix temple is OP busted but only 2 people in nearly 100 played it and did well with it.

Thats not enough data to draw any conclusion unfortunately. To get a true perspective on army power based on purely tournament performance we have to

A) acknowledge that the boundaries given only deal with tournament powered armies, which in the case of GW games is night and day with non-tournament style armies and

B) have each faction have enough players to even out the distribution sample of data.

tldr: because something is not over powered or broken in the tournament scene does not mean that to the rest of the game (those not building tournament lists) that the game is fine.


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 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Trust me, if you never changed your positions I would not respect your opinion nearly as much.

I think the shorter point of my post was to say GW needs to diversify their perspective. I have mentioned before that a big flaw I see holding them back as a company is how they approach balance.

To use summons as an example; having it around may sell 500 points or so of extra models at a high estimate (because let's be honest; almost everyone has more models for their army than make it into a given list, so even 1000 points of summoning is likely to include models that individual owned anyways). But that means if one person leaves the game or does not start they need five players with summoning armies to make up for it.

Now take that and apply it to balance as a whole. What I see is that selling more models to existing customers at the expense of balance results in a net loss of sales. Even the flat stats of players leaving/not joining due to balance issues are deceptively small because were those players engaged they would draw in others by weight of popularity.

GW really turned a corner in 2016 and I really enjoy the company they are today (as opposed to reluctantly tolerating them at best) but they still seem to be stuck in the mindset that the models are selling the game. There is indeed some back and forth there, but ultimately it is the game that sells the models.

Without dev input this is just flat guessing but based on dev output before, my intuition states that they are trying to focus more on competitive tournament style players, who are very happy with the game's diversity and balance at the top tier of play where everyone is striving to bust the game apart. The players that would be discouraged by bad balance would not be breaking the game, and would likely be facing off against power gamers and be given the choice to git gud (buy a tournament powered army) or go off and find something else to do.

Enlightening conversation this afternoon locally but we are setting up a kings of war and gates of antares group for our 20th year anniversary as a club next year and ... there are a LOT of people suddenly voicing their opinion about balance being important that were silent that walked off because they just don't want to deal with the issue anymore with GW.

I think originally the gamble was "narrative gamers will drive AOS sales, we don't need points" and we saw how bad that failed. NOt only did no one want to play the game, the narrative books they put out hardly moved at all and we don't see anything like them anymore being attempted by GW, presumably because they didn't make hardly any money. I know here there were like three of us total that bought any of the realmgate books or campaign books and the gw manager shipped the vast majority back unsold, and this is somewhere where we try to have regular campaigns.

I think now they swung the other way. Now its "ok narrative gamers didn't get us anywhere, lets fully support the tournament scene instead and as long as that is healthy and happy, the rest falls into place." I also think... thats probably the best way to go as much as I hate that direction because I honestly think that is where the majority lies. Speculation of course. We can't know that answer but it would seem visibly on forums and groups that the tournament gamer or competitive style gamer that maybe doesn't play in tournaments but still builds hard lists, that is happy with listbuilding imbalances is the current target audience and it is a large target audience.

Which begs the question is there even really a casual scene anymore and if so is the casual scene really just competitive style tournament gamers that simply don't play in tournaments? It woujld seem narrative gamers from the NEO movement are tournament style gamers that enjoy a story with their game. It would seem nearly all podcasts and youtube shows are at their seeded core tournament players discussing various portions of the game but it still comes back to competitive builds. Its hard to say that casual gaming is as popular when you never really see it in the wild or on videos / podcasts / media. (I know there is casual gaming ... I just think my version of casual gaming is not the same as what real casual gaming is anymore, but based on my own area the casual guys have given up on GW for other systems and are now becoming more vocal that we are supporting other games too)

I'd agree that focusing on the tournament scene makes a large degree of sense from a company standpoint. Back when Warmachine came out and started picking up steam, that was one of its foci: tournament play. At that time, there was a lot of discontent as I recall (I wasn't involved with GW games at the time, so mostly through grapevine) with the state of WHFB and 40K in the competitive scene. And the initial launch of AOS defintely wasn't a resounding success, having earned some pretty derogatory nicknames.

I think it's a fine line to walk, to try to support both "casual" and "tournament" level play in a single system. Short of doing a "tournament rules pack" (which, one of my all time favorite games does, and has done for years; Star Fleet Battles), getting a balance that is good for both the Powergamer and the I-just-like-these-models players is really tough.

I will say Neo-GW seems to be at least listening a little more to the community than they used to, so we might see some shifts in the next GHB or 2.5 or whatever. Granted, they are probably not listening to everyone equally, so it's hard to say which way the pendulum will swing next.

I think it's safe to say that the Internet haywired most casual scenes. While I agree with the larger point that tournaments aren't a perfect reflection of on-the-ground play, my personal experience has been that the gap between casual and high-level has never been narrower.

It's a fair point that in a truly casual setting, where players are assembling armies based on primarily on aesthetics rather than performance, tournament results are meaningless. Different approaches, different goals. But in my experience, most game-store metas are tournament-light settings, with players scrounging the Internet for lists, tricks and overperforming units.

As far as the soundness of the data — it's what we got. Everyone's acknowledged that it has outliers (as every data set does); you can still draw broad-brush conclusions — Legions is strong and very popular, Stormcast are popular and fair, DoK and Idoneth are spoilers that you must be prepared for.

And, of course, the ancillary — most supported armies apparently have answers for summoning, since many of them are still within spitting distance of baseline. (100% acknowledged that many smaller and almost all unsupported armies are struggling.)

I guess to answer the original question: No, I don't think the revised summoning rules ruined the game "again." I think it's better than at launch, and mostly better than 1.5 (GHB), but isn't quite "there" yet for overall.

Mewens wrote:
I think it's safe to say that the Internet haywired most casual scenes. While I agree with the larger point that tournaments aren't a perfect reflection of on-the-ground play, my personal experience has been that the gap between casual and high-level has never been narrower.

It's a fair point that in a truly casual setting, where players are assembling armies based on primarily on aesthetics rather than performance, tournament results are meaningless. Different approaches, different goals. But in my experience, most game-store metas are tournament-light settings, with players scrounging the Internet for lists, tricks and overperforming units.

As far as the soundness of the data — it's what we got. Everyone's acknowledged that it has outliers (as every data set does); you can still draw broad-brush conclusions — Legions is strong and very popular, Stormcast are popular and fair, DoK and Idoneth are spoilers that you must be prepared for.

And, of course, the ancillary — most supported armies apparently have answers for summoning, since many of them are still within spitting distance of baseline. (100% acknowledged that many smaller and almost all unsupported armies are struggling.)

I think it's fair to say that balancing for casual play only, also makes it much more difficult. Casual is so subjective that I think it is impossible to nail it down. I personally believe that nobody will be happy if they try to balance it primarily for casual play due to this. Balancing for high level play, is to me the most logical option, since it is going to be the type of play that can have objective data. This data is not perfect, but I think is the best they can really get.

I have no intention of playing competetive AoS, but I still think that is where the game balance should happen. In most cases it usually trickles down pretty well. While I can understand that this can induce an arms race in some places, that's where the social contract comes in.

I think having thought about it somewhat that indeed I would agree that the company has moved toward treating the game like warmachine and has largely a player base that resembles warmachine back in the day, with an indirect version of a page 5.

As such I would rescind my opinion on summoning. There isn't much of a casual game to worry about summoning in this instance I don't think. If you're playing an army that can't keep up with a competitive list, it would be on the onus of the player in this case to buy the models needed to have a good game, or find a different game to play. With that expectation in mind, that changes the landscape of the conversation for me significantly.

One thing I wish that tournament compilation document did was break up the 4 Legions allegiances. A Grand Host army is an entirely different animal than a Legion of Blood army.

I also imagine we would find Grand Host specifically over inflating those results, due to the majority of Legions tournament wins being attributed to the combination of Nagash + spell portal + realm spells.

Rising tide raises all boats; balancing the game as a whole would impact everyone positively. The tournament scene may be 'diverse' now, imagine if all the armies that currently get crushed by tourney ones were viable. I am seeing tournament players concerned with balancing only what they see, which is a narrow viewpoint. They do not seem to understand what they are missing.

WarmaHordes is an example that focused on tourney play from the onset, and that meant every army being viable. One can debate how good at it they were but they never looked at things, saw only one fifth of their factions performing, and said "working as intended."

Well WarmaHordes (along with practically everyone else other than GW), also tends to update every faction at once, rather than drip feeding updates over the course of several years.

I am sure many armies that do poorly (both casually and at the tournament level) would be in much better shape if their rules were actually made for the current gamestate like LoN, IDK, DoK, etc, rather than for a game that was made 3 years ago.

So in that case, what do we call the AoS version of chapter approved? Stormhost approved?

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
So in that case, what do we call the AoS version of chapter approved? Stormhost approved?

The GHB does not alter warscrolls, give spell lores, or introduce new units. It tacked on allegiance abilities for some armies (many still do not have anything), but mostly just alters points. Its nowhere near the across the board overhaul that PP put into edition changes. As it stands the majority of individual unit in AoS are still written with the beginning of 1st edition in mind.

NinthMusketeer wrote:GW really turned a corner in 2016 and I really enjoy the company they are today (as opposed to reluctantly tolerating them at best) but they still seem to be stuck in the mindset that the models are selling the game. There is indeed some back and forth there, but ultimately it is the game that sells the models.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Kirbynomics still happening. Maybe it's time GW to actually have a company that just writes rules and fluff. We have Forge World for the "high end" minis, we have Citadel who make the minis, but we have Lawyers and Accountants that make the game sadly. We need a new division that is just base on a great rule set.

In this case though if the target audience are people that want a deckbuilding style game balanced at the top because the ones in the middle or below can just buy new armies to have good games at the top, it can be argued that the game of AOS is selling the models because thats what the target audience wants.

That runs contrary to making more money, though.

But not if the assumption that they are going for is that the majority of the overall audience wants what they are giving.

Which based off of the commentary I've received on this topic for the past few years I will side with a huge chunk of the audience does in fact love this style of imbalance and listbuilding breakage.

I can't see their financials but we know GW is roaring right now financially and I have to think that AOS being a deck building game of imbalance advantage, that the management and dev team have to think that they hit pay dirt and should keep going in this direction.

Imbalance doesn't sell though.

At least not in the long term. We've seen this over the years as GW ignored balance and focused purely on models. Yes a new codex in prior editions of the game did generate big sales, but only for a shorter period of time. And through the whole process the company bled out and slowly lost customers.

Over the last few years we've seen them change, adopting a pattern of codex updates to update whole games at once instead of slow faction by faction (which often missed out many); and a general improvement in balance an speed up FAQ/Errata and updates.



To my eye this says that balance actually sells far better, even if it is also a harder target to achieve. Also look at most other competitive games - Magic the Gathering - Football - Starcraft 2 - counterstrike - Chess etc.... All the big names are big on balance

Of course GW has a long way to go; there are some culture issues in how they balance their game which are also compounded by how they write their rules. These are issues that should be resolved over time and we can hope they will.

From what the strong opinion from the community is though the imbalanced things like summoning are a lot of fun and "perfectly fine" because at the tournament level they are fine.

Yes and no - don't forget online is a single sounding box.

Also the concept and idea of summoning is fine - its the balance of it as an ability and function within armies that requires addressing. Perhaps we'll return to a time when you have to pay for summons much like Endless Spells; or perhaps they'll shift summoning and Endless Spells to their own niche of points so that armies without summoning might pick more powerful spells or abilities to augment their own force.

Also don't forget many people are fine when they are on the winning side of a battle; when they are on the losing its a different matter. Therefore as GW grows the game and more factions are released (esp those without summoning) the views against it might well grow. Right now there's an imbalance in opinion because whole rosters are missing from the game. Much of the Aelves are missing, humans are missing, a good chunk of skaven and orks/goblins too.

The people who like imbalance will still be playing if it improves; where are they going to go that has worse? The people who ARENT playing because of imbalance could be recruited if it was improved.