Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

BrianDavion wrote:

 Blood Hawk wrote:
[

I would argue CCGs are worse. There the imbalance is built into the business model. GW may or may not release CA 2019 next month with buffs to GK but I guarantee you that WoTC will keep churning out cards in every set that are hot garbage.

and at least with 40k if I know something is hot garbage and don't want it I'm not going to have to buy it on the chance I'll get it. If I want Primaris intercessors and assault marines are garbage I don't need to worry about "getting another damned assault marine!"

You can get any card without having to buy packs of any card game, Fans of magic often tell players not to buy packs as its never the best way to get cards you need or want. But for a lot of players, opening packs itself can be fun. Trades are still quite a bit of the hobby itself for some people. And Draft and other formats that use the packs itself as part of the game.

It just looks at little bit silly.

ccs wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
A big issue, as is often stated, is that other games need traction/acceptance. 40k, despite its flaws, is the "safe choice", the gaming equivalent to "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". You can reasonably expect stores to stock the product (or be willing to order it), there to be tables and terrain set up for it, and people to play with.

Not always the case with other games, even if they have better rules. And since gamers as a whole seem to be reluctant to take the first step sometimes, you get a situation where nobody looks at other games because nobody thinks there will be interest, so nobody has intrest in other games because nobody ever talks about them.

What happens in the circles I game with is this:
A new game is coming out/one of us sees something. If it piques someones interest they'll look into it a bit further. After that look they'll bring it up to the rest of us. "Hey, have you seen.... What do you think of...."
A recent example of this is Black Seas - a 1700-1800s age of sail ship game. You know, pirates, HMS Victory, Battle of Trafalgar.... Most of the group was pass/meh on it. Two of us were quite interested though (personally I think there's better rules sets for this than what Warlord produces, but....) & another one or two will give it a try (by using borrowed ships - if they like it enough they'l buy their own eventually).
And so I now have a box of tiny plastic ships assembled & in various stages of painting. I HAVE to paint these now as opposed to later as they look pretty poor without their sails/rigging attached & painting them after that step will be A LOT harder.

This is a lucky example. Far too often I see where the answer to "Have you seen" or "What do you think of" is either simply ignoring it, or saying how you have no interest in age of sail and nobody cares, while going back to playing Warhammer. That is assuming the game store isn't hostile to games they don't sell, which I've also seen.

Prices of cards isnt high due to lots of crap cards in each booster. Wotc sets the print run and decides the supply so they could change it in a heartbeat if they wanted. The "crap" cards are designed with other formats in mind, at least for the last decades, and you kind of get them for free.

You should only buy boosters if you like to draft or gamble and never to build a deck. It is a bit of a noob trap but I really like how its done. I mostly play limited and my left over cards enter the card pool of the constructed players and increases the supply for them while they subsidize my limited drafts by paying for cards I dont use. Its a win win.

Decks rotate but there are many popular game modes so most of the staple cards are always in demand and playable in some archetype in some format. And there isnt much of a downside to carrying around 3-5 decks for different format at a time since they are small and easy to carry and can be traded for cash quickly if you want to change anything. Unlike warhammer which is hard to carry around or trade with and you might have hundreds if not thousands of hours of personal investment in building and painting. If you have a bottom tier army it would be hard to quickly find a top tier army to trade for if they are both equal value/standard but you could trade a bad legacy deck for an equivalent modern deck in hours in a larger city or just a few days online.

Its ok for MtG to rotate and change which deck is at the top often and not have perfect balance below the top tier since its a completely different game with different investments than wargaming. Not really comparable in this regard.

Klickor wrote:
Prices of cards isnt high due to lots of crap cards in each booster. Wotc sets the print run and decides the supply so they could change it in a heartbeat if they wanted. The "crap" cards are designed with other formats in mind, at least for the last decades, and you kind of get them for free.

You should only buy boosters if you like to draft or gamble and never to build a deck. It is a bit of a noob trap but I really like how its done. I mostly play limited and my left over cards enter the card pool of the constructed players and increases the supply for them while they subsidize my limited drafts by paying for cards I dont use. Its a win win.

Decks rotate but there are many popular game modes so most of the staple cards are always in demand and playable in some archetype in some format. And there isnt much of a downside to carrying around 3-5 decks for different format at a time since they are small and easy to carry and can be traded for cash quickly if you want to change anything. Unlike warhammer which is hard to carry around or trade with and you might have hundreds if not thousands of hours of personal investment in building and painting. If you have a bottom tier army it would be hard to quickly find a top tier army to trade for if they are both equal value/standard but you could trade a bad legacy deck for an equivalent modern deck in hours in a larger city or just a few days online.

Its ok for MtG to rotate and change which deck is at the top often and not have perfect balance below the top tier since its a completely different game with different investments than wargaming. Not really comparable in this regard.

Balance-wise, MTG and 40k is not a great comparison.

Those "cards for other formats" in Magic are either terrible in anything but Commander, or deliberately designed to be worthless outside of limited, where no-one gets enough powerful cards that the garbage ones can't be ignored. Mark Rosewater himself said on his blog, in response to questions about making packs that weren't meant for drafting that "not designing for draft will not get you the cards you want." Those garbage cards are intended to fill packs, so that cardboard addicts will buy and buy hunting for the few viable ones printed in a set. I hate this part of Magic. There are way too many neat cards that aren't viable if you actually want to win games. Magic has come to a point recently where if practices don't change, and soon, players are going to abandon Magic for other games.

Rotating Standard is necessary for Magic. WOTC does need to sell cards to be able to keep making them, and supporting organized play. If standard never rotated, it wouldn't be standard- it would be vintage- bonkers fast and expensive. And new cards with new abilities would be even less likely to be viable.

Magic also has the pauper format, where only commons are legal.

40k isn't even poorly balanced by design, the rules team just isn't competent at their jobs, and the powers that be, at least, are opposed to hiring people with technical writing skills, and utilizing a more effective method of play testing. Why are there still arguments about people who are paid to write rules, doing their jobs properly, and the erroneous viewpoint that it is somehow up to the players to make the products that they have massively overpaid for "work?" This GW culture is baffling.

I agree. Wotc know what they do when they make cards. Unlike GW it is by design. Its bad for the consumer but you cant say they dont know what they are doing just maybe that they shouldnt.

Klickor wrote:
I agree. Wotc know what they do when they make cards. Unlike GW it is by design. Its bad for the consumer but you cant say they dont know what they are doing just maybe that they shouldnt.

Oko says this post is now a 3/3 elk.

Wotc makes huge mistakes. quite often. enough to warrant some major bans that end up devaluing cards significantly.

at least in standard.

though pioneer cause some issues because they didnt out right ban cards first so people bought up old banned cards that are now banned. losing a decent chunk of hype money.

Wayniac wrote:
A big issue, as is often stated, is that other games need traction/acceptance. 40k, despite its flaws, is the "safe choice", the gaming equivalent to "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". You can reasonably expect stores to stock the product (or be willing to order it), there to be tables and terrain set up for it, and people to play with.

Not always the case with other games, even if they have better rules. And since gamers as a whole seem to be reluctant to take the first step sometimes, you get a situation where nobody looks at other games because nobody thinks there will be interest, so nobody has intrest in other games because nobody ever talks about them.

I've said this many times, but it bears repeating. As the owner of one of the FLGSs in our city says- "Gamers are the flakiest bunch of people he has ever known". I can vouch for that too. Too many times you want to get a new system going, a new campaign etc. you have a lot of people be interested and want to join in only to back out at the last minute or never actually commit. It is infuriating.

It was why WMH took so frustratingly long to get going here. We finally had an FLGS, a bit of a rarity over here in Blighty; somewhere to play WMH in a store, in public view so we could get more players. Loads of people showed interest but they got very few biters and even fewer wanting to actually buy stuff. Christmas was coming up at the time and I said to each of the people interested to "ask" () for a faction starter for Christmas. There- no excuses of "I can't afford it!" and other such excuses (well, if you didn't buy a Dominos every other day maybe you could actually afford it, certain someone. ) that they were making to try and bail. No biters again. We got a small cadre of players playing it, but it was a fraction of a fraction of the number that showed interest.

Same with other games. At this point I've essentially given up if all they want to do is go back to GW games, which is ironic as I cannot remember the last time I saw anything other than MTG played down there, but that's a whole 'nother rant.

 Desubot wrote:

Klickor wrote:
I agree. Wotc know what they do when they make cards. Unlike GW it is by design. Its bad for the consumer but you cant say they dont know what they are doing just maybe that they shouldnt.

Oko says this post is now a 3/3 elk.

Wotc makes huge mistakes. quite often. enough to warrant some major bans that end up devaluing cards significantly.

at least in standard.

though pioneer cause some issues because they didnt out right ban cards first so people bought up old banned cards that are now banned. losing a decent chunk of hype money.

The key difference is that WotC is prepared to admit they f***ed up and ban a card in some formats. GW admits mistakes and corrects incredibly rarely, and even when they do they try and push the exact same set of rules/models for all 'formats' (inasmuch as casual/narrative/matched play are 'formats'), which ends up doing things like making Eldar pointless in casual play because they're priced in all formats based on optimized tournament lists.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Desubot wrote:

Klickor wrote:
I agree. Wotc know what they do when they make cards. Unlike GW it is by design. Its bad for the consumer but you cant say they dont know what they are doing just maybe that they shouldnt.

Oko says this post is now a 3/3 elk.

Wotc makes huge mistakes. quite often. enough to warrant some major bans that end up devaluing cards significantly.

at least in standard.

though pioneer cause some issues because they didnt out right ban cards first so people bought up old banned cards that are now banned. losing a decent chunk of hype money.

The key difference is that WotC is prepared to admit they f***ed up and ban a card in some formats. GW admits mistakes and corrects incredibly rarely, and even when they do they try and push the exact same set of rules/models for all 'formats' (inasmuch as casual/narrative/matched play are 'formats'), which ends up doing things like making Eldar pointless in casual play because they're priced in all formats based on optimized tournament lists.

Well i agree. though they kinda have no choice as they are beholden to their main bread and butter organized events.

Whilst I don't play Magic anymore (thanks to the Energy fuelled fupwittery of the Kaladesh block) its always had a very solid ruleset to largely carry it over WoTC increasingly frequent blunders

40k is far more wobbly due to GW's general 'do it like Jervis' way of thinking, I'd rather they sunk some effort into a tight ruleset that could be toned down for 'casual' play rather than the having to self patch it up for 'serious' play

But as long as you are willing to accept 40k for what it is you can't be doing the fun wrong (well maybe GK but...)

Wayniac wrote:

ccs wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
A big issue, as is often stated, is that other games need traction/acceptance. 40k, despite its flaws, is the "safe choice", the gaming equivalent to "no one ever got fired for buying IBM". You can reasonably expect stores to stock the product (or be willing to order it), there to be tables and terrain set up for it, and people to play with.

Not always the case with other games, even if they have better rules. And since gamers as a whole seem to be reluctant to take the first step sometimes, you get a situation where nobody looks at other games because nobody thinks there will be interest, so nobody has intrest in other games because nobody ever talks about them.

What happens in the circles I game with is this:
A new game is coming out/one of us sees something. If it piques someones interest they'll look into it a bit further. After that look they'll bring it up to the rest of us. "Hey, have you seen.... What do you think of...."
A recent example of this is Black Seas - a 1700-1800s age of sail ship game. You know, pirates, HMS Victory, Battle of Trafalgar.... Most of the group was pass/meh on it. Two of us were quite interested though (personally I think there's better rules sets for this than what Warlord produces, but....) & another one or two will give it a try (by using borrowed ships - if they like it enough they'l buy their own eventually).
And so I now have a box of tiny plastic ships assembled & in various stages of painting. I HAVE to paint these now as opposed to later as they look pretty poor without their sails/rigging attached & painting them after that step will be A LOT harder.

This is a lucky example. Far too often I see where the answer to "Have you seen" or "What do you think of" is either simply ignoring it, or saying how you have no interest in age of sail and nobody cares, while going back to playing Warhammer. That is assuming the game store isn't hostile to games they don't sell, which I've also seen.

Oh that happens. For ex; we looked at that new Marvel miniatures game. The consensus was "eh." Models look good. But interest in playing it? Zero. Maybe later? Maybe if some peoples favorite characters ever get made? Another was the Aeronautica Imperialis & Titanticus stuff - wow, talk about a cold reception....

As for the shop being hostile to things they don't/won't sell?
We can deal with that.
1) Only a fraction of our gaming is at the shop. Doesn't matter what the shops opinion is on whatever we're playing Sunday afternoon over at Frank's.
2) Shop doesn't want to/can't/won't supply something for whatever reason? That's fine. We've got this thing called the internet. Shop doesn't want us using their tables for games they don't/can't/won't sell? That's fine, see #1 above. It's perfectly reasonable to want what you sell showcased.
3) Shop gets pissy when they learn about something we're playing elsewhere that they don't/won't/can't sell us? Then we turn off the $ until they learn to keep their opinion to themselves.
Just because your the local shop doesn't mean that you're entitled to the $.

 Turnip Jedi wrote:
Whilst I don't play Magic anymore (thanks to the Energy fuelled fupwittery of the Kaladesh block) its always had a very solid ruleset to largely carry it over WoTC increasingly frequent blunders

40k is far more wobbly due to GW's general 'do it like Jervis' way of thinking, I'd rather they sunk some effort into a tight ruleset that could be toned down for 'casual' play rather than the having to self patch it up for 'serious' play

But as long as you are willing to accept 40k for what it is you can't be doing the fun wrong (well maybe GK but...)

This I think is the worst part. While over the years I've started to agree with the Jervis way of thinking, it can't be denied that it's far easier to have a tight set of rules that can be loosened for more laid back/narrative/wonky play than have a loose set of rules and fill in the gaps for competitive. Although Warmahordes had that and I never, ever, ever remember anyone playing casual Warmahordes games because even if you weren't doing Steamroller Scenario 2-list games, the rules themselves were tuned for playing in a competitive and decidedly non-narrative way and the very mechanical/methodical way the rules worked playing that way felt like you were actively going against the game because everything was so precise.

From the games I've played, for all its flaws, only 40k has at least been able to satisfy both needs (albeit its balance/competitive part needs extra work). But if you're playing competitive, it feels competitive. If you're playing narrative, it feels narrative. No other game has been able to do change depending on how you play.