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The guy who said "learn to play". I'll give him 7th ed Orks and I'll take 7th ed craftworld. 10000000 scatterlasers later, GG.

I’m absolutely positive I can lose with even the most OP army and spotted a 500 point handicap.

 Fajita Fan wrote:
I’m absolutely positive I can lose with even the most OP army and spotted a 500 point handicap.

Now THAT would be a fun White Dwarf battle report!

Oh me in a BR would be comically bad. I would lose the narrative game with the new army that always wins. :/

 Fajita Fan wrote:
Oh me in a BR would be comically bad. I would lose the narrative game with the new army that always wins. :/

That's what I mean would be fun!

Having one player DELIBERATELY trying to lose with a tournament list of the "best" army against a fluffy list from the "worst" army!

There are some armies, primarily xenos ones, that have been consistently weak. After 2nd Ed, when they were brokenly overpowered, Tyranids got a hefty nerf and have been consistently low on the tier list ever since. You might infer from my avatar that I'm doing the woe-is-me-my-army-sucks shtick but I think you'll find the general consensus backs me up. And I'm certainly not complaining about my Guard.

Because 'Nids may seem like a one-off outlier: Aside from the short-lived Nob Biker spam, Orks have been consistently low since 3rd. Necrons are in a similar boat to Tyranids with having been very strong at their full introduction in 3rd, but were steadily nerfed into the ground and have remained there ever since.

There are also armies that went underpowered for a very, very long time. Imperial Guard spent a full decade (3rd-4th) pretty much in the gutter, but then came back in a big way. Dark Eldar similarly went a decade before they escaped their then-very-dated 3rd Ed codex.

Personally I am not into the game for competition, but if my first experiences to the hobby were getting tabled by turn 2 every game, I don't know if I'd have stuck with it. I would always warn a new player if their heart is set on a race that historically has struggled and shows no signs of changing, not because I think they should be looking to win tournaments from the get-go, but because it's hard to learn the ropes when you can do everything right and still lose due to army imbalance. If they're okay with that challenge, more power to them. And right now it is bothering the hell out of me that I'm seeing posts on Facebook along the lines of 'I just bought the battleforce, help me make a list' and the replies are essentially 'most of it's worthless, get rid of it and buy these three meta units instead'. Sucks the fun right out of it IMO.

Getting back to balance, I do think the impact of local meta is often understated. What people who you will actually play against actually field matters a lot more than an abstract notion of all possible matchups gleaned from the Internet.

 catbarf wrote:
Personally I am not into the game for competition, but if my first experiences to the hobby were getting tabled by turn 2 every game, I don't know if I'd have stuck with it. I would always warn a new player if their heart is set on a race that historically has struggled and shows no signs of changing, not because I think they should be looking to win tournaments from the get-go, but because it's hard to learn the ropes when you can do everything right and still lose due to army imbalance. If they're okay with that challenge, more power to them. And right now it is bothering the hell out of me that I'm seeing posts on Facebook along the lines of 'I just bought the battleforce, help me make a list' and the replies are essentially 'most of it's worthless, get rid of it and buy these three meta units instead'. Sucks the fun right out of it IMO..

This is so very true. It's a flaw of GW games in particular that the sort of reply you see is common. At least other games, while sure those options might not be the best, there are almost always ways to make them better and you rarely see someone asking for list advice and saying what they have/like being told nah toss all that junk and use this netlist. That sort of advice is unhelpful and often just turns people off because who wants to be told after they've bought something, especially when you're doing it in the way the game tells you to, that it's all garbage and they need to spend even more money on other things. It isn't helpful and the fact that it's even considered acceptable is one of the biggest condemnations of 40k as a game because having that happen should be considered a huge, colossal failure of game design.

People should expect helpful advice, especially new players who are just starting their collections, WITHOUT telling them to just buy whatever the cheese du jour is. And if the options are netlist or lose, then the game is degenerate (as Sirlin would define it)

 catbarf wrote:
There are some armies, primarily xenos ones, that have been consistently weak. After 2nd Ed, when they were brokenly overpowered, Tyranids got a hefty nerf and have been consistently low on the tier list ever since. You might infer from my avatar that I'm doing the woe-is-me-my-army-sucks shtick but I think you'll find the general consensus backs me up. And I'm certainly not complaining about my Guard.

Because 'Nids may seem like a one-off outlier: Aside from the short-lived Nob Biker spam, Orks have been consistently low since 3rd. Necrons are in a similar boat to Tyranids with having been very strong at their full introduction in 3rd, but were steadily nerfed into the ground and have remained there ever since.

There are also armies that went underpowered for a very, very long time. Imperial Guard spent a full decade (3rd-4th) pretty much in the gutter, but then came back in a big way. Dark Eldar similarly went a decade before they escaped their then-very-dated 3rd Ed codex.

Personally I am not into the game for competition, but if my first experiences to the hobby were getting tabled by turn 2 every game, I don't know if I'd have stuck with it. I would always warn a new player if their heart is set on a race that historically has struggled and shows no signs of changing, not because I think they should be looking to win tournaments from the get-go, but because it's hard to learn the ropes when you can do everything right and still lose due to army imbalance. If they're okay with that challenge, more power to them. And right now it is bothering the hell out of me that I'm seeing posts on Facebook along the lines of 'I just bought the battleforce, help me make a list' and the replies are essentially 'most of it's worthless, get rid of it and buy these three meta units instead'. Sucks the fun right out of it IMO.

Getting back to balance, I do think the impact of local meta is often understated. What people who you will actually play against actually field matters a lot more than an abstract notion of all possible matchups gleaned from the Internet.

For the sake of friendliness and olive branches - though I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much about them being accepted - I do actually agree with most of what you've said here, at least in terms of the underlying realities in question (though not necessarily their interpretation). Like it's just a straight-up fact that DE went for about a decade without an update. I wasn't playing at the time... I left the hobby riiiiiigght around when 3rd edition hit (though DE had been introduced via White Dwarf like 6 months prior? Something like that, anyway)... but the history is there to look at for anyone who bothers. And as far as I know, orkz have never been a top-tier army.

Aside about orkz: They can kinda afford that, though, given how fun they are to play, and that they're not MEANT to be an elite force in terms of lore. The randomness of their rules (which I think was actually a big mistake to tone down) meant you could never really predict or rely on what would happen (the biggest problem with those rules, IMO, is that they never really included a random chance of the orkz performing way BETTER than most armies if you got lucky; it was just "do you suck or are you... mediocre?").

The main issues of disagreements around these things, much like around the simple, inarguable fact that GW's priority is making a friendly narrative wargame rather than a competitive tournament wargame, is just how bad you think they are, and how much they impact your enjoyment of the game. And that seems to orbit very much around how one plays it and how one's friends and LGS and gaming group play it and how competitive you are.

Early in the thread I made the minor, tangential point that the higher and more complex you program a chess computer to play against itself, the higher percentage of times white is going to win. We get a similar thing: the imbalance between factions becomes more pronounced at the "highest" levels of most clearly competitive matched play, wherein everyone is using the most optimal list they were able to come up with... and on the lowest level of skill, where neither player really knows what they're doing just yet, they're still learning the game, so they just march their models at each other, shoot, get close, charge.

But for the skill levels in between, which is the majority of players, it's not as pronounced. And for the people who aren't super competitive and super skilled (but also aren't super new and inexperienced) it's both not as pronounced AND not as much of a detriment to fun... and even if you seem to be losing a lot with a current faction, if you're playing against people with comparable skill, you can probable correct that just by improving your list and getting better with your tactics, not having to switch factions! AND, like we've been discussing, sooner or later there will be a new codex or new edition and you're relative strength will change regardless.

So at the end of the day, we're MOSTLY just talking about subjective differences of interpretation caused by personal differences in preferences, skill level, the kind of group or community we play in, etc. And that's an argument no one can ever really WIN.

Yes, 40k is terrible in terms of the balance one needs for a tournament game.
Yes, the balance of points could be a lot better.
Yes, balanced point values makes the game better for almost all players, regardless of the narrative vs competitive dynamic.
Yes, there's issues of detail scaling in the game, and the rules aren't really ideal right now for anything in excess of 1500 points max.
Yes, some factions and codexes are, in many contexts and ways, "better" or "worse" than others.
Sometimes, things that would make balance easier come in conflict with other elements of the game many players enjoy and don't want to see removed...
...but better balance also isn't *inherently* at odds with a narrative, immersive game.
Yes, the more diversity there is in codexes, factions, special rules, stratagems, relics, and units, the harder it is to balance them all.
Yes, the faster the release schedule, the harder it is to balance them all.
Yes, there's ways to represent different faction types other than just making more codexes.
GW have a difficult job with lots of different priorities.
Right now, GW prioritize designing 40k (but not ALL their games) in a way that leans more towards friendly narrative games than competitive tournament games, and this is unlikely to change.

Everything else is just a question of how we feel about it, whether or not we're okay with it, how much it does or doesn't impact our approach to the hobby, whether that impact is positive or negative, and so on. Which is a question of subjectivity.

Warhammer is a HUGELY diverse hobby, with countless approaches. I've been by no means been perfect or even all that good in this regard, but we should all try to be cool with other people having different feelings about different decisions GW makes, and not insisting it has to always be all about us and OUR version of the hobby, right?

Anyway, that's my one last try at us all being friends here, and remembering we're all here because there's at least something about this hobby we love and keeps us coming back, and makes us so invested. I mean, we're all 40k fans, right? We're a community! We have a common interest!

Except, as has been explained, it does not do the job of being a narrative game.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Except, as has been explained, it does not do the job of being a narrative game.

Whether it does or doesn't, to what degree it does, and whether it does so enough for what you want to get out of it, are all 100% subjective questions.

I , personally, me, in my opinion, my subjective and personal opinion, etc etc etc feel that, apart from issues with detail scaling, and certain very specific issues regarding particular units, and my personal and subjective blahblahblah preference for alternating activation (or whatever the term is called in WarCry and such?) over I Go You Go* (or whatever the acronym is) think it does a decent job, and acknowledge that I can't have everything my way all the time, and certain things I'd like would come at the expense of more competitive players, or players who like larger games, or even players who want SMALLER games.

"This game is primarily designed with laid-back narrative games between friends, using matched points vales and a mission, as the 'standard' image of a 'baseline' game, to which other considerations are appended" is a truth-statement we can argue about.

"it is not a very good game, in terms of the kind of game it wants to be" is a subjective opinion over which arguing is completely f-ing pointless. You can't "explain" or "establish" or "prove" that anymore than you could the claim that pineapples on pizza are gross.

I mean... come on, Slayer! You're so committed to "winning" this debate that you want to say all our personal feelings and preferences have been "already explained"??? As *I* explained, I think the game has some flaws, but I think it's good, and have fun playing it, and think it's flaws are impressively minor given how many things they have to juggle on such a tight and demanding schedule with limited resources!

*- And that, too, works only on some scales, not others. In some contexts, alternating activations would be a nightmare.

My best 40k experiences have been in a close-knit group of friends who all played the game. We made house rules, we imposed points handicaps, we made wacky lists and we generally had a blast. Even with my underpowered army (Orks), it was possible to have a decently balanced game full of fun by selectively modifying some of the basic rules or conditions accordingly. I loved playing this way.

Then I got older and moved away and found myself without a core group of friends to play with. I started playing pick-up games in gaming stores. And these are just... un-fun if you're not bringing a competitive list for a competitive army. I get stomped over and over again, because the game's poor internal balance is something that gets ruthlessly exploited in the casual pick-up game scene rather than fixed with gentleman's agreements. It almost seems as if the poor balance encourages jerks to tool up to destroy everyone with cheese, because they can and it's so obviously a winning strategy.

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Fajita Fan wrote:

Well… Grey Knights are marines…

All I heard about for years was how overpowered Matt Ward's GK were, then Phil Kelly's Space Wolves, how weak DE were now, OMG NO ONE PLAYS NECRONS, Orks are trash except Nob bikers, Eldar are too weak, etc. I know that plenty of codices had a good build, usually some one trick pony like Wave Serpents, but as overall books? Now marine players always believe they're at a disadvantage but when every playerbase thinks they're underpowered I find it amusing. I browse different forums and so far no one has said how overpowered they feel with CA2019, the grass is always greener in the other section.

This is part of why that tangent about advising a new player against buying a particular army they like because they're really sucky right now in competitive terms was so weird to me… which armies are "bad" and which aren't is constantly in flux. If someone sticks with the hobby for more than a year or two, chances are their preferred army will end up in a totally different "tier" then when they started. Drukhari may be a "bad" army now (though I wonder how much of that is people misinterpreting the fact that they're an unforgiving army, that requires a lot of finesse to use well), but someday it won't be, so I'm not going to let that deter me from the fact that I love their models and love their lore and love the way they play.

Someone's probably going to come in and yell some exception at me, like "SUCH-AND-SUCH ARMY HAS SUCKED EVER SINCE 5E" or something, as though outliers automatically nullify any point made about something that's generally true, but… well… at this point I'm not really writing my posts for the benefit of the people who've completely dug in their heels on 40k being an awful, irreparably broken PoS with virtually no redeeming qualities and all that.

The constant changes in power are part of the problem. I don't want my DA to be OP cheese for 6 months, then garbage for 3 years, maybe mediocre for a few months later. I want to be able to build a decent list and play games with a good shot at winning (through skill, not randomness) and have a good story happen, all at the same time.

The expectation is not for all armies to be top-tier, or to suck all flavor out of the game and make one generic codex for everyone's models. It is for the gap between the best armies and the worst to be small enough that, for those of us who enjoy a more competitive mindset, skill remains the determining factor, and all armies have a good shot at winning games. Mind you, winning isn't merely about the end result, but in having good, close, challenging battles.

This balance can be achieved while retaining flavor, too. It would just be in different places than pasted-on rules, or using different names for the same USRs depending on which codex you're reading.

Fajita Fan wrote:Learn to play.

This is an elitist, condescending attitude. Understanding the rules of 40k does not cause the game's severe imbalances to poof away.

MiguelFelstone wrote:
Games Workshop does NOT test their products in a competitive environment, or any environment it seems.

I see click bait articles all the time complaining about one thing or another, ways they could improve the game, ect, and that would be wonderful it it actually accomplished a damn thing.

If you accept the above, why on gods green earth would you believe it will be improved? If i'm wrong i'd love to be proven so, please elaborate.

Grey Knights are the poster boys for GWs in-house test team and the perfect example of how completely out of tune they are with the competitive players who buy their products.

If you have a single faction that can't win tournaments for years on end you have a problem, and like i said it's been like this for years, the last GK winning list i saw ran 5-6 baby carriers so it was a while ago.

So? What's your point?

They're plastic models that you build and paint and play a game with. I'm not looking for a perfectly balanced game, I'm looking for a multi-faceted hobby where I can make pew-pew sounds and cheer when I manage to roll enough sixes to be statistically improbable.

If you're going to tournaments with the same faction over and over again you're either:
A. having a great time because you're playing with your favorite faction come heck or high water
or
B. not doing that because you buy whatever the meta army is secondhand off of locals or ebay and then selling that as soon as the meta changes

The only people complaining about X army being useless AT THE TOURNAMENT that they spent HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS to travel to are people that aren't currently playing that army but would like to in the future.

And so the cycle continues.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
...And that seems to orbit very much around how one plays it and how one's friends and LGS and gaming group play it and how competitive you are.

Early in the thread I made the minor, tangential point that the higher and more complex you program a chess computer to play against itself, the higher percentage of times white is going to win. We get a similar thing: the imbalance between factions becomes more pronounced at the "highest" levels of most clearly competitive matched play, wherein everyone is using the most optimal list they were able to come up with... and on the lowest level of skill, where neither player really knows what they're doing just yet, they're still learning the game, so they just march their models at each other, shoot, get close, charge.

But for the skill levels in between, which is the majority of players, it's not as pronounced. And for the people who aren't super competitive and super skilled (but also aren't super new and inexperienced) it's both not as pronounced AND not as much of a detriment to fun... and even if you seem to be losing a lot with a current faction, if you're playing against people with comparable skill, you can probable correct that just by improving your list and getting better with your tactics, not having to switch factions! AND, like we've been discussing, sooner or later there will be a new codex or new edition and you're relative strength will change regardless.

I agree with all of that. My closest friends from college are the ones that got me back into 40K after a long absence, and our group is far from competitive- I have Guard and Tyranids, one is Death Guard, another is Orks, another is Thousand Sons, another is Ultramarines, another is Elysians. We don't take the game particularly seriously. Heck, I'm a painter first and foremost.

But all the same, even in a non-competitive setting, we do run into balance issues from time to time. Lately the problem has been that Tyranids really, really struggle against the new Space Marines- I've yet to survive past turn 3 against our Ultramarine player, and the other armies are having similar difficulties to lesser degrees. Could I optimize my list to fight Marines? Probably, but then that's starting to adopt a competitive mindset in the interest of winning, and practically speaking I have zero interest in buying a bunch of models I don't particularly like just because they're effective at the moment. This is the issue that new players run into- they're sold on the idea that they can build an army out of the models they like, then they put them on the table and find that they built the wrong army out of the wrong units and face an uphill battle. It might not be an auto-lose, and I do agree that in casual play balance is much less important, but right now in our group the performance of loyalist Space Marines is showing how balance can be problematic for casual play.

I'm going through the new-player process with my wife right now, who has decided to go all-in on Dark Eldar. I want her to be able to build the army she wants to play, but I also don't want her to buy an army and then be blindsided by it not functioning on the tabletop. For example, the codex tries to steer you towards the idea of taking three Patrols, but they provide barely any CP, so then you're cut off from all the flavorful stratagems available to the army, which in addition to reducing the army's effectiveness just isn't fun. The triple-Patrol structure is a flavorful idea, but because of its imbalanced implementation it represents a trap, even for casual play.

I don't demand nor do I expect perfect balance from 40K, but when imbalance starts to impinge on casual play I do think it could be substantially better than it is. My biggest criticism is just that the game is still firmly rooted in outdated 1980s design philosophy, and that really exacerbates some of the balance issues, but the relatively modern mechanics introduced in Kill Team and Apoc (eg alternating activations- better late than never, GW!) give me hope that a real evolution of 40K may occur sooner or later. I guess it could be said that I participate in the game in spite of the rules, not because of them.

I don't think it has to be a casual-vs-competitive argument. I think everyone stands to benefit from better balance and more interactivity.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
If someone sticks with the hobby for more than a year or two, chances are their preferred army will end up in a totally different "tier" then when they started. Drukhari may be a "bad" army now.

Mid-tier at worst, nothing in the game really compares to SMs but i've had a lot of success with a DT Coven, all those 2 DMG Venom shots just eat Primaris.

(deleting this post about how lots of wacky random-table stuff with orkz is great for narrative play but terrible for competitive and even worse for tournament, because I feel pretty good about where I left things off in the prior two posts, and don't wanna leave room for getting sucked into more arguing :-P )

The state of competitive 40k is not too bad all things considered. The meta rotates constantly and keeps the game fresh. I love how hard space marines are now. It's payback for all the abuse I gave them throughout 8E as a chaos/xenos player

Regarding pickup games, I recently moved to a new area and the local club here has laid out some fantastic guidelines for setting them up at their store. Copy/pasted from their rules:

When it comes to arranging games with an opponent, we are big advocates of “The Conversation”. It is important, in our busy lives, that the few hours we get to play a game be fun for everyone, even the player who ultimately loses. Discussing your expectations for the game with your opponent beforehand is critical for the enjoyment of all parties. If you want to bring your most powerful, tournament-level list — Great! All that we ask is that you ensure that your opponent is not taken unawares. If you want to kick back and relax with a game that is silly and casual, that’s fine too; just make sure your opponent knows not to bring his strongest competitive game. As long as we are mindful of maintaining a positive environment and contributing value to the community, all of us wargamers can enjoy our hobby together, regardless of our specific likes and dislikes.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
Except, as has been explained, it does not do the job of being a narrative game.

One day you should try seeing other viewpoints. To use your vernacular, as has been explained, your hot take isn’t the only view of the game. Plenty of people find the game immersive. Plenty of people enjoy it for narrative gaming. That’s their experience and you’d do well to accept that. Your experience is not universal... but this isn’t your first time on the internet so you should know that by now. Telling people they’re wrong to enjoy the game is... well it’s a choice. I’ll leave it at that.

Anomander's point stands. Two people can't take the same points and get a good game too much of the time.

nataliereed1984 wrote:
(deleting this post about how lots of wacky random-table stuff with orkz is great for narrative play but terrible for competitive and even worse for tournament, because I feel pretty good about where I left things off in the prior two posts, and don't wanna leave room for getting sucked into more arguing :-P )

You in the wrong neighborhood fool.

 Archon Sinter wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
(deleting this post about how lots of wacky random-table stuff with orkz is great for narrative play but terrible for competitive and even worse for tournament, because I feel pretty good about where I left things off in the prior two posts, and don't wanna leave room for getting sucked into more arguing :-P )

You in the wrong neighborhood fool.

The hell going on with your boobs, girl?

nataliereed1984 wrote:

 Archon Sinter wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
(deleting this post about how lots of wacky random-table stuff with orkz is great for narrative play but terrible for competitive and even worse for tournament, because I feel pretty good about where I left things off in the prior two posts, and don't wanna leave room for getting sucked into more arguing :-P )

You in the wrong neighborhood fool.

The hell going on with your boobs, girl?

Truly the question of our age.

 Archon Sinter wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:


The hell going on with your boobs, girl?

Truly the question of our age.

*nods sagely*

Martel732 wrote:
Anomander's point stands. Two people can't take the same points and get a good game too much of the time.

Yes they can. I think our group has only had one "bad" game since 8th started and it was mostly because the players dice turned against him.

 Sim-Life wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Anomander's point stands. Two people can't take the same points and get a good game too much of the time.

Yes they can. I think our group has only had one "bad" game since 8th started and it was mostly because the players dice turned against him.

I question the legitimacy of their competitive spirit if this is the case.

If that was your point, that a local gaming club can still have relative balance i'd agree. Honestly it's hard to follow after 20 something pages.

I don't think things are nearly as bad as people are saying, if you don't count the latest cluster of releases (that's a big IF), but i do agree GW has a piss poor record of testing their products and they could / should do more.

 Archon Sinter wrote:

nataliereed1984 wrote:
(deleting this post about how lots of wacky random-table stuff with orkz is great for narrative play but terrible for competitive and even worse for tournament, because I feel pretty good about where I left things off in the prior two posts, and don't wanna leave room for getting sucked into more arguing :-P )

You in the wrong neighborhood fool.

I looked at this and thought of the GTA:SA "You came to the wrong house fool!" quote (which might have been what you meant lol)

Anyways, I think everyone agrees that 40k is ill-suited to a hardcore competitive game, and probably should not have been forced into that square hole by a rabid community that wants everything to have serious business world championships with (inter)national recognition and maybe in the future paid sponsorships and livable wages for "professional" 40k players (seriously there are people who want this to be a thing. T-sports, they call it). GW certainly never seemed to want to make it like that and then the talk about it in 8th seems to be throwing a bone to that community seeing as they already fractured the game thanks to the ITC and continue to do so thanks to the ITC. I think GW ultimately didn't want to go back down this route but would be stupid not to (as seen in 7th) because like it or not, people seem to want these sort of appendage measuring contests to be a thing everywhere ever since Magic busted onto the scene with "professional" games being played.

Whether or not 40k is also a bad casual/narrative game (spoiler: It is, but you can work around it easier) is much more subjective because you can ad-hoc things and that's much more common at the casual/narrative level (ITC notwithstanding at the tournament level). It doesn't fix all the issues, true, but you can often fix just enough to not have a miserable game against someone, so the perception becomes that it's okay for casual/narrative. Of course, the result of "Game sucks but we can tweak it ourselves to make it better" is a problem all its own as Slayer-Fan not-so-eloquently put it because you shouldn't NEED to ad-hoc a game that you're paying premium money for and that's being pitched as a premium game; some one-man-show rules that are done in someone's spare time, put online for free or a few bucks and only half-written so need expanding sure (and the fact many of those are better written and balanced than an international, multi-million-pound company is laughable), but when the rulebook is what, $80? And the codexes are $50 each, not to mention all the other supplements you may or may not need, you expect not only a finished product but a good one at that. Since GW seems to liken themselves to Apple, it would be like buying an iPhone for a thousand bucks and then you find out you need to add the coding yourself to make calls, but texting works fine. You expect a certain level of quality that comes with a premium product that is pitched as being complete.

The issues that aren't balance-related seem to be that:

1) People don't want to communicate beyond points level and maybe mission. Whether or not you "should need to" is irrelevant as the game is clearly designed with the intent that most of the time A) You are friends with the person you're playing against so wouldn't mind talking to them anyway and B) You set up expectations for the game. It's entirely a player thing to want to do as little of that as possible which I get as you want to maximize playtime (especially in a game that can often drag on for several hours) without needing to spend a bunch of extra time, and also because it seems like most people play so infrequently that the choices seem to be either you play whoever just showed up or don't play at all that week/month/etc. so it really seems like people would rather have a miserable game than no game at all.

2) Different people want different things. Some people want a laid back beer and pretzels game that isn't too serious, others want a highly-tuned competitive focused game with world championships so they can "make a name" for themselves and maybe in the future be paid to play 40k or some such. Some people are just donkey-caves and like to crush their opponents mercilessly to feel better, who knows? When different people with different expectations meet for a game, things can suck. Which is why #1 is so important. If you're fine-tuning your latest LVO list, you probably don't want to play against someone who is mostly a painter and has cobbled together an army based on what models they think to look cool and vice-versa; the comp player is going to win easily so not get anything out of it and walk away unsatisfied, the non-comp player is going to get the stuffing kicked out of them and walk away disappointed thinking they just wasted 3+ hours on top of a drive to the store and had a miserable time that could have been better spent elsewhere. Nobody wins and both people brood resentment for the other.

3) The GW design teams and the 40k team, in particular, are either grossly incompetent, simply don't care or are swamped with so many products due to a ridiculous release schedule that they have no time to properly think of or write rules. If they really are splitting up and having Cruddace write one book, Grant write another and whomever else (not sure who else is on the team and they don't often say now) write the third book without talking about rules ideas and how they might interact with everything else, that's a big reason why books are inconsistent and one book might be well balanced, the next one is a bit weak, the one after that is crazy strong, the one after that one is back to mid-tier, etc. It would explain a lot of why each book feels like they are written in isolation if they really are. Between that and the fact that the rules/game are clearly secondary to selling models (despite the two being intertwined), you can blame issues on GW as they take the lion's share of blame, but it may not be the designers' fault if they are being pushed with unrealistic deadlines that eat into actual design time.

GW doesn't need to change anything because regardless of the low quality work that they put out rules-wise, people will still line up around the block to throw their money at them.

If you want to affect change you need to not reward the company for bad work.

 auticus wrote:
GW doesn't need to change anything because regardless of the low quality work that they put out rules-wise, people will still line up around the block to throw their money at them.

If you want to affect change you need to not reward the company for bad work.

And lest we forgot, people tried that and immediately were suckered in by 8th edition which in many areas killed off every other game that had come up during the decline almost overnight. I know here the moment 8th dropped it pretty much wiped out every other game being played other than 40k instantly.

 auticus wrote:
GW doesn't need to change anything because regardless of the low quality work that they put out rules-wise, people will still line up around the block to throw their money at them.

If you want to affect change you need to not reward the company for bad work.

For you to enact change you need me not to buy stuff, when I'm not overly upset with GW personally.

 Archon Sinter wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Anomander's point stands. Two people can't take the same points and get a good game too much of the time.

Yes they can. I think our group has only had one "bad" game since 8th started and it was mostly because the players dice turned against him.

I question the legitimacy of their competitive spirit if this is the case.

If that was your point, that a local gaming club can still have relative balance i'd agree. Honestly it's hard to follow after 20 something pages.

I don't think things are nearly as bad as people are saying, if you don't count the latest cluster of releases (that's a big IF), but i do agree GW has a piss poor record of testing their products and they could / should do more.

It's amazing how often I say on here that our casual groups enjoys 40k and doesn't think there's any glaringly bad balance that I'm told we must just all be bad at the game or playing it wrong.