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GW is clearly uninterested in making 40K the tight competitive game some of you want. For 33 years, it's been a breezy, creative, beautiful mess of a ruleset with a narrative focus meant to be played casually with cool miniatures under an indeterminate time length.

They've shown they can write tighter rulesets better suited for tournament play. And they've shown that they can do a decent job with balance even when executing their classic approach to rule writing.

40K sells great and works for them. It ain't changing. If that bothers you after a 33-year track record, who's really to blame for your dissatisfaction?

Well, that's fair...except that in 9th they have gone to tremendously far lengths to rope in the people who WERE trying to make their game competitive (ITC, etc) and getting them on board with a totally standardized system.

It's been clear for a number of years now that GW are interested in making 40k into a competitive game, in addition to a fluffy narrative one you play with friends for a lark. So it's fair to start judging them based on that.

 kodos wrote:

or stop writing rules
if GW is not a gaming company but a model company, stop trying to sell crap as the "best game ever"

either get the model output down if this is the reason for bad rules, or get better at writing rules

but stop using "we are producing too many models per month" as an excuse for bad rules as this as their own desicion and something they can do nothing about it

they had their chance with 8th but did not feel it was necessary but instead increased the amount of models by doubling on Marines

no sympathy here as it was their own decision to do it and if they cannot handle it there is no excuse

GW is a model company, most of their income is model sales and most of their expenses are model production and design. Thus they produce more models to increase income as anything else would be suicidal.

The tabletop game exist as an incentive to increase sales, because people usually like to be able to do something with the plastic they purchase (although there are also those that purchase models for the modeling hobby, not the game). Thus they write rules to play 40k, and although they are quite bad at it, to stop it would also be suicidal.

All we need to do is leverage Machine Learning and Blockchain technology to examine the rules, and then have Computron 40,000 determine the points cost of everything.

 ziggurattt wrote:
All we need to do is leverage Machine Learning and Blockchain technology to examine the rules, and then have Computron 40,000 determine the points cost of everything.

Why bother the answer is 42.

Games workshop have experimented with a less competitive game with no points values or anything of the sort. It was Age of Sigmar on launch. I didn't play it on release, so I don't know what it was like, but Games workshop did a 180 on it not too long after.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Well, that's fair...except that in 9th they have gone to tremendously far lengths to rope in the people who WERE trying to make their game competitive (ITC, etc) and getting them on board with a totally standardized system.

It's been clear for a number of years now that GW are interested in making 40k into a competitive game, in addition to a fluffy narrative one you play with friends for a lark. So it's fair to start judging them based on that.

The anti-horde rules like blast make a lot of sense based on that, because hordes are hell for competitive play as they are too slow to play and tournaments need quick games to be viable. One of the reasons hordes are not considered competitive is because competitive rulesets like ITC penalize hordes, because they don't want hordes.

Competitive 40k in 8th edition was honestly pretty good. Just about every army had some representation in the tournament scene and the meta was always changing, which kept things fresh.

There were definitely some low points (Castellans, Iron Hands) but there were also many distinct periods where a bunch of armies were top-tier viable.

I'm confident things will only improve for 9th edition.

 Tyran wrote:

The tabletop game exist as an incentive to increase sales, because people usually like to be able to do something with the plastic they purchase (although there are also those that purchase models for the modeling hobby, not the game). Thus they write rules to play 40k, and although they are quite bad at it, to stop it would also be suicidal.

still no excuse why they could not do/try to be better

Well, they are getting better - at least when they don't overrule their own playertesters and release stuff they know is overpowered just for the lols, like they did with the IH supplement.

They've still got a fair ways to go, but they do seem to be slowly moving in the right direction on this stuff.

Which would be an excuse if we talk about a new/fresh company here

but GW is doing it for 30 years and is the Top Company claiming to be the Prosche of Wargaming

Trying and learning is nothing they should get away with as no one would buy a Porsche and say "they still need to learn how to build an engine, but at least they try and use 4 wheels now"

 Tyran wrote:

The anti-horde rules like blast make a lot of sense based on that, because hordes are hell for competitive play as they are too slow to play and tournaments need quick games to be viable. One of the reasons hordes are not considered competitive is because competitive rulesets like ITC penalize hordes, because they don't want hordes.

Hordes are not the problem or slowing the game down
a Horde player knows how to speed his gameplay up

re-rolls, single model mechanics, gameplay interruptions slow the game down, nothing which is related to Hordes

 slave.entity wrote:
Competitive 40k in 8th edition was honestly pretty good. Just about every army had some representation in the tournament scene and the meta was always changing, which kept things fresh.

There were definitely some low points (Castellans, Iron Hands) but there were also many distinct periods where a bunch of armies were top-tier viable.

I'm confident things will only improve for 9th edition.

I am sure "Ynnari = I win button" was fun for everyone involved.

 kodos wrote:
Which would be an excuse if we talk about a new/fresh company here

but GW is doing it for 30 years and is the Top Company claiming to be the Prosche of Wargaming

Trying and learning is nothing they should get away with as no one would buy a Porsche and say "they still need to learn how to build an engine, but at least they try and use 4 wheels now"

That is why I strongly tend to advocate that people vote with their wallets. If the rules are not well done, stop buying them. The only real impetus for them to change is if the rules don't sell. If the rules sell, then the rules are "good enough (to sell)."

That is why I really applaud people and groups of people, who take on the work for their own rules (like you did in your sig, I see). Sure, those rules won't be perfect either, most likely, but the impetus to improve them can be shown there much more prevalently, especially because they can be a living, growing, evolving rules set.

At this point, why can't we have communities here come up with rules sets? If I had more time, more talent and more knowledge, I might just try it myself with the help of like minded individuals.

Darsath wrote:
Games workshop have experimented with a less competitive game with no points values or anything of the sort. It was Age of Sigmar on launch. I didn't play it on release, so I don't know what it was like, but Games workshop did a 180 on it not too long after.

It was great, and the most balanced* I have seen a GW game, ever. And not by a small margin.

*The community stepped in and provided points. We did a better job than GW ever has.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Well, they are getting better - at least when they don't overrule their own playertesters and release stuff they know is overpowered just for the lols, like they did with the IH supplement.

They've still got a fair ways to go, but they do seem to be slowly moving in the right direction on this stuff.

My thoughts exactly, which is why I try and give them credit where it's due and only take shots where they screwed up.

Speaking of screw ups: I'm still not entirely sure that they screwed up the LoS rule since the internet is known to try and game systems, but I read the entire thing as a conditional statement that gets overruled if we're dealing with multiple units with the "character" keyword so that might be my own biases talking.

I am curious if they'll change the bodyguard rule to be a "counts as 3 or more models for the purposes of Look Out Sir" sort of deal.

 kodos wrote:
Which would be an excuse if we talk about a new/fresh company here

but GW is doing it for 30 years and is the Top Company claiming to be the Prosche of Wargaming

Trying and learning is nothing they should get away with as no one would buy a Porsche and say "they still need to learn how to build an engine, but at least they try and use 4 wheels now"

 Tyran wrote:

The anti-horde rules like blast make a lot of sense based on that, because hordes are hell for competitive play as they are too slow to play and tournaments need quick games to be viable. One of the reasons hordes are not considered competitive is because competitive rulesets like ITC penalize hordes, because they don't want hordes.

Hordes are not the problem or slowing the game down
a Horde player knows how to speed his gameplay up

re-rolls, single model mechanics, gameplay interruptions slow the game down, nothing which is related to Hordes

Except the fact that all of those things are massively exacerbated by large amounts of models.

 H wrote:

At this point, why can't we have communities here come up with rules sets? If I had more time, more talent and more knowledge, I might just try it myself with the help of like minded individuals.

people won't accept it as those "ideas" people would come up with will be seen as a step too far and not being 40k any more

I have written rules using Armour modifier, as 40k has them now, during late 5th Edition. It was said that such rule will kill the game and not being worth playing any more

I have added Cover as a bonus to armour, while in addition used special rules as "to hit" modifier for fast units, was said to be a terrible mechanic and 40k will never use such stupid rules

And the worst crime I have done was treating vehicles the same way as other models (armour saves, health points, no facings) which I had to remove because it was unacceptable and needed to come up with something different (a workaround that did the same but just looked like vehicle armour is different)


while there is no stupid mechanic or rule that won't be seen as big improvement and making everything better if it comes from GW itself

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Darsath wrote:
Games workshop have experimented with a less competitive game with no points values or anything of the sort. It was Age of Sigmar on launch. I didn't play it on release, so I don't know what it was like, but Games workshop did a 180 on it not too long after.

It was great, and the most balanced* I have seen a GW game, ever. And not by a small margin.

*The community stepped in and provided points. We did a better job than GW ever has.

Yeah, I mean, the amount of hours that even a small community can put in vastly outweighs what any development or play-testing team can put in. Sure, "professionals" might know some things here or there that a community might not, but the number of play-hours, test-hours, communities can do is beyond what any company could pay anyone to do realistically.

I can jokingly imagine the following meeting:
GW Employee 1: We'll just drop points, they are never accurate anyway!
GW Employee 2: What are they going to do, make their own?
Community: *Makes best points costing ever.*
GW:

That's how you effect change though, you demonstrate it. What could they have done there? Pretend the community points costing wasn't happening? No, they pretty much had to compete in the points costing game. No competition, no likely change, honestly.

I mean, perhaps I should just get off my soap-box here, but 9 editions and what 3 Apocalypse iterations, plus Epic and whatever other supplemental rules sources we've had and somehow, out of all that, we could not syncreticly devise notionally "better" rules sets, based on subjective criteria? Seems unlikely. We could probably come up with at least 3 different rules sets, one to focus on ideal "gameness," one on more "simulation" and even one that is a hybrid of the two. And who knows how many others, if we really tried. But perhaps I am just delusional.

ERJAK wrote:

Except the fact that all of those things are massively exacerbated by large amounts of models.

usually elite armies have more of those

but yet the Ork players I know and have seen playing were not slower and sometimes even faster than the Marine players
although they had to move more models and roll more dice

but units bases, coloured dice (5 per colour), preparing turing opponet acting instead of waiting helps a lot

 H wrote:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:

Darsath wrote:
Games workshop have experimented with a less competitive game with no points values or anything of the sort. It was Age of Sigmar on launch. I didn't play it on release, so I don't know what it was like, but Games workshop did a 180 on it not too long after.

It was great, and the most balanced* I have seen a GW game, ever. And not by a small margin.

*The community stepped in and provided points. We did a better job than GW ever has.

Yeah, I mean, the amount of hours that even a small community can put in vastly outweighs what any development or play-testing team can put in. Sure, "professionals" might know some things here or there that a community might not, but the number of play-hours, test-hours, communities can do is beyond what any company could pay anyone to do realistically.

I can jokingly imagine the following meeting:
GW Employee 1: We'll just drop points, they are never accurate anyway!
GW Employee 2: What are they going to do, make their own?
Community: *Makes best points costing ever.*
GW:

That's how you effect change though, you demonstrate it. What could they have done there? Pretend the community points costing wasn't happening? No, they pretty much had to compete in the points costing game. No competition, no likely change, honestly.

I mean, perhaps I should just get off my soap-box here, but 9 editions and what 3 Apocalypse iterations, plus Epic and whatever other supplemental rules sources we've had and somehow, out of all that, we could not syncreticly devise notionally "better" rules sets, based on subjective criteria? Seems unlikely. We could probably come up with at least 3 different rules sets, one to focus on ideal "gameness," one on more "simulation" and even one that is a hybrid of the two. And who knows how many others, if we really tried. But perhaps I am just delusional.

You are. 'Community' rulesets happen. And they're junk. They're consistently junk for completely predictable reasons, as thousands of voices pull in a thousand different directions each according to their own whims and prejudices
Loud voices rise to the top, and pull things in fewer directions, and others react out of spite or indifference, and vital voices drop because they just don't have the time to deal with this crap anymore and the project fails and drops off.

And frankly the reception for using these 'community' (I keep using that in quotes because so many people get excluded that it obviously isn't ever a community effort) is poor. You can talk a small D&D group into using houserules for the length of a campaign. You can do something similar for a half-dozen wargamers playing every weekend in the same garage. But you can't on a large scale- people just don't want to deal with the politics of it, they just want to use the rules out of the box and play the game. If its too awful they won't, but they don't want to put the kind of effort in a 'community' ruleset requires.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Well, that's fair...except that in 9th they have gone to tremendously far lengths to rope in the people who WERE trying to make their game competitive (ITC, etc) and getting them on board with a totally standardized system.

It's been clear for a number of years now that GW are interested in making 40k into a competitive game, in addition to a fluffy narrative one you play with friends for a lark. So it's fair to start judging them based on that.

You mean the points values that they inconveniently include at the back of the book compared to the power levels they put right in the datasheets? That will drive the new narrative system in 9th? And we're talking about the system with endless hundreds of datasheets and faction and subfaction rules that are expanding with no end in sight? Ballooning game time lengths and requiring a stack of books?

You're right that they're throwing bones to the competitive crowd. But that's a vastly different thing than building the overall product for that audience. If that was the goal, they'd do a hundred things differently. But kids and casuals are a huge part of their 40K business and will always be prominent in GW's thinking. There will always be a square peg/round hole element to playing 40K competitively. That was true back when I was actively playing in tourneys, and it seems especially true now given the sheer complexity and scope of the game.

AT is my focus these days. Although the rules are written in a classic GW narrative style, the rules are fairly tight and intuitive/easy to teach, the balance pretty good (there was one major outlier than they FAQed quickly), and the gameplay is very tactical and engaging with alternating activations and lots of maneuver with a resource management element. And the models are great. Scratches my itches. These days when I go to play 40K...it just feels HEAVY, you know? And most of my 40K playing is playing very casually with my oldest. I still have fun with it, but it is what it is.

TL;DR -- People can obviously have fun with 40K however they want, and clearly GW is throwing more bones to matched play. But I think the overall system and development approach is less suited than ever for competitive play, so it's an upstream swimming exercise.

 kodos wrote:
while there is no stupid mechanic or rule that won't be seen as big improvement and making everything better if it comes from GW itself

Yeah, the "appeal to authority" fallacy in full force there.

It's a shame really, because there likely are so many cool things we could do with our toys, if people didn't put blinders on and think there is an "authority-given" "objectively" correct way to play with them.

I've seen the sort of work that comes out of the house rules, and while there is some gold there, there is also a ton of silt to filter through to find it.

 kodos wrote:
Which would be an excuse if we talk about a new/fresh company here

but GW is doing it for 30 years and is the Top Company claiming to be the Prosche of Wargaming

Trying and learning is nothing they should get away with as no one would buy a Porsche and say "they still need to learn how to build an engine, but at least they try and use 4 wheels now"

Citation needed.

 H wrote:

sieGermans wrote:
I play both MTG and WH40k. Hands down, Magic is more complex to balance for Vintage (1.0) [which is what allows for all cards, bar a comparatively small ban list] than WH40k. Yet, the most played format, Standard (2.0), has about 2500 to 3000 card interactions at most and is far less so.

Again though, the point is not balance, the point is rules clarity.

How many times in a MTG game, even a Vintage-legal game, is the game state unclear, or are the interactions unclear? And in those cases, how many are where the formal, Comprehensive rules unable to give a definitive solution, so much so, that RAI must come into play? (I think the answer is vanishingly small, honestly.)

That is what I am discussing. The formality of the rules, as it relates to clarity in how they would interact with each other. It has nothing to do with balance in any way, shape or form. Balance has nothing to do with formality or clarity. I am only discussing the latter two.

I think you mistook my point--we aren't disagreeing here in terms of this premise.

I was helping to clarify misunderstandings about how complex Magic is versus Warhammer 40k (Vintage Magic is more, Standard and Limited [the default competitive formats] Magic is less).

Additionally, and as a point of clarification of the facts only, I don't disagree that Magic has far far fewer unclear rules interactions resolved via fiat (i.e., FAQ/clarification). However I could draw up a finite (not a typo: it isn't infinite) number of niche examples to prove that Magic can have unclear situations based on its rules (e.g., Opalesence and Humility, Chains of Mephisotopholes and Brainstorm, Affinity for [x] and sacrificing [x] to pay costs, etc.).

Where we [might?] be disagreeing is that the business model that supports Magic's far more robust design/development/release cycle is not adoptable by GW due to substantial differences in Overhead costs associated to the game productions.

I'll repeat here what I said earlier:

However the costs for production, overheads, shipping, and even business model are totally incomparable. Magic has a pennies per card manufacturing cost, a wider distribution channel, a deeper base of engaged customers, and a higher product turnover due to having virtually invented the "loot chest" business model at scale. Their healthier margins support a more expensive overhead.

And whilst we might all wish that GW could turn its record profits back into the product full-bore, the reality is that GW has had a shaky position of dominance over the last 20 years, with numerous upstart companies coming along with the serious potential of unseating them.

sieGermans wrote:
Additionally, and as a point of clarification of the facts only, I don't disagree that Magic has far far fewer unclear rules interactions resolved via fiat (i.e., FAQ/clarification). However I could draw up a finite (not a typo: it isn't infinite) number of niche examples to prove that Magic can have unclear situations based on its rules (e.g., Opalesence and Humility, Chains of Mephisotopholes and Brainstorm, Affinity for [x] and sacrificing [x] to pay costs, etc.).

Well, I am going to disagree there. While those can be confusing, to someone who is not well versed in Layers, or in how replacement effects are applied, or in the order of determining and paying costs, the Comprehensive rules gives you the definitive answer in all those cases. What I meant by clear is, that there is no "interpretation" there. How Layers work in MTG is not a case where one must divine the intent of the rules and interpret from there, it's rather a case where you simply understand the what the formal rules prescribe and execute it. The cases you provide, again, are in fact confusing for those who are not familiar with the formal rules, but when presented with them, arguing what should happen is like arguing what 2+2 ought to be. There are very few cases where the formal rules do not give a clear-cut answer, it just might take a bit of research to see why what is prescribed is what it is.

So, indeed, I was not succinct enough in what I meant by clear, so my apologies for that.

sieGermans wrote:
Where we [might?] be disagreeing is that the business model that supports Magic's far more robust design/development/release cycle is not adoptable by GW due to substantial differences in Overhead costs associated to the game productions.

Well, here I am honestly not sure. They surely are different, but I don't think that really dictates what must be the case for the rules themselves. I think the bigger part is that Magic rules are free and always have been, where GW charges for theirs. Justifiably or not, and for whatever reason it is done, that makes a tremendous difference most likely.

I personally wish the game had a cap on dice rolls. The numbers get ridiculous, then add rerolls and it gets out of hand. No way should any unit be rolling 120 dice. Personally, I think it should max at 30 per unit per action. Have more than that, doesn't matter, that's your max. Yes, this would mean certain units should be made more effective so that many rolls isn't necessary.
Speed up the game.

 bullyboy wrote:
I personally wish the game had a cap on dice rolls. The numbers get ridiculous, then add rerolls and it gets out of hand. No way should any unit be rolling 120 dice. Personally, I think it should max at 30 per unit per action. Have more than that, doesn't matter, that's your max. Yes, this would mean certain units should be made more effective so that many rolls isn't necessary.
Speed up the game.

Are you a carnival worker?

Do you have small hands?

Do you smell like cabbage?

Justbkidding , most games I see are about throwing tons of dice, less tactics and more math hammer.

Things like 6 aggressors rolling 140 dice (more than that actually since you gotta roll the dice to see how many dice you roll...what a perfect metaphor) are awful. It adds no fun whatsoever, just tedium.

 kodos wrote:


but GW is doing it for 30 years and is the Top Company claiming to be the Prosche of Wargaming

I'm 90% sure that no one from GW ever said that and you've twisted a well known quote to fit your argument.