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I wonder if there would be a difference in the community if GW had not pushed it as a competitive game in its early years? Would people see it as a more casual hobby or would the competitive spirit still have arisen to push it as a primarily tournament-type game.

(Though I do agree GW could do a much better job balancing the game for competitive use, but at heart I’m just a filthy collector/casual).

 Crimson wrote:
Because trust me, the GW guys are much more like me than they're like you.

Oh i believe that, for sure, look at the state of the game.

Sigmar does. That's why it's a better tournament game.

In my experience working with companies who have continuous balance cycles, competitive players do not want balance.

They want a meta they can solve, feel good about solving, and complain about. Complaints give them that dopamine rush of knowing how the game is broken, and figuring out the broken new meta makes them feel like they know things others do not.

Then, some fraction of them goes out and buys the broken thing, enough to make it profitable anyway.

That's exactly the game people who invest heavily into the gameplay aspect buy into, even if they're extremely vocal about not WANTING that to be the case.

But this is capitalism. GW doesn't listen to your complaints, they listen to sales figures. And they know that they can get whales to buy more if balance follows the "wheel of fortune" model more than the "finely tuned scale" model.

People complaining about allies? Clearly the fix to that is to give armies a special bonus for not having allies!

We COULD release a PDF with the "purity bonus" that each faction gets for not taking allies in the list. If we did it all at once, we could balance them against each other, playtest them against each other, etc.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooor we could pick our most popular faction, give them that bonus and package it with another half-dozen bonuses slathered on in order to justify selling it as a book, completely upend the competitive meta so that faction shoots from the bottom to the tippy top and everyone competitively minded makes a rage post about it, then runs out and buys the book and a few boxes of models.

If nothing else, the way some people have been acting in this thread sure has been a reminder of why I avoid the competitive scene...

There's chill people out there, they just know better than to post in the Dakka general discussion forum

This place has always been, shall we say, loosely moderated.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
If nothing else, the way some people have been acting in this thread sure has been a reminder of why I avoid the competitive scene...

It's the sign of a weak argument, when you resort to snide comments and insult the people who just don't agree with you.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
If nothing else, the way some people have been acting in this thread sure has been a reminder of why I avoid the competitive scene...

It's the sign of a weak argument, when you resort to snide comments and insult the people who just don't agree with you.

I can't tell if this is a general statement, in which case I agree.

 Crimson wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

It's your job to make the mods eye catching.

And I will. But GW needs to produce kits that come with bits that make that possible. Making awesome looking models is literally their main priority.

It's GW's job to make a kit so that you can properly put units together.

And you can. You can build the Chaos Terminators in several differnt ways. Sure, you cannot build all possible permutations that the rules allow from a single box. This is often the case with units that have a lot of options. Deathwatch Veterans sprue for example has only one stalker bolter even though the rules allows giving one to every guy. Now due the whiners like you GW has recently started to just remove the options from the rules. So when in the next edition of CSM codex the Terminators come with powerfist as a default and only one of them can take a power axe we know who we can thank.

You seem to forget that in your constant white knighting.

I am not white knighting, I am just trying to explain to your poor robot brain how a human being with aesthetic sensibilities and not hell bent on winning in a beer and pretzels game might approach things. Because trust me, the GW guys are much more like me than they're like you.

I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators. That's not a good kit, period. Also the Deathwatch box is fething garbage too, so that's not helping your argument either.
And no, none of those kits look "awesome" out of the box. Your love of hodgepodge messes is messy and not aesthetically pleasing. So there you go, GW didn't even do the job you said they're supposed to do!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Yoyoyo wrote:
There's chill people out there, they just know better than to post in the Dakka general discussion forum

This place has always been, shall we say, loosely moderated.

Anything not positive = loosely moderated to you.

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Its a mystery to me as to why people keep trying to force something so staunchly not a competitive game into that niche. If GW wanted to make the game Warmachine levels of competitive they easily could but they don't for a reason.

SERIOUSLY.

It couldn't possibly be more clear that 40k is meant to be a fun, narratively-oriented, mostly-casual kind of game about spectacle and cool battles and funny moments and nice memories to enjoy with friends. That's the priority. It's always been the priority. It always will be the priority. People are welcome to focus on tournaments and competition and winning, of course, but it's just so weird to keep seeing people expecting, or demanding, that the game completely alter itself into something it isn't and never has been just to better match their particular style, when they could just … go play a different game with a more technical, competitive focus to it.

GW is marketing the new edition as playtested and a competitive one with matched play rules, balance changes, etc... They are just bad at it.

Yoyoyo wrote:
There's chill people out there, they just know better than to post in the Dakka general discussion forum

This place has always been, shall we say, loosely moderated.

Nah, it's alright, most people here seem okay. Like in the WYSIWG thread people were strongly disagreeing but no one seemed, like, straight up angry or overly rude. It's just a couple people in this thread seemed just… not people I want to talk about 40k with.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple!

Dude you have 16,000 posts here and you straight up sound like an ashhole. You can't make an intelligent response without being super passive aggressive?
All of your posts in this thread can be summed in in 5 words: "You're wrong, so you".

 JNAProductions wrote:
D&D isn't about competition. Can't say the same for the others (having not played them) but D&D is NOT a competitive game.

You do know that D&D originally started as a competitive game, right? Gary G wanted the players to basically try to collect as much loot as possible and if that meant dicking over a member of your team, so be it. Temple of Elemental Evil ring any bells? You literally had to trick a teammate into going into one of the portals as a sacrifice before the party could go on. Later they amended this and allowed "minions" or "hirelings" to sacrifice.

The milk toast editions that exist today are basically a 4-8 hour version of read aloud My Little Pony.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Crimson wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

It's your job to make the mods eye catching.

And I will. But GW needs to produce kits that come with bits that make that possible. Making awesome looking models is literally their main priority.

It's GW's job to make a kit so that you can properly put units together.

And you can. You can build the Chaos Terminators in several differnt ways. Sure, you cannot build all possible permutations that the rules allow from a single box. This is often the case with units that have a lot of options. Deathwatch Veterans sprue for example has only one stalker bolter even though the rules allows giving one to every guy. Now due the whiners like you GW has recently started to just remove the options from the rules. So when in the next edition of CSM codex the Terminators come with powerfist as a default and only one of them can take a power axe we know who we can thank.

You seem to forget that in your constant white knighting.

I am not white knighting, I am just trying to explain to your poor robot brain how a human being with aesthetic sensibilities and not hell bent on winning in a beer and pretzels game might approach things. Because trust me, the GW guys are much more like me than they're like you.

I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators. That's not a good kit, period. Also the Deathwatch box is fething garbage too, so that's not helping your argument either.
And no, none of those kits look "awesome" out of the box. Your love of hodgepodge messes is messy and not aesthetically pleasing. So there you go, GW didn't even do the job you said they're supposed to do!

But they do look awesome and I enjoy seeing units with flair and character instead of same model with same loadout x10. The chaos termie box is a fantastic set of sculpts.

What has that got to do with how many guns are in there?

Presenting your argument in passive aggressive tones does not make your more correct, nor will it make your view seem more reasonable.

Dudeface wrote:
I can't tell if this is a general statement, in which case I agree.

It was.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
D&D isn't about competition. Can't say the same for the others (having not played them) but D&D is NOT a competitive game.

You do know that D&D originally started as a competitive game, right? Gary G wanted the players to basically try to collect as much loot as possible and if that meant dicking over a member of your team, so be it. Temple of Elemental Evil ring any bells? You literally had to trick a teammate into going into one of the portals as a sacrifice before the party could go on. Later they amended this and allowed "minions" or "hirelings" to sacrifice.

The milk toast editions that exist today are basically a 4-8 hour version of read aloud My Little Pony.

Do you play D&D? Because I'd have to assume, from that, that you don't

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers.

Why, why, why oh why does it have to be one or the other? If this isn't a why not both what is?

I can't have a great looking game of miniatures that doesn't suck? Are those two things mutually exclusive?

It's always the casuals vs the competitive players here, i seriously think a lot of us are on the same page. I enjoy the hobby aspects of this game at least as much as i do actually playing it.

This is like politics in the states, i gotta be on one team or the other?

You can absolutely have both balance and cool aesthetics, at least in theory. I am pretty sure no one here has argued against balance. But Slayer argued that aesthetics should be sacrificed for the ease of min-maxing and that certainly seems like lunacy to many.

Furthermore, some people do not value balance so highly. This doesn't mean they're against balance or that they do not care about it at all. They merely find the game enjoyable despite certain balancing issues.

Also, when discussing about balance, one should bear in mind the environment (or the 'meta'.) Ultimately I feel that whether game is balanced for top tournament tables is far less important than whether it is (roughly) balance for casual pick up games in which people use their hodgepodge collections. In top end competitive environment people will always find the most broken thing, and there even tiny differences in power seem significant. And as someone said, I think many competitve people even enjoy that. 'Solving' the game, finding that optimal build. And as long as this does not become chess where everyone has an identical army that optimal build will always exist, no matter matter how well the game is balanced.

Now, balance for casual setting is far more important. This for me means that two people with random TAC armies can play a game with either of them haveing a reasonable chance of winning (40%ish, maybe, assuming equal skill.) Constantly getting curbstomped simply is not fun, and to many constantly winning without effort really isn't fun in the long run either. I don't think the game currently is quite is there; the marine supplements are obviously overtuned, and previously the Eldar stacked hit penalty shanenigans were pretty unfun as well.

Even by dakka standard this thread is absolutely bat****.

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:

 JNAProductions wrote:
D&D isn't about competition. Can't say the same for the others (having not played them) but D&D is NOT a competitive game.

You do know that D&D originally started as a competitive game, right? Gary G wanted the players to basically try to collect as much loot as possible and if that meant dicking over a member of your team, so be it. Temple of Elemental Evil ring any bells? You literally had to trick a teammate into going into one of the portals as a sacrifice before the party could go on. Later they amended this and allowed "minions" or "hirelings" to sacrifice.

The milk toast editions that exist today are basically a 4-8 hour version of read aloud My Little Pony.

God, yeah, I hate when a company puts out an edition of a game that regular non-hardcore gamer friends of mine want to actually play and enjoy instead of a hypercompetitive backstab-fest I have to go play with smelly strangers in a basement.

The new edition of DnD, whatever magic formula it has hit on, is some black magic wizardry. I have had so many friends of mine ask me "Scotsman, you play with miniatures and paint them and stuff, do you know how to play DnD, me and my girlfriend want to try it out!"

I dunno, it reads like the entry-level RPG DnD has been for several editions now to me, but they've done something right in a big way to make the appeal as mainstream as it is now.

Sterling191 wrote:
Even by dakka standard this thread is absolutely bat****.

The D&D arguments slay me.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators.

Yes, you keep repeating that and for some reason you seem to think that it matters. I don't know why. Would you be satisfied if they errated the starting melee weapon for them to be a power fist instead of the power axe? (I think the kit comes with enough fists.) I mean absolutely nothing would functionally change but your specific complain wouldn't apply anymore. The starting loadout is pretty arbitrarily chosen and is just one among many possible loadouts, it really isn't any more important than any other combination.

 Crimson wrote:

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 Crimson wrote:
So yes, the aesthetics matter, they matter way more than your inane desire to min-max everything in a silly game of toy soldiers.

Why, why, why oh why does it have to be one or the other? If this isn't a why not both what is?

I can't have a great looking game of miniatures that doesn't suck? Are those two things mutually exclusive?

It's always the casuals vs the competitive players here, i seriously think a lot of us are on the same page. I enjoy the hobby aspects of this game at least as much as i do actually playing it.

This is like politics in the states, i gotta be on one team or the other?

You can absolutely have both balance and cool aesthetics, at least in theory. I am pretty sure no one here has argued against balance. But Slayer argued that aesthetics should be sacrificed for the ease of min-maxing and that certainly seems like lunacy to many.

Furthermore, some people do not value balance so highly. This doesn't mean they're against balance or that they do not care about it at all. They merely find the game enjoyable despite certain balancing issues.

Also, when discussing about balance, one should bear in mind the environment (or the 'meta'.) Ultimately I feel that whether game is balanced for top tournament tables is far less important than whether it is (roughly) balance for casual pick up games in which people use their hodgepodge collections. In top end competitive environment people will always find the most broken thing, and there even tiny differences in power seem significant. And as someone said, I think many competitve people even enjoy that. 'Solving' the game, finding that optimal build. And as long as this does not become chess where everyone has an identical army that optimal build will always exist, no matter matter how well the game is balanced.

Now, balance for casual setting is far more important. This for me means that two people with random TAC armies can play a game with either of them haveing a reasonable chance of winning (40%ish, maybe, assuming equal skill.) Constantly getting curbstomped simply is not fun, and to many constantly winning without effort really isn't fun in the long run either. I don't think the game currently is quite is there; the marine supplements are obviously overtuned, and previously the Eldar stacked hit penalty shanenigans were pretty unfun as well.

Your aesthetics take up room on a sprue so that you can't build the default unit of 5 Combi-Bolters, 5 Chainaxes. Not sure why it's so hard for you to grasp that this DOES make it a bad kit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Crimson wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple. You can't even make the default loadout for Chaos Terminators.

Yes, you keep repeating that and for some reason you seem to think that it matters. I don't know why. Would you be satisfied if they errated the starting melee weapon for them to be a power fist instead of the power axe? (I think the kit comes with enough fists.) I mean absolutely nothing would functionally change but your specific complain wouldn't apply anymore. The starting loadout is pretty arbitrarily chosen and is just one among many possible loadouts, it really isn't any more important than any other combination.

It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.

Slayer, I think you need to go to bed.

 Sim-Life wrote:
Slayer, I think you need to go to bed.

No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Slayer, I think you need to go to bed.

No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.

I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.

The default loadout could be sword for the champion and four fists like it is for loyalists. But it doesn't really matter. They even changed it from Power axes to Chainaxes between the codex versions. It is arbitrary, it doesn't matter, it is just one combination among many, all of which cannot simply be included in this box without adding an extra sprue. You would be satisfied with a purely symbolic errata that would have zero functional impact. Your argument is not based on any discernible logic and you're literally raging about nothing.

 Crimson wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
It does not come with that many Power Fists so that doesn't really matter now, does it? For sake of argument though, yes that would at least make more sense.

The default loadout could be sword for the champion and four fists like it is for loyalists. But it doesn't really matter. They even changed it from Power axes to Chainaxes between the codex versions. It is arbitrary, it doesn't matter, it is just one combination among many, all of which cannot simply be included in this box without adding an extra sprue. You would be satisfied with a purely symbolic errata that would have zero functional impact. Your argument is not based on any discernible logic and you're literally raging about nothing.

You must be new to this forum. Your last sentence is a summary.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Slayer, I think you need to go to bed.

No I think you should argue why the Chaos Terminator kit is reasonable as is. Either that, or you can argue for the main topic that play testing that isn't doing it's intended job is okay too. I look forward to the hilarity.

1. The chaos terminator kit has literally nothing to do with the argument. You're using it to derail the argument because your position is weak.

2. The main argument was that 40k is is not and was never intended to be a high level competitive game and trying to force it into that role is a mistake but at a casual level the game is okay.

Dudeface wrote:
I'm curious what your thoughts about the one kit lacking equipment has to do with play testing to be honest?

Not a damn thing.

Slayer just isn't going to quit until hes been vindicated/validated.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

 Desubot wrote:
I hate to break it too you but the competitive scene is probably not the majority of the customer base.

I'd believe that if i wasn't watching the top selling products on GWs website for the last year or so, every single release you have some kind of meta breaking BS that just wipes out whatever stock GW had.

A good example of that recently was with the SM codices, IH hits and every single SM flyer in stock is gone within a day, and i don't think it was a bunch of casual gamers who just suddenly thought those flying bricks look really cool.

Another example would be with the IK release, for almost a year the top selling model on GWs website was the boogie man.


Casual players don't drop hundreds of dollars on the spot right after some new book drops, meta chasers do.

MiguelFelstone wrote:

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
I'm gonna repeat the problem for you one more time. Let's see how well you understand when I make it stupid simple!

Dude you have 16,000 posts here and you straight up sound like an ashhole. You can't make an intelligent response without being super passive aggressive?
All of your posts in this thread can be summed in in 5 words: "You're wrong, so you".

they're not sounding like one....
and this could sum up most of their posts.

GW plays the game fundamentally different than competitive players do. the design direction starts at the model and ends with the rules. so if their design direction is one that starts as narrative biased, then when it comes to rules, the model influences rules.

I will admit GW does "screw the pooch" when it comes to "balance". Hell primaris as a whole sucked for me up until recently. but the main issue is how "competitive" players, playing a game with different rules(ITC/ETC/whatever), complaining about how unbalanced the game is, in said different gameplay.


the major thing is, if the models looked like diarrhea, even if they had a "competitive" ruleset, would not be as successful as they are now.