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AngryAngel80 wrote:
That works for IH, but how does that fly for the Guard codex ? There was a lot of lead time that hinted to those two needed to be fixed issues that could have had an easy day 1 fix. Are we to believe they didn't get the touch of grace to see the problem and ponder a fix until two weeks after the proper codex dropped when the problems were there since the index ?

Did they not have time to brainstorm some fixes for IH in the time it took from book going to printers, then be released ? It's not an instant process. I'm sure the play testers could have even had some ideas on the matter. I get there is schedules but if you claim to be a quality product and you charge a mint for your items people should expect effort worth the cost.

Edit: It leads to a feeling like there will be many issues from this new edition that will be broke as hell on release and we'll be getting yet another broken product, paid for with a high price and lacking day 1 fixes for stuff people will pick up on from the first week out in the wild. That is what people are worried for and concerned of.

I'm not trying to defend them. I'm saying the problem is actually in some ways worse: that everything is determined by dictates from non-developer management about when something has to come out, not by developers deciding they have some nefarious plan to over or undercook something to generate model sales.

I just do not think the developers have that sort of power any more. They're just peons. Management says "X is coming out on Y date" and they come up with something. If it's right on the money, that's fine. If it's not, oh well. If it's way, way off...oh well, it's still coming out, and the upside of that attitude is there's no particular pressure to issue a FAQ that fixes it right away.

GW's focus is on selling people products. The game is just a vehicle to do that. What's important is the product sales. The game just has to be good enough that people keep spending on the products that are regularly released, and nothing can be allowed to jeopardize that regular release schedule except, well, literally a global pandemic that forcibly shuts their factory. And even that global pandemic was not allowed to endanger their yearly price hike. They just don't modify their plans for anything - not for unbalanced rules, not for typos, not for global catastrophes unless it physically disables them from producing stuff.

yukishiro1 wrote:
I don't think they're competent enough to deliberately release OP stuff then nerf it two weeks later. I think that frankly gives them too much credit. Plus it's not like they do it every time - there are plenty of books they release that are just kinda garbage.

I think the truth is that they have release schedules they will not deviate from, and that informs everything. It's going out, whether it's ready or not. It doesn't matter if it's filled with embarrassing typos; it doesn't matter if it's filled with badly thought out rules interactions that are going to break the game's balance. If it's overpowered and that causes people to buy stuff you can nerf later...so much the better, the suits always love more $$$, but it's not the original plan behind it.

Making stuff op is easy. It's making things balanced that requires competence. Flipping balance this way and that way is dirt easy.

tneva82 wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
I don't think they're competent enough to deliberately release OP stuff then nerf it two weeks later. I think that frankly gives them too much credit. Plus it's not like they do it every time - there are plenty of books they release that are just kinda garbage.

I think the truth is that they have release schedules they will not deviate from, and that informs everything. It's going out, whether it's ready or not. It doesn't matter if it's filled with embarrassing typos; it doesn't matter if it's filled with badly thought out rules interactions that are going to break the game's balance. If it's overpowered and that causes people to buy stuff you can nerf later...so much the better, the suits always love more $$$, but it's not the original plan behind it.

Making stuff op is easy. It's making things balanced that requires competence. Flipping balance this way and that way is dirt easy.

Complaining that things aren't balanced on release is easy, understanding that the team will never roll out a perfectly balanced game no matter how much playtesting is involved is hard.

I will give them some credit: they don't take a hammer to problems like they used to but instead of making smaller adjustments to try and dial things in.

That isn't to say I enjoy the way things end up broken, I kept not starting armies because melee was so meh for Templars and World Eaters which was a shame because I really like both of those factions but they were just not that interesting to play for all of 8th. Which basically means for the last 3 years GW was losing sales just because they couldn't get melee dialed in right.

Speaking of Day 1 errata, didn’t the space wolf codex have one - something to do with sagas or whatever their faction ability was?

And they still use the sledgehammer; I remember the commisar/conscript merry-go-round, and I seem to recall a recent change to deep strike had to be rolled back when Ork players complained it nerfed them too harshly.

 Stormonu wrote:
Speaking of Day 1 errata, didn’t the space wolf codex have one - something to do with sagas or whatever their faction ability was?

And they still use the sledgehammer; I remember the commisar/conscript merry-go-round, and I seem to recall a recent change to deep strike had to be rolled back when Ork players complained it nerfed them too harshly.

No deep strike change has been roll backed. Only change to change was originally it was you could DS to your own dz in turn 1. That got t2 earliest period.

 Stormonu wrote:
Speaking of Day 1 errata, didn’t the space wolf codex have one - something to do with sagas or whatever their faction ability was?

And they still use the sledgehammer; I remember the commisar/conscript merry-go-round, and I seem to recall a recent change to deep strike had to be rolled back when Ork players complained it nerfed them too harshly.

Early 8th definitely had more hammer, but the slow buffing of Marines (prior to the supplements and doctrines of the codex) and the way they shifted points later in the edition (incrementally instead of large jumps) shows they are trying to work in smaller steps to fine tune.

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Complaining that things aren't balanced on release is easy, understanding that the team will never roll out a perfectly balanced game no matter how much playtesting is involved is hard.

no one is talking about perfect balance

but GW is also making basic mistakes regarding rules design (changes rules to be more "realistic" instead to benefit the game mechanics/balance) and from what we know their play testers don't get the full rules to play with

another problem is that last minute changes are a thing (that were never tested at all and no one knows what the impact on the game is) for different reasons (like changing the core rules in AoS because the played it wrong in the lauch/intro video instead of admit the mistake or make a new video)


perfec balance is not possible, but if you GW sees themselfes as the Porsche of Wargaming, they should at least have a Quality Managment like Porsche and not just the price

Everyone claims they aren't talking about perfect balance but the nitpicking says otherwise.

And citation on how they currently do their playtesting? I've only seen claims on how they used to playtest over a decade ago, not how it's currently done.

I won't claim they haven't screwed up (see Iron Hands for the obvious example of ignoring the playtesters) but hopefully the strong community pushback on that got them to listen to the feedback more.

Also I'd argue GW is pushing to be less realistic. 40k was trending towards a simulation from 5th to 7th with the number of rules interactions and layers.

8th was more geared towards accessibility for new players and 9th seems to be streamlining stuff further with more abstract terrain rules like obscuring that ignore TLoS.

 Stormonu wrote:
And they still use the sledgehammer; I remember the commisar/conscript merry-go-round, and I seem to recall a recent change to deep strike had to be rolled back when Ork players complained it nerfed them too harshly.

I'm not aware of any changes to ork deep strikes that have been rolled back.

There was a certain crowd which claimed that you couldn't use Da Jump in T1, but they were never right, the new rules just clarified that.

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Everyone claims they aren't talking about perfect balance but the nitpicking says otherwise.

how so?
nitpicking, first of all, does not mean you want perfect balance but you want obvious mistakes be removed
talking about unit X has no role on the battlefield because there are other units that do the job better for less points might be nitpicking but it is still not asking for perfect balance

 ClockworkZion wrote:

And citation on how they currently do their playtesting? I've only seen claims on how they used to playtest over a decade ago, not how it's currently done.

I won't claim they haven't screwed up (see Iron Hands for the obvious example of ignoring the playtesters) but hopefully the strong community pushback on that got them to listen to the feedback more.

was'nt it with the Iron Hands were we got infos that the testers have never seen the full rules but were given very specific information?
might be wrong here and it was something else, but the infos are not a decade old, as a decade ago GW did no testing at all, so everything we have heard about playtesting has happended with 8th edition (or AoS 2.0 and Underworlds)

 ClockworkZion wrote:

Also I'd argue GW is pushing to be less realistic. 40k was trending towards a simulation from 5th to 7th with the number of rules interactions and layers
8th was more geared towards accessibility for new players and 9th seems to be streamlining stuff further with more abstract terrain rules like obscuring that ignore TLoS.
.

it is not about if the game is becoming more of a simulation or not, but how and why rules are added/changed
dedicated transports have been added and removed in the past always with the argument that the new rules are more realistic

now with Tank/Monster rules immersion/realism was again an argument why those rules are better

point it is, rules need to made because they benefit the game and/or add more balance
realism is never a good argument unless you really make a simulation as I can bring in realistic arguments why a single nurgling can stop a tank, as I can bring in arguments why it can not

40k by itself can never be realistic as half of the stuff ingame would never exist at all. But the game has build its own world by the rules and background given and everything inside must just work within the given construct no matter how realistic it is or not

while would the argument for those rules be that Tanks have no Melee Attacks and adding such would make the game more complicated which the designers want to avoid, the rules that tanks can just ignore melee for shooting was chosen as the best solution to balance those units without adding another layer

if you just add them because of realism, sometimes it might work out well, sometimes it does not and you get into problems because you never thought about balance in the first place but only about how realistic your game is (although it is a game and not a simulation)

If it can be classified as "nitpicking" it is neither obvious or arguably important, and yet people treat it as if every small error breaks the game.

And the only concrete info about playtest I've seen dated back to around 5th ed. Since then the only other thing I saw was the studio ignoring the playtesters feedback for how broken Iron Hands could get.

Tabletop Tactics just dropped this vid on their involvement with playtesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLM6O6Aglc

 Latro_ wrote:
Tabletop Tactics just dropped this vid on their involvement with playtesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLM6O6Aglc

some information for those of us who can't watch it?

thanks

 ClockworkZion wrote:
Everyone claims they aren't talking about perfect balance but the nitpicking says otherwise.

How exactly does it say otherwise? Do you live in a 5 year old's world of black and white where "it has room for improvement" = "I will settle for nothing else but perfection"?

zamerion wrote:

 Latro_ wrote:
Tabletop Tactics just dropped this vid on their involvement with playtesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLM6O6Aglc

some information for those of us who can't watch it?

thanks

sure,

Playtestings and preamble:
- cant reveal anything new (no suprise), they gonna talk about their thoughts on stuff already revealed.
- exp of play testing has been long, and is saying GW do, do it in depth
- they think 'everything' will work well
- they get the rules, submission feedback deadlines using forms
- gw rules team, suprised how responsive they were

Points:
- points going up is a good thing, games had too many models in them.
- everything being cheaper makes things hard to point at the lower end
- It plays better when its faster
- Stu black saying loosing a squad from his list is fairly accurate as to what to expect (so 200ish pts in current money)

Table sizes:
- table size is a guideline
- but, they recogmened the new table sizes
- it makes it more tactical
- it also makes combat armies better (interesting point).
- its been playtested on the new sizes
- good for tournaments, will be able to have more players + quicker games. expect all tournies to run the new size

Missions:
- big changes here
- current 40k environment is disparate, ITC, ETC, core etc
- Missions are an attempt to bring these inline with the use of secondaries
- Missions very much support a theme in an army and secondaries really support tailoring the mission to your specific army
- focus on seeing variety of opponents
- still wise to have some balance as missions might punish you.

Command points:
- They like paying for detachments. 8th was bad because detachments covered weaknesses from other armies and rewarded you for doing it with CP.
- Will be more refined, cross faction strats might be harder

Crusade:
- First time in their opinion 40k has a robust narative system since rouge trader
- Its not like necromunda 100% but similar to it in the xp system
- They really like crusade, very social experience and themed

Closing:
- best bits of 8th, new stuff makes it better. Sky isn't falling. They are very upbeat about it.

 Latro_ wrote:

zamerion wrote:

 Latro_ wrote:
Tabletop Tactics just dropped this vid on their involvement with playtesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObLM6O6Aglc

some information for those of us who can't watch it?

thanks

sure,

Playtestings and preamble:
- cant reveal anything new (no suprise), they gonna talk about their thoughts on stuff already revealed.
- exp of play testing has been long, and is saying GW do, do it in depth
- they think 'everything' will work well
- they get the rules, submission feedback deadlines using forms
- gw rules team, suprised how responsive they were

Points:
- points going up is a good thing, games had too many models in them.
- everything being cheaper makes things hard to point at the lower end
- It plays better when its faster
- Stu black saying loosing a squad from his list is fairly accurate as to what to expect (so 200ish pts in current money)

Table sizes:
- table size is a guideline
- but, they recogmened the new table sizes
- it makes it more tactical
- it also makes combat armies better (interesting point).
- its been playtested on the new sizes
- good for tournaments, will be able to have more players + quicker games. expect all tournies to run the new size

Missions:
- big changes here
- current 40k environment is disparate, ITC, ETC, core etc
- Missions are an attempt to bring these inline with the use of secondaries
- Missions very much support a theme in an army and secondaries really support tailoring the mission to your specific army
- focus on seeing variety of opponents
- still wise to have some balance as missions might punish you.

Command points:
- They like paying for detachments. 8th was bad because detachments covered weaknesses from other armies and rewarded you for doing it with CP.
- Will be more refined, cross faction strats might be harder

Crusade:
- First time in their opinion 40k has a robust narative system since rouge trader
- Its not like necromunda 100% but similar to it in the xp system
- They really like crusade, very social experience and themed

Closing:
- best bits of 8th, new stuff makes it better. Sky isn't falling. They are very upbeat about it.

They also state they've been testing " a lot all at once" and hope that codex creep won't be a problem this time round. Kind of suggests all 9th ed codex are done in some capacity and involved in the testing process.

Smaller board making more tactical? Seriously doubting their qualification if removing importance of movement makes game more tactical...

Thanks for linking this video, it was really interesting to watch.

tneva82 wrote:
Smaller board making more tactical? Seriously doubting their qualification if removing importance of movement makes game more tactical...

You might want to listen to their reasoning for that before judging them. It actually made a lot of sense to me.

and yet when people press them on the cultist intercissor hikes they get all defensive.
GW rulesteam beeing supposedly responsive torwards them is not GW rulesteam beeing actually responsive as anyone with a FW army can tell you.
IF GW releases the dexes staggered as they do the average player will still feel Codex creep inevitably.

The rest is great and i trust them but that has been stuff we knew.

tneva82 wrote:
Smaller board making more tactical? Seriously doubting their qualification if removing importance of movement makes game more tactical...

Having less room to manoeuvre doesn’t detract from careful movement. Like, at all?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

tneva82 wrote:
Smaller board making more tactical? Seriously doubting their qualification if removing importance of movement makes game more tactical...

Having less room to manoeuvre doesn’t detract from careful movement. Like, at all?

depends with the ranges on guns we have nowadays and as of yet no news in regards how good terrain actually will be , yes smaller tables will lower overall manouvre value.
That said, if the cover system is good then yes they might have a point.

Also not sure on the combat armies exemple, because smaller sizes makes them better but good enough remains to be seen.

Not Online!!! wrote:
and yet when people press them on the cultist intercissor hikes they get all defensive.
GW rulesteam beeing supposedly responsive torwards them is not GW rulesteam beeing actually responsive as anyone with a FW army can tell you.
IF GW releases the dexes staggered as they do the average player will still feel Codex creep inevitably.

The rest is great and i trust them but that has been stuff we knew.

The gw rules team had nothing to do with forgeworld until about a year ago, at which point the 9th ed process was under way and they correctly binned off the index to start again.

If all the codex are written and balanced now, it doesnt matter when theyre released, unless you assume other people getting new stuff makes it better than yours by existing.

The vibe i was getting from them was smaller size, smaller model count makes the game more of a nail biter.

Like you dont have 150 models covering the board
You have to think about the moves you do make because there isnt as much room to correct a mistake later on

Dudeface wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
and yet when people press them on the cultist intercissor hikes they get all defensive.
GW rulesteam beeing supposedly responsive torwards them is not GW rulesteam beeing actually responsive as anyone with a FW army can tell you.
IF GW releases the dexes staggered as they do the average player will still feel Codex creep inevitably.

The rest is great and i trust them but that has been stuff we knew.

The gw rules team had nothing to do with forgeworld until about a year ago, at which point the 9th ed process was under way and they correctly binned off the index to start again.

If all the codex are written and balanced now, it doesnt matter when theyre released, unless you assume other people getting new stuff makes it better than yours by existing.

GW-rulesteam hasn't taken over since the first CA? And where would you find that?

And no on the second bit, an actual propperly for the edition written dex will still be better adapted to said edition. sure it might not be as aggrivaiting but still noticeable , especially when your dex is potentially one of those that get a later release.

I gotta imagine that there's some kind of Kill Team style "long range" penalty. The problem is, it feels like GW is solving everything with "-1 to hit" in a system where they've already made it so modifiers don't stack. At this rate, everything will be -1 to hit all the time.

the_scotsman wrote:
I gotta imagine that there's some kind of Kill Team style "long range" penalty. The problem is, it feels like GW is solving everything with "-1 to hit" in a system where they've already made it so modifiers don't stack. At this rate, everything will be -1 to hit all the time.

don't be daft mate.

It'll be a string of -1, +1, -1, +1 +1, -1, -1 again then +1 again.

'So 'ill use my normal BS then, that was fun'.

Dudeface wrote:
The gw rules team had nothing to do with forgeworld until about a year ago, at which point the 9th ed process was under way and they correctly binned off the index to start again.

FW did initial index(after being told 8th ed is coming together with public...). After that every single model rule and point cost has been GW rule team. How many CA's that is? 3 at least. And didn't custodes get rules in the meanwhile? Gw again.

Dudeface wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
and yet when people press them on the cultist intercissor hikes they get all defensive.
GW rulesteam beeing supposedly responsive torwards them is not GW rulesteam beeing actually responsive as anyone with a FW army can tell you.
IF GW releases the dexes staggered as they do the average player will still feel Codex creep inevitably.

The rest is great and i trust them but that has been stuff we knew.

The gw rules team had nothing to do with forgeworld until about a year ago, at which point the 9th ed process was under way and they correctly binned off the index to start again.

If all the codex are written and balanced now, it doesnt matter when theyre released, unless you assume other people getting new stuff makes it better than yours by existing.

Factions with older codexes will have it rough until they get new ones. The new rules are going to make anyone with bonuses to playing mono stronger while making factions that currently rely on soup weaker. There will be codex creep at least until everyone has codexes written with that new direction.

Not Online!!! wrote:

Dudeface wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
and yet when people press them on the cultist intercissor hikes they get all defensive.
GW rulesteam beeing supposedly responsive torwards them is not GW rulesteam beeing actually responsive as anyone with a FW army can tell you.
IF GW releases the dexes staggered as they do the average player will still feel Codex creep inevitably.

The rest is great and i trust them but that has been stuff we knew.

The gw rules team had nothing to do with forgeworld until about a year ago, at which point the 9th ed process was under way and they correctly binned off the index to start again.

If all the codex are written and balanced now, it doesnt matter when theyre released, unless you assume other people getting new stuff makes it better than yours by existing.

GW-rulesteam hasn't taken over since the first CA? And where would you find that?

And no on the second bit, an actual propperly for the edition written dex will still be better adapted to said edition. sure it might not be as aggrivaiting but still noticeable , especially when your dex is potentially one of those that get a later release.

Here's the warhammer communit post saying the main team are rewriting FW rules in Jan this year, which is when 9th ed would have been under way: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2020/01/24/new-rules-incoming-for-forge-world-modelsgw-homepage-post-2fw-homepage-post-3/

But if all codex are written at the same time, balanced at the same time, together, why is the one released later on suddenly "better"?

No existing codex has crusade content in, its safe to say every faction will get another book eventually.

yukishiro1 wrote:

AngryAngel80 wrote:
That works for IH, but how does that fly for the Guard codex ? There was a lot of lead time that hinted to those two needed to be fixed issues that could have had an easy day 1 fix. Are we to believe they didn't get the touch of grace to see the problem and ponder a fix until two weeks after the proper codex dropped when the problems were there since the index ?

Did they not have time to brainstorm some fixes for IH in the time it took from book going to printers, then be released ? It's not an instant process. I'm sure the play testers could have even had some ideas on the matter. I get there is schedules but if you claim to be a quality product and you charge a mint for your items people should expect effort worth the cost.

Edit: It leads to a feeling like there will be many issues from this new edition that will be broke as hell on release and we'll be getting yet another broken product, paid for with a high price and lacking day 1 fixes for stuff people will pick up on from the first week out in the wild. That is what people are worried for and concerned of.

I'm not trying to defend them. I'm saying the problem is actually in some ways worse: that everything is determined by dictates from non-developer management about when something has to come out, not by developers deciding they have some nefarious plan to over or undercook something to generate model sales.

I just do not think the developers have that sort of power any more. They're just peons. Management says "X is coming out on Y date" and they come up with something. If it's right on the money, that's fine. If it's not, oh well. If it's way, way off...oh well, it's still coming out, and the upside of that attitude is there's no particular pressure to issue a FAQ that fixes it right away.

GW's focus is on selling people products. The game is just a vehicle to do that. What's important is the product sales. The game just has to be good enough that people keep spending on the products that are regularly released, and nothing can be allowed to jeopardize that regular release schedule except, well, literally a global pandemic that forcibly shuts their factory. And even that global pandemic was not allowed to endanger their yearly price hike. They just don't modify their plans for anything - not for unbalanced rules, not for typos, not for global catastrophes unless it physically disables them from producing stuff.

They don't change their plans because they are a BIG company. Which is overall a good thing (IMHO) for a wargame/model company (for those like me who have like 2000-4000 euros worth of models), because they sell everywhere, and it is easy to find people to play with, wherever life takes you. I wolund not inverst much in a game produced by a small buisness, because its just too much of a liability. So yes, downside to that is they juggernaut their way through every fiscal year, and don't react much to whatever happens around them (it seems that way, I am not 100% certain though) and yes, their prices are now absolute madness (If I started 40k now, I would probably just stick to one army (orks or nids), and not have 5 and half armies like now).