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 Daedalus81 wrote:

 An Actual Englishman wrote:

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I think there's more to it. The player base didn't shift from from Eldar aside from perhaps the handful of top players that move around a lot. It was Imperium, CSM, and Knights (mostly) who took a hit in their rates of attendance. It seems like the vast majority of players stick to their lane or spray their existing marines grey.

December win rate for all Codex Astartes : 55%
December win rate for all Codex Astartes without IH : 50%
December win rate for IH only: 65%
December win rate for Asuryani : 57%

Nerf IH and things look a lot more rational on the marine end. That doesn't mean it is fun to play them or that they're implicitly balanced.

I think there were more shifts than you make out, but I don't have the data on that at the moment. Either way my points were to illustrate why there is a negative sentiment around Marines particularly, not explain any strength and/or weakness of the faction on a subfaction level.

Regarding the stats above, why are we only looking at December which is probably the quietest month insofar as 40k tournaments go? Not to mention the fact that many "top" players use the period to practice for the end of the season LVO. It's probably the worst month to focus on in terms of balance discussions?

But it does show that IH have an out-sized impact and other marine factions may be worse (but they may also be getting smothered by IH). Asuryani otherwise seems robust.

It's the only set of data where the most recent changes converge enough (relatively). It certainly isn't perfect or absolute in what it covers. As mentioned before - nothing in CA will have applied to any of these games.

I did a quick spreadsheet to view transience between lists for players. They seem to be relatively static for those who show up often, but you can see the ones who jumped ship for Marines.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FfHXnT_4pmBKom2sw6aJF9WdujfVoI0_Ki3HShn-ocM/edit#gid=0

What winrate did you get for December Non-Custom Asuryani? The numbers seem to suggest Custom has similar impact on Asuryani as Iron Hands has on Marines (if anything, I think it's more pronounced with Asuryani - the only other subfaction with notably higher than 50% win rate has only 3 lists).

Regarding eldar I think it's a combo effect of expert crafters, which is great with min units, weak with hordes, the other buffs from phoenix rises and the points drops from chapter approved.
Things like falcons were good units but overcosted compared to other choices from the codex from a competitive standpoint. They got dropped to the point of being pretty efficient and effective with the psychic powers and expert crafters. Being able to give the army a +1 save over 12" away helps sweeten the blow of losing alaitoc too.
People mocked phoenix rises upon release but it's proven to shake up the eldar meta, give an alternative to alaitoc which wasn't fun for the game without throwing the faction under the bus like ynarri and the points drops have pushed the army to greater efficiency.

The traits have allowed eldar not to rely on death blobs of doom+guide and made opponents deathblobs less efficient as they overkill MSU or risk not making the kills.
The game has literally been: "if I get 1st turn my super blob combo wombo will kill your super blob of death"

This means that the standard point and click tactic of "ima delete this and this during my shooting phase with unit X" no longer works.

Shooting at 3 MSU war walkers is a lot different at shooting a squadron of 3 walkers... Players haven't adjusted well to this new paradigm it seems, where you have to gamble on dice.
Simply re-rolling buckets of dice to guarantee meaningful kills just doesn't work against custom Eldar and we make opponents wasting a lot of dice. Not sure why thy'd not rather spread fire and gamble.
But I suppose if your tank has 20 guns its hard to judge things in that manner lol..
The planes skew this even further due to their power levels but ive banged that drum enough...

It seems players cant adjust to the new playstyle. But they will.

Wana fix the game? Get rid/severly limit re-rolls/modifers auras/modifiers for everyone.

 Argive wrote:
The traits have allowed eldar not to rely on death blobs of doom+guide and made opponents deathblobs less efficient as they overkill MSU or risk not making the kills.
The game has literally been: "if I get 1st turn my super blob combo wombo" will kill your super blob..

This means that the standard point and click tactic of "ima delete this and this during my shooting phase with unit X" no longer works. Shooting at 3 MSU war walkers is a lot different at shooting a squadron of 3 walkers... Players haven't adjusted well to this ne paradigm where you have to gamble on dice. Simply rerolling buckets of dice to guarantee kill 2 blobs a turn no longer works or is viable against eldar.

The planes skew this even further due to their power levels.

Wana fix the game? Get rid/severly limit re-rolls/modifers auras/modifiers for everyone.

I agree that would be better overall for the game...however - that would be a complete rework of the edition. I am pretty sure every eldar list is still including doom also.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

kingheff wrote:
Regarding eldar I think it's a combo effect of expert crafters, which is great with min units, weak with hordes, the other buffs from phoenix rises and the points drops from chapter approved.
Things like falcons were good units but overcosted compared to other choices from the codex from a competitive standpoint. They got dropped to the point of being pretty efficient and effective with the psychic powers and expert crafters. Being able to give the army a +1 save over 12" away helps sweeten the blow of losing alaitoc too.
People mocked phoenix rises upon release but it's proven to shake up the eldar meta, give an alternative to alaitoc which wasn't fun for the game without throwing the faction under the bus like ynarri and the points drops have pushed the army to greater efficiency.

It was mostly DE and ynnari players that mocked it. I think CWE players knew instantly that it was a significant buff. Like...blanket ignore cover + 1 armor and MC and -1 AP on shuriken's are pretty much better than any of the eldar faction traits we have previously (aliotoc -1 is not great anymore with all the reroll all hits auras) and they get to pick 2 of them...it is pretty close to the effective power increase of space marine custom traits.

Yes but it no longer makes or breaks your turn/game. I prefer to just MW output. Its nice to have in your back pocket for sure..

And its never a gurantee.
If I had a £1 for every time doom failed I could afford a new scorpion tank!

Its not like Farseers get a perma +1 to cats just for existing or spending a CP.... We have to take a biel tan craftworld for that privilege or ulthwe special characters for a situational +1.

So how is any of this affecting those of you who actually go to any of these tourneys? Any of you been swayed to change your army?

I think people should relax and wait for 9th edition and new books in the meantime

Bharring wrote:

What winrate did you get for December Non-Custom Asuryani? The numbers seem to suggest Custom has similar impact on Asuryani as Iron Hands has on Marines (if anything, I think it's more pronounced with Asuryani - the only other subfaction with notably higher than 50% win rate has only 3 lists).

Good question. A little more difficult to pull correctly, but I think I got it...

Asuryani - 58.8%
Asuryani lists w/o Custom - 45.6%
Asuryani lists w/ Custom - 70.8%

A bit shocking, really.

Is it because only bad players are using non-Custom Craftworlds? Or do non-Custom lists struggle too much?

I'm inclined to think it is the former.

Average tournaments for the year (using any list) for those using Custom - 4.5 - and those who did not - 3.2.

Then again for those under 3 tournaments this year -- Custom : ~68% and Other Asuryani : ~40%. Meaning potentially weaker players benefiting more, but we don't know if this was their first major and have been playing all along under the radar.

Another problem with these tournaments is that some go past 5 games - sometimes even up to 9. That means anyone capable of getting those extra games provides a distinct edge to that faction numerically.

Data is ridiculously hard to understand well (lies, damn lies, and statistics) - especially in this format so no one should draw any ultimate conclusions.

 Argive wrote:
The game has literally been: "if I get 1st turn my super blob combo wombo will kill your super blob of death"

I think you should not ignore player agency when making this judgement. It’s not the fault of the edition when two players meet who choose nothing but glass cannon units and pitch their entire strategy towards T1/T2 unit deletion at the expense of resiliency.

It should also be noted that there are methods to debuff offence. Certain abilities kill re-rolls (Vox Scream, Forbidden Gem) and others debuff hit chances directly (Symphony of Pain). There’s also abilities than will severely punish castling for bonuses, like auto-explode on big vehicles. So there’s tons of potential there for players who would prefer to be more defensively focused.

Depends on the Army, Yo. Orkz, for example, are notoriously fragile.

Yoyoyo wrote:

 Argive wrote:
The game has literally been: "if I get 1st turn my super blob combo wombo will kill your super blob of death"

I think you should not ignore player agency when making this judgement. It’s not the fault of the edition when two players meet who choose nothing but glass cannon units and pitch their entire strategy towards T1/T2 unit deletion at the expense of resiliency.

It should also be noted that there are methods to debuff offence. Certain abilities kill re-rolls (Vox Scream, Forbidden Gem) and others debuff hit chances directly (Symphony of Pain). There’s also abilities than will severely punish castling for bonuses, like auto-explode on big vehicles. So there’s tons of potential there for players who would prefer to be more defensively focused.

And these are all fairly uncommon rare occurances and abiltiies usualy available to very sub par factions..

I get what you are trying to say but alpha strike tactic has become very very prevalent due to lethality, weight of dice available, and re-rolls available.

Obviously this is my opinion only. I could be wrong in this assessment..

Hehe. I remember the last time I tried to play defensively against marines. I took tons of cheap units, took the defensive subfaction trait, took the -1 to hit warlord trait, put my troops in transports, and then turn 2 happened and six aggressors removed like 40 models from the table in one shooting phase XD

The Newman wrote:

happy_inquisitor wrote:

The Newman wrote:


This. The uneven release schedule just kills any hope of maintaining balance. The other thing that kills it for competitive play is that without a checkmate condition it's very hard to recover once you start losing the attrition fight, and that sort of thing needs to be baked into the core rules. It's really hard to bolt such a thing on onto a system after the fact.

Variance Hammer did a really good article on why the game is harder to balance than a lot of people seem to think http://variancehammer.com/2018/06/04/how-would-nasa-balance-40k/

As for the win condition - that is in the missions. The CA19 missions are now really good and give a route to victory for some very diverse army builds. This is now the polar opposite of the ITC missions which are really showing their age and clearly narrow the meta to a dramatic degree. It is the easiest thing in the world to bolt onto a system after the fact, GW changes this every year as part of what balances the game. The problem is that large parts of the competitive scene totally ignore these changes.

First off, that article is a good read. So is the one on Game Stewardship that is linked within it. Nothing I didn't know, but well put none the less. The points it's making apply just as much to the "new hotness" problem within the context of all but the most cut-throat environments.

I'll admit I haven't read through the CA 19 missions, but I'd be very surprised if they added actual "achieve this game state -> victory, game over" checkmate conditions. All the CA missions up to this point have just been adding a layer to the calculation of whether you've lost too much material to have a path to victory. However, however, if I'm being intellectually honest that's what a proper checkmate condition is doing in the first place. The difference between deciding whether you can achieve a checkmate in Chess and a caster-kill in Warmahordes is how complicated the calculation is, not the fundamental nature of that calculation.

Mark it down in your calendars people, somebody just said "I've listened to your argument and you've changed my mind" on the internet.

So what is bringing 40k down at the competitive level? We've ruled out the lack of a checkmate condition, and Warmachine had a lot of the other issues we're complaining about but it still held up to a cut-throat tournament focus. (Specifically I'm thinking of inter- and intra-faction balance issues, rock-paper-scissors elements in list design, and lethality.) The thing that really stands out as different is threat range. The standard deployment zones were 30" apart and the average gun range was about 12". Very few things could get into shooting range turn 1, almost nothing could manage a turn 1 charge, and a majority of units didn't have ranged weapons at all. Maneuvering into position was critical, and I think that's my biggest complaint about 40k; the feeling that the really important decisions were made when we put our lists together instead of after those lists are on the table.

Once a decade it happens, and you chuck it in barely outside the first week. Does this mean I have the whole rest of the decade in which nobody listens to what I am trying to say?

I have only played one CA19 missions tournament so far but I do recommend people give those missions a try - really play through several of them in a competitive mindset and see just how different they are to playing the ITC mission every game. There are some interesting and tricky decisions which come up as a result of the missions, generally there is a trade-off to be made between scoring VP now or trying to deny your opponent the chance to score VP in the future by killing their stuff. That then pushes through to a different form of list design - the sort of ultra-durable or ultra-killy lists we see at the top of the ITC are sometimes too one-dimensional across that set of CA19 missions. In reality, I do not think it is possible to list design so well that your list basically wins all those 6 missions for you, the variety of challenge is enough that whatever list you bring you are going to have to actually get the winning work done on the table in at least some of the missions.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

ccs wrote:
So how is any of this affecting those of you who actually go to any of these tourneys? Any of you been swayed to change your army?

Personally I avoid any tournament which uses the ITC missions. I do not change my army, I change the competitive formats I am willing to spend my precious free time in.

Vote with your wallet.

If you hate the balance issues in the tournament scene but keep going to tournaments that are promoting that imbalance you only have yourself to blame.

Aside from a hiccup one ediition Eldar have been pretty broken my entire lifespan playing the game. I could go away for 10 years come back and say Eldar are OP and have a reasonable chance to be correct without knowing at all the current meta state.

That said, there really does need to be a better parity for armies in this game. If this edition can't do that and that was its whole designed purpose to clean up 7th and make things on a better keel and they can't, I'd say some design goals weren't met. As well, doesn't matter how much people love marines, a stale meta will slowly bleed players as people do tend to take it poorly if they feel their armies are the NPC faction to get smashed by the chosen ones forever.

ITC DATA ONLY

# 1-it is a set of house rules not intended by GW

From this limited data though. What conclusions can we draw?

#2-alot of elder players are better at farming CP, possibly have better stratagems to pop, or a list of better gear, abilities and so on, nothing new really elder have been strong like that since I got into the game in 3rd, that's why we call them "dirty elder".

but you would expect something for a race, although dying, that has been around for 100s of times longer than the imperium to have some edge.

If you were GW...how would you handle this problem?

#3 ignore it. GW didn't make the current game for tournaments or for fan systems like ITC. even though they created the problem back when they introduced the official tournament systems of rouge traders and grand tournaments back in the era of 3rd/4th edition. then they cancelled it all and moved away from that scene.

There is a massive distaste for the state of competitive play right now

I#4
I have had a massive distaste for the state of competitive play since 2011 when I played my last GT and saw the attitudes and types of gamers It brought in. cheaters, poor sports, people who got aggressively angry when they didn't win.

the best game I had at one GT event was 5th edition against a black legion player who brought summoned demons and a unit from each of the 4 chaos god aligned chapters (noise marines, thousand sons, plague marines and berserkers) all led by abaddon.
his list was very thematic and he was personally a lot of fun to play against. I don't even remember who won, but I do remember my GK attachment made abaddon smell his finger (sacred incense for the lols).

I even still have a pic of that army



On the flip side we had a guy win best painted, not that his finished stuff didn't look great with the layering and green stuff mods, but he only got a near perfect score because he hid an unfinished squad and replaced it with a unit not in his army list for the event during paint judging to get himself a better score. (he came back the next year with elder and cheated like a boss, or so he thought, fudging extra movement, getting units out of vehicles on the other side of the vehicle from the access point etc...)

Lol if that won best painted the standard must be terrible.

Yep, this is what happens when portions of the community focus on the gaming and meta ahead of everything else. Damages the experience for everyone.

The hobby can and should be used as a barrier to curb the types of people you don't want at events, and to promote a bigger investment into the faction and sub faction you play.

For those of you that DO play ITC and follow its nonsense, have the TOs ever explained why they're still sticking to the missions the way they are, even though it appears to be stagnating? Even the people that play ITC seem to be turning against it as of late.

Psst.............. might wanna re-read that again the pic I posted was the guy I fought with the black legion list the other guy who won best painted was not pictured I tried to find it but I seem to have misplaced it. I think it was a slaneesh/noise marine list


FOUND IT! had it in a different folder

this is the cheater



like I said he does good work but it wasn't finished it should have docked him like 75 points for an unfinished army.

 Sim-Life wrote:
For those of you that DO play ITC and follow its nonsense, have the TOs ever explained why they're still sticking to the missions the way they are, even though it appears to be stagnating? Even the people that play ITC seem to be turning against it as of late.

I'm glad that it is. The ITC missions are so, so boring at this point. Even ignoring balance or anything else it's the same thing game after game.

And they encourage static lists because you chose objectives like kill more/hold more.

 Sim-Life wrote:
For those of you that DO play ITC and follow its nonsense, have the TOs ever explained why they're still sticking to the missions the way they are, even though it appears to be stagnating? Even the people that play ITC seem to be turning against it as of late.

ITC missions update yearly. For all the bluster that data does not show non-ITC missions performing any more admirably yet. Maybe you'll get better results with CA19, but you guys should probably temper your words until then.

Why? The ITC does a lot of great thing. The issue is not the ITC but the mission format, that's a single aspect of it.

One that is not necessary.

I run a lot of custom missions for events, and I have yet to write what I felt was a decent mission that didn't end at latest turn 5. It seems like any competitive game I play, regardless of whether we play CA or ITC, ends by tabling turn 3-4. I know that doesn't cause an automatic loss, but I've never seen a situation where the remaining 2-3 turns does not allow the player who still has models on the board to rack up a super easy win.

What are these missions people are playing out of Chapter Approved where the person routinely getting tabled is able to build such a lead that the person doing the tabling isn't able to easily win with 2-3 turns unopposed on the board?

Enough people like that the missions take a lot of chances out of it and let you tailor your list based on its own strengths rather than your opponent. It's missions designed by people who wanted to emulate Warmahordes' Steamrollers but missed the point.

That's why they keep it. It pushes listbuilding even harder as the main component in 40k which all the competitive players want apparently.

the_scotsman wrote:
I run a lot of custom missions for events, and I have yet to write what I felt was a decent mission that didn't end at latest turn 5. It seems like any competitive game I play, regardless of whether we play CA or ITC, ends by tabling turn 3-4. I know that doesn't cause an automatic loss, but I've never seen a situation where the remaining 2-3 turns does not allow the player who still has models on the board to rack up a super easy win.

What are these missions people are playing out of Chapter Approved where the person routinely getting tabled is able to build such a lead that the person doing the tabling isn't able to easily win with 2-3 turns unopposed on the board?

People can literally watch the ITC games on Twitch and see that people aren't getting tabled all the time and games are much closer than they state on this forum.

In fact ITC has the lowest difference in scores for all mission sets this year.



This also true when we look at just August through November (Dec was all ITC).



And it even applies when I make the scoring VP a ratio:

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
For those of you that DO play ITC and follow its nonsense, have the TOs ever explained why they're still sticking to the missions the way they are, even though it appears to be stagnating? Even the people that play ITC seem to be turning against it as of late.

ITC missions update yearly. For all the bluster that data does not show non-ITC missions performing any more admirably yet. Maybe you'll get better results with CA19, but you guys should probably temper your words until then.

40KStats basically has no date on CA18 or CA19 missions. They don't even have a filter option for them.

Nor do I expect them to have any data on them in the near future. One of the curious things about the "meta" for Chapter Approved missions is that unless you are actually at one of the big events (typically at Warhammer World) you have almost no way to find out what it is. Yet there is a whole scene of mostly small local events which use those missions - along with those larger GW events of course. Indirectly I think this is one of the reasons why it remains so diverse, it's hard to net-list if nothing is on the net and net-listing is definitely one of the things which accelerates the narrowing of any meta.

Having followed I think that there is clear agreement that some specific subfactions are punching well above their weight.

This naturally leads onto the questions on ‘balance’ and nerfs/buffs to apply to the over/under performing armies.

However, a huge problem in identifying what is a ‘strong’ or ‘weak’ army is the often-substantial difference in performance (i.e. win %) that appears for many sub-factions between ITC and non-ITC environment.
So, what are the conditions under which we are trying to balance the different factions and subfactions? Granted I haven’t played ITC but a quick browse of the web shows how ITC missions are a quite a different beast to the Eternal War/ Maelstrom of War missions that GW have produced.

As such I don’t find it that surprising that some armies perform rather differently (for better or worse) in ITC conditions and the ‘Base’ GW missions which presumably GW use for most of their testing. To me it seems reasonable that some of the ITC under/over performing issues can be attributable to the ITC missions and rules themselves.

It is however equally clear that some sub-factions seem to overperform irrespective of the environment.

To me it doesn’t matter if a faction is fairly common (e.g. CWE) or exceeding common (e.g. marines) if any faction can regularly, repeatedly and consistently turn up and punch (well) above it’s weight is a problem (i.e. a high performance is not an outlier due to a {very} small sample size). IH (and successors) and the PA options for CWE seem to fall into the former. It doesn’t matter if a third or a tenth people can bring the overperforming army. Though I can see how this will affect people’s perception of this. However how big, or widespread the problem is does vary between ITC and Non-ITC... (e.g. using ony recent results custom CWE are over 60% win rate and 8% clear of the nearest CWE subfaction... whilst non-ITC CWE as a faction are averaging 60% with custom CWE being entirely representative of that).

40k has always been more of a ‘beer and pretzel’ game, then carefully designed to be perfectly balanced. The differences between the ‘Base’ GW missions (which presumably are the conditions underwhich armies are balanced) only serves to both exacerbate and create balance issues.
Given the documented misalignment of performance between ITC and Non-ITC then until the differences in the underlying performance drivers between these two environments are normalised, I see that there will always be ongoing issues with over and under performance in ITC as they are measuring the effectiveness of the armies under different conditions from those conditions the armies have been balanced in.

Given that the ITC missions are reviewed annually, surely to quickest and most effective way of correcting some of the over or underperformance of subfactions is to address the structure and scoring of ITC missions?
Should ITC missions be constructed to produce missions with similar performance drivers to GWs ‘base’ missions this would also greatly aid in being able making use of the available data. At present the largest data set (ITC missions) doesn’t match the ‘base’ GW environment, so is extremely compromised in terms of justifcation for basing nerfs/ buffs on.

 Argive wrote:
And these are all fairly uncommon rare occurances and abiltiies usualy available to very sub par factions.

Chaos for sure has the most defensively oriented approach in competition, but it's not like other factions ignore it. Shield Drones and Eldar Flyers rely on strong saves and negatives to hit respectively.

Without getting into points and balance discussions, you can't always rely on going first. So being able to take a punch well and then counter is ultimately more reliable across 5-6 games.

happy_inquisitor wrote:

The Newman wrote:

Mark it down in your calendars people, somebody just said "I've listened to your argument and you've changed my mind" on the internet.

Once a decade it happens, and you chuck it in barely outside the first week. Does this mean I have the whole rest of the decade in which nobody listens to what I am trying to say?

Yes. I'd appologize, but now you're free to completely ignore all social media for ten whole years. Think of how much stuff you can get done with all that free time! You're welcome.

 Daedalus81 wrote:


In fact ITC has the lowest difference in scores for all mission sets this year.



This also true when we look at just August through November (Dec was all ITC).



And it even applies when I make the scoring VP a ratio:

More very interesting analysis thank you!

Closer victories do make for more interesting games, so that's a good showing for ITC.

I think balance between factions is going to be the most important factor for assessing a format though. The burden of proof is really on the ITC (and other formats) to show (statistically) that their alterations to the core rules are necessary, because otherwise we'd all be better off using one set of rules.

happy_inquisitor wrote:

40KStats basically has no date on CA18 or CA19 missions. They don't even have a filter option for them.

Nor do I expect them to have any data on them in the near future. One of the curious things about the "meta" for Chapter Approved missions is that unless you are actually at one of the big events (typically at Warhammer World) you have almost no way to find out what it is. Yet there is a whole scene of mostly small local events which use those missions - along with those larger GW events of course. Indirectly I think this is one of the reasons why it remains so diverse, it's hard to net-list if nothing is on the net and net-listing is definitely one of the things which accelerates the narrowing of any meta.

There is a group of games in the data that are basically NULL for mission type. Those sit at 51% for the ratio. I couldn't tell you if they're CA or not though.

Unfortunately until there is a collection point for the data it remains anecdotal. The people at my club switched to ITC, because we felt the games represented a more fair change for all players.

CA19 might change us back, but it will take time.